Posts by BenWilson
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The war on terror has got so boring I don't even care to know what happened in this particular twist. So the Americans and the English and the Australians want to have their own never-ending wasteful stupid war. Let them. The best response seems to be to ignore it completely.
Eventually enough people will die and enough money will be wasted that even the stupidest will get sick of it and call it quits. I'm beginning to think that making a circus out of Iraq is the main reason the Americans wanted it so much. A lot like the child who misbehaves for attention. The war on terror needs a time-out badly, since smacking has never worked. Maybe some positive attention, if only something good any of those countries are doing could be found.
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Raymond, the devil you know? Alcohol's long term effects are known, and all bad. The key difference is that the effect of banning it is also known and that was also all bad. The effect of banning BZP is unknown. I'd speculate it will be mostly bad. Except for the worms, they'll be on the rise...
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Am I the only one who has had a reasonable dose of BZP and noticed no effect whatsoever? After the absolutely disgusting taste was washed away, that is. I tried many varieties in progressively increasing doses, and they have never had any effect at all. I'm not surprised people have ODed on them. I was tempted, just to see what all the fuss was about.
So I'm hardly bitter they're off the market, personally. Except in the more general "people should be allowed to choose" kind of way. Surely this will drive kids back to illegal drugs that actually work.
I'm surprised no one has thought of making a disgusting flavoured bottled water that they could call "Legal High Waterzzz" or something like, to catch and combine the idiot/kiddie market that buys BZP and bottled water.
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Joe "Weakness being numerical inferiority, perhaps?"
Amongst other things. I'm not saying they were soft and lame. Colonists wasted everyone, the world over, taking every cheap advantage they could.
Michael, I'm talking about scale, not individual anecdotes. Yes there were a few organised battles with the Aboriginals in which, by and large, got slaughtered. There were a lot more against the Maori, who were far fewer in number, and not all of them went the colonist's way. Yes there was a great toll on the Maori from disease and poor working conditions. But same goes for the Aboriginals. You would have to never have seen personally the state of the two races in comparison to think that Maori are in anywhere near such a bad way as the Aboriginals.
I don't know to what extent the difference boils down to the races themselves, rather than their treatment. Maori were and are quite different people, possibly much closer in mindset to the Europeans who were taking them over (however much they might deny it). They were much more apt to take on European techniques and technology, to explore, to become crew on ships, to organize and fight than the aboriginals. Some of that no doubt derives from geographical differences between Australia and NZ.
But the treatment also comes to a large extent *from* their differences in nature. Just as Maori were more quickly able to get what Europeans were about, so the Europeans probably understood where the Maori were coming from. It doesn't seem that such mutual understanding ever existed, and still doesn't, between Europeans and Aboriginals. So the Europeans found it far easier to treat Aboriginals like animals, and indeed vermin to be exterminated in many cases.
So it's a bit of both - their existing nature *and* how they were treated - that accounts for the far more shocking current state of average Aboriginal life than Maori.
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Michael, you say
"Ben you are sooo wrong on this point:
"Such wholesale oppression didn't happen here, at least not nearly to the same scale."
Can I recommend popping along to your local marea and having a wee chat on the issue. "
I'm not saying the Maori did not suffer in many ways from colonization. I'm just trying to put the difference between the countries in perspective. That there even is a marae to go and have a wee chat about the issue at is indicative. If you think there's just no difference between the way the indigenous people were treated in the two countries, then it's you who are sooo wrong. Perhaps some of it comes down to differences in the natures of the indigenous peoples, and where the Maori fought the Aboriginals withdrew. But I don't think it's entirely that. I do think the Aboriginals were treated worse, either through their own weakness or greater cruelty in the invaders of the time. Or both, more likely.
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Che, I'm aware that there are many Aboriginals in Victoria, but the fact I didn't see them is what I'm commenting on. I spent the first 2 years of my time there working the dairy industry, spending a great deal of time in the country, and same goes, no black fellas to be seen anywhere. Not on farms, not in small towns. Admittedly I didn't explore every mining town and desert dwelling, but my movements were at least across the entire fertile belt from state border to border.
Ewan, I didn't even see the fair skinned variety. So where the hell were they? If they're in the city, I'd expect on an average commute to see maybe 10 in the thousand people that might pass before my eyes. But nope...it was like they were hiding out.
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" bum
I think a better description might be "traumatized and depressed person""
Um, no, the people I saw were bums. It's a fairly accurate description for people who sleep on the street and beg for money, then spend it on grog. Perhaps they became bums by being traumatized and depressed. Perhaps they were always bums and they just love it. I don't know.
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"Australians are not all rednecked bigots, and some New Zealanders could do with being less smug and self-satisfied about their supposed superiority over their Australian cousins."
Ewan, I agree. I lived there too, and there was a great deal of dismay at their own establishment, and a far greater level of political activism amongst those people than here. But they also have a much bigger hill to climb.
Australia does have much bigger class and race issues than we do. I mean the fact that the Aboriginal population even live in the Northern Territories is indicative of that. Prior to colonization, Victoria was the most populous Aboriginal state, which is hardly surprising when you consider how much more fertile it is than the desert that Aboriginals were pushed onto and currently occupy. Such wholesale oppression didn't happen here, at least not nearly to the same scale.
I have never in my life met such downtrodden and dispirited people. They are not so much beaten as broken. I kept my eye out for Aboriginals the whole time I was there, just out of interest, but I'm sad to say I met very few, they just weren't in Victoria. Those I did meet were almost entirely drunken or stoned bums. Never once in five years did I meet an aboriginal in the corporate world I inhabited. Not even a janitor, shopkeeper or taxi driver. Just nothing but bums, and once I saw a girl who appeared not to be a bum on a train. Considering how many tens of thousands of people I saw on trains, that's a pretty sorry tale.
Compare that to NZ, where, sure, there are imbalances. There are few Maori engineers, for instance. But there are some. And certainly Maori in gainful employment are to be seen everywhere, from the unskilled to the highly skilled. Most people would at least know *some* Maori people personally.
So NZers can be forgiven for being a little smug, but we shouldn't take it so far as to say we don't have any problems here. That would be ridiculous.
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Tze Ming
"Someone above scoffed at the ability of tai chi 'fighters' to actually beat people in fights - probably because tai chi is not taught as a fighting style much, even though it is originally a fighting form - but it turned into a qi gong style. I wouldn't back a Tai Chi practitioner against a boxer either. The ones I see most often are the 80 yr old Chinese grannies doing gentle circular motions in the carpark of the Mt Roskill cricket club. They are lacking a little in the speed and muscle tone department. Kung fu though, is part of the same qi business - but rather faster. Jet Li might dispute the 'Western boxing always beats Chinese boxing' claim..."
*Someone* has a name. They did not scoff, they were making a very simple point about the *reason* that Tai Chi is unlikely to successfully go head to head with any other martial art where competition is allowed. The reason is because they do not test whether they can, therefore they don't refine their skill in the crucible of practical experience. And it was clearly stated that Tai Chi still has merit as a form of exercise. It's especially excellent that old grannies can do it. I'm considering it for my first Chinese martial art myself. To me it captures the essence of what China has to contribute to the martial arts, which is a very healthy form of lifelong exercise, rather than success in international competitions.
As for Jet Li, he is most welcome to test his skills in a boxing ring anywhere in the world. There will no doubt be millions of scrappy bogans just in China alone who would love to beat him up. Let alone those annoying barbarians who don't have the good taste to be born in China.
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Russell, yes, despite it being a tiny sport, the America's Cup is the main event, so anyone interested in yacht racing worldwide would consider coming here and that's still a LOT of people, and many of them have a lot of money. Sometimes it's better to have all of a small pie than a tiny piece of a big one. The Rugby World Cup, even if we won it every time, would only be held in NZ once every 20 years. And we're pretty much showing that as a nation we're too small minded to actually do the World Cup justice. I'm betting it's actually going to be a bit of a humiliating experience for NZ. We could at least have got a decent stadium out of it, but no, the penny pinchers won the day. It's going to end up like the Athens Olympics, I think.
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