Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan

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  • Hard News: Let's be hearing it,

    Why would Bill English receive 50,000 private emails between Don Brash and others?

    Where'd you get that number from? Did obtaining it . . . hurt?

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Let's be hearing it,

    Which makes him a prime suspect for leaking the material in the first place...

    I REALLY can't see English - or even Brian Connell - deciding to spill their guts to Nicky Hagar.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

  • What Happens: The Sequel!,

    Hi James,

    I do make an effort to read things that don't fit my view of the world (I'm currently reading 'The War of the World' by conservative historian Niall Ferguson. I read David Farrars blog every day).

    What I don't read is brainless partisan hackery that sounds like it was written by an unusually ignorant and ill-informed nine year old.

    So my advice to you is to try reading something by someone who isn't just a cheerleading shill for a political party. I do it frequently and it is very worthwhile.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

  • What Happens: The Sequel!,

    First line of James link:

    While the Democrats push for America’s complete surrender to Al Qaeda in Iraq . . .

    Have to admit I stopped reading at about that point.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

  • What Happens: The Sequel!,

    But the funniest bit is "And please don't bring up appeasement of Hitler, your nation didn't exactly take a stand there." Yeah, those evil Americans, what did they do to oppose Hitler? Maybe a visit to the beaches of Normandy would be of benefit to some.

    Yes - thank goodness the US decided to stand up to Germany before they could cause any REAL harm.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

  • OnPoint: Bar brawls aren't my thing,

    Here I was, hoping to retreat from controversy and grow pinot noir in Martinborough, earning enough income through writing to keep my daughter at university for another year, and suddenly I'm a "cynical racist", "brainless bimbo" and numerous other ad hominem attacks, including the accusation that I write whatever any passing man tells me to write.

    Maybe Coddingtons current passing man - her husband Colin Carruthers who doubtless earns the cost of a years University tuition in a matter of hours - could help her out with the bills?

    DCs bizarre attempts to lie with statistics are bad enough, but attempting to play the victim by pretending that she's some poor, struggling solo mum when she's married to a man earning well into seven figures really scrapes the bottom of the barrel.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

  • What Happens: The Sequel!,

    It seems to me stopping these regimes from getting nukes should be a very high priority for any rational person and country.

    Ironically it seems to have been a very low priority for political leaders in the US and Europe. North Korea now has nukes. Iran will have them in about five years unless the US declares war on them - the probabiilty of which is vanishingly unlikely.

    The question is not 'is the world safer if Iran has nukes - yes or no?

    The question is: which will make the world less safe - a nuclear Iran or war with Iran?

    In the best of all possible worlds the answer would be 'war with Iran'. But the countries most likely to be confronting Iran - Israel, the UK and the US - have all recently demonstrated beyond any doubt that they lack the military capability and civilian leadership to prosecute the kind of action required to disable Tehrens nuclear ambitions.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: The God Thing,

    One possible explanation is the multi-verse model. An infinite number of universes come into being and those few with the right initial conditions will have life. It's a version of the weak anthropic principle. We see the universe is fine tuned because that's the only type of universe that can be observed.

    And then there's this idea:

    http://www.starlarvae.org/Star_Larvae_Cosmological_Natural_Selection.html

    Money Quote:

    When a fresh universe explodes into being from a black hole that resides in a pre-existing universe, the values of the baby universe's fundamental constants are influenced—but not completely determined—by those of the parent, according to the theory of cosmological natural selection. The indeterminacy of quantum physics allows some play in the system of inheritance. When a black hole forms from the collapse of a large star, information is not perfectly conserved, according to the quantum theory of black holes. As a result, the values of the physical constants are likely to differ from parent universe to offspring and among the offspring. Once such variation is introduced into an ensemble of successive generations, the succession proceeds according to the Darwinian model. If its capacity to make black holes determines the reproductive fitness of a universe, then Darwinian selection theory predicts that those universes most predisposed to make black holes will be most successful at passing their values of the constants forward into future generations. In other words, the evolution of universes selects for reproductive fitness, and this selection pressure drives the evolution of universes in the direction of increasing fertility, which means in the direction of making more black holes.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: The God Thing,

    The Terry Eagleton review of Dawkins book is patently absurd. The closest I've come to reading 'The God Delusion' is flipping through it at Unity Books, but it seems likely to me that Eagleton hasn't read it at all.

    Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be.

    In my ninety second flip through I noted that Dawkins addresses.

    1. The Teleological Argument (Aquinas).
    2. The Ontological Argument (Anselm).
    3. The Argument from Scripture (C.S Lewis, amoung others).

    It's telling that Eagleton doesn't actually address Dawkins refutations of these arguments but instead complains that he hasn't read enough Theology:

    What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?

    I doubt Dawkins discusses how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, either. This argument is like a hollow Earth apologist insisting that a geologist isn't qualified to debate with them 'because he hasn't read McBride on Concentric Sphere's, or Lyons on the Hidden Tunnels at the North Pole'.

    Likewise, I don't need to read a vast volume of books on Astrology to know that it's patent nonsense. Ditto phrenology. And ditto Theology.

    If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could.

    The patently obvious difference here being that South Asia is a real place with real facts and a real body of knowledge, while God doesn't enjoy any of those qualities.

    My favourite part is this:

    Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

    Let's take it from the top. The big problem with the Tony Blair/Octopus analogy is that nobody actually believes Tony Blair is an Octopus, while many billions of people believe that there IS a personal God. According to a recent Harris poll 37% of Americans think that God is a male. Most believers think of God as being 'a person' - the Gods of the Jews and Muslims have very distinct personalitles.

    What Eagleton is doing here is taking Dawkins to task for not writing specifically about HIS God that he believes in. But as we can see from the review Eageltons particular beliefs seem very different from that of most religious people. This passage, is perhaps the core of the review.

    Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic.

    Eagleton can't seem to get it into his head that Dawkins doesn't believe in God. Eagleton starts from the position that God exists, created us, loves us, blah blah blah - but hasn't really grasped Dawkins basic position that there is NO proof for any of these beliefs. He doesn't address them because he simply doesn't concede them as having any validity. He doesn't 'understand that God is transcendant of us' because he simply doesn't think God is real.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

  • OnPoint: Fisking for Asians,

    Everything else aside, I'd be fascinated to hear Coddingtons practical ideas on how 'some asians' could be 'sent back'.

    Does she propose some sort of lottery system? ('Congratulations Sir! You and your family have just won an all expenses paid, one way trip to sunny Myanmar!')

    Or does she just want to send back convicted ethnic asian criminals? And how would that work? Would she establish some sort of 'blood quanta' system to figure out who is and isn't asian (maybe Dr Brash could help)? Would the state get to nationalise the assets of deported asian criminals? What would happen to their families? Do they get deported too, even though they've committed no crime, or do the children of asian criminals become wards of the state? Is there even a process for stripping someone of their New Zealand citizenship? Wouldn't a separate system of punishment for different ethnic groups be, you know, insanely racist? Are Indians Asians? Mongols? Uighur?

    Enquiring minds want to know.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

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