Posts by Kumara Republic
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Craig:
And you think Gordon Brown gives a bio-degradable shit about domestic politics literally on the other side of the world? Sorry to say this, but I don't think we're really that important.
Unless of course, some nutters drag the 'Punch a Pom a Day' campaign out of compulsory retirement. And what's to stop them going further: 'Frag a Frog'... 'Sock an Ocker'... 'Slap a Jap'... 'Clout a Kraut'... 'Spank a Yank'... well, one gets the general picture.
Starting to sound like a rap recording to me...
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and Rodney had Mark Sainsbury eating out of his hand as he promised to 'get stuck into' the RMA and radically restructure local government.
I accept that the RMA needs fixing, but if Rodney has his way with it, he could merely be throwing out one problematic 3-letter acronym only to find himself dealing with another - ELF.
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... before it goes random and starts posting 10,000 word exerpts from Ayn Rand books. Torybots do that if misconfigured, you know.
... or make robocalls at 1:30am.
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Would have been good if they'd come down to Welly. Problem is, TSB Arena isn't quite big enough. Hopefully Depression 2.0 won't discourage the proposed mega-arena.
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Are Rodney & Roger happy now? The British airline surtax sounds like an ominous portent. If North America, Japan, Australia and the rest of the EU follow suit, it'll likely have a bigger impact than Britain joining the EEC in 1973. "Carbon pariah", anybody?
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There are plenty of Americans who loathe what air travel has become in that country. When I was last there, in 2006, the requirement to remove shoes had come into force. Transferring at LAX, that happened in a hot, non-air-conditioned room that, of course, really stank, and there was a queue and a guy barking instructions. It was just an ordeal.
Agree, LAX is essentially an interrogation chamber with aircraft runways. Was SFO any better?
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Couldn't be as bad as Little Britain USA -- even the ads are playing havoc with my usually somnolent gag reflex. HBO cancelled Deadwood, Carnivale and Rome so they could commission that shit? The new characters don't work; the old ones aren't tired, they've been flogged to death in contravention of international conventions against torture, and if these guys aren't outright misogynists it's the only impersonation that's at all convincing.
And it's not just HBO who are out of touch. Firefly showed promise, only to be mothballed by FOX at its peak. The follow-up film Serenity acknowledged the fan loyalty, but still, the whole thing seems to illustrate some kind of inverse proportion between the quality/intellectuality of a show and the number of seasons it lasts.
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Does this mean courts now have to take into account unreal and insignificant risks?
That was exactly my thought when I heard the news item about it on the radio.
How far (or near) is it to the infamous 'sus laws' that caused Brixton to explode in 1981?
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Rich:
That's the concept I disagree with, that economics and social policy are independent axes. Like I say above, they're intertwined. If you favour economic liberalism, you'll wind up taking a social authoritarian stance because of the need to clean up after your economic policies.
BenW:
I disagree. I'm basically a social liberal, and the economic dimension is just something I don't give a crap about most years. I don't think they need to be tied together.
But practically, you are right. Most of the time they do seem to be tied together - inversely. Social liberals tend to be economically left.
To a certain extent, the traditional liberal-conservative divide still persists. Socially liberal centrists appear to be politically homeless - too rightist for Labour, too leftist for Nat/ACT/Libz, too liberal for Nat/NZF/UF/SoCred. Maybe there's room for a UK-style LibDem grouping? Or would Natbour (sic) leave no room for it?
I do agree though that ACT is libertarian for economic reasons than social reasons. Their de facto idol Ayn Rand herself once remarked that homosexuality "is immoral, and more than that; if you want my really sincere opinion, it's disgusting."
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Who was it that said the following, probably not long after 9/11?
"If you can scare people enough, they'll believe anything."?