Posts by Stephen Glaister
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General response: Thanks to everyone for their comments (even the depressingly snarky ones) on my paper. I'll now try to respond individually to people's points. It'll probably take me at least 30 minutes to get all the separate replies posted...
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to James Butler,
Thanks for your comments/queries, but my arguments have nothing to do with probability or with empirical rates of failure, rather I cast everything strictly at the level of logically and mathematically necessary features. See Section 2.4 of the Intrins Probs paper for discussion of this (and I return to the point from slightly different angles throughout the paper - see esp, the end of Section 4.2). And see Section 1 of the Ratios paper to catch me making exactly your kind of objection against people making the sort of argument you wrongly claim I am making. At any rate, I'd encourage you to take a look at my various attempts to anticipate and answer objections. I think you'll find yourself represented there, I hope fairly. I could say a lot more at this point but, really, it's all there in black and white, better than I can off-the-cuff paraphrase it. And until you're up to speed on my actual line of reasoning rather than shadow-boxing with stuff I specifically, repeatedly disavow, there'd be little point in my putting further machinery on the table.
Would the availability of PA marriage change the probability of PARs forming, or of existing PARs ending in unfavourable (ie. societally costly) circumstances?
Probably not (in both cases), but who knows? Certainly, in countries like NZ, where lots of law applies by default in de facto multi-partner situations, there shouldn't be huge practical differences +ve or -ve.
Do formalized vs. informal PARs have different probabilities of being fulfilling? Are the costs to society of a formalized PAR ending in divorce any greater than those for an informal PAR, and even if so, is the difference in cost greater on average than the benefits of allowing PA marriage?
The principal cost of allowing poly-marriage is conceptual: it wouldn't be true in that case that every marriage is an in principle locus for (has the potential to host) high-bandwidth fulfillment and intimacy for all parties to the arrangement. (Marriage extended to poly cases would be well on the way to being dissolved into a much looser category of caretaker relations and networks - which is what a lot of radicals want, of course! ) I don't think that there's any mechanical way to weigh conceptual costs and benefits - the costs and benefits of specific sorts of social intelligibility - against all other conceivable personal and practical costs and benefits. Compare: NZ's policy of allowing non-citizen, permanent residents to vote in national elections (but not to be representatives) is a huge conceptual loss for the country: NZ literally makes far less sense than it otherwise would (see my paper on that here). Doubtless there are a range of benefits to various people from the current policy, but they're hard to commensurate with the principled/conceptual difficulties that are characteristically my concern.
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to James Butler,
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I've got what I take to be a sound argument against extending marriage to poly-arrangements, one that applies gender-neutrally and even when all background liberal democratic norms of consensualness and non-coerciveness are satisfied. It's complicated tho'. If that sounds interesting to you, and you're up for long reads go here.
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I guess the Dec 3 and Dec 4 gigs might have been markedly different, hence the somewhat variant memories. Ganley mentions hearing NO play In a Lonely Place which I don't remember hearing (and which isn't on the published Dec 3 set-list). Conjecture: the Dec 4 gig was better-tempered, had all technical problems sorted, no delays, included a few more comforting, backward-looking songs, etc..
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The Ganley article doesn't square especially well with my memory of the 1982 Mainstreet show. IIRC, New Order came on incredibly late, at least 2 maybe 3 hours after Cooper Clarke finished his set (so their stage time was sometime around 1 a.m.?). A number of people gave up and left (some had last buses or ferries to catch) before NO came on so that NO actually played for a smaller crowd than Cooper Clarke had had. What filled up the multi-hour gap? Extremely loud (impossible to talk over) house and techno and rap played though the PA. All of that 'straight from NYC clubs' music was fairly alien at the time, and pretty hard to take (12 months later we'd be digging it). This also contributed strongly to the crowd decay. The hold-up seemed to be traceable to some technical problems (Gillian Gilbert banged keys and pads on stage to little avail, only to stroll through the crowd to the mixing desk to try to sort something out. This happened several times.) NO didn't seem cool exactly: Hook surprised with his low-slung bass and cock-rocker poses (he seemed to be in a different band from the others), Gilbert's keyboards were unbalanced and her playing was amateurish/shaky and Bernard Sumner seemed snarky towards her for that and her technical problems. In sum, NO seemed riddled with tensions. Because of all this - the band apparently in a bad mood, the audience in a bad mood by the time they came on - NO's set felt pretty tense and there were some snarly interjections from the crowd (some of whom were insisting on their right to hear more joy-divisiony material, which Sumner didn't appreciate). One of the two best songs of the night, Your Silent Face, ended with Sumner venemously yelling 'Why don't you piss off' at particular audience members who'd irritated him (as opposed to underplaying/near speaking the line as per later record, etc.). It was that sort of gig: grumpy, contentious, technically fraught, thin-skinned but occasionally inspiring and ahead of its time . And yeah, given all this, that NO left all the electronics of Temptation playing for several minutes after they'd all left the stage (for good and without acknowledging anyone) did rub some punters the wrong way.
The bottom line for me and everyone I knew was that NO had been interesting but a bit of a mess, and that they clearly weren't in the same league as Simple Minds at Mainstreet a few months earlier. Those guys tore the roof off the joint and just blew people away. NO, not so much.
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Holy crap, that Pat Matheny take-down of Kenny G. is so brutal I actually ended up feeling a little sorry for the guy. Warning to all musicians... do NOT piss Mr Metheny off!
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Kyle: The law can just be written in different ways. And the important thing, in my view, is just not to deceive to yourself about what it all adds up to.
What's merely a defence and what's positively coded up as a permission in law is not that important (controlling for enforcement etc). If you are a country (e.g. Brazil now, TX up to about 1970 I seem to remember!) that has on its books that "legitimate defense of honor" is a justification for a guy to kill his wife (i.e., as a defence against homicide charges), then it's pointless to try to maintain that you don't allow guys to kill their cheating wives (or whatever it is). You do. And if that blot gets wiped off the books then it's right to say that you've finally criminalized it.
Simialrly if you repeal our self-defence justification (s 48) then what have you done? I think it's fair to say that you've criminalized defending yourself. It's pointless to say that, no, (i) self-defending always strictly involved committing a crime, and that (ii) only a possible defence has been removed. (All of that is best understood as a description of how you've criminalized something.)
Suppose you want to argue against people being able to defend themselves because you think too many people are getting off assault charges on such grounds or that vigilantism is breaking out or.... That's fine... just don't kid youself that you're doing anything less than criminalize self-defence.
In either case - crazy defensive law being removed, or very good defensive law being removed - it's very important to be able to see the criminalization forest rather than all the procedural trees. No one needs to wait around for the positive law never-never-land which includes "You may not kill your cheating wife" or "You may not use reasonable force to defend youself" to have grasped the true meaning of what's just happened.
You didn't like my drug law case but doing a "reasonable amounts for personal use" defence clause would be a perfectly acceptable way of writing a decrim. law, and if our own traditions had evolved ever so slightly differently (i.e., to value personal substance expression a little more) we would write it that way.
Your accounts of smacking and Captaincy are too narrowly procedural and legal-formulation-dependent in my view. See earlier remarks about forests and trees.
Your speeding case:
It's illegal to speed in New Zealand. If I speed, and either 1. don't get caught, or 2. don't get a ticket/conviction because I have a good excuse (ie, hospital emergency! pregnant woman! chased by homicidal axe murderer! I'm actually a police officer doing my duty!), then speeding is still illegal. I still broke the law, I just got away with it or had good reason for doing so.
I think there are a bunch of cases to consider here and this note's too long already.... But, look, if there was an explicit defence against traffic violations clauses somewhere in the traffic regulations:
e.g., "Police, fire personnel, etc. are justifed in ignoing trafic regulation so long as they pay reasonnable attention to public safety" without regard for the speed limit"
then I'd say that their speeding etc. is effectively legalized (and even that there's a sense in which their actions stop being speeding in that case)
It might be nicer in some respects to have things formulated non-defensively, e.g.,
"Police etc. may ignore trafic regulation so long as they pay reasonable attention to public safety"
But, seriously, there's very little difference between these two options. Deleting either one would amount to binding the police, etc. in traffic-misdemeanor land with the rest of us, and with either one the poliec etc. are free.
I do not claim to speak for the Left any more than I claim to speak for the mafia. I speak of them both occasionally.
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Don't forget about Strangelove's doomsday device... the Cobalt-Thorium G-bomb. Mwahaha.
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Kyle: It's pointless playng the "it's only a defence" game. If you crimialize possession of a drug but throw in a clause later about "reasonable amounts for personal use" not resulting in anyone going to prison, rather than sticking it in the original clause, then you've decriminalized possession of reasonable amounts etc.. It's just a different way of getting the same thing. The left would see this on any other issue (and does in fact do so), I swear....
Moreover, s59 is clustered together with s 60 ("Discipline on Ship or Aircraft"). The heading over both clauses is Powers of Discipline. Please check this out, here. Maybe you've been misled about this.
The point is clear: you are a law to your child, just as the Captain of the ship is law to everyone on the ship. [Lefties don't like that assertion of law/authority which is why they want it out and can't compromise a la Borrows! Don't kid yourself.] In both cases it's a positive power and authority being acknowledged.Of course, even if the legislation hadn't gone that extra step to be completely clear, by my first point, there would still have been genuine legalization.
Your speeding case has too many variants to consider. Sorry.
Rob S: Thanks, yes we crossed wires. It's hard to write as clearly as one needs to I'm finding.