Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Back when I was at Uni and trawling for potential scholarships, I found one that was for something like "children of members of the New Zealand Defence Force seeking to study Agriculture at Lincoln University".
When coming to Canty, I went through the first-year scholarships and ended up concluding that what I really needed to be was a disabled Pacific Island or Maori train-driver's kid studying engineering, because then I'd qualify for everything.
That said, I am actually in no place whatsoever to complain about a lack of funding, but there's specialist scholarships aimed at a huge variety of different groups, and I don't see why this one is any different. Nelson College used to have a scholarship for boys who could prove they were of "pure British stock". I wonder if the Listener ever had anything to say about that?
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I'm not a great believer in things being they way they are just because that's how they have always been.
I tend to think of that mindset (traditional = good) as being closely related to the "natural = good" mindset, and equally as fallacious. You also need to watch out for people who claim "we've always done it that way" when "that way" is an invention of the last couple of generations (see: housewives.)
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There are a lot of teenagers who live independently of their families either because they choose to, or because they have to. I accept that. I just wish that they didn't have to. That you hadn' t had to.
I don't know, though, if thinking of those teenagers who are living independently as children - with all the connotations thereto - is always helpful. They're not mature adults, certainly, but neither are most people in their early twenties. Which isn't to say it's not right to feel bad if they're in crappy circumstances, but I think whether someone is a child or not is *highly* dependent on their individual circumstances, especially once they hit their very late teens.
People are often as adult as you treat them, basically. I was still a kid in most ways when I left for uni, despite being legally an adult. I know people who *still* act like children, even though they're in their twenties. I know people who were adults well before they came to university. These things are highly relative.
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Not banal in the least. The closest I ever got to anything *resembling* this sort of thing was seeing some people smoking dope on school property. From a distance.
I'm sure signal inhibitors do exist. I remember reading about them in the UK. Some newspaper imported one (possibly from Japan...?) and had a merry old afternoon cutting people off who were using their mobe in public with no consideration for others.
Don't they have them in prisons here, or were thinking about introducing them?
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And things are getting even more interesting.
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Yeah me too, and the outrage is building!
I remember listening to a BBC podcast, oh, six months ago now, talking about the subprime crisis. They interviewed one real estate guy in California who said that they were having a huge mosquito problem for the first time in decades because there were so many empty houses with swimming pools that weren't being cleaned, due to foreclosures. And I remember thinking, my god, this is huge, why hasn't anyone noticed? How did this happen?
It just seems to have taken most of the world six months to realise exactly how much of a problem there was.
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This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so effing serious. With the Freddie and Fannie bailout the worlds largest home owning democracy has effectively placed millions of mortgagees in state housing by proxy and with the AIG bailout they’ve just instituted national insurance. Did someone forget to tell the Bush administration that socialism was dead cos they've obviously become late converts?
And yet at the political forum on health the UCSA ran yesterday, the ACT candidate still found it appropriate to ramble on about the glories of the free market solving everything, even when questioned directly about AIG.
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And, I'd want to be wearing my beige, retro, polyester suit, in acknowledgment of Lovelock's Gaia theory.
Now that *is* a reasonable example of pseudo-religious environmentalism. Which isn't to say that those of us who prefer a more rationalist worldview haven't borrowed the good parts and called it Earth Systems Science, but the sentient-organism-Earth stuff is excessively silly.
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Sue Bradford: standing between me and Sue Kedgley and not voting for the Greens.
Heh, almost for me. I have a lot of respect for Sue Bradford and all she's managed to accomplish, but Kedgley represents the rabidly anti-science aspect of some environmentalism that struck me very poorly during the big GE debate and that the Greens have never quite redeemed themselves on for me, and likely won't anytime soon
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Except for Sue Kedgley - never one to pass up on an opportunity to suck all the innocent fun out of life - who answered "I certainly wouldn't want to be a battery hen..." followed by a short lecture on the wretched life of the poor creatures.
Sue Kedgley: standing between me and voting for the Greens.