Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Well, yes he was -- by people for whom the British Tories, the Australian Liberals and the NZ National Party might as well be Maxist-Leninists on crack.
Comparing the political compass readings for US and NZ politicians/parties can be very enlightening in this regard. It can't be said often enough: America is really on a different planet politically to the rest of the world.
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Incidentally, I don't think McCain is as big a dunce as you think.
He is old.
Reallllllly old.
But hey, anything's better than Bush ain't it?
Where "anything" includes "someone who cannot use the internet", then, no, it isn't. I'm sorry, but in this digital age, anyone who can't be arsed to learn how to use email is not qualified to be the most powerful person in the world. And his age is no excuse.
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You'd reckon we should rock at that. It's the old #8 wire tradition.
Are we good for gold in the mens barbed wire this year? And how do you think the humidity in China will affect the womens HotTape(TM)?
Did no-one ever tell you not to mock the people with weapons? The highly aggressive people with weapons?
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Given that every few years they totally revise how they think they looked (Reptiles/birds?), or which bone came from which beast, I think there's rather a lot of guesswork that goes on.
I hate to break it to you, but the bird-dinosaur thing has been solidly established for a decade or so now. It's hardly every few years.
You know what I really want from the Olympics? Some footage of the fencing. I'm not fussed. I'll take the men's sabre pools at three am if I have to. I'll take the men's sabre team pools at three am if that's all there is. But I find it deeply frustrating that we send people to the Olympics to fence - we've even had someone make the top eight - and yet sports which no New Zealander plays, yet alone plays at an Olympic level, get hours of footage. (Handball and synchronised swimming: I am looking at you.)
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Happy birthday!
The Lesbos thing begs the question: what do they call women of the Sapphic persuasion on said island?
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I didn't condemn it. I just said that I have trouble feeling any particular concern.
You don't feel any particular concern that there are moves afoot to prosecute people for obscenity based on what they write and post on the internet in password-protected groups? No matter what you think of the content - and it would certainly trip my squick-meter - it's the principle that is at stake here.
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For some reason, I am not feeling the outrage on this one. It is one thing to write the story as "therapy", it is a different matter again to post it on the internet.
And how is that different from the dozens of fairly graphic accounts of surviving sexual abuse I can walk into Borders and purchase? Some people get their stories published in a book. Some people post them on the 'net. If it works for them, fine. But you can't condemn one without the other.
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Hah, forget Jaqueline Carey; at age eleven I procured from my school library the biographical story of a Saudi princess, which involved plenty of child abuse, kinky sex, etcetera. And some of that was mild compared to the historical novels I came across in the public library. Anyone who thinks that the internet is the only place innocent children could possibly come across this stuff is either stupid or had an exceptionally sheltered childhood.
This issue is of particular concern to fandom - last year LiveJournal, in response to complaints, deleted a whole lot of journals under the guise of purging child porn. Included among the deleted communities were those which were communites for abuse survivors and a discussion group for the book Lolita, as well as several fanfic communities - because clearly when you write about two fictional sixteen-year-olds having sex, it's child porn! Most of the journals were later put back up after a storm of outrage, but it was definitely a warning sign.
I think Craig is entirely right - it's fine for the middle and upper classes to walk into Borders and buy their kinky lesbian BDSM porn - and they're sure as hell not age-testing for that, let alone in a library! - but the internet as seen as more dangerous because it's available to everyone. I think it's also seen as an easy target - people are primed to be worried about sex on teh Intarwebs. They're primed against censorship and/or banning of books, because only uneducated people do that. So down go the websites.
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Um, Lucy, to quote Peters himself what part of NO didn't he understand? :)
The part where he was completely unaware who made the donations to the legal fund? I think it's highly embarrassing and he's behaved like a dick post-revelation, but it's quite easy to see how the whole situation arose without any wrongdoing on Peters' part. It doesn't make him any less stupid, though.
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I'm going to jump in the minority bandwagon here: while I thoroughly dislike the way Winston has handled this whole matter (he was positively tedious on Morning Report today), I don't think he's lied or knowingly misled anyone. I think the anonymous legal fund donations policy has come back to trip him up in a very bad way, and while he probably _should_ have thought about the legal fund, stupidity is not the same as wilful misdirection.
But everyone seems to be having so much fun running with the "Winston has lost the moral high ground" line that I somehow think this point of view isn't going to get much of an airing. (And didn't he lose that somewhere back between the baubles and the EFA giveback-to-charity fiasco?)