Posts by Chris Waugh
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Up Front: The Missing Stair and the…, in reply to RaggedJoe,
However casual racism is not unknown. Mostly it is born of ignorance IMHO.
In the cases of people who grew up in small, isolated, homogenous communities, sure, like my mother in law staring with blank incomprehension when the waitress tried to explain to her that this restaurant doesn't serve pork because it's a Muslim restaurant (not exactly racism, but transfer that ignorance of the big wide world outside the two villages she's spent her life in, and... ). But what bugs me is the white former colleagues who've felt the need to shit talk our own students or The Chinese generally within earshot of the students. If you're in China, you don't have any excuses for such prejudice. No amount of explaining those odd little facets of Chinese history, culture, language, society, etc that they're deliberately choosing to ignore slows down long enough on its trip from one ear to the other to stick in their brain. They have decided. And so one day I asked, "So why are you in China, then?" "Money" was the answer. Oh yeah, you get real rich teaching in China...
Argh. So a careful strategy of managing the amount of time spent with certain colleagues became necessary.
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And dusk this evening, clouds moving closer in.
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Wah, 3 straight days of hot, and most importantly, dry and (mostly) sunny weather. Today's setting sun from the overbridge as I brought the wee one home from kindy.
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Sunset on the hot and (finally!) dry, sunny day that was yesterday.
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Hard News: Fluency, ease of manner - and…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Slickness has nothing to do with trustworthiness.
Absolutely true. Trouble is, slickness sells, and that's what we've been reduced to in this modern world, mere consumers whose sole function is to buy crap we don't need. Key, for all his myriad faults, is doing a better job of the selling.
My sympathies lie with Campbell, but he seemed to be outgunned.
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Hard News: Fluency, ease of manner - and…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
It’s not only being a ratshit Opposition, but a basic failure of the Opposition’s fundamental duty to act as a check and balance on the Government of the day and the Executive.
Absolutely agree.
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On a purely playing the game level: Yes, Key was good. I liked Campbells' "So sue us! Lay a complaint with the BSA!" moment, but so far as I could tell that was the only punch he landed. And why did he ask Key to comment on operational matters?
But having said that, I agree with Hillary.
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Hard News: The GCSB Bill: We at least…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
I don' know, Tom, I haven't seen anything to say the GCSB will be able to help NZDF with internal security. I would've thought they'd be supplying NZDF with intel about external threats. After all, not only was GCSB founded to be the foreign intelligence agency, they're also supposed to be the elint specialists and therefore presumably have access to info useful to NZDF that NZDF doesn't necessarily have the ability to intercept itself.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Hebe,
Google sez the Indian word for swastika was swastika,
I'd be inclined to trust Google on that (although, Sanskrit, surely?). My German is way beyond rusted out, but I seem to remember the Nazi abomination of that symbol being called a Hakenkreuz. I also note the caption to the photo in Joe's link says:
(and a little notice explaining it's ancient usages)
And from the about page of that Proswastika site:
The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit svastika
So I guessed right about the Sanskrit.
In Chinese it's a variant of the character 万, meaning 10,000 or myriad, everything, as in the line from the Daodejing:
无名天地之始，有名万物之母
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth, the named is the mother of the myriad things
That's my crappy translation. My excuse is I'm in the office struggling with the rubbish office computer and don't have a copy of the Daodejing on me to consult.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Just thinking,
the Swastika tiles
I'm going to assume they were of the more traditional variety that way, way predates the Nazis' appropriation of that symbol.
