Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
New Zealand had the death penalty for murder up until 1961, when it was abolished in a free vote in Parliament. The death penalty for treason was abolished in 1989.
Which semi-confirms the impression I had that on the day before the death penalty was abolished treason was the only crime you could be executed for. It also helps to explain the half century gap between the last execution and the final abolition of the death penalty.
What I remember debating as a 17 year old at Rongotai College was FPP vs. MMP, and me being the only one in my circle of friends who supported MMP. I was so frustrated to be just a few months short of being allowed to take part in the referendum.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Hilary Stace,
the 1989 law change, they are incredulous.
Was it that late? By 1989 I had attended 7 schools and I honestly don't recall ever being strapped or seeing or even hearing about anybody else being strapped. Nevertheless, the strap was something we all knew about and it was still a threat.
But thanks for the work you put in getting that law changed.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Revel Drummond,
I can say with complete confidence that my life would have been worse had my mother been investigated, charged and convicted for smacking me and my brothers.
The trouble with comments like yours is that they effectively deny the abuse that others experienced ever took place. I thought it clear that what happened to Miche as a kid was not a light tap on the bum or rap on the knuckles. See, between the two extremes of kids who never get smacked and kids who are beaten to death by their parents is a whole range of experiences, and an awful lot of kids suffer terrible physical abuse. And here you are effectively telling Miche and many others that what happened to them as kids wasn't abuse, that they deserved it, that it was for their own good..... the same shit their abusers told them.
I'm really struggling to find polite words for the attitude implied in your comment, so I'll just leave it with
It
Does
Not
Help.
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Spotted on my morning walk. And because the Chinese, as is so often the case with this kind of thing, is clearer than the English - the EV definitely means electric vehicle, as in electric car (电动汽车/diàndòng qìchē). A sign of progress? Preparation for the couple of hundred thousand electric cars that are supposed to go on sale to the general public this year? We shall see...
Meanwhile, business as usual on the East 4th Ring Road... And a light noreaster meaning all that exhaust is just sitting over Beijing. Well, it has been a fairly mild winter here so far this year.
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Thanks, Christopher, I'd heard about the Land and Water Forum, but hadn't realised it had progressed to the point where the government was shuffling its feet and making up excuses to not act.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
The consequences of which can be a criminal charge, including a bail condition that you not associate with your children (who are witnesses) while the trial process is ongoing. Which, if you are a single parent, means their homelife is massively disrupted etc.
But, Graeme, once again this is not an academic exercise. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who would've preferred their parents to be arrested and prosecuted, and there are plenty of kids for whom a massive disruption of their homelife is precisely what is needed to give them a chance of getting out of an abusive situation.
If Colin Craig is being honest about how he disciplines his daughter, then he is not in any danger of acquiring a criminal conviction and his homelife is not going to be disrupted. But as Richard Stewart points out above, we used to have parents successfully using the old Section 59 to get away with quite horrific abuse.
Oh, and for anybody following the link to that Guardian article: do not read the comments, or at the very least, comment #1 is highly likely to be triggering for some (I read the first sentence then immediately scrolled upwards).
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Not so functional.
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Capture: Coast to Coast, in reply to Lilith __,
So small in that big space and with that ferocious sky.
Yup. Russell may have been "only" out at Te Atatu, but what he's not telling us is that what he was doing there was photographing infinity.
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Capture: Coast to Coast, in reply to Leigh Russell,
Thanks, Leigh. It sounds like most videos of just before the quake, except I hadn't seen the lights. What's annoying is that it sounds like the kind of video where I should be able to get around it being blocked just be looking at the Chinese video sites - it certainly doesn't sound like anything disharmonious that the censors would delete as soon as its uploaded. It's surprising these lights would be visible in broad daylight, but Sichuan is known for its humid, very cloudy climate. A friend was living there at the time - in Chengdu, so close enough to feel very strong shaking, but just far enough to be safe - and he used to post comments on his blog along the lines of "Wow, actually saw the sun today!". There's a Chinese saying "蜀犬吠日/Shǔ quǎn fèi rì, which literally means "A dog of Shu barking at the sun" meaning somebody getting all in a fuss over something perfectly ordinary that they've never seen before - Shu was an ancient kingdom in the Sichuan/Chongqing area, and the cloudy climate means the sun is such a rare sight the local dogs would freak out on the rare occasions it appeared. I guess that kind of climate would make earthquake lights especially visible even in broad daylight.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But it is true that we venerate physical elites fairly easily but it isn’t cool to say I was lucky enough to be born with the ability to remember a whole lot of shit from lectures and hence am quite good at something intellectual.
Very true, but there's also this bizarre fixation on doing only things that have immediate and very obvious practical application. What's the bloody use of quantum mechanics? Stop wasting time on that pie in the sky stuff and build me a faster iPad, dammit! Or, the version I got all the time at university: Why are you wasting your time studying French? You should be studying something useful! (and in case the answer isn't obvious: Because I'm interested in it, and anyway, how can language skills not be useful to a country entirely dependent on international trade?)
Of course, as is clear to us, blue skies scientific research is immensely useful because it builds the knowledge base that allows people to make cool new technology. Trouble is you scientists seem to have as much trouble persuading our "leaders" of that as us language geeks have persuading them of the usefulness of linguistic skills. Sigh.
Back to marking plagiarised essays...
