Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Russell Brown,
I do wonder if Joyce’s dictatorial style is going to come back and bite him at some point.
Dictators overrate their ability to bargain. Businesses see them as a soft touch - you only need to convince one person, so you just do a full-court-press on them. Not many people can withstand sustained pressure.
Telecom is playing a game for all the marbles right now. It's telling that they've never seen a better time to make such an outrageously obvious play.
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Muse: Rugby World Kitsch, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
That's always been my favourite piece of opera. I'm still, to this day, amazed that it's actually a human voice doing all the work. Some of the notes sound like they're coming out of a flute, and in these days of autotuning, that's an automatic assumption.
It most certainly is Mozart's take on transcendent ragging.
Why it isn't is well outside MUSE's remit, or my expertise in political pathology.
Well, I'd say that even Hide is aware that if you rag on absolutely everything that is thought of or made by NZers, pretty soon, they'll all hate you right back. Then the public will turn on that performance art which is ACT waxing lyrical, and decide it doesn't need any funding either.
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Hard News: Perverse Entertainment, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Openness to new experiences and ideas is only so valuable. There are some ideas that are just plain bad, and some experiences I know I never want to have. So the conservative brain is still a vital part of the species - it's the part, on the whole, that has got us to where we are.
Indeed, it's actually a vital part of the ability of the species to have new experiences and ideas. Small groups form with ideas that soon become conservative within the group, even if they are radical to the rest of society. These groups protect and nurture each other in a conservative way within their radical context, and occasionally, produce the really big ideas that propel the entire species forward.
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Does plot and formal experimentation really have to be a zero sum game?
Of course not. You have to choose the dimensions along which you are prepared to experiment. Plot can be one of them, but it doesn't have to be.
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I'd have thought that if you're going to give a gigantic handout to a company to build an even more pervasive monopoly than they already have, that you'd be wanting to impose MORE conditions on them, not less.
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Russell Brown,
"meaningless because it doesn't allow for data caps, or international data."
Not quite meaningless, but those questions were the first in my mind too. Unless a cap is just plain "so high it hardly matters" (which my American colleagues seem to enjoy), it's a vital part of the calculation. If it's a secret, I've come to expect that to mean that it will be a nasty surprise.
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Jolisa,
You know, I'm suddenly wondering where all the authors are (save Islander, of course)... Is there a parallel discussion somewhere, in which they are busy swapping stories about the declining quality -- and terrible rudeness! -- of readers these days?
I sincerely hope they're at a keyboard, fingers flying, minds full of visions, energetically plying their trade. Which would leave them little time for commentary. If reading wasn't so obviously vital to writing, I'd note ironically that if they're here, they're lurking.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Caleb D'Anvers,
Another argument that comes to me right now, bubbling from within, is that any popular discipline from which people are excluded by virtue of lack of funds is very likely to immediately become the very one that entrenches class privilege. This was where humanities started - they were, very largely, an education in the values of the elite, and training in how to be elite, and as such there is a very simple socialist argument against the idea, without there even needing to be any real value in them at all. Which is not to say there is no value, it's just another reason they should be available as widely as possible.
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I well remember the "What is Philosophy?" lecture that the HOD gave to all new students, which used the metaphor of a search for a mystical lost mountain, in a fantasy land. The teachers were likened to guides. But he was at great pains to point out that not everyone found a mountain, and those who did, did not necessarily find the same mountain, and he couldn't tell you for sure if any mountain was the right mountain to find. It was a humorous and abridged and inverted version of Journey to the East so far as I could tell.
The funniest part was the reaction of other students after the class to this bloody strange start to an entire field of inquiry. To me it was pretty clear what he was getting at, that it was the journey that mattered. But others it threw into fits of rage and they promptly dropped the subject. This was probably a very good idea for them. Some people thought it was just bad poetry, and thought that they could probably find better guides. Some thought they knew which mountains they were heading for already and how to get there (I fell into this category). Others had no idea what to make of it.
To me, it was exciting. That was what drew me in, not the promise of riches. So far as I'm concerned I'm still on that journey and mere riches are but a stepping stone to what really counts.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Not for the first time, I have to say big props to Ben for that comment.
Cheers, although I'd feel much more flattered if you could go through my thought experiment, and anyone else who has felt the same way as I did, even if not to the same extent. I find it extremely hard to believe that I'm unusual in this respect, and would much appreciate insights into how people handled being the outsiders in some debate in this forum. Also, if you've never been an outsider, would you say you always held the opinions you now do?
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