Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Wait wait!
Why do anarchists drink herbal tea?Because proper tea is theft.
Sorry, back to what you were doing. -
David, establishing a society for a few months or years hardly moves beyond "interesting social experiment." For one thing, if your model society collapses under the weight of external pressure, I have to wonder how model it really is.
I would argue that the society that we live in is a mixture of capitalism and socialism, with some other isms thrown in. The balance moves around a little, and varies country to country, but pretty much everyone has a mixed society in this way.
Yet if I was to say that capitalism didn't work on the basis that there's no pure capitalist countries I'd probably be laughed at. Yet people happily say the exactly same thing about socialism, anarchism etc etc.
Personally I don't think any of them work well in pure forms, which is why we're in the melting pot of ideas at the moment. Capitalism moderated by socialism. Authority moderated by anarchism. And vice versa. -
Could it be that the police were trying to embarrass the Govt. for what they were doing to Rickards and Dewar et al?
Well, the actions against Rickards and Dewar etc were taken by the police, and would have been signed off by Broad most likely. The government didn't interfere in the decisions to prosecute at all, and as far as I'm aware, they have no power to do so.
And you wouldn't need to ask him to know that Broad and a heap of other cops have been positively spewing over Rickards and Dewar etc. It will have been the bane of the Commissioner's life for the past year, and a conviction of Rickards would have made his life much easier now with the reinstatement etc issue.
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why has China (one of the greatest engineering nations throughout history) stayed with the chopstick when the population eats so much rice.
I believe this one is to frustrate non-Chinese people who like Chinese food and think they should eat it the traditional way.
They of course don't necessarily abandon western eating methods, and leave their plate two feet from their mouth on the table while waving around the two sticks.
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The need for the Great Southern Land started with "The revolutionary era began in 1763, when the military threat to the English colonies from France ended."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_revolutionWell that's a page that talks about the American Revolution, and doesn't mention the great southern land. The bit outside the quote you've added to a stand alone sentence which doesn't relate to the first part at all. That's not evidence, that's misleading use of quotations.
If you have to misuse wikipedia quotations, you're really stretching it.
Although not on wiki we did have 4 convicts and then another 9 or 12 youth offenders who went on a murder spree on the West Coast of the South Island finally being caught in Nelson.
There's nothing there to prove your original point about NZ being discovered because England needed a dumping ground for trash. Assuming we accept the commonly held view that Abel Tasman discovered NZ, it had nothing to do with England, it was a Dutch voyage.
The first English here, after Captain Cook were Whalers, Sealers and then missionaries. They all knew New Zealand was here, so they can't be said to have "discovered" it in any meaning of the word, but anyway.
Some of the whalers and sealers were trashy, but they came from a variety of places, they weren't there under any authority from the English or any other government, and they mostly didn't come with any settlement plans, most of them came, plundered, traded, and left again. Those that did stay, did so of their own free will, and weren't dumped here at all by England.
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Australia & NZ were only "discovered" because England needed another dumping ground for its trash
I'm sorry Michael, that's nonsense. Depending on which theory of discovery you follow, the reasons alter, but none of them had to do with convicts.
Tasman sailed here under the orders of the United East India Company, so nothing to do with England at all. He was looking for new shipping routes and trade possibilities.
Cook was here over a century later hired by the Royal Society to track the path of Venus, and then to search for the mythical 'great southern land'. His journey was driven by the scientific community.
There's recently been material about the Chinese discovering NZ first, obviously disputed. Clearly nothing to do with the English though.
Australia was used to dump 'trash' with convicts for a while. New Zealand was never used to dump trash, though certainly a fair bit of trash did make it here under their own steam - whalers and sealers and so forth. The main organised settlements originating from England were the Wakefield settlements, and they were about leaving behind the depravity and pollution in England, and setting up a better, more ideal lifestyle in this new land. The people who came certainly weren't trash.
The crown didn't intervene in New Zealand much until it appointed a resident. Largely that was because they were becoming aware, through missionaries, that non-natives were causing all sorts of problems with disease, trade in guns and alcohol, crime etc, and they were asked to help.
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Neither Tame Iti (for Tuhoe or otherwise) nor the Fiji junta enjoy any sort of official international recognition, so it's a rather pointless gesture.
Well, the Fiji junta seemed to get a lot of recognition last week at the Pacific Island leaders forum.
And as Tuhoe can hardly exist outside the context of the modern New Zealand state, I regard protest to that end as something of a moot point
Protest activities are full of gestures, and some of them are indeed pointless.
The point of declaring a sovereign nation would not be to become one. That would confuse tactics (declaring yourself a sovereign nation) with strategy (getting a message about your history to the general public). Every time Tame Iti or someone else does something 'sovereign nation-like' that message comes back out in the media and we all get reminded of something that the activist wants us to think about.
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Now Michael - that would be "self appointed ambassador of a nation not recognised by any government or the UN, to the leader of an undemocratic military junta." That's pretty queer in itself.
That's a tactic that has been used with some success by indigenous people's around the world. Not self-appointed ambassadors that I know of, but Aborigines have set up a protest embassy in Canberra for ages.
And given that Tuhoe as I understand it, didn't sign the Treaty, but were included into the British Empire by act of NZ Parliament, without their consent, declaring themselves a sovereign nation and putting into place some public structures of that nation is an entirely sensible protest tactic.
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The Celts?
They don't burn very well. Too soggy.
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Touch-typing has served me well, but all the other skills - like counting spaces and tabbing across to lay out a brochure - were virtually obsolete when they were being taught.
Touch typing, I remain convinced, is the second most useful thing I learnt at high school. It made university, and work, and that crazy internet thing, so much easier. Watching academics these days who are first finger typing their way through their latest book...
(The most useful thing I learnt was 'Writing a 5th form history essay', under the tutelage of Mr Bailey. I wasn't good at it when he taught it to me, but I used the same basic skills in university all the way up to my dissertation.)