Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Peter West,
So, somewhat ironically, my sentiment seems to apply to this very post. Might have to go back to lurking for a while :-)
That just made it all the more poignant. Thanks for your contribution, hope to see some more.
I've experienced this quite literally thousands of times. In the end, I figured "well, another way of saying the same thing isn't bad. Perhaps my way might click for someone better." So I post it anyway. What the hell - I never claimed to be the most original writer!
But I can fully understand that time requirements and the expectation of following up any responses can be a heavy burden. Also, the first posts are the hardest, because one can feel that it's important to make the right impression. If you're struggling with this, but want to post, I can only say what I think about that - that unless you want to make a big splash, there is no requirement to do so, it's perfectly possible to slip in quietly in the warm pool first, or splash about in the shallows, before getting the pluck to take a huge bomb from the 10m board.
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Cops are being attacked all over New Zealand and nothing happens in isolation...
Sure doesn't, when a cop is acquitted for kneeing a prisoner so hard in the balls that one of them resembled "mashed potatoes" to the doctor who saw him immediately afterward.
I very much doubt that the public will be behind O'Connor on this. It's like something out of the bad old days to go arresting musicians for their songs. Also, it goes directly to the point of the song. Police seizing the power to censor political views expressed by artists can get fucked.
I doubt it's something police generally would agree with, even. They might not like someone getting bitter on them, but they're smart enough to see that people get bitter when they're muzzled anyway. It was a very foolish thing to do, and I expect it will bring a lot more interest in such expressions.
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Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Russell Brown,
Aha. How do you come by your 10,000 guess btw?
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ACTs always had this big chance to really go through with the idea of liberty and take a stand on drugs. Private conversations with ACToids indicate quite a lot of sympathy to the idea. But it never seems to make much headway in their publicly stated policy.
I expect that economic liberty is more important to them than social. That's how it came across to me, and why I lost all interest long ago. It seemed to me that surely they could at least openly say they supported widespread legalization. But realpolitik took them to where they are now.
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I love lurkers. Their very existence makes me feel a little bit safer, like we have a whole bunch of guardian angels. Since everyone is a specialist in something, most of them will experience a time where they think "I know a lot about that, perhaps I should kick this discussion in the right direction".
It would be nice to know their number somehow, even within an order of magnitude. How to reconcile Russell's guess at 10,000 who read discussions with Nielson suggesting that 53% of readers contribute - surely there aren't 5,300 contributors?
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In any case he took extreme offence to it for an unexpected reason
Tough luck for him. This is the net, he's gonna get called it a lot.
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Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
That's exactly the image that always comes to mind when I read you...blowing smoke off a pistol...
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Hard News: Dreaming of a world without evidence, in reply to Russell Brown,
Quite possibly. But that can lead to some perverse outcomes.
I was thinking the most perverse outcome is that it's almost as bad in terms of production safety to consumers as the uncontrolled manufacture that illegal drugs suffer from. Better to have fewer, better tested drugs.
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I've tried some of them. I'd concur with most of what the tripme people said. My main concern is that they're really new, so the long term health effects are not really known, unlike the good old fashioned weed (which is not without side-effects, but you know what they are).
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Not all True Believers are Tinks. Some deliberately offend one group to get the sympathy of the other, to make their real point, whatever that is. O'Connor is in this category. I think his real point was "I'm the man to represent the West Coast".
He is still a fool, though. What he doesn't get about West Coast homophobes, whoever they are, is that saying his party is run by gays isn't going to impress them. So he's alienated everyone else, and quite possibly alienated the same people he was dog whistling to.
Tinks are more cunning than he is.
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