Posts by BenWilson
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Capture: Autumn lite, in reply to Jos,
Here’s an inverted ginko tree
Trying to figure that shot out. It’s a reflection, right? And the shot itself is inverted, bringing the tree right way up?
Great shot.
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Two of those jobs I do and two I never have done, but experience tells me it’s amazing what you see and hear when your eyes and ears are open and you have the tiny amount of experience necessary to see the signs.
Also, if you're not looking for something, then you have an excellent chance of not seeing it. Therefore it actually matters what you're told to look for.
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Angus Robertson,
And since I wouldn’t be able to see it from right on top of it – how is a security guard 15 m away, scanning a crowd of hundreds supposed to see this shit? Answer: they fucking can’t.
That's pretty much true. They can, however, be complained to about that behaviour, at which point they can warn the people concerned and hang around nearby to make the point. And if they do that, then people are encouraged to use them if necessary (something that most people would only do if they really needed it).
If, however, the park makes a press statement that they won't do shit to help, it rather undermines that. It's also a stupid thing to do, because the majority of people there don't actually like drunken idiots making a scene near them.
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Field Theory: Part of the Game, in reply to Hadyn Green,
But I will say this, I have spent a long time removing gendered insults from my general lexicon
What do you call dicks then?
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Field Theory: Part of the Game, in reply to Yamis,
When I played in the 90s we would get penalised for saying things like “c’mon ref” after a call we didn’t like so we pretty much knew not to go there.
It was common when I played waterpolo for penalties to be given for even raising one's eyebrows about a referee's call. To say something about it was considered disrespect and could easily result in ejection for the whole game. To actively harass the referee almost never happened, and in the one case I remember, the player was suspended from playing for about 3 months. Furthermore, the referee had the power to eject spectators from the pool complex for anything they didn't like.
I used this in one schoolgirl's game once, where an annoying Dad who had absolutely no idea was abusing me from the the stands. I stopped the game, took the ball, went up to him and told him that the game would not continue until he left the complex for 5 minutes to cool down. The look of shock and shame was well worth it, and he did what I said, and apologized to me after the game.
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Field Theory: Part of the Game, in reply to Martin Connelly,
The homophobes at Eden park represent one side of how civility and politeness have declined in this country.
Is that true? I'd say it's got better, but it's got a ways to go. Gawd I remember one of the only games of cricket I went to in the 90s there was some guy who yelled loudly "Pussy on a Stick!" over and over for hours. It was his only contribution. The most common chant was "Tufnell's a Wanker", accompanied by stomping feet and clapping. That one went all day.
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Scott Chris,
Within the context of this incident, provided the benefits outweigh the harms
So you're a Utilitarian, rather than a moral relativist. Utilitarianism is an absolutist doctrine. It holds that the good lies in the balance of harms and benefits, and that is in stark contrast to cultural relativism.
Let's have a look at the goods and harms. How do you see the benefits of making homophobic insults to a woman you don't know in a crowd of strangers who have paid to watch a rugby game? Is there some good at all that comes from that? How about the harms? Can you actually acknowledge that harm comes to a person who is made to feel insulted and then intimidated, then finally physically confronted, by a group of apparently drunk men, in a situation where moving away means leaving the stadium, since seating is allocated? How about the rest of the crowd around the group? Are they getting some benefit from the outcome? Is it nice for them to be around a confrontational situation that they also would have to give away their tickets to avoid? How about the other gay people in the crowd, which could be as many as one in ten people?
Lay out the calculus on the table. Work it through. It's one way to come to an understanding of what happened there.
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Scott Chris,
You simply use it as a tool in trying to be objective.
It might sometimes be helpful to understanding a completely different culture. But that is not the situation under discussion here. The woman was a NZer in a NZ rugby stadium.
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Scott Chris,
You do realize that moral relativity is a controversial theory, right? It's not clearly true, beyond all doubt. Quite the opposite, it suffers from some very strong criticisms, the main one being perfectly exemplified by your line of argument here - that you are arguing one can't criticize behaviour of other people, so long as some culture of the time deems it unacceptable, so it's a deeply conservative theory.
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Hard News: Not good enough, Eden Park, in reply to Sacha,
Yup, what they instead did was to say to the fools who like to spoil it for others that it's OK by them. Aside from any moral reasons, that's just bad business.
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