Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Friday Music: Going Large, in reply to Konrad Kurta,
My hope is that this pushes a lot more music into lossless formats, so we're not stuck looking at HDAudio.com and pining. http://www.flyingnun.co.nz/ started selling FLAC a while ago much to my joy.
I've read a lot about his views on high fidelity audio - I still feel it's largely a pointless exercise. I read an article somewhere that the human ear can't even distinguish between CD quality and super ultra HD audio
Possibly this one: http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/high-end-pc-audio,3733-18.htmlThis is a long article where people with a few clues did quite a lot of testing and decided that a 99c chip sounded almost indistinguishable from a $2000 DAC even when playing into $1000 headphones.
My experience is that my external, USB DAC ($99-ish) with decent headphones is much better at home in the quiet than anything else I'm willing to shell out for, but around town or at work the cheap version of my headphones powered by my phone or desktop PC is good enough. I can reliably ABX the DAC at home on certain tracks (ie, not the bad recordings), but my motherboard has unremarkable audio. Overall, about $NZ2500 has got me: a USB DAC, three pairs of decent headphones (for me the $$$ set, plus partner and work) and a usable set of powered speakers. Just the DAC and one set of phones would be ~$NZ350.
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The question of whether certain Labour members will be able to resist putting the boot into The Greens is, as always, open. They still have their hard-core "I would rather die than share government with The Greens" members, and there's a very real risk of public hissy fits. The problem is less that it is a distraction, as the suggestion to tactical voters that there is no point voting for either party as they will not be able to form a government together. Hopefully Cunliffe can follow his defeat of the ABC's with a firm quieting down of the "rather be in opposition" crowd.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Matthew Poole,
What one would not expect to find is that one beat one’s children to death more than once but was only convicted of manslaughter the second time around. Your ridiculous, convoluted scenario really doesn’t withstand any scrutiny whatsoever.
You'll note that I have not used any of the legal jargon terms, because I have little to no knowledge of what they mean. I have never suggested, as you say, that "one beat one’s children to death more than once but was only convicted of manslaughter". You have put words into my mouth, labelled them ridiculous, then dismissed my argument.
Classic lawyer move, and an example of why lawyers rate with politicians in public esteem.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Bart Janssen,
You mean when it was all those defined as citizens that were allowed to vote and who gladly resorted to poison and assassination if the vote went against their personal wishes all the while happily using the non-citizens as slaves.
That is pretty much what I was alluding to. Or the more recent enthusiasm for women and children being treated as property while the franchise was extended to more adult men. I believe that for a while Maori women landowners were allowed to vote while white women were not so privileged. That was quickly corrected, possibly before any of them actually got to vote. But also without the nastiness around aboriginal men being granted the vote in Australia around the time of federation.
I'm not sure my depth of cynicism about "rah rah democracy" came through in the previous post.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Matthew Poole,
You are awfully confused about preventative detention, it seems. It's not a sentencing option for murder ... And one could be facing preventative detention before the age of 20, assuming a conviction for some form of culpable homicide before the age of 17.
Forgive me for chopping out much of your post, but that doesn't make sense to me. Is there some legal subtlety that makes murder so distinct from "culpable homicide" that it's impossible to commit the latter just by beating children to death?
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Moz, this aspect of your argument I just don't get. How many child abusers kill their children
It only has to happen once for my argument to be valid. I think it only has to be possible for my argument to be valid.
It would also seem to me that all people, so long as they are still alive, are capable of rehabilitation.
If we had a system for rehabilititating people that would be an excellent thing to think about. But we have a legal system that removes people from society for a period and treats them extremely poorly, and a political system set up to make it much easier to ratchet up the punishment than to move towards rehabilitation. I think the possibility of rehabilitation has to be balanced against the possibility of further harm to other people (who also have rights).
It's nice that you (and others) like to view abusers as people, but keep in mind that many of them don't view you as people, and definitely don't view their victims as people. One of my parents is incapable of that despite being almost 70, so I think the change of rehabilitation is effectively zero. But while that person is alive, it will continue abusing anyone it can persuade to stay within range.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to B Jones,
The cost of surgery? If it's not with my consent, it's assault.... You don't hear me saying prison, it's not so bad,
No, but you repeatedly say that other things are so much worse than prison that it's not even worth mentioning the imprisonment. In case you're not aware, accused criminals are repeatedly assaulted, battered, threatened and imprisoned before even getting to trial. The process of imprisonment necessarily involves daily infliction of all of those except battery, but battery is a constant risk. They're often not crimes, of course, since they're committed by the state, but even the ones that are are very rarely prosecuted.
So, is the assault and bodily harm of surgery better or worse than imprisonment?
With the "right to access their parents", you seem to be unaware that it's difficult for children to access imprisoned parents. Note that the child has not committed an offence but it having it's rights violated by the state regardless. Again, you appear to regard imprisonment as such a minor inconvenience that it's barely worth mentioning.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to B Jones,
Or why forced sterilisation is different to chopping off hands. Because at this stage it sounds like the argument of someone who thinks that forced sterilisation can be achieved by a waving of hands rather than inpatient surgery under anaesthetic.
My response is “is it better than being beaten to death? Yes? What problem?”. Because that’s exactly what we’re talking about here – the “human right” of a parent to continue killing their children, being contrasted with what I think is a right children have, the right to life.
For someone who is willing to countenance the huge expense and ethical dubiousness of imprisoning someone you are being quite precious about the cost of surgery. Modern keyhole surgery is somewhere between a tattoo and a hangnail. General anesthetic is optional, and the discomfort is apparently minor in most cases. Yes, some people choose a general for it, as they do for may medical procedures. I’ve met one woman who was almost disappointed that the procedure was so quick and painless – her mental preparation was quite out of proportion to the actual event. For me, the most painful part of the vasectomy was the injected local anesthetic.
By contrast, it’s perfectly legal to circumcise a child without anesthetic, and without any medical or ethical justification. So again, society already accepts this level of trauma and risk. If you want to argue that we shouldn’t I’m happy to hear it, but as with killing people, you haven’t attempted to make that argument. Simply saying “people have a right to freedom of movement” doesn’t mean we have to open the prisons, and saying “people have a right to bodily autonomy” doesn’t mean we can’t chop them up. Rights are a contest, famously “your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins”.
Someones’ right to continue producing and killing children is one that should be curtailed, I think we agree on that?
Now that I’ve had another go at answering your question, back to my question above: I’d love to hear a defense of the state forcibly denying a child their right to access their parents (article 9.1) put in human rights terms.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to B Jones,
I’m not sure what point there is having a representative government if nothing they do is democratic unless it would pass a plebiscite.
On a completely separate note, I'd be up for a discussion of the many and various meanings given to "democratic" and which of them can usefully be applied to NZ. I mean, you have the "Democratic Republic of Congo" currently under military rule (or being invaded/occupied, depending on your viewpoint) at one end and consensus systems described as "minority veto democracy" at the other. I'm not sure which application is less accurate.
But strictly, unless something is voted on it's not democratic. Whether a law voted on by a whipped majority of a minority government composed of elected representatives is "democratic" is arguable. The way we use "democratic" today bears sod all resemblance to its historical use, and the term has been hotly contested ever since it was coined. I mean right now we have a military-corporate state claiming to be a democracy, contrasting itself with a self-appointed committee that also claims to be a democracy. And that's just the two major world powers... Realpolitic suggests we not get hung up on the labels, and focus on making the system we have work better.
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Hard News: Making it up on smacking, in reply to B Jones,
"But faced with a flat “it is never ok to sterilise someone” argument"
Where?Possibly a different B Jones said:
I’d hope that in this day and age, only a very small minority of people would think compulsory sterilisation is an acceptable solution to anything.
Was my paraphrasing of that quote incorrect? Could you restate it to make my error clear?