Posts by nzlemming
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Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Just hang around the Kodak booth, sweetie, and one day your prints will come :-D
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The problem with calling them "Tinks" is that every so often a "w" will slip in there and that won't end well...
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Sacha,
That seems to be a common misconception on the left – of course this government have a plan. You’re watching it
I think it's flattering them to call it a plan as such. What they have is a mindset (I hesitate to label it as ideology) that colours all their decisions. A plan would require definite thought to have occurred.
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Hard News: Perverse Entertainment, in reply to ,
You're not from these parts, are you?
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
I started on the Internet in Usenet after using Compuserve forums and bulletin boards
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Hard News: Chasing the Trans-Pacific Express, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Thanks. I had come to that conclusion by experience, but wanted to confirm it. Took me a frustrating while to discover "padding" on my T-box
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
And if the person on the other side of the herd responds to them in kind, then you step in and sternly warn them to argue in good faith.
When someone argues from an ideological position and claims it as self-evident fact, refuses to consider others’ experiences that run counter to that position and derides those experiences as self-interest, that’s bad faith.
You call PAS a “clique” that suffers from “gestalt consensus”. It’s possible that a passing intellectual might help you with those terms as I don’t think they mean what you want them to mean. There are cliques here, yes; they come and go, temporary ones based on common ground or thought, more lasting ones based on common experiences. People always gravitate to those of like mind, or “birds of a feather” in any grouping. But I don’t see PAS as a whole as a clique – I see it as a community of interest. People who come here regularly are largely of a generally liberal nature (I wonder how many more qualifiers I could fit in there), plus a few who, as you say, relish the argument. There are those here that I don’t personally engage with because – no point. No point of contact between us, not even enough common ground to swap experiences. Not a problem, they don’t engage with me either. We all get along better and can focus on stuff we care about.
“Gestalt consensus” is the natural consequence of any self-generating community – these are the truths that we hold self-evident, as a group. Knowingly challenging the norms of any community requires solid evidential backing, or why bother? You hit the defensive wall – get classed as an intruder by the community’s auto-immune system and the anti-bodies mass to quell the invasion. Standard human dynamics, again studied by those sociologists and intellectuals you dismissed earlier, our understanding of which is based around observation of smaller, self-evident biological systems.
You say it’s nastier “than Kiwiblog, since it’s rather more sophisticated” – I say, it’s preferable to be polite even when teeth are clenched behind the smile. And, even on a bad day, PAS is a mentally healthier place to be than Kiwiblog or the Standard – as bad as each other.
It appears to me that you don’t like what you perceive as “academia” and that you project this across all intellectual activity – if it doesn’t materially progress socio-economic well-being, it shouldn’t be paid for by the state/taxpayer. But the part of that you appear to be missing is the “socio-” bit. Not everything can be measured by dollars – this is the fundamental flaw in the neocon economic approach that reduces everything to transactions that must be measured in dollar terms. Without people examining whether particular approaches are a good idea from a societal standpoint, even if they make money in the short term, we wind up in a global economic crisis where the rich continue to suck the poor dry at ever increasing rates.
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Hard News: Chasing the Trans-Pacific Express, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Mind you with a little tuning you can do a good job of series recording based on epg data without series tagging provided the stations don’t mess with the epg data
Paul, n00b question, but is there some code is attached to the actual programme that alerts the PVR to start recording, or is all the smarts in the EPG and the PVR goes by the time the EPG says the show should start?
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Hard News: Perverse Entertainment, in reply to Russell Brown,
Well, that’s thee and me, then ;-) I think I first encountered Hard News on Usenet, when you used to post it for expats.
ETA And Steve makes 3 ;-)
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Hard News: Perverse Entertainment, in reply to Leopold,
He’s real?
I always assumed that he was a lefty running reductio ad absurdum commentary on Mr Farrar’s postsI think he is real. The pseudonym dates back to Usenet and nz.general
ETA @MatthewPoole Snap! But less of the dinosaur, ye young whippersnapper!