Posts by Heather Gaye
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That's f*&*#ng appalling - we sold out our climate change response just to get free insulation for "our" people?
The fact that insulation is being provided specifically to Maori on different terms is bad enough in itselfIt sounds so bad I reckon it can't be right. I'm holding out until I hear the story from a more reputable source.
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I'm with Kyle. For starters, I just don't think there are enough rich privileged families in NZ. I wager the majority of otago students come from middle class families where the parents are topping up their kids' expenses because it has to be done. That's what my parents did for me. Granted, it didn't occur to me at the time that an education was something I was lucky to afford, but I also wasn't hooning around with my parents' credit card, or flipping the bird or the bottle at authority figures.
The generalisations over who's able to afford a tertiary qualification hold, but just because a bunch of students caused a riot, it doesn't automatically follow that they did it because they're rich snotty brats with a chip on their shoulder. Probably they're snotty brats. Possibly they're rich. Speaking from a little experience, likely it's the newly-left-home teen dream to be involved in something of a subversive event - especially one that's been hyped up by the police and the media - without any forethought of how ugly it may very well get. Absolutely the instigators should be punished according to their crimes. But wow... the judgement in this thread is weirdly equal & opposite to the us&them mentality in the herald your views column - a sort of liberal self-loathing, or survivors' guilt or something. Although perhaps it's a sweeping generalisation to presume that the kind of liberal intellectuals that make up PA's membership are more likely to be financially secure graduates...
& regarding all the talk about how they *must* be well-off because of the cost of tertiary study: in an economic climate where a tertiary qualification is pretty much mandatory for any decent-paying career outside the trades, that situation makes me kind of stabby.
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It's fascinating. The oddities just highlight the power of social engineering*, word association, & straight out familiarity.
"fur trade" isn't just wearing animal skins - it's clubbing baby seals and killing off endangered species. I bet most of the people who said they believe it's morally wrong are just repeating their conditioning, without having given it any thought since the last greenpeace pamphlet arrived in their letterbox 20 years ago.
"homosexuality" has had enough years of activism and exposure (ref: familiarity) to make people question the reactive "unnatural" tag they (or their parents) had been brought up with.
"divorce" & "abortion" are givens; if you have had one, or can imagine needing one, or are close to someone who's had one, then you're more likely to be ok with it. Granted, there's also a social engineering influence; because they're legal and available, people are more inclined to opt for them, therefore people are more likely to be tolerant of them.
...and I reckon abortion's level of moral abhorrence is less due to the "murder" aspect than people think, but more because it's perceived to be predominantly employed by "irresponsible" young women. For conservatives, it's a very easy target to reinforce their crusade against sexual immorality."polygamy" suffers from the associations with patriarchal coercion, nutty personality cults, and from the lack of any progressive debate prompted by any western active/activist community. To my (limited) knowledge, there's a growing number of people that view polygamy as a valid lifestyle choice, but I've been trying to work out why there's not that much desire to start the debate.. I guess polygamist individuals tend to viewed as peers by (& hence move predominantly in) social groups that already endorse the right to most non-heteronormative/non-exclusive relationships & extravanilla sexual recreation - it's something that they generally don't have any need to share outside the group. I guess it'd become a society-wide issue if more polygamous partners wanted to start having children, but so far that seems to be predominantly only the isolationist religio-fascist headjobs have gone / been made public with that one.
* I might add: I'm using social engineering as a neutral term. I think our supposedly immovable moral code is based pretty heavily on our environment and the views of those we associate with. I have no problem with the government changing the rules to change opinions, as long as it's accompanied by (or intended to promote) a more advanced debate than thou shalt/shalt not.
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My understanding of the system is that it shouldn't bias towards the big parties - you still get a party vote and they still get the same number of seats as under the current system.
OH, sorry, I getcha now. Thanks for clarification, that sounds way more sensible.
Re: extremist groups getting in on less than 5%, seriously, if 0.8% of the population wish to be represented by a crazy, then fair do's to 'em.
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We could use the MMP method from the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg and proposed but turned down for Scotland. These guys don't have party lists - the list seats are instead filled by the candidates who lost their electorates by the smallest margin.
At first read that sounded quite good. Second read, I don't really see how it counts as MMP at all. It's effectively a variation on FPP system - & would weight parliament in favour of the two biggest parties.
It's the party's policies I'm voting for, and not any specific member. Even if I dislike half the party list, at least I can count on them being pretty consistent in their support of their own policies.
Absolutely with getting rid of the 5% threshold though.
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Gio, I love that system SO MUCH! If I thought it would be useful here I'd start doing it straight away. As it is, I guess I buy coffee for my impoverished friends regularly enough to feel like I'm doing my part.
give the machine a much-needed backflush.
This.
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...just looking around the net, it appears that there wasn't any promise of a referendum, but a lot of people believe there was. Found this article by muriel newman saying that what was actually promised was a "full review", held in 2001. An earlier article by don brash says the same thing. I'm now wondering if someone was deliberately spreading disinformation.
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It was never promised when MMP was voted in all those years ago, that we’d have a rethink a decade or so down the track,
Actually, I'm pretty sure it was. I remember part of the public information campaign was that in the event of a change, there would be a follow-up referendum 10 years after introduction, basically to allay the concerns of those in favour of the status quo. Can't cite any source though.
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1. It brings better coffee to the poor unfortunate natives, who know not what they drink.
2. It makes you appreciate how hard it actually is to make the kind of coffee we like.I was on a train and there was a group of extremely smooth 20-year-olds sitting opposite me. At one point, the coolest, smoothest(, prettiest) boy stood up & asked if anyone else wanted tea. They all did. They all sat around being cool & smooth and drinking tea. The natives don't drink coffee.
One of my hosts made a comment about just starting a part-time job in a cafe, and learning how to make the coffee. The way she described it, she was as familiar with espresso as operating an alien spaceship.
I really think it's less about not knowing what they're missing and more just an ingrained cultural disinterest in coffee, in the sense of the urban national identity we've elevated our coffee cult(ure) to.
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...I agree there's a strong correlation between the kind of person you are on- and offline. The whole thing about learning to "do" the internet is probably more relevant to n00bs. Nearly everyone acts like a total numbnuts of some flavour for a month or two, but most come right.
...and the rest end up on kiwiblog. I guess DPF's doing us a favour by keeping them all nicely pegged in one place. Imagine if they didn't have anywhere to vent!