Posts by Keir Leslie
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I don't care about asbos; I'm not talking about them.
But seriously, laws left over from putting down the Chartists and such are not candidates for anything other than derision.
-
Yes, I know exactly what you meant.
The laws referred to are the other, supposedly non-jackbooted-in-origin laws.
-
Oh, and Sofie, we don't have ASBOs here. That particular spot of fascism hasn't made it beyond the shores of the UK, and long may it continue. The laws about assemblies where those uninvolved may fear for the safety of themselves or their property long pre-date the jackboot behaviour of the current UK government.
Yes, they go back to the jack-boot behaviour of previous UK governments.
(And, seriously, just because you're a rioter doesn't mean you don't have rights.)
-
Novelty award for conflating punk with nazism, tom. Can't be a particularly strong argument.
Yeah, not like punks ever did that themselves, eh?
-
Well, duh it isn't an isolated incident. But never let the perfect be the enemy of the good, eh?
-
Keir why not rename Christchurch Crīstcirice? Your basis seems to be that Written Maori not be allowed to evolve with the new collective people of the land, or that an English loan word must accord to required spelling dogma. Which is clearly not the case.
Because Christchurch is an English word, thus it follows English rules in English. I would be up for arguing that it maybe should be Christ Church, but eh, the Pakeha tradition tends to let us change things like that by customary usage.
Whanganui is a Maori words, thus follows Maori rules in English. And really, I don't get this nonsense about organic change etc; this isn't organic change, it is the imposition of settler culture over both Maori and non-settler English. I am arguing for Whanganui as a user of English who would rather like my language clean of ugly little bits of racism.
-
Almost the entire English language consists of missspelt foreign words.
Hang on, that's dodge as all get out. First of all, there's the basic Anglo-Saxon corpus, which I think we can, for the sake of argument, call indigenous, which we couldn't misspell if we tried. Then there's the correctly spelled foreign words. And then there's the interesting case of words which may be `foreign' but really, why is the Parisian standard French version of boeuf more `correct' than beef --- are langues d'oc merely misspelled d'oil?
And surely there's no reason to say that Frensshe of Paris is wrong, but the French of Paris is right; so you have to be careful with the idea of a correct spelling.
Also not place names: see Kolkata vs. curry.
Whereas Whanganui is clearly of Maori origin, clearly was meant to be spelt Whanganui, which is clearly the correct way to spell it both in English and Maori, and is important.
The assertion is not that Wanganui is wrong in Maori; it is that it is wrong in English, by the standards and rules of English, and I should rather agree.
-
But the difference is in the evidence not the nature.
(Although I am sure there's a certain style of argumentation that is common to the nuttier type of conspiracy theories, it's the nutty part that's of interest, not the conspiracy part. Why nutters are attracted to conspiracies is interesting, and the type of nutty conspiracy theories people go for is also.)
HORansome, I assume you know Kathy Olmstead's work, right? That line about people believing the US gov't was lying and conspiring because it was lying and conspiring always struck me as a good point.
-
And also I guess that `official theory' is a bit dodgy, because officialdom isn't uniform, and ideas can be locally very strong but not globally.
(Say, Lysenkoism.)
-
I agree, but when a Conspiracy Theory challenges a widely-accepted and argued for Official Theory, it is up the Conspiracy Theorist to do the work.
But that isn't a matter of conspiracy or otherwise, but a matter of generally preferring bodies of evidence to not much evidence. I am also unsure about the division between conspiracy and official theory.