Posts by bmk
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Muse: Some Link Crack To Tide You Over..., in reply to BenWilson,
No wonder you found it depressing:)
I only did German in high school and we got to translate fairy tales into German which was actually pretty cool - but I think the reason for this was that fairy tales were all we would have been capable of doing.
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Muse: Some Link Crack To Tide You Over..., in reply to BenWilson,
You didn't like Hermen Hesse? I have only read him in English but he's one of my favourite authors and wish I could read his works in the original source.
Their was a scene in Steppenwolf where I could feel the translators pain - paraphrase
"Haven't you noticed you have been calling me thou while I have been calling you thee?"
The translator trying to get across the difference between the formal sie and the informal du. -
Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to nzlemming,
What about the automatic checkers looking for 404 errors on a page so the site administrator can remove/modify the link? I had heard that they were very useful but never used one personally.
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Hard News: Bishop Brian: It's worse than…, in reply to nzlemming,
Religions start out as cults.
Exactly and once the cult has enough followers they become a religion and have all these rights that cults don't have. IMO they should be treated equally.
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Hard News: Bishop Brian: It's worse than…, in reply to Peter grower,
I tend to think Destiny church are a cult.
To me the only difference between a cult and a religion is the number of believers.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Emma Hart,
Thanks - that is similar to other experiences I have found. No doubt there are situations with power imbalances but there are plenty of other cases where the girl is mature enough to decide for herself if she wants to sleep with a slightly older guy.
The strict adherence to ages can cause real problems as illustrated in the example I gave in previous situation.
Perhaps the ideal would be a two-tiered consent age. A lower consent age but a limit on age separation ie. a 16 year old and a 14 year old is ok but a 14 year old and a 25 year old is not ok.
But situations like this are just so hard. Cause each situation is different and laws are black and white. I was so glad in the case I mentioned the police didn't charge my friend and used discretion - the police told my friend (after talking to his girl friend) that her parents were being unreasonable but they were largely bound by the law - it was good though that they got them to change their mind.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to BenWilson,
It didn’t help that most of what we heard about the sexual encounters of our friends were the girls who were mostly shagging older guys, and the guys who were mostly shagging younger girls. Everything about that speaks of power imbalance, and statutory rape is all over it.
Yes it does but this is where things get really blurry. Say you have a 16 year old male with a 15 year old female who want to have sex with each other, is this wrong? And if you say it is then with the genders reversed is it still wrong?
Things get very blurry around the consent age – ideally I think it should be a bit lower. One of my friends nearly got prosecuted. He was 16 and had been in a relationship for 6 months with his 15 year old girl-friend. Her parents when they found out they were having sex demanded the police charge my friend. The police didn’t want to charge the boy and eventually talked the girl's parents out of it. But the distress all this caused to the boy, girl and the boy’s parents was enormous.
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I remember reading a biography of Golda Meir, that their was a spate of sexual assaults on females in Israel and a cabinet member suggested that a curfew be put in place for women. She responded by saying that if anyone should be put under curfew it should be men since they were committing the crimes. Funny though how the first instinct was to prohibit the victim rather than the perpetrator.
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Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to Russell Brown,
The Herald story itself is on page 7 of the paper. Not really getting why it isn’t front-page news
Because there are far more important stories.
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Legal Beagle: Voting Referendum: Jus' Sayin', in reply to Christopher Nimmo,
Yeah I thought this would be the way to make it work if you were to maintain the threshold. Make the preferential listing purely optional so that someone voting for national or labour could just tick the box whereas someone else may choose to go 1.ALCP 2.Greens 3.Labour or whatever. This way would ensure that everyone at least has the chance to make their vote count for something.