Posts by Neil Morrison
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The government has taken a gradualist/consensus-building approach to this issue which to me seems to be the best long term approach.
For example, they've reached a compromise position with the foresters.
Getting interest groups and the public on side rather than shouting at them is always going to get actual results, although it may not serve the emotional needs of some.
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Her account was that the SIS had never previously asked about those people.
But Zaoui was well aware that it was what ever contacts with people from the GIA that were of concern to the SIS. Not fully disclosing significant contact with that group was hardly going make him look open and honest.
That said, time has moved on, he seems to have distanced himself from his ex-colleagues who had turned nasty. The other odd thing the Herald reports is that Zaoui fears those ex-colleagues. If true that might explain the mystery of his wanting to leave Malaysia.
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I'd be really interested in a French perspective
i would be too but one of the few points I thought Zaoui had in his favour was the possibility the France got it wrong. At the time France had was facing a very real terrorist threat from Algerians, there were bombs going off in Paris, and Zaoui had a poor choice of friends it seems. (Why he later got offside with countries like Malaysia remains a mystery).
But at least his family will be able to join up with him. What ever one thinks about Zaoui they were innocent victims.
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the man is just starting to get the justice he deserves.
he has indeed. The NZ authorities carried thru with a process which, although obviously flawed, in the end was governed by respect for fair play and justice.
It's a pity Zaoui did not pay the same respect to the NZ refugee process when he entered the country illegally. He seems to be no more and no less deserving than the many thousands of others who do abide by the UN refugee process which NZ is part of.
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I guess my concern is that it’s really hard to figure out what those hominids were thinking....I suspect that any attempt by us to put ourselves in their heads is doomed to failure, our cultural perspective makes it impossible.
It's very difficult to figure out what they were thinking but it's not necessarily doomed to failure. There is evidence that can be interpreted (although perhaps not definitively in all cases), such as the length of time between using fire and creating fire. The development of representational art, tool use, funeral practices etc - each must imply a change in the way our primate ancestors understood and interacted with the world and each other and hence can be evidence of changes within our brain/mind.
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I'm curious about what that long delay between the use of fire and the knowledge of how to make fire possibly says about our early ancestors' view of the world around them.
We clever Homo sapiens now know all about fire - how it's a product of chemical reactions. But we didn't know that until fairly recently - a couple of hundred years ago. Prior to that it was thought to be an element in itself.
So go back to those early years on the savannah, where hominids had even less intellectual capacity than us. Lightening strikes a tree and fire is produced. What would that appear like to those observing? Perhaps a bit like the hand of God touching the earth and producing magic. (Not that this is exactly what they might have imagined but the general idea that fire was a fire strange phenomena).
It would have taken a while to recognise that fire was not just a gift from heaven but the product of heat and therefore something that humans could produce. It would require a leap to a quite different understanding of the physical world much like the leap from phlogiston to energy.
**REPLY:** an interesting point, Neil. I've wondered a lot about that delay as well. Cheers, DH
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If the Stop Bush Coalition want to force some kind of confrontation with the Police for God only knows what reason, then they wear the consequences.
These events have been the focus of some very violent protests in the past. Violence by people who if they were in power would make both Bush and Howard look like Thomas Jefferson. So I'm inclined to accept the need for the sort of security we see in Sydney. And get rather tide of endless tide of self pity coming from these protest groups.
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che, if your want to imagine people you disagree with in the worst possible light feel free, but it's not really a rational argument.
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word about the internet is that things in Iran might be changing sometime soon.
But seriously, there are many many refugees wanting to come to NZ who abide by the UN established process. One can feel a lot of sympathy for Panah but his dishonsty has to be compared with all those others who are just as, or even more, desperate who play by the rules.
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The problem is that cost-benefit analysis relies on contestable projections and parameters. Goodstein's review points out that other economists believe Lomborg might be lowballing the economic costs of climate change and exaggerating the economic costs of addressing it (in comparison to, say, Stern or Stiglitz).
Economics is an inexact science, there's bound to be lots of disagreement. A utilitarian cost-benefit analysis is just one way of looking at things. I don't have an opinion one way or the other on this approach but it does foreground the fact that we have choices to make and that those choices may entail trade-offs.