Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Field Theory: All Blacks v Wallabies Tensionfest, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Quite right, my apologies to Kahui
We ended up watching a version with Aussie commentators (due to it not showing up on the official website I paid for access on and me not being willing to be internet-free for another twenty-four hours) and one of them referred to Nonu as "Muliaina". Twice. He corrected himself in the second half, but really.
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Hard News: Winning the RWC: it's complicated, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
More specifically, half of the Peoplemeter households? Whether they accurately represent the diversity of the NZ poulation is a moot point. I think not–most would have been tucked up in bed long before the game began.
And if you assume they do - well, anything that half the country turns out to watch *is* clearly something with a cultural impact. It doesn't have to impact every single person individually for that to be generally true.
I've been really pleasantly surprised at how our weekend World Cup watching nights have turned into the social highlight of the week - our American friends come over, they laugh, they cry, they have a Steinlager, they practically decide to adopt Israel Dagg. It has, in a very serious way, been a really great opportunity to introduce them to New Zealand culture. And next week we get to do yet another part of the Traditional Kiwi Rugby-Watching Experience: the crucial game played at a god-awful hour of the early morning. It's gonna be ace.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Rich Lock,
Logistics is what wins or loses wars, usually.
Pretty much. Some of the best innovations of military technology, for civilians caught in the middle, were the ones that meant the soldiers camped on your land weren't also eating all your food. Easy to forget that conflicts where one side had an overwhelming military advantage are also historical anomalies; slow, grinding wrestling matches were far more common, and far more vulnerable to problems in lines of supply.
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Hard News: Where are the foreigners?!, in reply to Bart Janssen,
This actually has practical applications. Since the capsasin receptor is the same as the chemical pain receptor, for people with chronic and painful bladder infections one effective treatment for the pain is to flush the bladder with capsasin (under general anesthetic). This provides relief from the pain for 1 to 3 months.
That is so cool. I had no idea they'd put the concept into practical use.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to DCBCauchi,
Napoleon was an innovator, the precursor to mechanised total war, the prototype. We got canned food and tampons from Napoleon’s innovations, among other things.
Hardly just Napoleon; the whole machinery of Revolutionary France and their need to defend themselves from their neighbours led to military innovation (the draft, for instance, has its roots in the post-revolutionary European conflict.) Napoleon was significant, sure, but he was building upon changes that were already occurring.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Rich Lock,
A thought that’s been forming in my head for a while, and which is currently around the half-baked stage is that over the last 5000 years or so of recorded history, the amount of time where there hasn’t been a war on somewhere is pretty much zero.
It might be pointless, but as a species, we do an awful lot of it, nearly all the time. To delude ourselves that violence is the exception in our make-up rather than the norm might not be helping us deal with it.
That's a oft-made observation. Obviously records get patchier the further back you go, but I believe the best estimate is that there's something like 60 years out of 2000 that we don't have records of a war for, and probably in those 60 there was a war somewhere, we just don't have a record for it. Humans are a bit special that way.
I can’t, off the top of my head, think of very many ‘purely military’ expeditions over the scope of history which didn’t go hand in hand with conquest or trade protection/expansion.
But it's still true that in terms of a nation's overall military force - not sending a couple of battalions or a few ships along - the idea of war as a thing where you pack up your military and go way overseas is modern. The World Wars, Vietnam, Iraq; that model does not compare to anything pre-Napoleon. Most violence was (and still is) local. It's far easier to hate and kill your neighbours than some guy half a world away. And, as you say, humanity is historically very, very good at it.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to DCBCauchi,
I dispute your allocation of proportions. Maori influence on Pakeha culture is all-pervasive, subtle, and deep. Right from the get-go to the present day.
I agree, it's there, and it's hugely important to how mainstream NZ society operates. Being overseas I certainly notice how different NZ culture is to other Anglo-Saxon colonial nations in the sheer scale of influence of the native culture on the mainstream. I just think it's important to not downplay how much European/British mores and culture were forced on Maori whether they liked it or not. It's two simultaneous but very different dynamics.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Lilith __,
Gengis Khan? Ancient Romans? Alexander the Great? The Spanish Conquistadors? I disagree that colonisation doesn’t count as war. “Colonisation” generally means a war against peoples who can’t hope to win.
All of those people started out with their neighbours. The Conquistadors cut their teeth in the Reconquista. Alexander started with Greece. Genghis started with the other Mongol tribes (and the Mongols were basically the last Central Asian migratory wave, of the domino type that started with the Indo-European language group, rather than a purely military expedition.). By world standards Rome's conquests largely were local wars - and they started with Carthage.
Most colonisers, as long as they could control trade, did not pursue a policy of waging war on locals - expensive and terrible for the labour market. Did coloniers mistreat, abuse, infect, and otherwise inflict massive damage upon native populations? Hell yes. But it was very rarely through direct military action. The Americas were a special case mediated by the biological exchange of disease environments. Everywhere else, things were more gunship diplomacy than invasions per se.
Sending large military forces to places far away - the way war is waged by first-world countries in the modern age - is not the historical pattern of warfare. Beating up on your neighbours with large military forces very much is.
(My point is that that wasn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of examples.)
Evidently, but it came across as a tad facile. NZ culture is undoubtedly hugely Maori-influenced, but the colonisation of Maori culture by Pakeha is a much more significant factor for those involved than the relatively mild intrusion of Maori culture into Pakeha culture. And the violence thing...really, c'mon.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Rich Lock,
Well, the history of the planet seems to be tightly woven with struggles between factions that to the outside eye are indistingushable, for causes that are incomprehensible. Civil wars are generally the most vicious.
For all of human history but the twentieth century – excluding colonisation, because that usually wasn’t about deliberately making war on people, making profits was preferable – going to war meant, pretty exclusively, going to war with your neighbours. C.f. every area of the world. The closer you were to people, the more time you had to find excuses to fight with them. The whole idea of war being a thing where you go and fight people a long way away with whom you have little cultural contact would have baffled everyone right up to, oooh, Napoleon. There just wasn’t any point to it. (Not much point now, come to that.)
I reckon we should think of ourselves as an essentially Maori society. Look at Te Kooti. He took what the Pakeha had to offer and used it. Just as the Pakeha took what the Maori had to offer and used it. We end our sentences with ‘eh’, we take food and drink round to the barbie, we raise our eyebrows when passing people on the street. We’re still pretty violent.
…because we all know pre-European Maori culture consisted of food-sharing, a particular verbal tic, and killing each other. Right.
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Hard News: Where are the foreigners?!, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
So either I have raised my tolerance-level to chilli or the increased popularity of Indian food (in the Western World) has watered down the dishes to suit our (on average) mild palates.
I understand that repeated consumption of chili-hot foods does increase your tolerance, basically by maxing out the appropriate receptors. It can get hotter, but you stop being able to taste it. There is an awful lot of watered-down stuff on the market, though (c.f.: nearly every supermarket curry packet in existence.)