Posts by linger
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Anon for obv. rsn.,: Sympathy, agreement -- and appreciation for sharing your experience with us.
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Some observers may well be asking:
What is "trolling" anyway?One useful starting definition might be:
Posting for the sole purpose of manipulating readers into a response.So there isn't anything wrong with playing devil's advocate in an argument (i.e., arguing for a position that you do not actually agree with) -- as long as it is done primarily for the purpose of advancing the argument. But if your point is actually to clarify or expose some weakness in someone's argument, it is usually more efficient (and hence, more considerate to readers) to state that more directly. And if your aim is to get someone else to point out that weakness for you, then that's getting closer to trolling. It would be safest for devil's advocates to explicitly signal that stance in advance (as, indeed, most people do here).
What makes PA rather special is that, mostly, we can operate by trusting that positions are honestly held. Trolling is destructive because it betrays that trust.
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That's a statement of fact. You might like to call it an opinion
That's exactly the point. You keep mislabelling your personal definitions as "facts". (e.g. "human life" starts at conception -- by your definition). Making such a statement is not sufficient to make it true; which is why you have been asked to provide some supporting argument. Replying by a re-statement is, not surprisingly, unconvincing.
Combined with the repeated dismissal of others' observation-based statements (which might be rather better candidates for factual status!) as "so many words" ... it just screams "troll".
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"wet impulses" (and you get serious icky point for that, Russell
wot, after you've just raised the spectre of a possible Brash -- and I quote --
fucking feature
!?
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Stupid people get to vote too
and there's the biggest problem with democracy in a nutshell.
It is vital for a truly viable democracy that political parties are engaged in minimising the number of stupid people, rather than simply pandering to them, which is the default option for parties wishing to gain power (once they've done the math). Watch out this year for parties chasing the stupid vote. *sigh* -
I think Robbery meant to cite Double J and Twice the T. If he had, that would just about be the most offensive thing he's put on this thread :-)
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as long as Key's just being transcribed without numbers, how do we know he hasn't been saying "poor money" all this time?
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A large part of the difference between "traditional" and "te Papa" displays, it seems to me, is not so much in the amount of information presented, as in what kind of information is presented. It is somewhat analogous to the difference between a dictionary (where there is a known organising system, and you can easily find a particular piece of knowledge that you want) and a Google search (which is much less obviously ordered, and where you will get a lot of less relevant information unless you already have a fairly clear idea what you want to find out).
One of my interests is natural history.
I enjoyed exploring the glass cases of the old National Museum (and similarly, the Wanganui and Auckland museums), and I appreciated the hierarchical taxonomy on display, as a system for grouping together related species. Because these were placed side by side, I could easily see what features they had in common, and what more subtle features distinguished them.
By contrast, the information in Te Papa's displays tends to be arranged, not in terms of any exhaustive detailed classification system, but instead in broad thematic groupings (such as by habitat type). This makes it harder to spot relationships between species -- but easier to see how they co-occur in context, and (depending on the quality of the display) what their roles are in their ecosystem.
On balance, I prefer the older style, as it was easier to get close enough to specimens to observe them in detail. I also prefer having enough mental space to think my own thoughts and draw my own conclusions about exhibits -- I find the audio and video components a little intrusive. But that doesn't mean the newer style is necessarily "dumbed-down".
Neither approach, by itself, seems entirely successful at presenting a living culture. In some ways the displays used by the Wanganui museum in the 1980s -- a combination of glass cases AND dioramas showing actual use -- were the best approach I've seen to that problem.
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Something happened to my Rs.
um... I'd rather gathered that from the story.
Or is that just modern paranoia? -
Ouch. Sorry Kyle; from your earlier post it seemed you actually had different options you were able to consider.