Posts by Idiot Savant
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It's the ideal ring wingnut response to the economic crisis. 9 Day working week? Too much overhead. Kill one in ten with a virus? Ideal...
And as a bonus, all those funerals boost GDP. It's win-win-win!
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Why Che?
Synonymous with "revolution"?
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Sure, and we're lucky enough in New Zealand to have MMP and the Greens, but in most countries who you vote won't make any material difference. In most western democracies, and a great deal of developing countries, there is nobody on the left or the right prepared to forego short term productivity and growth for the sake of building a new infrastructure.
Most European countries (France may be an exception) use proportional representation in one form or another. And most have Green parties which are growing in strength. The glaring exceptions of course are the US, UK, Canada and Australia - all of which have unfair electoral systems designed to exclude alternatives from the political process.
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...which is an angry and cynical way of saying:
As a consumer, you have no real power over whether your electricity is generated renewably or not, whether there is good public transport or not, whether companies have to pay the full cost of the environmental damage they are causing (or better, being prevented from inflicting it in the first place) or not. Those things are determined by the framework of energy, transport, and environmental policies set by national governments.
Theoretically, to the extent that our democracies actually work, we have control over those frameworks.
The upshot: buying is not enough. "Ethical consumerism" is not enough. You need to fucking vote.
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Why do so many of you think that offsetting is a really good idea? The whole offsetting industry is an absolute mess, see New Scientist's reporting on the issue.
Because a ton of carbon is a ton of carbon is a ton of carbon. And from the atmosphere's point of view, it doesn't matter whether that ton is emitted (or rather, not emitted) by you or someone else, or sucked out by a tree.
And that said, I agree: many of the "offsets" on offer are dodgy (different prices though are not an indication of this - instead they're a sign that different methods are being used to gain those offsets). The only advice I have is "shop around". There are offset companies - NZ's CarbonZero is one - which do highly robust and scientifically monitored offsets. (Air New Zealand's also seem to be robust, backed by NZ Kyoto AAU).
As for the wider view, yes, individual consumers offsetting is really just salving their conscience, no matter how robust those offsets are. But OTOH, unless you're willing to live like a medieval peasant and burn dung, that's the only option on our table as individuals ATM. Reduce what you can, offset what you can't, and pressure the government for serious policy. Because this consumer movement bullshit won't make a bit of difference - to solve this problem we need real policy from our government to reduce our emissiosn and shift us to that shiny, renewable, sustainable low-carbon future we need to be in. And that requires engagement with politics, not abandoning it to the market.
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And if the GP say something like " have you considered reading the bible" go to another GP and say "I am going to kill myself if I don't get help" and keep on going and going and going...
And report the other prick for malpractice.
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Graeme: think of it as a more amusing way of asserting truth as a defence. And of showing where I rank domestic abusers in my heirarchy or jerks.
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I now look forward to working with the charities who I love and that is the best thing about this sentence, I can get back to working with the charities and doing my community service with charities that I am passionate about.
So, how many charities want to taint themselves by being associated with a convicted domestic abuser?
I'm sure the queue will be a mile long.
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Defamatory statements have a pretty wide definition.
They "tend to lower a person in the estimation of right-thinking members of society, or that tends to cause the person to be shunned or avoided, or that tends to cause the person to be exposed to hatred, contempt or ridicule."
The guy's admitted beating his partner. It's hard to see how anything we say could damage his reputation more than what he has already publicly admitted himself.
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Latest from Fiji: the regime has ordered the closure of all ISPS...