Posts by Kyle Matthews
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I take it you're comparing a rather hasty intervention in Iraq vs the lack of intervention in Sudan?
I'm not comparing the situations as similar.
But I think if you took polling data from the Sudan, there'd be sections of the population that would be 100% in favour of anyone coming in to stop them being... well killed.
Yet people argue over polling data as justification for being in, or not in, Iraq.
If public opinion of people was the determining factor in international interventions, Iraq wouldn't be top of the list then or now.
I really just don't understand why it's ok to use these figures for Iraq.
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Yeah, TEC would be the obvious one. It's very strategic direction, and undoing the market reforms that national set in place to have tertiary institutions compete with each other. Presumably it'd get folded back into the ministry and cut in half. It's not 500 staff though, or even close. There would have to be trimmings, implemented through budget cuts, across the board.
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When Kyle said the above I felt he was still missing my point.
Yeah I get your point. And the reasons why it's 'ok' to poke at Epsom and swimming pools, but not Maori and beer/cigarettes - that's valid to explore.
I just don't like the model of 'let me prove how what you said was a cheap shot by putting up another one as example'. We can do better than that, in debate.
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I really don't get how either side uses polling data in relation to Iraq. This isn't an election, it's a war, or a civil war, or a complete fuck up. Arguing over how many percent, or whether the percentage of support for war has gone up or down. Talk about not seeing the big picture.
Sometimes there are moral imperatives (to quote the West Wing) and this really feels like one of them.
How there are moral imperatives in Iraq, but not in some other places around the world - Sudan for example - I just don't get.
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makes me wonder where in the public service? there are a few over-inflated policy units that really do need to be shrunk... but these kinds of numbers would herald a potential return to the bad old days of richardson and birch.
Yeah. And so far Key has been throwing out the 'bureaucrats rather than front line'. Even if it doesn't hit the mythical front line. It's a lot of people to pull out of the civil service. That's what... 4-5% of them?
Unless they're going to disestablish something (or some things) large - kiwisaver, working for families, TEC - that the current government has created, that's going to create a real squeeze. There are some departments that you can't just cut 5%. So some places are going to be carrying more of the load.
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Kyle - pleae don't skim read.
Your link clicks onto Blacks reply and several retractions from quite a few who dissed it 1st up including Nature.
Well I didn't skim read. You've followed another three links or so, which if you're that into it, up to you. I can't be particularly bothered, I've spent my evening coaching kids to play ice hockey.
The debate about Black's book is whether a punch card machine was fundamental to the holocaust.
You said that IBM supplied typewriters, which aren't even close to the same thing. The Nazis wouldn't need to go to IBM for typewriters - they had several brands made in Germany - the Kanzler, Adler to name two.
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Exactly Stephen.
The debate should be about whether or not those jobs are important enough for us to pay however many million dollars on them.
Not whether theatre, a movie theatre, a supermarket, a corner dairy, etc etc will suffer.
If factories close down in small towns, it sucks for local businesses, they get burned. That isn't a reason for keeping the factory open though.
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Was it IBM who leased typwriters to the allied and the axis forces. (Enabling the Holocaust) Then when a typewriter was capture by the otherside charged them a lease for the use of the same typewriter while still charging the orininal leasee.
You forgot the people that supplied the paper and the ink. Damn enablers.
I believe the story is actually that punch card machines produced by an IBM subsidiary were used as part of the information processing. A suit brought against IBM was dismissed.
Peter Hayes, professor of history and Theodore Z. Weiss Professor of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University says it's a non-story in this review.
If the issue was typewriters... well Germany was perfectly capable of making their own typewriters.
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Somehow I doubt that
Your comment, whilst possibly made with frivolity in mind, conveyed an unnecessarily patronising view of a group of people who have as much of a right as anyone to vote in their own interests
would have got the point across quite so vividly...
So you prefer a principle of "when shooting for effect, add other targets in because collatoral damage will make it more vivid"?
I don't think it's a big thing, and everyone can tell IO was making up an example to point out the other one. I just think there's ways to make your point without it. And given that the point was about not making stereotypes because they're not fair...
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Er, that was precisely my point.
Yeah, the "you said something crappy, I'm going to provide another crappy example" annoys me.
It's the 'how low can you go' approach to life.
Do we need to point out how bad that thing was, by bringing out something else bad, just to make our point?