Posts by Andre Alessi
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It isn’t my place to pick for christchurch but if it was my choice that rebuilding would be slower and attempt to make something really neat, not simply restore business premises to functional.
But people aren't going to hang around for a year waiting for their workplaces to be rebuilt. It's all well and good to want to use Christchurch as a model for "City of the Future!" (insert Simpsons "Monorail" reference here) but there's no point building a city where half the population has had to move away to other cities to find work before it's done.
Good planning is obviously now even more important than ever, but I think there's the possibility of losing sight of who all this rebuilding is intended to benefit.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Oh, but isn’t politicizing human misery really really bad? I do struggle to keep up with where the moral high ground is at any given moment.
Well, when it's a policy decision someone agrees with, it's "politicizing human misery", when it's not, it's "putting a human face to the fallout of heartless government policies".
[omarlittlemode] All in the game, yo. All in the game.
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Surely all it will take is for a major daily to publish an interview with a homeless Christchurch family that is in danger of losing WFF and the whole idea will be dropped?
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Bart Janssen,
You only think you aren’t a mindless drone …
Ssssh, I'm trying to keep up the facade!
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to James W,
But by debunking them, you don’t just ignore the problem and hope it goes away, you confront it head on.
That gets into some pretty tricky territory as to which incorrect beliefs we tackle and which we don't, as well as the degree and time spent on each.
A much more effective approach is something like Penn & Teller's Bullshit where the debunking is done once, along with methods for thinking about these issues that can be applied in other cases. People aren't mindless drones, if they're given the right tools to analyse and understand issues, they'll work out the problems in their own time.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Right now a hundred right-wing bloggers will be googling Peter Hyde to see if he’s ever joined a union, or written a letter to the editor about climate change.
Is that before or after they start fantasizing about roaming bands of avaricious brown people, thus requiring the immediate arming of all good, god-fearing white homeowners? Because that seems to be where a significant part of the "discussion" is going in the nethers of NZ's internet.
Proposals to relax gun ownership laws in 5...4...3...
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We did Jazzercise at Mayfair Primary School, but we did it to Pseudo Echo's Funky Town.
I don't think our teachers really understood the concept.
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Sacha,
Take that, Mr Ring.
Loke/Loge also makes an appearance in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, commonly referred to as “The Ring Cycle”, which tells a story of tragedy and loss that leads to the destruction of Valhalla, and ultimately a bittersweet freedom for those left behind.
We have now come full circle.
EDIT: Which reminds me, there are always the words of the "Schopenhauer ending", which as far as I know isn't commonly used in modern productions, but still:
Were I no more to fare to Valhalla's fortress, do you know whither I fare? I depart from the home of desire, I flee forever the home of delusion; the open gates of eternal becoming I close behind me now: To the holiest chosen land, free from desire and delusion, the goal of the world's migration, redeemed from incarnation, the enlightened woman now goes. The blessed end of all things eternal, do you know how I attained it? Grieving love's profoundest suffering opened my eyes for me: I saw the world end.
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This has already been posted (and Juha linked to it on Twitter) but I'm still a little amazed at Ring's writing on "Pawmistry":
Dismayed by the glaring lack of literature on the psychological complexities of [cats]… Ring… began experimenting with age-old tools of divination to open a window into a cat's inner self.
Ken Ring first discovered palmistry for cats at a psychic party two years ago. He has since devoted much time to conducting research in this revolutionary new field.
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I do seem to remember Mikey Havoc gave Ken Ring a bit of air time back in the day (during his first stint on Drive, I think?)