Posts by Bart Janssen
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one afternoon I drove over to ESR
And you didn't come and visit? We are right next door!
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Speaker: Abortion: morality and health, in reply to Iain Thorpe,
Blocking is a bad call Russell.
No it isn't. There was a high risk of him saying something genuinely hurtful and with Russell absent no moderation was possible.
And as Russell said too much of this discussion is from OWGs like me ...
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Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to Pharmachick,
I don’t believe in communism
Good for you. It pretty much failed as a political ideology.
Do you however, believe that there is no value in helping those who are struggling?
What I'm describing is that the idea of winning and losing in society is inherently wrong. Things that harm a part of society harm the whole society. If someone is losing we should be helping them not chiding them for not trying hard enough.
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Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to Pharmachick,
Your reply to #5 is just insulting. I am not going to give you my life history (mostly because its one of your business), but I could equally cry “bad small NZ town, broken home, abusive father” etc. That attitude is complete BS in the face of a determined approach to life.
So you are arguing that just having a "bad start" shouldn't stop you succeeding? Which is fine.
I'm not trying to be insulting. Instead I'm trying to say that rather than put the onus on the disadvantaged to just "try harder" so that they succeed one by one (or just fail) we actually could treat this as real life and care about our fellow humans enough to help them.
I don't win when you lose, even if your loss has nothing to do with me.
I lose when we lose, because our society is diminished by your loss.
The only way I win is when we win. That sounds horribly like some 5 am paid promotion but it is a different way of viewing our society. One that sadly got kicked to the curb 30 years ago.
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Speaker: Abortion: morality and health, in reply to Moz,
My fingernail clippings are possibly human, depending how silly people want to get with the definitions. I’d rather stick with “sometime between conception and adulthood”,
At some point in the future it will be possible to develop a human being from stem cell tissue and likely cause differentiated tissue to transform into stem cell tissue. In short, making a human from say a small biopsy will be possible. Such a human will be a person with all the rights and responsibilities of any other person. Does that make all the biopsy samples in all the hospitals human?
And as for adulthood - well the brain doesn't appear to stop developing ever and certainly is changing dramatically into the mid 20s - you wanna come up with a humanity test? Cause I don't.
Even the mark of birth is difficult now. Many children are born prematurely, many born via caesarian section. Every year medicine changes the time required inside a human for a fetus to survive.
None of these measures stand up to science now and even less to science in the future.
But it is absolutely true that the mother IS a person NOW. It is simply her choice, that is the only viable moral path.
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Speaker: Abortion: morality and health, in reply to kiwi_guy,
Really if you are going to be a troll can you try and be original.
And in all honesty, this subject is just too important to have trolls dribble all over it.
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Speaker: Abortion: morality and health, in reply to George Darroch,
At a certain point, the product of fertilised egg can be considered a human – somewhere between conception and birth. The law (rightly) does not try to define this. But in this absence the law essentially treats all medically procedures to induce the abortion of that fetus as criminal, and exempts them under certain conditions.
So at some point in a pregnancy the law decides the potential human (fetus) has more rights than the existing human. Sigh.
The woman has the right to decide the fate of her body. The law should reflect that.
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Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to Pharmachick,
There are winners and losers in life.
Only if you perceive life as some kind of grammar school sporting event.
It isn't. Those "losers" are actually human beings. They have children, who themselves have the intellectual and physical potential to create and love and contribute to the "wealth" of everyone. But they can't because everything about their situation means that those people and their children can never reach their potential.
The nonsense we have been fed by Labour and National over the last three decades is that we need to pick winners and support them and they will lift our country to great heights. And well those losers - they can buck up and learn to be more like the winners.
We are all all part of the same society. My life is diminished by the fact people die in cold damp houses. My life is diminished by kids leaving school at 15 without having the joy of actually learning. We all lose together.
This isn't a damn game. It's not about winning and losing. Its about figuring out how everyone can live a really good life together.
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Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Once again, this Puddlegum blog article begs the question: did Labour really lose votes to National, given the Nats’ actual number of votes barely changed, or did Labour lose votes to the “missing million”?
Data doesn't lie, only the people interpreting data lie.
The data indicate that for some reason Labour supporters have been choosing not to vote. They aren't voting Green, they certainly aren't voting ACT, and they aren't voting National.
That interpretation is consistent with the data (which is not the same as being true).
It gets even more interesting if you look at electorates like mine (Mt Roskill) where Goff creamed in but Labour took a bath.
Again that data is consistent with Labour voters choosing not to vote for the party while at the same time choosing to vote for Goff!
I find it hard to believe everyone at Labour HQ is a moron, so they must be looking at the data and asking serious questions - but everything about the data says asking "why did you switch from Labour to National?" is a really stupid question because sod all folks did that.
If people are happy with their MPs (Mt Roskill) but unhappy with the party - it really suggests that something about the way MPs interact together with the each other and the party as a whole is causing a LOT of voters to say "fuck that for a lark" and walk out of the voting booth having left the party vote unchecked, or much simpler gone to brunch instead.
Contrast that with National where all those farmers and countryfolks marched out determinedly to vote.
Labour as a party failed to provide their voters with a reason to bother.
My personal feeling, looking at the data, most folks didn't actually believe Labour would do anything if they were in power. Even if you hated what National had done, nothing about Labour convinced people they would actually change anything - so why bother voting.
Even if you wanted the Moa brought back, the fact the rest of the Labour MPs immediately turned on him meant it wouldn't happen. Even if you wanted a CGT the way the rest of the Labour MPs mumbled into the mic about the policy made you feel like they wouldn't really make it happen.
Nothing about the Labour Party and its MPs last election made you feel like they had any intention of committing themselves to getting anything done even if you agreed with what they said they wanted to do.
So why bother voting.
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Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to George Darroch,
‘inability to form a government’
Given their perceived inability to talk to each other that seems a fairly obvious corollary.