Posts by B Jones
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Tempting as it may be, I've always found it's a whole lot easier to maintain the moral highground in a debate when you don't resort to making up silly versions of a person's name. It's one of the least appealing things about what passes for debate in that other popular blog.
Grant's contributions have been facile, naive, disingenuous, incoherent and downright infuriating in their blithe dismissal of demonstrable facts, but they have mostly been superficially civil. And civility is one of the most appealing things about this place.
There are better ways to deal with it, just sayin.
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Hmm, if you were filled with righteous conviction of your own correctness, steeped in a worldview that places evidence below faith in importance, and a sense that those who disagreed with you were doing the devil's work, would a little abuse put you off trying to proselytise?
I'd be more discouraged if my proclamations were consistently ignored rather than engaged with.
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Without having seen it, I suspect that in that context, "obviously" means "one would expect this to be the case, but we have to ask because it's not all that obvious to us, and we'd like to reassure ourselves and our viewers that we're not being played here."
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Plugging one's ipod into the TV is a great idea badly implemented. Before we got a decent portable media player thingy, it's what I did from time to time.
To start with, ipod will only play certain kinds of mp4 video, which means that if you have a bunch of avi files, you'll need to convert them before the ipod will play them. This isn't too hard but it takes special software and ages, and can leave the audio out of sync with the video.
The major problem, though, is that at least on ipods bought in 2006, the screen resolution is half that of a standard television, and that's how it outputs to telly. The result is watchable but not all that enjoyable. It's good enough when for one reason or other the media player won't co-operate, but not worth investing in extra cableage.
On the positive side, a few good telly episodes on the ipod can be really handy when travellling and stuck on a plane or ferry.
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Let them get jobs sounds suspiciously like let them eat cake. Grant's arguments against the welfare state can be equally applied as arguments against charity.
It helps to have a basic understanding of economics. The reality is, is that the amount of work societies can perform is not constant. It depends on there being unmet needs and free resources to pay for those needs. Surprise surprise, when the amount of money floating around in the economy to pay for work decreases, the number of people able to exchange their labour for money decreases. See the unemployment rates in the early 1930s, mid 1960s, late 1980s and mid 2000s for data to back this argument up with. In the Depression, governments insisted on the unemployed undertaking relief work in return for the dole. In the absence of demand for real work, this involved a lot of digging holes and filling them in again. The problem with work for the dole schemes now is that the work is either similarly pointless, or risks competing with economic industries.
Work might be important (if so, why does so much work people do not attract any financial compensation?) but you can't solve there being labour that nobody wants to pay for by insisting that there's something wrong with the people trying to sell it.
And, dare I say it, this is about people being unavailable for paid labour because they're undertaking unpaid labour raising children. Making this possible for unexpectedly pregnant single women means that they may be less likely to opt for abortion.
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No, just that it's practiced by people, who are imperfect and have their own prejudices that can impact on the services they deliver.
It's a constant struggle to me, to understand why people believe the sheer nonsense they often do. But believing in nonsense can be a matter of life and death, and deserves more than dismissal as a response. If we can meet people's needs to be listened to, to have some understanding of the world and certainty about the future, to be treated with respect and kindness, and to be amazed and awed without feeding them nonsense, the world would be a happier place.
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I agree - although i find it hard to believe that could be applied to NZ.
See any tino rangatiratanga-type forum on the issue of vaccination.
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So why its popularity here?
Because it's not just in the third world that scientists and technological practitioners treat people who are different from them badly. Tuskegee and the Unfortunate Experiment are two salient examples in living memory. I don't think it's a coincidence that interest in the paranormal rose (again) not long after science's apotheosis in the Manhattan Project. Or that Victorian paranormalism followed hot on the heels of the Enlightenment*.
That plus lasting cultural myths like "women's intuition" and postmodern stuff about different ways of knowing is a potent mix.
*I can't explain Isaac Newton, though - both a scientist and alchemist.
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uhhh.... but the psychics are still full of shit, right?
Entirely, and even more problematic is the way they prey upon the most vulnerable. The same applies to all sorts of weird beliefs, and the ultimate tragedy is when the disempowered reject science as a tool of the oppressors, thereby becoming more disempowered, and losing the opportunity to shape science to meet their own needs.
The tricky part is to practice science in such a way that doesn't generate an oppressors vs oppressed response, being respectful of the people you're working with and their own experiences, which are really just more data. The polio eradication people had the right idea, backing off when the kids disappeared into the bush and coming back the next day after they'd talked to the village elders, rather than just going in and vaccinating the ones who were left, without permission.
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Whoo, "chicks love it"? Sounds like scrum time for the Womens' XV.
My only explanation, should there actually be a strong gendered aspect to belief in the paranormal, is that supposedly down-the-line straight science and reason has historically been practiced by people with sexist ideas, who have at times been reluctant to subject their biases to genuine scientific scrutiny. Hence science gets co-opted by sexism, and women don't see their own world views represented in scientific thought, or are taught science in ways that assume they won't be very good at it or go very far with it. Similar with the criminal law - a psychic who wanted return business wouldn't ask "what were you wearing?" and "had you had anything to drink?".
Psychicism is the ultimate equal opportunity, anti-authoritarian belief system, in which anyone is as good as anyone else. When science is the world view of those in charge, those who are not in charge find something else - see the documentary on polio vaccination in Africa and India that screened earlier on 7 last night.