Posts by Kracklite
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Hard News: Te Qaeda and the God Squad, in reply to Sacha,
I presume the court will be told why, but in the meantime that sure doesn’t sound too harmless from here, no matter how friendly the guy is.
That does disturb me, but using that as a pretext to suppress political dissent by people who do not use such things also disturbs me.
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Hard News: Te Qaeda and the God Squad, in reply to Just thinking,
Actually, yes, I agree that people can be dragged into, indulge in radical movements due to an excess of testosterone or simple vileness, but there have been a lot of the activist community who were attacked because they were simply activists. "Activist" and "terrorist" are two different categories and as I know in Wellington, the police cracked down on activists using the pretext of suppression of terrorism and that is what I find disturbing. Suppression of actual terrorism, however incompetent it may be, is justifiable, but the fact is that they used this as a pretext to persecute activists, however wrong, naive, foolish they may be, is the most disturbing aspect of Operation 8.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to BenWilson,
Show me anywhere I’ve been disrespectful.
I’m sorry, but that just strikes me as defensive, and a little bit smug. An immediate family member whom I love is dying of cancer, another might yet. To talk about these people as if they were “burdens” is disrespectful.
You don’t have to agree, but you do seem to be very naive about people who have had to deal with addiction, or people who have had to deal with loved ones who are dying. To think of them as economic units who are a burden on society is, in my humble opinion, disrespectful of their worth as people.
I’ll forgive you because you are lucky. Pray (if you are religious) that you remain lucky. The odds are that you won't be, however.
All that’s happening is I’m dissenting from a group opinion.
Sociopathy is a poor substitute for machismo, and I’ve never seen the worth of machismo anyway.
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Hard News: Te Qaeda and the God Squad, in reply to Russell Brown,
My view remains that there were things going on that warranted the attention of the police, even if was mostly idiocy. Sadly, they managed to be bigger idiots than the “terrorists” were.
I strongly suspect that if the original police affidavit isn’t released after the trials, it will be leaked by someone
Agreed on all points, but as has been noted here and elsewhere, the police (as a group, culture, what have you) used this as a pretext to crack down on people who were irritants to them, and that has very sinister implications.
(And it’s another reason not to trust Phil effing Goff, who condoned this shit, but that’s another redundantly irrelevant tangential digression.)
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Hard News: Everybody's News, in reply to Ross Mason,
Nicely said.
Every building contains within it the energy of its own demolition. All the energy that was required to lift the mass of its own material to its upper levels lies there, waiting. When something fails, all that energy will suddenly be released again and that energy will drive the destruction of the building overall.
Just to add, and I know that this will never convince some conspiracy theorists (which really does a disservice to the word “theory”), steel does not suddenly fail catastrophically at its melting point, it weakens substantially before that point once it is heated and softened.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to HORansome,
Socrates was a dick
Well, we mostly have Plato’s word on Socrates, and Plato definitely was a dick. If I had a time machine, a rifle and a convenient grassy knoll…
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to BenWilson,
a) I accept that smoking kills people. I’m not sure how much of a burden this actually is, since everyone dies in the end, and people with shorter lives could easily burden it less.
I’ll restrain my anger over that last phrase and attribute it to your naiveté.
The care of people with cancer is not cheap, and it is rather drawn-out too, which if one considers non-monetary maters, can be rather burdensome in… oh, what’s the euphemism? Shall we say “non-objective”?
I’m having to deal with a family member doing the dying thing now due to a cancer (not smoking-related, but nonetheless…), and another who may – or may not – have dodged that bullet (which may or may not be due to his smoking – but maybe it’s due to a supernova long ago producing a gamma ray photon that hit a DNA molecule in a cell somewhere in his sinus) .
Please don’t be so glib – there are real effects. We all die indeed, but the way we die, how long it takes, how much it hurts, not only for those dying, but those around them… well, they all matter a lot, and they cost in more than financial terms.
this particularly polite debating club
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
A little taste and tact please? They’re not mere societal conventions, they’re founded on basic respect for other people.
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If it matters (or even if it doesn’t, and the fact that it doesn’t, but people act as if it does, which is often the point of their satire, but I digress…), The Onion has something to say about it. Apple will survive or not based on the culture that it has engendered.
I’m not an early adopter myself, and often think of computers as ‘bureaucracy in a box’: No. Not today. We’re closed. Someone’s on sick leave. You submitted a form that was the wrong shade of green (this happened to me for real at Massey McUniversity), we lost the paperwork. You have not followed the correct procedure and all of the information has been lost – was it important?… and so on.
PCs, Windoze? Bah, I’d rather have HAL 9000. For all rather rigid methods of Apple’s interfaces, their devotion to making things work more or less how actual people might want to use things and even the haptics of their keyboards make them the choice for me.
Again, I hope that the culture that does that endures.
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Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to Sacha,
Yes, I'm glad to see that reported in the general media. Their bullshit needs to be exposed promptly and clearly.
"and potentially drugs" Potentially? Jesus Henry Fucking Kerrrr-ist, what a lying, weaselly [pre-emptively deleted]!
Ben:
Yup, I know of plenty of people who aren’t autistic, who have been roughed up badly by the cops, and then persecuted for years with charges hanging over them. Once they get it in their heads that you’re a villain, it becomes us-vs-them.
Indeed. Same here. Very much so. Seen the bruises and the more severe and permanent injuries too.
Juvenal - you know, blah blah... "Quis ipsos..."
If this were another forum, some idiot would pipe up with "Oh yeah? Well whoya gonna call when your house is burgled, huh? A hippie?!!!!ELEVEN1111!" Thankfully there's no need to go on into arguing about that.
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Brilliant!
Have you seen this?
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Oh, and...
Q: How many hipsters does it take to change a light bulb?
A: It's a very obscure number; you wouldn't have heard of it.