Posts by BenWilson
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Co-pendants unite!
That's an excellent neologism.
A pendantic neologism at that.
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Was he supposed to 'fess up that there was 'a few bumps in the road' re his marriage?
That's a new euphemism for an extra-marital affair that his wife didn't know about.
Sure it would have been political insanity to 'fess up'. It was also political insanity to have the affair in the first place.
Craig is right, it shouldn't be a matter for public scrutiny. That doesn't stop it being such a matter, whether it should or not. Mallard's troubles will be scrutinized for sure. And probably will end up 10th page news for one day.
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Well, I've had a few interesting discussions there. It's good to occasionally engage with people who utterly disagree with you on almost everything.
Yup, although I draw the line on them disagreeing about the value of using rationality and courtesy.
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Ryan, you are! But trolling Wishart is very tempting, I can see that.
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Unless you're just doing it because you're bored, he's not actually worth arguing with, because when confronted with his own fabrication or foolishness, he simply convinces himself of the next thing.
My experience was that he doesn't argue at all. He just makes personal attacks. That's in his works and his responses to criticism.
The only thing of interest about the views of Wishart is that they are somehow published in glossy form without running a loss. It seems like business model is that Investigate is really a circular and it sells advertising. It could probably sell a lot more if it didn't include whack views every second page, but it's Wishart's soapbox and he's allowed to pay opportunity costs to stand on it.
Heh, Danyl, it looks like Ian's rewritten the entire book just in the comments field. I'm tempted to find out why he thinks moral relativism has brought the West down, but I know it's just a teaser with no substance the way 100% of the articles I've ever wasted 5 minutes of my life in the doctor's waiting room reading have turned out to be. He'll have a specialist definition of moral relativism which will probably turn out to be equivalent with socialism, which is in turn equivalent with Nazism, which is in turn equivalent to Islam, and run by queers.
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Hell, at least they would be somewhat more characterful choices than yucky old John Banks and boring old Dick Hubbard.
That seems to form the bulk of our thinking about Mayors. That's the only reason yucky old Banks got in I think, he's a character, even if that character is a complete dickhead. Winston Peters has been trading on it for years...which is why I continually despair of representative democracy. To form the basis of massively important decisions around personality cults is only slightly less fucked than monarchy as a means of government. Couldn't all the actually important decisions just be outsourced to the people? Or at least the subsection of society who care? I don't really give a shit about the Eastern Transport Corridor, but I'd like to have thing or two to say about planting trees in the middle of what used to be perfectly good roads out West.
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LOL at Wishart, Godwin's Law personified. I do find it interesting that there is a cretin market out there that wants to put him on the bestseller list. Someone's gotta take the cretin money I suppose. And to use his reasoning method: Mein Kampf and Das Kapital are also bestsellers.
Re: Dawkins, why agonise over human irrationality, an outcome of evolution in the first place? If it were optimal for everyone to be Einstein, it would have happened millions of years ago. It's as dangerous to claim a monopoly on rationality as it is on God, IMHO, since both are claimed to be paths to the Truth. Science is a very broad term that is used very dogmatically at times. If evolution teaches us anything it's that the weirdest creatures can survive - same goes for science - the weirdest theories may not only survive but become the dominant, and predicting which is not easy. I think it is no coincidence that God is still with us despite thousands of years of the existence of rationality. Don't mistake that with saying I believe in God, btw.
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Did E do anything for you?
Hard to say for sure, which in my book really means no. I once had a good night, but that particular night was good anyway.
There's still a couple of uppers to try, but I'm on a bit of a health kick recently, and I've found that the mood-altering effects of exercise and sleep are the strongest I've experienced in over a decade. Perhaps always being an exercise nut does mean the uppers have less effect, certainly I get a strong adrenal response to good training, and finding some pill to be weaker than that makes me wonder why I would bother.
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Yes, it would have been better and fairer to stick with existing due process, and in a less poisonous political environment that might have happened. It might also have wound up demonstrating to most of the people who took shouting "we have always owned the foreshore and seabed" that they in fact did not.
Then again, it might not. But I agree, and only with the benefit of hindsight, that it would have been better to leave it to the courts. Labour could try being the first party in history to repeal it's own Act! That could be a very interesting way to turn the tables on National, and force Key's hand on at least one issue.
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Ben, they worked for everyone else but you.
Phew, I thought I must have just been crazily at odds with common perceptions of what 'high' actually meant. Maybe I have odd brain chemistry, and it just didn't work for me.
Then again, I do recall some effects - there was a sort of gnawing feeling in the stomach, rather like anxiety, and sleeplessness (which I suffer from anyway). Is that what kids call getting high these days? I must confess my experiments with other uppers (which I won't go into here) have also had similar observations. Perhaps I'm just not an uppers kind of guy. Or perhaps I'm too critical to let a placebo effect work on me.
Fletcher,
it doesnt follow that something better had to be available just because BZP was so poor.
Actually I was saying that coffee was stronger, but kids didn't want an upper that their parents used, which smacked of squareness, however effective it might be, and is also an acquired taste. BZP rode the line of being something that was 'barely legal'. For a lot of kids it's enough that you might get busted by your parents, too much that you might get busted by the cops. Personally, I feel the exact opposite way ;-)
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