Posts by BenWilson
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And reductio ad absurdum is the best coup de grace to that modus operandi. But aegrescit medendo, and optimi natatores saepius submerguntur. So pax melior est quam iustissimum bellum.
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Speaker: Telling Our Own Tales, in reply to Emma Hart,
What I’m just sayin’ is that’s the same person.
More telling to me is the identical use of ...... dot dot dot everywhere.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
I'll do my best to convince as many students who can vote to vote next week. It won't be high on their agenda, though, as first week back is usually full of tests (which I should be swotting for instead of doing this). Not optimistic. When actually put upon to tell them why their lives would be improved by swapping National for Labour, it's hard to come up with anything compelling. Of course I'll be suggesting that if they don't like Labour they can vote for parties that Labour would most likely have to negotiate with.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to B Jones,
I’ll feel comforted then, if the civil state chucks my person in jail, that it’s only my person and not the rest of me, whatever that is
If I understand the Christian doctrine even remotely, and you are a Christian, then you can probably feel quite safe about that. It was built in right from the start that your immortal soul was safe from damage in the corporeal world. It was a great consolation to Christians as hungry lions munched on their entrails without even caring to give them a quick death - or so said a number of people who had not actually endured being eaten by lions.
It might even be true. Or the poo-monster might get you. Certainly, in those circumstances, a fair amount of you would end up as lion poo.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Yes, that is very interesting. Curious that labourers and tradies have very high non-voting stats. But everything is confounded by the really big contributor, age. Maybe almost all the other correlations are subsumed into that - the young are the most likely to be unemployed, most labourers are younger, and youth incomes are much lower. Even ethnic group, which would seem to be independent of age, might not be. Don't Maori and Asians have a demographic bulge at the low end - Maori because of poor mortality stats, and high birthrates, and Asians because of the massive student population?
The big picture is that young people don't vote anywhere near as much as older people. That much is very clear.
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It’s objective at least in the sense that language is objective (without getting into the ‘private languages’ argument.)
But you can't avoid that argument. Language is objective when uttered, in the sense that multiple people can hear the sounds (although it's really very disputable whether everyone, even people with perfectly good hearing, can hear all the sounds), but the "meaning" of the utterance may or may not be objective. That is not at all clear. It's a great mystery, an ancient conundrum.
Which is why practical policy is not dependent on it being true or false. Laws would be very unsound indeed if they required a highly contentious philosophical position to be true in order to work.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if they're absolute or non-absolute in their source and meaning. All that matters is that there is a method by which decisions can be made using them that is practical and consistent and acceptable to its subjects. When that is present, the rule of law can prevail.
It's a giant red-herring to seek in the long dead the sources of our current rectitude. It's been an endless excuse for shitty decisions. I'd say it's a form of stupidity that could even be hundreds of thousands of years old. I don't really care what Og said about the law, when it comes to my rights (although of course if anyone could find out what Og said, it would be extremely interesting). My rights don't derive from Og's opinion. They derive from the opinions of the living, because it is the living who will enforce them.
It is true that the legal system must concern itself with precedent when making decisions, sometimes very old precedents. That is necessary because that is all they are empowered to do, to preserve the consistency of the law, and enforce it. But they are not given the power to make that consistency absolute, for all time. Otherwise law could never change, and Og's way would be the only way. We change the law continually, and old precedent gradually becomes irrelevant. We don't incarcerate gay people any more, because living people have decided that doing it is wrong, no matter what Og or Albert or Blackstone said. The wrongness of that could be absolute or relative, it doesn't matter. Judges have to follow the decision, or they will be the ones in trouble.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to WH,
Heh, good old Euthyphro, still my favourite Platonic dialogue.
Don’t worry, no-one’s accusing the magic poo monster space aliens of that.
Nice one. I put my hand up for sure as not being the nicest of commentators. I'm more of a fan of robust debate, in which the opponents actually set on with as much intent as they can muster, within the basic rules. Anything less is patronizing to the opponent and boring to the crowd.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to UglyTruth,
You are mistaken.
The subsequent bunch of stuff you dump to justify the claim that I'm mistaken makes no reference to what you claim I'm mistaken about, which is that the entirety of the legal and enforcement apparatus in this nation will back up the sovereignty of our parliament. A bunch of quotes lifted from some quack website is not going to convince anyone that laws passed in this land do not have to be obeyed if the common law is in conflict with them.
All you actually have there is a strictly legalistic interpretation of the phrase "the law of the land", for which you have as much authority to assert the meaning as you do over the word "oath", ie none at all. The law of the land is a common phrase referring to the laws that hold in a land, and that includes statute law. That is how I meant it, and how I continue to mean it. We're not in a courtroom here, we're on an internet blog. If you want to split hairs forever on this, I'd concede that you don't use the phrase that way, and could even use it in discussions with you to avoid wasting more time. But for now, no, I'm not wrong.
The laws that hold in this country are considerably more than the common law on my definition of "hold" and "country" and "considerably", and "common law" and "definition" and "are" and "more" and so on and so on. Split hairs all you like but the basic thrust of what I'm saying is that if you think you win arguments by becoming an inflexible walking talking latin regurgitating link-whore, you got another think coming. You're trying to actually argue for natural law and God and our parliament not being sovereign via being a language Nazi, and it won't wash. You can't convince anyone of anything that way, they'll just laugh at you wanting to insist on using your private language to prove the existence of your God, your "natural" laws, your opinion about the sovereignty of our Parliament. It's got all the force of my 4 year old telling me that his toy dog Woofy says he doesn't have to eat his beans.
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Prime Minister John Key said such a target was unrealistic and would cost billions to achieve.
"Swimmable is a very, very high and expensive goal. If we were to make that the national standard it would have an enormous impact on the cost for rate payers - billions I think," he said in July.
What are the numbers on this that aren't pulled out of John Key's proverbial? The simpler measures of fencing waterways and planting trees along them don't sound that costly, and are probably in many ways economically sensible in the interests of preventing erosion, maintaining soil quality (purely counting its fertility, not the wider measure of its level of pollution), and preventing stock losses.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to B Jones,
It's hard to see how it could be, since it's asserting the supremacy of English common law. But maybe the aliens want to play around with this. I'm curious to see what they come up with.
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