Posts by Stewart
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Gotta confess my own non-breeding status here; but my sisters both approve of my 'uncling' of their kids (him-on-a-bike, that sounds way worse than I intended, but I'm leaving it in). They learned to ask certain types of questions of me, knowing they wouldn't get fobbed-off without a decent (or indecent) reply but that it would also be a reply worth listening to.
And often the starting point of a conversation with their mum or dad.
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Sorry, a bit ranty and not in keeping with the generally light-hearted tone - sorry chaps (of all genders and persuasions).
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I take great exception to the anti sex-ed campaigners that abrogate their responsibility as parents for teaching their own kids - about sex, about anything!
Too many parents want the state/education-system/anyone to do all the tougher parental responsibilities and leave them free to think being a parent is all about being unconditionally loved.
People (obv not PAS readers) need to recognise that parenthood is a very responsible position and that they need to instill in their kids the values that will work best for them. Ignorance, aggression and bigotry are not values that work to improve their holders' lives.
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And agreeing that it is never appropriate for the military to act independently and withold information from the government of the day.
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OnPoint: Other People's Wars, in reply to Rich Lock,
Sorry, Rich, I should have been a little clearer and appeared a little less partisan.
I was more rejecting of John Key's smiley-wavey dismissal of the book's claims (I haven't read the book yet) about the apparent systemic disconnect between what the NZDF has been getting up to and what they have been telling their 'political masters'.Not really limiting it to the incumbents as I am given to understand that there have been both army and navy actions that were taken against the express wishes of the current National and the previous Labour governments.
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Let's be honest - if you were a military commander (Mr Mataparae, for instance) would you want to divulge all your plans for the NZDF and its deployment to a slack-brained lightweight like our current PM?
He comes across as a glove-puppet with all that "I'm very relaxed about it actually" b/s. And I wonder how much seething Helen Clark is doing these days?
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It is a question of how the RWC and ancilliary events are being promoted via sponsors and the media, compared with how we, the fans/the population/the affected see the whole thing.
I think people, on an individual level, are fine with most of it. I know I am but I am certainly not buying into all the corporatised prostituting of our nationality or even our sense of self that the media/sponsors seem to think is the way to go.
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From some stuff I read around the start of the 3N, the ABs were concerned about how they had been getting punished (last season?) for having a too-dominant scrum when the opposition collapsed. This then led them to the concept of not overpowering the opposition but instead holding them up (to prevent the collapse) and taking the chance that the opposition might make something out of the scrum.
I think this is why (1 of the reasons) Crockett didn't look as effective - he's trying to hold up the man inside him from a position where he has trouble maintaining his bind.
Anyone else a bit frustrated at how long Piri Weepu was taking to get the ball out of some of those rucks? He looked well short of pace a number of times and his service was slow. He's great off the bench but I'm not seeing him as a run-on half-back.
Carter and Smith were awesome - like having extra loose-forwards out in the backline. -
Hard News: An open thread while I'm down…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Please let this be the only time I am 'like John Key' as I can't recall just what I felt about the tour. I was in my mid-20's, quite keen on rugby and pretty gung-ho about ending racism, but the clincher is that I was working in a bar in Glyfada, just outside Athens and was disengaged from the whole thing.
Does that make any similarity with our piss-weak PM less cringeworthy?
Our english-language news was from the US armed-forces paper and a weekly Sunday Telegraph (for the crossword as much as anything), so events around the tour simply passed me by.
Reflecting on it now I feel conflicted as all hell - I hope that I would have come down on the side of the protestors but it is unlikely I would have been actively involved. It is something that I had to read up on when I returned at teh start of 86.
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The communication of scientific knowledge to laypersons is generally heavy on metaphor and simile in order to reduce the complexity to a level that has some chance of being accepted. It is like the translation of Ben's Arabian Nights from the Arabic (scientific jargon) into English (something at a level that laypersons can hope ot comprehend).
So translators of science need to be conversant with the scientific/Arabic realm and be able to parse this knowledge into 'easy speak'.