Posts by Tom Semmens
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I was thinking:
Entitlement
Sorry
Gilberterian.Then i thought there was something poetic about those three...
EntitlementSorry I did that
Gilberterian.
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...and former treasury analyst Geoff Simmons...
You mean someone who worked for the organisation of which was said (to quote our glorious leader):
"Treasury can’t tell us what the deficit is going to be in December let alone what’s happening in 2030 or 2040"??
That Treasury?
After that I read that I decided there were to many words in the article. -
I reckon Justin Marshall is going to be an awesome commentator when he fully retires, just the tonic we need in the commentary box.
I can't understand how everyone is talking up this win as showing how rugby should be played. I would have thought the lesson every coach in the world would have seen in 10 metre high flashing neon lights is "DON'T TRY AND PLAY THE ALL BLACKS AT THEIR OWN GAME".
Surely the advice you'd give your players up against the All Blacks would be kick the ball downfield, play offside as often as possible and kick the penalties - i.e like the Springboks?
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Ok then, explain to me exactly what happened that day.
"Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war."
It seems to me that what happened was Osama Bin Laden was considerably luckier than the IRA were.
As for subsequent events - it is not unknown for people to seize an opportunity and bend it to their ends.
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Not Kim Hill's finest moment... in fact she was damn rude... I haven't given up on her completely yet, but I'm damn close...
Anyone listening to that interview would have known where Kim Hill stood on the of the idea of a 9/11 conspiracy. Any sane and intelligent person would agree with her. I say three cheers to her for not allowing the rediculous post-modernist idea that every opinion is as valid as the next one as long as it is sincerely held act as Mogodon for an insult to her intellect. Sometimes you just have to make it clear that you think someone is a nut.
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While I think Colin Craig is a misguided twit, I think sadly that his problem - parking his coyness on the day - has been a surfeit of honesty. He told us how much he was spending, what sort of crowd he thought would show up, and what he was aiming to achieve.
Good on him for his honesty, a right wing fundy with the courage to state his convictions and put his own money where his mouth is may be a fool, but he is a reasonably honest fool.
The problem is his mates like Baldock, McVicar and McCroskie have built their public lives on dishonest sophistry and trojan horse agendas. Do you think McVicar would have organised the PR for the march on Saturday with the honesty Colin Craig did? Would have McCroskie?
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Looking at the Herald, they were talking about a budget of close to $450,000 -- but this is a decent fraction (a third, maybe) of what you would expect to spend running a general election campaign for a decent sized third party -- is there any evidence that the actual spend came close to the $450k they talked about??
There is little doubt in my mind the Section 59 referendum has morphed into an aattempt to re-launch a Fundamentalist political party. If you see this march in the context of part of a program of trying to build momentum for the 2011 general election then it makes a little bit more sense.
Getting only 4-5000 people though shows just how deeply Godless socialism has infected our benighted people since 1935.
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Craig's explanation is actually rather like one of the referendum questions he espouses: he jolly well wants to see something done, but seems curiously disinclined to actually propose an action that would meet his needs.
That is because when they do, their crowds vanish and their votes evaporate.
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I have thought a bit about this. It seems to me no one has questioned that this novel represents a substantial and original work of imagination. Surely, then, this must be the test on the degree of seriousness with which this plagiarism is viewed? Once upon a time, when the spoken and written word was the only means of communication for ideas, novelists were much more prolific than today. Agatha Chrisitie wrote 80 novels. Alexander Dumas wrote 277. A 20th century author called John Creasey apparently wrote 600+ novels under 28 different pen names. The reason I mention this is I read somewhere that (I think) Mark Twain was in the habit of writing down pithy phrases and comments he heard or read in travels. I am sure that unattributed borrowing of different turns of phrase was endemic in the heyday of the production line written word in English literature - only they didn't have the internet back then so no one could check. I am not familiar with the duration of these notorious "sixteen passages" within the novel, but I get the impression they constitute just that - passages. If my recollection is correct on Mark Twain, I wonder how his writing could stand up to the scrutiny of the internet?
The internet has allowed much greater checking and turned everyone from the professor down into a lazy SOB. Most education, even at tertiary level, treads a well worn path. It is nonsense to suggest that amongst the billions of words and millions of essays, theses, and doctoral submissions the same ideas, quotes, references and phrases are not repeated time and time again. Students have always borrowed and re-written to a greater to a greater or lesser extent their mates work and essays. Yet it is only now we have an obsession with plagiarism in our tertiary institutions. This is, IMHO, actually a symptom of the wider general malaise afflicting our higher educational institutions. Concentrating on the evil of plagiarism and applying draconian punishments to students caught plagiarising is as often used to mask falling standards as much as express any genuine concern that someone might not be submitting original work. Now the University of Auckland is caught on the horns of a dilemma. To admit that Witi Ihimaera's crime isn't all that much and that novelists may have been pinching the best bits of each others writing since Homer was a lad is to destroy their moral force when dealing with plagiarism from their students; Yet to confront the root cause of this plague of plagiarism in their student body would be to open a can of worms indeed.
No wonder they just want it to go away.
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The current sudden outburst of soccer hysteria says more about the over-exposure of rugby in the main centres than it does about the skills and playing style of the All Whites.
Let's face it - there are plenty of teams who would thrash the All Whites who are not going to be in South Africa.
I just can't enthused over beating Bahrain and then celebrating hysterically just because we qualified to turn up. How low is that hurdle? The All Whites will have a starters chance in South Africa I suppose, but they'll be lucky to score a goal let alone actually win a game.