Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Emma Hart,
From that link I found this one painfully amusing:
When you're 35, "she's legal" isn't good enough.
Classic. I wonder how that would go down as a rule in a brothel. Sorry, mate, you're just too old for our girls.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to James Butler,
I’m not sure what the analogue would be for ages of consent.
No, I'm not either. If there weren't predatory pedophiles, there wouldn't need to be an age of consent? But there are such people. Perhaps that may change/lessen. Or it could go the other way. To me that seems more likely. If emotional and physical maturity are going in opposite directions, pedophilia would be likely to rise.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Emma Hart,
But isn’t part of that development not just age, but experience? How do you learn to handle relationships if you don’t have relationships?
Precisely. It's analogous to over protecting children from physical play. It doesn't really make them safer, because they don't learn what is actually dangerous, they don't develop the skills and strength to deal with the challenges, and they never learn to deal with pain.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Moz,
An immature 25 year old? No way.
I think it's more about consent than maturity - that's an incredibly subjective idea. Furthermore, having sex is in itself a driver of maturity, a rite of passage.
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Hard News: Modelling Behaviour, in reply to Rob Stowell,
a far more accurate description, pretty much sums it up :)
Considering I had some of the exact same brand and sub-brand purchased from a different place, and we took it together, and experienced nothing like that, it's the only accurate description. I do not believe that they were the same thing, and since they didn't have to say what's in it, that's definitely not precluded. Can't say I liked it, though. It was amusingly novel, the first time, for there to be a legal thing that had a real effect, somewhat like dope. But beyond that, the legality (and thus availability) was the only thing that was better about it.
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Hard News: Modelling Behaviour, in reply to Russell Brown,
I doubt it would generate acute kidney injury, which has happened here too.
Or cause a person to lapse into unconsciousness 4 times during dinner, as happened to a friend of mine in front of me. On a different occasion said friend took some synthetic whatever in his back yard, and woke up in his front lounge lying on the floor surrounded by the shards of his coffee table, and was unable to move for around half an hour. This was not an inexperienced drug taker, either.
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Our unwritten constitution is not worth the paper it's not written on.
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Oblique is for the chess puzzles. You were being cryptic :-)
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Legal Beagle: On Consensus, in reply to Steven Peters,
Yes it was addressed to you, as in '.the most horrifying thought of all is that the party system might break down completely, and individuals might vote according their own views of right and wrong'.
I was mocking that kind of thinking. Sorry about the lack of clarity - I am not horrified by the thought - party lovers are. Which is not me.
I am not sure that 'representative government' prohibits parties from acting as representatives, as you assert.
Of course it doesn't, otherwise we wouldn't have parties. What I'm saying is that parties have broken down the idea of representative government, which was to be a government of representatives, typically of a region. Each was allowed to vote and act in their own conscience. But of course even within a system that is supposed to decentralize power, powerful cliques form that take control. This is so normal that we barely notice it. Proportional representation was a response to this, a system that set out to specifically recognize that parties are actually the units of power, not individual representatives, and to allot them power proportional to their popular support.
would argue it still is the dominant electoral cleavage, Nat on the centre right, Labour and Greens centre left, and NZ First traditional centre.
It is, but prior to MMP it was nearly exclusive. Yes, you can line up the parties left to right, if you like. But you can also line them up in other dimensions now, and those dimensions do not become synonymous with left/right. It is possible, when you have a more than two parties, for issues to not fall across the left-right spectrum. For instance, ACT may be in full agreement with the Greens about some particular liberty that all the other parties actually disagree with.
It's a step towards what I feel should be the inevitable thrust of democracy, that every dimension gets it's proportional representation, that no issue can be held down just by the tactical alignment of party views, no matter what it's level of popular support.
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Legal Beagle: On Consensus, in reply to Steven Peters,
From what you are saying, are you in favour of a lowered threshold, or against it?
Not sure if that's addressed to me, but if so, then yes, I've been in favour of a lowered threshold from the first moment that I heard of the stupid idea that we even had one at all, right back when MMP came in. I don't think there's anything good about parties, and MMP was an important move to compensate for the fact that parties form despite the intention of representative government being that representatives would govern, rather than parties. However flawed it was, it broke up the stupid left-right false dichotomy somewhat.
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