Posts by Rich Lock
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
If you want to piss someone off…ask them at the height of their Christmas shopping frenzy if they are going to midnight mass at their local church….
Just out of interest, is this something you do? You know, approach people at their most stressed and busy, when they have a lot to do and prepare in a short space of time before everything closes down for summer, when they're probably also concerned about money, when they're fighting with hundreds of other people doing the same thing, you choose exactly that time to approach them and ask them irrelevant highly personal questions?
Seems awfully like trolling for the lulz to me.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Max Rose,
I’d say that most of us celebrate Xmas with feasting, indolence, exchanging gifts, drinking, and inadvisable sexual encounters (well, if you count office Xmas parties). In other words, much more consistent with Brumalia, Saturnalia, and other winter solstice festivals than anything to do with the baby Jesus.
http://crispian-jago.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-venn-diagram-of-christmas-traditions.html
All hail the blessed St John of Nakatomi. For verily did he walk barefoot amongst the evildoers and deliverest the innocent from their embrace. And verily didst the same shit happen to the same guy twice. And then three more times with diminishing returns of quality.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
celebrate Christmas and Easter.
Define 'celebrate', please.
I haven't 'celebrated' easter for around 25 years. I have worked for private companies that have closed their offices on good friday and easter monday. I'm afraid I didn't beg them for the opportunity to come in to work. Does that count as celebrating? Now I work for myself I have been known to work on both those days. Sometimes I get time off by default as my clients aren't working.
I tend to thank secular trade unions more for my time off - you know, negotiating things like weekends, fair working conditions including the length of a working day and paid overtime.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
What surprises me about this conversation is the depth of anti – religious feeling….like, where is the fear coming from?
I spent most of my school years at a school where CofE was the default setting. We had a compulsory Religious Instruction class, purely christian teachings (once a week for 5-6 years). All assemblies included a hymn and a bible teaching, every day (every weekday in term for 7-8 years).
That's quite a considerable amount of time spent presenting these things as absolute and unquestioned facts, but relatively speaking, this net sum of this teaching was nothing more than a light sprinkling as oppposed to the full immersive experience it could have been. However, the effect on an impressionable young mind is to literally put the fear of god into you. I spent considerable hours as a child deeply worried and scared about the consequences of various actions on my part and those of the people I loved.
Were my parents going to burn in hell because they weren't christian? What about my jewish, sikh and hindu friends? Was there a ledger somewhere where every bad thing I did was added up? Where was the tipping point between overall being a good person and being a bad person destined for hell? Could I offset my bad deeds with good deeds? How did I know what was good and how much they were 'worth'?
You really think that sort of mental torment is uncommon when you force-feed a child with this sort of thing as an absolute? Do you think that's acceptable? A small price to pay?
It isn't 'fear' that you should be querying, its anger. And it's pretty obvious where it comes from. It's the result of mental torture and abuse that's a direct consequence of half-baked well-meaning but deeply flawed state-spondered religious instruction. Any 'fear' I have is for my children going through the same thing.
You want to teach them religion? Fine. Your curriculum now includes: Thor, Odin, Jupiter, Mars, Zeus, Baphomet, Lugh, Coyote, Gish, Qamatis, Bastet, Turan, Tlazolteotl etc, etc, etc. All religious systems are required by law to be treated equally (equal class time) with your 'mainstream' religions. Too much? OK, I'll compromise. All religious beliefs held by reasonably large groups of people today are required to be equally treated in a classroom context. That includes: Christianity, Hindu, Sikh, Judaeism, Islam and ancestor worship/spirtualism in SE Asia. You must also spend equal class time discussing both of (and not together) alterrnative religions in a western context (paganism, druidism etc) AND the flying spaghetti monster (as a way of introducing a discussion of non-belief). Your Christian teaching section must include an in-depth discussion of the teachings of Leviticus, in particular those dealing with: wearing clothes made of multiple threads, improper sacrifices, owning slaves, what sort of meat you can cook and when, and sexual relationships. These are to be discussed with a focus on why these teaching are inappropriate in a modern context and why modern religios teaching no longer follows them.
Class time must also be devoted to a comparison of scientific method (hypothesis, observation, result, conclusion, publication of result and replicability of same) vs belief/faith. Class time must also be devoted to psychology and phsiology of the human brain and a discussion of why we may be inclinded towards belief as a default state.
All are to be treated equally: any attempt to twist the curriculum to favour the teachings of one over another results in the school failing that portion of thhe inspection process.
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Pete George,
I’ve addressed that particular issue extensively over time Russell, often being attacked for it. In fact I was banned from Whale Oil for going and confronting their attitude to rape and Tania Billingsley. This is what I posted there:http://yournz.org/2014/07/12/why-theres-anger-murray/How often have you gone and stood up to them Russell?
So they way to deal with these people is to go to their website and post comments until you're banned? Righto.
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Matthew Poole,
s it plausible that Key has been such a helicopter manager that he never got his hands dirty when #TeamWhaleCollins was digging dirty on ACC claimants and public servants? Sort of a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, where he’d leave ministers to their own devices while he swanned around for photo ops and golf games?
Rock, hard place. He either knows and his hands are just as dirty, or he didn't know and he's an incompetent leader.
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Kumara Republic,
Have there been any instances anywhere in the world, where hacktvitists have directly influenced the outcome of an election?
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Michael Meyers,
Michael, even without reading the book (which I haven't either), you're still overlooking:
1) the allegations of blackmail against Rodney Hide.
2) the allegations of trawling of brothels for material to use against their opponents.
Two points that have come out in the media discussions. I can't think of anything similar that any other political party has been accused of.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Caleb D'Anvers,
seems that, sometime between Brash’s Orewa speech and now, we lost a country.
If I wanted to be uncharacteristically optimistic, I'd point out that 'dirty politics' has sold out faster than any other book recently, including, apparaently, the last 'harry potter'. They literally can't print it fast enough.
Also, a google search for 'dirty politics' brings up Public Address as the fourth result, all the others on the first page of results being NZherald, stuff, TV3, etc.
Yer MSM may not want or know how to engage with this, but it seems J. Public is pretty keen.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Michael Meyers,
In olden days a hint of hacking
Was looked on as something shocking
But now, Heaven knows,
Anything goes.