Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Rich Lock,
you are actually close to the top of a shortlist of PASers I'd like to meet in real life, for what that's worth
+1
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Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Shaun Lott,
They went to Moro! Nice restaurant!
I hear the bar is also nice.
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That doesn't mean it can't have some tact, or be at least slightly accomodating.
I find being unable to even broach reality, after receiving quite a lengthy rag session about how hard life it, to be taking accommodating to extremes.
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That's what you lose by forcing your artists or your writers or your intellectuals to become dishwashers.
It doesn't seem quite so clear cut to me. There's also a lot of successful artists who worked in shitty jobs to pay the bills too.
But I'm not even vaguely suggesting that benefits should be cut, even for people who are simply lazy. I just find issue with the idea of it as a career choice, because for some reason it's wrong to make money from one's art. You *are* making money from it, just by being on such a benefit. Just not very much.
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Except the pool of jobs is finite, so this relative of yours is not actually taking money from anybody else.
Trying to get my head around what you're saying here. Do you mean that if they take a job, they take it away from someone else, who ends up on the benefit, so the net result for the benefit pool is the same?
Or are you saying that taking from the benefit pool is never taking from anyone else?
But the money I was actually referring to was not benefit money. It's the familial support stream, which definitely does take money from someone else.
I don't have a problem with this kind of benefit, if the idea of it is to enable people to find their way into fulfilling paid work. I'm not so sure about it if the idea is to support the person for their entire life, because they have a fundamental objection to doing things other people actually want, however fulfilling they find that.
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Just as an example - what if you're the kind of person who thinks its unethical to make money from the arts? How do you make a living when you have money issues like that? Yeah, you need to get your shit sorted out.
This seems like a thorny issue. Given that I have a close relative who feels exactly this way, I've experienced the reasoning. But I find it hard to reconcile with the fact that they're perfectly happy to take money from people who do work, and usually in things that "aren't their dream job", because that's the lot of most working people, doing a lot of stuff that they really wouldn't feel like doing if it weren't for the bills that need to be paid.
It made sense for a while. But after 15-odd years, it's wearing thin. I'm not about to suggest their benefits get cut, or the constant stream of support from the family be severed, but I do tire of hearing about the horrors of how hard their life is, when any suggestion about how to change the situation is angrily rebuffed.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Mincing AFAIK describes a way of walking. It looks a little like dancing, a little like tiptoeing. But it's associated with gays, and I've certainly heard the nouns "mince" and "mincer" to mean gay. Probably saying that someone was mincing if they actually weren't would be using the term to code gayness into a description. If they actually were mincing, though, I'm not so sure. It can be applied to women and also I've heard it used as a description of a way horses can be taught to walk during dressage. Also, in rugby, I've heard it used occasionally to describe highly effective dodging, stutter-steps and goose-steps, twirling around a tackler. David Campese was famous for it. There's no implication of gay there, it's more coding the idea of elegance.
So context is everything.
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I'm actually really pissed off. I had decided that today I would front up and meet some people here, and move forward with my involvement, but after this there is no way I could do this without feeling a whole lot of things that just aren't healthy or helpful.
Nah dude, do it. Serious. You'll feel better. Speaking from experience here. Go to the picnic, or meet up in some other way. No one's going to fisk you at a party, you'll end up talking about your lives rather than politics.
it's been postponed
good to know
Definitely. I might still be able to come.
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just try to remember to be careful about both what we write, and how we read and react to what others have written? We don't want to end up with people simply avoiding discussions.
Therein lies the tension. You can be so careful that, as one of our regulars related to me, you can spend 5 hours writing one sentence. It's borderline to me whether that's better than just saying what you wanted to say, how you wanted to say it, and putting up with the outrage, corrections, etc. Somewhere in between is a happy medium?
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Cool, we could have our own cloud. Now all we need is the bandwidth to sell it to the rest of the world.
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