Posts by linger
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I'm extrapolating from slightly out-of-date life tables (hence recalculation of 77->79 above); but presumably there was a more recent analysis after the 2013 census.
-
Polity: A hazy, intriguing crystal ball, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Average life expectancy for Maori males who have reached 70 is 79.
So he should have a few terms yet... though this is assuming WP's lifestyle is averagely healthy, which is debatable.(For comparison: in 2002, life expectancy for Maori males was 69, but additional life expectancy for 65-yo Maori males was 13 years –> 78.)
-
Hard News: Ten Thousand Maniacs, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Grinding it through my own rusty cogs,
même pas peur should most literally be:
“Even so, no fear”.It could correspond to “You don’t scare me” or “It don’t scare me”
(with a vernacular invariant verb stylistically appropriate to the original).
Further informal reduction (also in keeping with the original’s lack of subject) gives the translation “Don’t scare me.”;
it’s not intended to be the imperative.
You’re right though: keeping the standard verb agreement
(“Doesn’t scare me.”) removes the ambiguity.The bigger problem with this translation comes from shifting the focus from the original ("fear" -- which could be personal or general, but either way defiantly claims the lack of the act's intended effect) to the speaker (forced by converting the noun to a verb "scare [me]").
It would be more accurate to keep the literal translation.
Reducing it to “No fear”, of course, would be even more problematic:
shades of “Bring it on!” -
Hard News: The GCSB and the consequences…, in reply to chris,
Yes, I can see how the SIS could follow Customs’ approach
of an iron fist in a rubber glove:“If you’ve nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear —
Once we check that you’ve got nothing hidden up there.” -
First of all, Depeche Mode:
My father also worked for a bank – but as he could mostly transfer between Wellington region branches, we were fairly solidly based in Lower Hutt, interrupted by a 5-year exile in Wanganui. Only the second Hutt place, and my grandfather’s place in Avalon, have really stuck in my memory as “homes”.
I hate the mess and chaos and upheaval of moving – so much so that I’ve stayed in the same run-down apartment in Saitama for longer than in any NZ residence to date, rather than face going through it by myself. But it’s not home.
Of course, I tend to live mostly inside my own head anyway: just even more so while in Japan.
Which leads me to Tim Minchin:
It’s a understatedly powerful song, though I think he leaves out an important step in the progression here: possibly because rhymes for “community” are hard to fit into a song lyric.
And in that sense, PAS is as close as I have to a home right now.
Cheers, Russell. -
Up Front: How I Learned to Stop Worrying…, in reply to Danielle,
And then there was the Smurfs with, what, a 100-1 gender ratio?
And that only because the producers needed to have one character for half their target audience to identify with.
Proving it's not enough just to have a quota -- but it's a start. -
Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to nzlemming,
Like how Key is cast as taking the side of the Aussie in that analogy.
-
Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to James Littlewood*,
an annual conference that far outshone expectations
really?
I/S’s takehome message is worth repeating here:
the [Labour] party is empty at its core. […] They have no values, and no policies that won’t be chucked away after the next poll. And as a result, you can’t trust them to deliver, because what they’re offering will change three times over before the next election. […] I’m not saying that parties should have their policies fixed in stone and unchanging. But they need to have something at their core, something they can point to to justify changes, something to stand for .
-
Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to SHG,
True, deportation is not an option a country can take for its own citizens: where could they be deported to?
I would guess kw’s point is that, if two people have been tried for and convicted of the same crime by the same country’s justice system, they should face equivalent sentencing options.
I think I would agree that deportation should not be an option for non-citizens in cases where their country of origin would impose an unreasonably harsh sentence for the same crime (extreme case, capital punishment).
I also think how much of a disruption to life and livelihood deportation would entail (not just for the convicted criminal, but for their family) should be considered: here the issues are whether deportation itself would be an additional unreasonably harsh punishment, and/or whether innocent people would also be punished.
But I’m not seeing the decision to deport a convicted criminal as automatically “abhorrent” in every case. -
Herald ’s view distorting Len’s:
no news there!