Posts by linger
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a “troll” who actually believes what they’re saying
would normally just be called a wingnut. Though that implies also that their position is, not merely wrong, but belongs in a frame of reference incompatible with your own (and/or by extension, with any reasonable individual's, in your opinion).
More neutrally, they could simply be called a "True Believer". (I like that term in that you can judge for yourself how much sarcasm to attach to it.)
Characteristics that might be more consistently useful as diagnostic criteria for trolling:
* derailing (bringing the topic, whatever it was, forcibly back to the troll's own position);
* obliviousness to counterargument;
* use of responses that merely restate the original claim without support or elaboration;
* focus on language, and/or supposed motives, rather than content, of responses.
-- all of which derive from the core defining property of posting only to provoke a reaction.
Lack of belief in the position ostensibly held is also implied, but may not be so central a criterion for practical purposes.* * *
Danyl has clearly and consistently stated that he believes his own education was a waste of money. We might perhaps agree with him to that extent -- while disagreeing about what generalisations are possible from that subjective datum. -
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Arts: the qualification is evidence that you read a number of books.
That is oversimplifying to the point of reductio ad absurdum.
In Arts, the qualification should be evidence that you have read a number of books, and understood enough of their contents to be able to synthesise, use, and critique a specialised framework of analysis. -
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
I can almost guarantee that the Karenina reference must have been something like “Stars all pretty much behave the same way during their time on the main sequence, but different star types each go wrong in their own way”.
[And Richard's followup confirms this.]
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to richard,
I enrolled in a BA conjointly with my New Zealand BSc because I was feeling a bit stifled on a diet that consisted purely of physics and maths. But the funny thing is that the philosophy papers I took made me a better scientist
Snap.
At VUW, the Philosophy of Science course was offered by the Biology Department. It was also the first university course I took that required extended essay answers (by contrast, lab reports have a fairly mechanical structure that actually needs no explicit logic), which helped when I took up philosophy and linguistics.
But beyond that, I found that the science courses I took gave me a different perspective on studying language, which turned out to be ideally suited to the quantitative, distributional, and above-all-else empirical field of corpus linguistics. -
Hard News: Media7: Doing it for the Kids, in reply to nzlemming,
(Actually, to be fair to Craig: Russell’s post does seem to support a judgement about the Minister’s response only on the basis of the resulting newspaper headlines . I assume you'd agree Craig is perfectly entitled to engage with the content of the original post rather than focussing solely on the commentariat.)
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Hard News: Time to get a grip, in reply to nzlemming,
... And just as much a media "professional" as Henry is.
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Sorry Craig, are you saying that applying the scheme to South Canterbury -- given the information available to Key and English at the time -- was a competent decision?
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new, fancy, 21st-century website, with actual things to read
... as long as you want to read about houses. (I wish it were otherwise, but: See cover story. Again.)
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Democracy only really works if the voting public is educated enough to truly participate in their society: to decide for themselves what kind of society they want, and to understand the issues on which to choose their representatives.
[And surely part of that education should be comparative cultural study (how else could anyone form an educated judgement about preferred kind of society?) –
so the availability of a liberal arts education is not unimportant to this goal.]This is something the Liberal Government of Pember Reeves, Ballance & Seddon got : it was the impetus for the 1877 Education Act setting up free compulsory state education.
The current bunch of clowns (government and so-called “opposition”), on the other hand, seem to have utterly lost sight of this basic principle, and are acting more in keeping with the idea that if the majority of the public are kept uninformed and ignorant, then they are easier to lead.
NZ’s woeful news media can also be blamed for this state of affairs, as there should be some kind of public education role for the media to play – but of course that would probably require some kind of government funding, to ensure that that role is performed by media companies that actually have a stake in this country rather than merely a duty to return a profit, either to their overseas owners, or to the aforementioned clowns in the case of TVNZ.
But with opposition and media missing in action, who is left to call the government on this? (The education sector, logically ... but wait for the cries of "vested interest".)
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the title “the were people” belongs to me!
Which means Alan Duff must even now be plotting "the were warriors".