Posts by Keir Leslie
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
And you're a fascist octopus I/S, all slimy and jack-booted.
Seriously, would you believe that there is not in fact an obvious right answer with all the rest being horrible evil bad things that only horrible evil bad people would ever want to promote?
-
There's quite a bit of difference between adopting an architectural language and wholesale replication.
Um, not as much as is implied here; see the Calcutta High Court and various other Gothic Revival structures. Likewise replication of Classical originals. I mean, yeah, not exactly the same thing, but I can't see how it is any worse than a Triumphal Arch after the Roman or whatever.
(And the Taj isn't exactly ancient, it's about as old as the new St. Paul's.)
-
Your Mum says "that's right, you were very helpful today as well, and I think I should be fair." To create fairness your Mum has two options: giving you an ice-cream too, or taking the ice-cream away from your sister. Which is better?
Obviously the second; but both are equally fair.
If we removed the coat-tails, Act would have Hide, and no list MPs, which would be the same number of list MPs as NZ First. It is unfair that the geographic distribution of voters can have a spooky-action-at-a-distance effect on list votes, and this should be fixed. Now, there are two ways to fix this, one remove the coat-tails mechanism, or two remove the threshold. I think both would be preferable in terms of fairness to the current situation, and I value fairness here over proportionality.
(And the analogy is dodgy, because ice cream for one person is an unalloyed good; Act getting MPs when NZ First is denied are not exactly.)
-
But it is unfair, and removing the coat-tails mechanism would make our system fairer in one intuitive sense. It might make it less proportional, but proportionality is not the be all and end all of an electoral system.
And in fact the coat-tails thing isn't just about representing minorities, it is also about geographic concentrations of support, so arguing one way or the other says little about one's nasty aristocraticness.
-
Indeed. It particularly depends on whether you take an expansive view of democracy or a narrow one.
Huh? No, it depends whether you value and how you define equity; it arguably isn't equitable that if my party vote goes to NZ First it is wasted but if it goes to Act it isn't, merely because of tactical voting by National supporters in Epsom.
And I might yet agree that my vote should be wasted; it is rather that I feel that the Act voter's should also be. That seems intuitively fair even if it isn't proportional, and people can value fairness without being anti-democratic etc.
-
A replica of Edinburgh Castle in Dunedin. Cathedral Square could do with Big Ben. A Golden Gate bridge across the entry tro Wellington Harbour.
Except, to be honest, it's too late to put fake Gothic architecture in Christchurch, we've already got a lot of it, especially on the Square; it's too late to try and make Dunedin look like Edinburgh, the good burghers have already tried that.
So why not make bits of Auckland look like bits of Agra?
(And seriously, if you have a problem with tacky, there's a lot of other tacky stuff in Auckland to get annoyed at & it is perfectly possible to make Mughal-esque buildings non-tacky, and in fact it is one of the traditional things for British Empire architects to do.)
-
Nah, it was just the kind of bog standard `you are an ignorant Texan fool' stuff, with added playing at being a hard man on the internet bits, which were what really fucked me off. Sub-Card basically.
-
OTOH, he usually has a good spectrum of main characters, race-wise, so he's not *unaware* of the issues, and I vastly prefer my fiction with black and Jewish and Middle Eastern main characters to the many all-white worlds out there.
Um, how to put this? Let's say that it seems Stirling is well aware of the issues, but purposefully and offensively wrongheaded about them to an astonishing degree. This is just going on his non-paper-published remarks, so I have no particular opinion on his published novels, but.
(Another edition of `why the internet rather spoils sf authors, reading Stross' and James Nicolls' blogs variety.')
-
I should just point out that the British Civil Service, for all the jokes and inadequacies, is in fact a wonder of the world & that most of those full commission etc things are political impositions.
-
no, it isn't so much the failure to be outraged as the idea that one is acting appropriately when one proposes a tax on daytime soaps etc. If that was sf you'd get ripped to shreds, but, of course, Bourdieu etc.