Posts by Andre Alessi
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For the HB earthquake , even in 1931, there was a constant stream of cars heading into and out of HB by the evening of the quake.
My worry is the electricity network through the north island is vulnerable to volcanic eruption/quake as there is a concentration at Whakamaru, which has Auckland's lines concentrated for about 1 km wide.Replacement could take months
Electricity wouldn't be the end of it, either. Even localised events could wipe telephone services out for weeks-and most people have zero plan to work around issues like that. The massive 2000 pr cable under Mangere Bridge that was burnt through (twice!) by roadworkers back in 2005ish took over three weeks to get sorted out, with some neighbourhoods going so far as to organise daily group excursions to houses with phonelines outside the area for elderly and disabled residents.
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I take comfort in the fact that, living on a peninsula near sea level, and on the slopes of a volcano at that, if the Big One does hit, I probably won't survive to worry about food and water-and if I do, I can always raid the neighbour's fridge for pickled caperberries and cranberry juice.
A friend of mine is also doing interesting things with online music over at Hypetape, if that's your bag.
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Where's Jonathan Swift when you need him?
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What will it take for homosexuals to stop mocking my family? I ask myself this on a daily basis.
Tell me about it. Just last week, a group of old lesbians were standing outside my parents' house singing Melissa Etheridge songs in a nasal, mocking fashion until the wee smalls.
Well, either that or Neil Finn's signed up for Music in Parks again...
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Monkey tennis?
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Speaking of the big wide world that doesn't like teh gays too much, Francis Arinze is coming to Devonport next month.
From his wiki page:
"In many parts of the world, the family is under siege. It is opposed by an anti-life mentality as is seen in contraception, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. It is scorned and banalized by pornography, desecrated by fornication and adultery, mocked by homosexuality, sabotaged by irregular unions and cut in two by divorce."
Just what NZ needs, another paleoconservative thug masquerading as a priest of the god of love and teaching our young folks that difference and change is always bad.
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I don't think there's any serious doubt about said action.
I agree, and my wording was probably a little on the flippant side. I guess I should have said "He didn't exactly say he was gay" which is a slightly different point. The denial that someone can actually be gay (rather than just "perverted" or whatever) is part and parcel of fundamentalist Christianity.
To me, the public interest here isn't just the hypocrisy of an influential evangelist getting caught doing what he speaks against; it is that his story illustrates the sheer falsity of the idea -- still promoted by Haggard and others like him -- that homosexuality is a disorder that can be cured through counseling.
Well, this is where I admit to having problems with the public attention. Is it newsworthy that a man who preaches hate and lies about homosexuality is revealed to privately perform homosexual acts? The progressive in me says "Yes! Everything we can do to break these people down, and to show gay teens that the people who claim to hate them are just turning their self-doubts outwards is justified!" The classical liberal in me says "Play the ball, not the man. Whatever he does in his private life is private. Treat him the way you'd want to be treated yourself, even if he repeatedly shows he doesn't want to live up to the same standard, because the fight itself is ultimately about respecting people's right to live their lives how they want."
Like I said, at the time, I found the whole thing funny, and I kind of still do. But even if we rightly mock the guy for "struggling" with his sexuality, I still feel like it's easy to forget that we all go through our own struggles internally, and have something like a right not to be casually mocked for being human underneath it all.
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More like the going rate for danger pay and post-traumatic stress counselling. Really, how much money would it take before you'd go near Garrett's block and tackle?
Well, I was looking at getting an iPhone...
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Never? What about, for example, Ted Haggard?
I don't think the public was terribly well served by his outing (if you can call it that, given that he didn't actually admit to any hot man-on-man action.) However, his congregation had explicit standards of behaviour (public and private) that they expected from their pastor, and he violated those, so from that angle it was almost the equivalent of an employment issue. The public titillation surrounding those events wasn't sufficient justification for the news being discussed in such detail in the media, though.
Even so, I'm not going to lie: I found the whole episode hilariously funny. But the only way I could do that is by refusing to consider Haggard a real person instead of just some unfeeling stereotype-which, of course, is exactly what he and others like him have done to homosexuals for years. I have no doubt there's a very real, very personal tragedy underneath all the schadenfreude, and I recognise the ultimate aim here really should be some kind of moral consistency from all involved, myself included.
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What's interesting about someone being a lesbian?
Where I come from, that deserves nothing but a yawn and a reach for the remote.