Posts by Rich Lock
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
And that's a bad thing because??????
We can't watch sports in our gruds all Sunday afternoon while occasionally lifting our legs to fart loudly?
Damn you, wimminz! Damn you all to heck and back!
-
I do wonder how deep-seated the biological/psychlogical urge to 'other' those who are different is.
Clearly, there are some people who have real problems with 'difference': women in the workplace, 'ethnics' running the dairy, 'gays'...more or less anywhere.
It does, to a greater or lesser degree, seem to be quite deep-rooted in the human psyche. How do we deal with that?
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Didn't agree with all of it, but thought it offered an interesting and different perspective.
-
Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Well, yes. But then the joke...wouldn't have worked.
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Steve Reeves,
It makes me wonder just what Farrar's "essential values" of New Zealanders might be. Can you imagine even trying to start agreeing on what those are? The term is, essentially, meaningless.
It's a debate that's been going on in the UK for quite a number of years. There is now a government-produced 'life in the uk' test that immigrants are supposed to take, but it has been heavily criticised.
It seems to me that a lot of cultural characteristics are defined by saying what the culture 'isn't' - a negative definition where you point to an aspect of another culture and say 'well, we're not like that'.
When you try and define the culture positively, the terms generally seem to become a bit imprecise, or so broad as to be meaningless. 'Inclusive', 'tolerant', 'stiff upper lip' etc.
This take on the Norway events comes at it from a male-threatened-by-female approach, which is an interesting perspective.
-
Fracking, magnates: how do they work?
-
Hard News: The scandal that keeps on giving, in reply to Danielle,
I dunno... there are a lot of heavy drug users in the music industry who come out of it reasonably intact. Look at Bowie or Elton or Fleetwood Mac or David Crosby. And those are just some of the ones we know about.
Yeah, but I reckon the ones we know about are the tip of the iceberg. The road to rock sucess is strewn with drug casualties that yer average punter has never heard of, and never will. Get rich first, then develop a smack habit, chaps*
a combination of crack, heroin, ketamine, ecstasy and alcohol (aaaaaand now I have a QOTSA earworm, inevitably).
But you're missing the C-C-C-C-C-COCAAAAAIIIIINE!!!11!!!!1!.
*Joke. Actually, don't.
-
Hard News: The scandal that keeps on giving, in reply to Danielle,
I spend a lot of time looking at him in wonderment, thinking 'how is that guy still alive?'
Exception that proves the rule, innit?
Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix and about a billion others aren't rocking too hard on this mortal coil any more.
-
Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Odd, considering the associations with the devil's music:
-
Hard News: The scandal that keeps on giving, in reply to Kumara Republic,
And the Michelle Malkins of this world are playing the No True Scotsman card with the Norway bombings, now that the far right extremist, ID’ed as Anders Breivik, has admitted to carrying them out
I only caught up with the Norway story on Saturday evening, and didn't immerse myself in the detail, but apparently, the immediate reaction was that http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/24/charlie-brooker-norway-mass-killings:
On Friday night's news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to al-Qaida. Countless security experts queued up to tell me so. This has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida attack, they said. Watching at home, my gut feeling was that that didn't add up. Why Norway? And why was it aimed so specifically at one political party? But hey, they're the experts. They're sitting there behind a caption with the word "EXPERT" on it. Every few minutes the anchor would ask, "What kind of picture is emerging?" or "What sense are you getting of who might be responsible?" and every few minutes they explained this was "almost certainly" the work of a highly-organised Islamist cell.
And, for want of a better place to put it, an interesting article on trolls, moderation and online commenting.
Unusually, some of the comments under the article are worth a read, too.