Posts by James Butler
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Maybe not, but they have plenty of toadies in these parts.
Yep, but hating on Saruman and Wormtongue is pretty unsatisfying when you know the big kids are sticking it to Sauron.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
There are some local attempts to get this happening here – Occupy Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and, er, New Plymouth. It seems to have a fairly broad set of goals, encompassing pretty much all the issues that people of a leftist persuasion currently care about.
One downside of living here – no locally-based Evil Empire worth targeting. Well, not since Faye & Richwhite buggered off, anyway.
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Also, I personally wouldn't want to have a beer with most people. Call me an out-of-touch elitist, but there it is.
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Hard News: Dropping the Bomber, in reply to Danielle,
I would understand this reasoning if I thought Key had any charisma. At all.
It's the age-old "What does she see in that dickhead? Can't she just dump him already?" conundrum, writ large.
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Russell Brown,
I used “fscking” as a humorous alternative to “fucking”. But you probably knew that …
That’s the joke.
ETA: Was meant to be animated. Oh well.
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Martin Lindberg,
ETA: LOL, ie6 failed to attach file and edit-window crashes browser. iPhone to the rescue.
You can't attach a file with an iPhone, either...
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Russell Brown,
fscking buttons on the fscking mice
Since OS X is Unix, if you want to fsck, you can just open a terminal and type “fsck”. Why does it need to be a button on the mouse?
Actually, Apple mice in general. I can’t recall a good one, and some of them were/are basically unusable. I use a Microsoft one!
Microsoft mice, and (some of) their keyboards, are about the only MS products I would happily pay money for. They’re never the best on the market, but they’re comfy, cheap and sufficiently well made.
Unless the industry changes drastically in the future (and the odds are that it will, I guess) I don’t imagine I’ll ever buy another Apple product – the iPod Touch I own is a great piece of kit, but the iOS ecosystem is too limited for my taste. But I’m happy to accept that I’m a small demographic, and Steve’s genius was tailoring technology to enhance the experience of the large demographic, rather than expecting people to tailor their thoughts and actions to the technology. Other tech companies are slowly learning that lesson.
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Hard News: LATE OCTOBER: Life in the…, in reply to Jackie Clark,
mandatory place and time for PASers to meet up
So long as it's not a Thursday.
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Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Huh? Any less than being the ACT party with 501 members and mega-rich funders?
No. I don’t like the current system either.
Obviously, if you have only 15,000 members and have a membership fee of $10,000 then that would make a nonsense of my idea – but that is just a silly objection in reality.
I disagree. I can easily imagine ACT (well, an ideal ACT, perhaps not the actual one) attracting a significant number of members even with a five-figure membership fee.
Less than forty years ago, with a population of three million, Labour and National boasted memberships approaching six figures. We should atrivce to re-produce that level of political engagement.
Agreed.
And they wouldn’t exactly be broke – a party with 25,000 members charging $30 membership PA would have up to 2.25 million to contest an election, a princely sum for a campaign.
Except this wouldn’t be just to run the campaign, it would have to run the whole party.
One of the interesting things about the massacre in Norway was that the ruling party even held a popular youth camp. Wouldn’t it be great for the NZLP to have summer camps for hundreds of young people, or for the National Party ball to be the highlight of the social calendar in places like Gore and Howick?
Yes it would.
because the majority of people won’t read it
And this objection also doesn’t hold water either. The publication of membership numbers and fee structures is EXACTLY the sort of rude and easily digestable populist information people would be interested in reading. Trawling through partylists and bio’s to re-write it? No so much.
OK perhaps, I think the bigger problems would be that people a) don’t want to think they’re being influenced by money, and so are likely to discount the effect of that influence; and b) wouldn’t necessarily draw the conclusions from the data that you or I would. One thing the conservative parties in the US and here have proved in recent years is that people love winners, and can be persuaded to vote aspirationally against their own interest even when they know they’re helping only the rich.
I agree with your assessment of the problem – lack of broad political engagement – I’m just not convinced of the details of your solution.
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to BenWilson,
I’ll bet. Interestingly, on his blog, he claimed that he was going to only write one tweet per day, and follow no one. I can’t find where, but remember it quite distinctly, thinking it a very interesting experiment. I presumed it must have failed, when I found him following me.
He gave up on that a few weeks ago, after a slightly heated exchange where it turned out that he could DM his followers, but no-one could DM him back, I believe.