Posts by BenWilson
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An industry specialist says 40 per cent of homes he tests contain traces of methamphetamine, known as P.
Wow, I had no idea that upwards of a million NZers are involved in the production of P. That really is a crisis. Or bullshit. Hmmmmm.
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Polity: Let the big lies flow, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Just the idea that everyone is getting the same means that people start working and acting in a more community minded way. It is all about social justice.
Yes, I think attempting to boil the whole idea down to the exact $ each person gets is a good way of completely ignoring most of the point of it. It's not just about how much $ you get, but what you have to do to get them. Or what you might be able to do differently, given them. Or what others will no longer be able to do to you, given them, and what others are also getting.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Sacha,
Because people who won't even name themselves are always so credible when speaking on such matters.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to linger,
Truths are his flies,
fueling webs of lies. -
Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to izogi,
Yes, like Chuck Norris, who doesn't do pressups, he presses the Earth down. John Key doesn't tell lies. He simply speaks and all truth and knowledge are moved into alignment.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Well it destroys the cherished idea of full employment as an imperative. Indeed we need hardly even keep track of unemployment if unemployment benefits aren't this line item that we're always trying to reduce. We could instead focus on things like wellbeing and poverty. Unemployment has been a bullshit statistic for so long just because it is such a political hot potato, because it's tied to welfare. Untied, we could perhaps actually come to terms with what labour really looks like, and what it ideally could look like, without that distorting influence.
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Hard News: More than a bang on the head, in reply to Rich Lock,
Boxing also has the 'standing eight-count', where a boxer who has taken a heavy hit can take eight seconds to shake it off before going back for more
Yes and it's almost always much more than 8 seconds, because that's just the time between the ref having made the other boxer stop and go to the corner, and the other boxers standing up, at which point the 8 count begins. During that entire break, of course, the other boxer is recovering too, and will launch the next barrage slightly fresher.
which makes it more dangerous than, for example, MMA, where the match is over if you are unable to defend yourself.
Not to mention that MMA fights end as often as not with a submission, in which the loser taps out before they are seriously harmed.
Quite a lot of MMA fights involve hardly any blows at all, if both fighters prefer to wrestle.
Helmets haven't stopped gridiron players suffering very badly from concussion. There's even a Will Smith film about it.
I understand the prevailing wisdom to be that harm is far more likely, the more padded you are. Certainly the people I know who have played both rugby and gridiron have said that gridiron is much more dangerous. The head is literally a weapon, that you deliberately smash straight into opponents.
It makes sense on the argument that however much protection you give yourself in a contact sport, if it's competitive, the cutting edge will always be riding the line of physical damage.
Similar arguments are often made in motorsport, that things that apparently make the vehicle safer actually make racing more dangerous because all they do is encourage more risk taking. ABS brakes, for instance, meant that drivers could brake later into corners. So, of course, they do. Which means that they come off corners much faster than before if the vehicle loses control.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Joe Wylie,
and, uh, saving the environment
Not entirely sure I see how that works. I know it's a claim sometimes made by proponents of UBI - but I don't see the chain of reasoning. Something to do with transforming capitalism so that it doesn't squeeze the last drops of goodness (and then some) out of everything it touches?
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Part of what I've always liked about the UBI is that it's not really an anti capitalist idea. It could actually make capitalism work better. It could stimulate internal demand, creating jobs where there were none, and yet it doesn't require unrealistically demanding class warfare as the solution to all ills. A class system could continue forever, and yet it could do a lot to alleviate what that actually means, increasing mobility for all those that class really matters to. Maybe, over time, it might simply come to mean less, if being the lowest class doesn't automatically mean sleeping in a box on the street and begging for crumbs, and getting kicked by the doorman, one step higher up the ladder.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Joe Wylie,
surely that reads like a reassuring dog-whistle to those higher up the food chain that a UBI is really about a solid subsidy to entrench low wages.
Yup. Probably. And it might even do that. But low wages are hardly unlikely to disappear any time soon. They're a fact of life for a massive chunk of the population. Instead of waiting for the revolution this could make a real difference to the precariat right now.
For students, and young jobseekers, for instance, this is finally a reason to vote at all.
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