Posts by Sam F
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We saw various traders' trucks in Point Chevalier at 10am on Sunday morning, collecting anything metallic. If you could stick a magnet to it it was gone within hours onto the back of a truck, baled up with old bike frames, car bodywork, fridges...
My folks' neighbour put out two old aluminium windows. They took the metal and left the panes of glass on the verge. There was as a result very little left on the verges at all, except for the real garbage. As a sometime greenie I would have found it encouraging if the broader ramifications weren't so freaking scary.
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I got a pretty heavy dose of the various maligned philosophers mentioned here during the course of my undergraduate history degree. If it hadn't been for my subsequent Honours year, where we basically got to strip what we did as history students apart with those theoretical tools and then put it all back together again into an actual craft practised by actual people, I would have left with a very different degree.
The way I see it now is that a large part of coming to peace with postmodernism is being aware of what it is that you're doing and using the theory on offer when it might be productive. Sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn't - if you try to second-guess everything that you're doing in (for instance) history, you end up going around in circles.
It's better just to be aware as much as possible of your fallibilities and positions of power et cetera and then just do what needs to be done as best you can - as long as you've been honest with yourself it'll generally be okay, and at least then you've produced something of value for the next generation to deconstruct.
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as I have aged, my reaction to these sorts of future plans announcements has gone from "Wow, this will be great when it happens..." to "Jeez, I hope I'm still alive to see this happen..."
Not meaning to threadjack, but I thought the same thing when hearing the NASA Orion project story on the radio last night - we're possibly going back to the moon in the 2020s (don't forget the chicks this time!), and maybe to Mars in the 2030s. First reaction: wow, I'll be getting somewhat old by then. The awe, wonder etcetera came a moment later. Sad really.
That said I'll be about the same age as my dad is now if we do hit the red planet when they're expecting, so I'll be around to see it - it's a bit less certain but hopefully dad will too, fate willing.
Dark fibre sounds vaguely healthy but doesn't stir the emotions quite so much.
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But seriously, Roger Douglas could have been put in a bottle. Then we could have marveled about how his head managed to fit.
A lamp would work better. Rub it and ask him three wishes, and he'll magically tell you that the market will provide them and vanish back in again.
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witter
I'm so happy to see this word is still in circulation. :)
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Thanks Sam F
I can't work out what I did that was good, so now you've got me worried... :) Sorry if that post seemed too shrill or I seemed to be jumping down your throat at times. I was writing and posting way too slow and missed a whole bunch of stuff at the top of the page, which didn't help.
Not sure about others but I still find this a really awkward and controversial topic to be discussing (even here in these understanding and enlightened halls), so apologies if I perhaps haven't been clear in my wording - not meaning to attack anyone, just trying to bat the issue around without feeling overly icky... might leave this one for the night I think. :)
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Thank you Sam. I have been huffing nothing.
Didn't mean to offend - I didn't actually realise that was a position you yourself gave some credence to, rather than a devil's advocate-type argument that someone else could potentially distort out of what Emma said.
<quote>Producing naked photos of children, whether by means of camera or using photoshop is not intrinsically harmful to children. That assumption is baseless, unless children are harmed in the production process. Glossing over such distinctions is akin to glossing over the distinction between the pedophile and the citizen who downloads images of child pornography.<quote>
The kind of material you're describing is far tamer than what I thought was under discussion, but I really don't think that what you're describing would be without harm. Even the tamest softcore including actual adults is predicated upon the consent of the adults appearing. Minors by definition can't give that consent and goodness knows what the long-term psychological ramifications would be of growing up knowing pornographic images of you had been passed around the Internet during your childhood without your consent. Doesn't bear thinking about
I also find the whole concept incredibly distasteful and sordid, which probably won't surprise you, but I'm pretty sure there's no harm reduction argument for such a thing either.
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As far as I'm aware, we operate under exactly the same broadcasting standards as apply to Radio New Zealand. Or is there some section of the Broadcasting Act that established a different, lower bar for commercial radio I should start exploiting now?
Just to clarify, I didn't mean that (for instance) talk radio inherently has lower standards than TV1 and should be treated more leniently as such. Breaches of good taste, decency and so on can happen anywhere, but my point was that you might wish a national state-owned broadcaster to be particularly sensitive to these issues and perhaps even try to set some kind of standard.
I am trying to envisage some kind of moral guest boycott of Breakfast, or other shows with similar issues. All I can imagine is either the host reduced to slagging off some poor soul in the paper (or on FaceYouTubeSpace), or soul-destroying slagging matches between the host and whatever emptyheaded publicity junkies come to fill the gaps that more reasoned commentators have decided to leave unfilled.
Wouldn't it be better and more productive to arrange things such that guests don't need to worry about completely outrageous personal attacks when they appear on public TV?
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Based on that though, a case could be made though for compiling a selection of produced in a way not harmful to children.
I'm going to break the deafening silence: given that producing this stuff is by definition harmful to children, who would be seriously making such a case and what would they have been huffing?
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Ah. Thanks guys.