Posts by Keir Leslie
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i'm not in fact in favour of soaps ad infinitum, but i do think that the `heheh days of our lives' stuff is basically rather icky snobbery, and that there probably is a good case that the provision of these particular soaps is a worthwhile thing we should promote.
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soaps are inherently long running, so it isn't fair to talk about 35 years in isolation, in comparison to The Archers or whatever, it isn't that long.
note also that people bitch about the cancellation of firefly or whatever all the time, and you don't tend to get the angry what are you complaining about reaction. Instead it's seen as rather touching etc.
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In fact, I'm not averse to a tax on daytime-soap watching.
Would it be a bit bitchy to start talking about Bourdieu here? Because I doubt if this was `TVNZ cans arts programming' people would be chortling about the sad tossers who stay up till 11:30 just to get a hit of some artist waffling on about his work; instead it would all be `public service broadcasting' `charter ethos' etc etc.
In other words, i think it may be class linked, not gendered.
(Personally, I would like soaps to be wiped from the face of the planet because they give me hives, but that is not in fact a good basis for public policy.)
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...astrology. Astrology.
Nah, I wouldn't be prepared to say that western dismissal of non-western astrology wasn't basically racist; after all western anthropology etc did dismiss correct ideas for racist reasons, therefore on the basis that the reasons for incorrect and correct ideas are essentially similar, I wouldn't be surprised to say that western views on non-western astrology aren't on one level racist.
(& again for western astrology where i shall let elitism equal racism, also of course one can't attack Feyerabend's arguments by simple ad hominems. One can disagree with F but his ideas do need to be engaged with.)
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The thought of the national side whose coaches danced with joy for holding Iraq to a goalless draw making it to the World Cup (sorry George: the Mens World Cup) is a little depressing.
Pal, if I came from the land of cattanacio, I would not be getting cheeky about any other country; at the very least, we don't play anti-football.
I mean, for fuck's sake, Zizou was righteous against Materazzi, who really was not anything in that game but a thug and an embarrassment to football.
(I am entirely serious above, if you're an Italian, you shouldn't mock the idea of a goalless draw, that's the ideal of Italian football.}
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Oceania in Asia would be dumb as a very dumb thing; the small associations can't afford to fly teams to the Gulf and so on.
(Men's World Cup anyway, also.)
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The All Whites will go the world cup, where they will be exposed as a bunch of plodders, outclassed charlatans who qualified via the weakest of weak competitions.
Look, the All Whites captain gets paid an order of a magnitude more than any All Black and plays in, if not the, one of the, greatest league competitions in any sport. Certainly the best footballing league in the world at the moment. Yeah, Nelsen and Killen are standouts, but calling them `plodders [...] outclassed charlatans' is just wrong.
Sure, the All Whites aren't Brazil; they are a respectable team from a small country that is actually pretty decent considering they are competing against almost every other country in the world.
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It wasn't so many centuries ago that women were burnt as witches because they challenged the status quo and the power hierarchies.
Hang on, this is very tendentious. Yes, women (and men) were burnt as witches. No, in general they hadn't actually done anything to be burnt as witches except possibly be slightly-well-off unprotected women through no particular effort on their own part; that's why `witch-hunt' is a pejorative. Assuming that there was any real sense in which witch hunts targeted people who challenged the status quo etc gives witch hunters far far too much credit. (I mean, above and beyond the way the violence inherent in the system did anyway.)
Especially when you try and link it to mediums and alternative medicine; witches were not anything but unlucky, in general and excepting, of course, bits of the Baltics and occasional weirdness elsewhere.
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Not really: one is limited to one's instruments, and there are quite possibly fundamental limits on one's instruments, but that's not really a deep problem for the empiricist: here are things we can know, and the rest is metaphysics.
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If Heisenberg doesn't suggest there are limits to what can be observed, than I don't know what does.
You don't need Heisenberg for that; one can imagine a perfectly happy empiricist who admits that one can't observe things that happen infinitely far away in an infinitely large universe,
And she wouldn't see that as a limit to empiricism but merely as something of a limit to the universe, which it would be nonsense to try and `go beyond'; Heisenberg is rather mean to realism, not necessarily empiricism.