Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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[I]t[']s not only not leaving the water cycle, it[']s not even leaving the watershed. The factory is generally within 100km of the farm, so the water (again not leaving the NZ water cycle) ends up slightly further away from where it would have otherwise.
Sure, but in what condition is it when it gets there? What additional goodies is it carrying back to the watercourses? What role is it playing in soil erosion and the subsequent compromise of riverine and estuarine ecosystems? I'm not sure that you can mitigate those effects to any great degree. Dairying's not only thirsty; it's also dirty.
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I'd love to see us taxpayers... enabled to choose priorities as to where our money goes/is expended.
Am I the only person envisioning nightmare scenarios here?
Uh, yeah. California's had a lot of fun with these kinds of ideas. One result is that the education system is horribly underfunded. The flagship University of California system is hundreds of millions of dollars in the red. This is what happens long-term when you expose financial planning to public referenda.
Personally, I think that people who see these schemes as a "great chance" to "choose priorities" aren't sufficiently scared of their fellow citizens. Spend some more time at Your Views. Read the comments at stuff.co.nz. This is what we're dealing with.
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Yes, Goldie and McIntyre invented painting on canvas, you know. In fact, Pakeha culture -- hell, human beings themselves -- evolved here. Came up out of the ground. Something in the water here, apparently.
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It's like the market populists are stuck in a perpetual 1966. But, hey, I guess the Maoists did have the coolest uniforms.
I should totally go to bed now.
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Closing the station would help fulfill the fantasy that many people have here that it is in fact a genre for white rich folk.
Absolutely. I've never quite understood the joy with which some on the "anti-elitist" Left attack "high culture," while simultaneously championing "pop" as the unerring and righteous "voice of the people." I guess the reasoning is that pop is, well, popular and people seem to like it ... so it must be good. Virtuous, even.
What this totally ignores is the extent to which pop is an industry -- a top-down system in which prefabricated tastes are imposed from above. (Adorno was right dammit.) Meanwhile, while we all play this "shoot-at-the-evil-Ludwig-van-Beethoven" shell game, the actual elites (Sony, TimeWarner, etc. etc.) get away with handing us our culture -- and ass -- on a plate. Which we then also get to pay for. One could get quite depressed.
ETA: OK, I see that Giovanni's more eloquently addressed the point that a viewpoint like Robbie's is actually a rather draconian form of market fundamentalism. Get with the program. (Not programme.) Dubstep dubstep dubstep. TINA, indeed.
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When I was at high school, punk rock happened. We cut our hair and affected working-class English accents when we sang. It changed my life, and it led directly to a popular music culture that we regard as our own, and which inspired kids in America when they picked up guitars.
... Aaaaaaand here's Seattle rockers Kinski, performing a little song y'all might know ...
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How hard is it for architects and planners to grasp that that sort of residential building doesn't bring life to a space, it kills it?
Absolutely. It's like: architects, please familarize yourselves with the tort of private nuisance. This is why your groovy plans for "mixed spaces" will always fail. Thank you.
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Have you ever been a teenager?
Of course. But not everyone is a teenager. Which is kind of where the libertarian world view falls down.
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Apart from the proven public health benefits of decriminalizing our current drugs - the removal of the stupid puritanical attitude to using drugs to alter your mind would surely foster the development of, if not safe, then at least safer drugs.
And yet, the most socially accepted and omnipresent drug in our culture -- alcohol -- is also the most widely abused and the most damaging. Doesn't that suggest that there's a supply angle here as well? People don't automatically do illegal drugs because they're attracted by the frisson of illegality, much as libertarians would like to think otherwise. People use drugs largely because they want to get toasted. The legal aspect is kind of irrelevant in this regard, except to the extent to which it alters supply.
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Unfortunately, those volumes are bound back copies of The Truth.
I think you're being deeply unfair to New Zealand's most venerable scandal rag, there, Craig.