Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: The Missing Stair and the…, in reply to Max Rose,
But when people start quietly but nervously asking “Will X be there on Friday?”, they become a Missing Stair.
Seems like a necessary but not sufficient condition. I can think of people that create apprehension in my circle whom I would not call missing stairs. People don't want to avoid them because they make offensive remarks, but because they have other behavior that doesn't lend itself to relaxing in their company. Wildly fluctuating moods, for instance, so the person can be a depressed drag, or wildly angry, and you don't know what will spark them off. But when they're good, they're good.
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Hard News: Fluency, ease of manner - and…, in reply to Deborah,
we’ve not yet seen David Shearer turn on a performance that could match it. Or maybe he has, but we’re just not aware of it.
I've never seen it, and I've seen lots of bumbling. He's not bad in questions in Parliament, but that is with backup vocals, so it's hard to be sure how good his voice is.
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I dunno. I’m a bit weary of hearing him miss his step on Radio NZ.
Me too, I'm no fan. But I'll admit it's a hard ask for him to perform well in a debate he wasn't even in.
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Hard News: Fluency, ease of manner - and…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I doubt Kevin Rudd would fart without running it by a focus group first
That would make interesting research, random groups rating various politically aligned farts.
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Also, it's dead easy to get stuck into Shearer again. But he wasn't in the interview, and it would have been a very different beast if he was. He may come across poorly when questioned about what Labour's policy and direction is, but that's not what this would have been about, and he's perfectly competent at taking an aggressive line of questioning, from what I've seen in Parliament. To even have the Opposition present in such an interview raises the most important question of all - is there really a significant threat at all to justify these laws? The Opposition don't even have a case to answer there - they can simply assert that they don't believe it to be so, and ridicule the hypothetical threats that Key raises. The question has never been "is there any threat at all", but rather "is the tiny threat worth the massive intrusion into civil liberties?" to which the Opposition can simply place their opinion on the table.
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Hard News: Fluency, ease of manner - and…, in reply to Don Christie,
What surprised me is that people were surprised a NZ prime minister could front up and defend their policies. Has JK set such a low expectation?
This. The main surprise seems to be that JC didn't tear him to pieces. I've never seen JC tear anyone to pieces, that doesn't seem to be his style. But we've seen Key in so few interviews from unsympathetic interviewers, that there could be tendency to think he hasn't got the skills for them.
To that end, the main triumph was to get him onto a serious prime time interview at all.
The business of tearing him to pieces is unfortunately the job of the Opposition. If that is to happen for the public to see, then he needs to be pitted in an interview against a competent antagonist, rather than a journalist who is required to be impartial for their own credibility (even if they are aligned away from Key on this actual issue).
Personally, I didn't and won't watch this kind of interview. It tells me nothing that I don't know, since 95% of the information that is imparted is non-verbal - so long as Key remains calm and folksy, and the interviewer gets frustrated, then it really wouldn't matter what he said to an issue that people who get their news from Prime Time TV won't really understand or care about.
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to B Jones,
Sticking timid kids into environments that freak them out can show them their inner strength, or it can scar them for life.
Yes, I've never got over drama classes from childhood :-)
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I kind of took the obvious pleasure we all took in putting our bodies in harms way as a given.
That's not the only pleasure I mean. I'm referring also to things that aren't pleasurable because they are dangerous. A child might like, for instance, climbing a tree, because the view is better up there. They might like to climb monkey bars to talk with the other children up there. Or they might just like the problem solving involved. Every pleasure is worth something to them, and has to be set against the potential dangers. It's often found wanting, but it should at least be added into the calculation.
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Bart Janssen,
And that is of course the point. This is actually a balance between preventing all possible harm and allowing children to learn by (sometimes painful) mistakes
I'd go further and say for at least the 10th time on this site that considering only the balance of harms is blinkered in a major way too. If you think the counterbalancing consideration against the possible harm now is a possible harm later, and that is the only consideration, then I've got a real problem with that. The other thing that is lost is the enjoyment that the child might have got out of the activity. That is a good in itself.
Balances of harms and pleasures. That's the Utilitarianism I believe in.
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think the spirit of all this is still alive in extreme sports. Protective gear has meant that kids are just more extreme. Their standard gear is much better than what we used to have. But still, you get guys doing this:
Kudos for his exclamation! Most people it's "aaaah, F$%#$!", but he says quite clearly "Oh no, I broke my leg in half", which if you can bear the shitty quality (sorry I couldn't find the original, think it's been removed from youtube), is pretty much exactly what happened.
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