Posts by Neil Morrison
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As someone else said earlier: the 81 Springbok Tour was when the middle class learnt the cops were actually bastards ...
That was the intention of many of the protest organisers which didn't really have much to do with fighting apartheid I suppose. The thinking was - provoke a fight with the police and then ordinary NZers will rise up and overthrow the oppressors. Why do you think that you weren't informed that the protest you were in was going to deliberately set out to confront the police? Possibly because ordinary NZers might have objected to being used so cynically as cannon fodder.
Some of the police have a lot to answer for over the tour but the protest movement was wrong to move from civil disobedience to taking on the police.
I've noticed with David Farrar that whenever he has a disagreement with another blogger he most often sticks to the issues rather then going in for gerneralised bitching. The comment threads go crazy at times.
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I enjoy a good laugh at silly research too but something about this doesn't ring true. It really is too obvious. I'd like to read the actual research article. The author, Dr. Emily Oken, appears to be interested in weight gain and pregnancy in general and here's a report on Pregnancy weight gain affects toddlers' health which I imagine is pretty useful research.
So maybe the research on post-partum weight loss makes a bit more sense in the full context of Oken's research.
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After Robyn's post, just treat the following as somehow being, well, ironic.
Virginia Woolf is one of those superstars of literature that leaves me cold.
She's not someone I'd read again but To the Lighthouse has nostalgia value.
Similarly with Simone de Beauvoir although I achieved a long standing personal goal of reading Les Mandarins in the original over the Christmas period. (It's a strange book with various narrator-view-point cleverness which I think there's a point to but I'm not sure). She was my first introduction to politics and although I now disagree with much of here thinking she still lurks.
How do you rate Kubrik's Lolita? I'm a great admirer of Kubrik and a few close friends think it’s the greatest movie of all time. I've been meaning to read Brian Boyd's biography of Nabokov - he’s a big fan of applying evolutionary psychology to the arts and was curious to know if he used it with Nabokov.
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Who would have thought. But it does figure, don't ya think?
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[Mr Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]
It was very mischievous of Woolf to drop such a bombshell in parentheses.
Having left Henderson for 1st year uni at Victoria, my first flatting experience was in Raroa Rd with a music major, a psychology major, and a Christian. To a 17 year old these women of 20 seemed the height of intellectual sophistication and physical attraction. While I tempted them one after the other unsuccessfully with the dulcet tones of Hendrix they plied me rather more successfully with a range of literature which included Virginia Woolf.
The Time Passes passage of To the Lighthouse still haunts me.
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I think the "research report" is a load of crap.
I think your critique is unconvincing.
Maxim have regularly produced complete crap but this actually is an interesting piece of research. It's worth dealing with the issues it raises rather than complain that conservatives are stealing liberal's words.
I think liberalism is robust enough to survive not completely owning particular figures of speech but it is in danger when liberals don't actually engage with what their opponents are saying.
Not that Maxim haven't set themselves up for no being taken seriously.
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Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
Literally, the world made a lot more sense after that.
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I read Maxim's research report on social justice linked to by Grant Robertson and found it, well, unremarkable.
I've never found any "research" from Maxim to be particularly credible but this is worth reading. The conclusion that there's always a trade-off between Equality and Liberty is not exactly news and I wouldn't have thought it would be very controversial.
Internet surveys have obvious methodological problems but this is an interesting picture of what many NZers think on the subject of Social Justice. I really can't see how we can deny that there is actually a wide range of views on what social justive is and how we can achieve it.
I came away thinking more of Kieslowski's Three Coulers: White rather than wanting to look under my bed for neo-con boogey monsters.
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anybody willing to suggest that coining it the 'Anti-Smacking' bill has had no effect on the discussion and people's understanding of the issues?
It helped to clarify things. But seriously, that's my understanding of what the bill intends. Otherwise why would there be the issue of police discretion over prosecuting parents who smack their child?
Training the religious fundamentalists of the future.
I'm not arguing that Maxim is not a threat to liberal values just that this rebranding is hardly a threat. To the contrary I would see it as a bit of a victory for liberals - they are forced to adopt the liberal discourse or at least the trappings.
Lurking at the back of this "Language matters" issue is a now discredited trend in the philosophy of language epitomized by Foucault's view that language is a prison. For some reason this view was highly attractive to many on the Left. But it really is quite dated. Its continuing popularity might be because liberals like to scare themselves.
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I made the mistake of reading Maxim's opening blurb on Social Justice -
It is about people and how they live together. Government cannot bestow identity, inspire hope or secure belonging; it cannot shape character or show love. These things, which are vital for human flourishing, are forged and sustained through living and dynamic relationships with family, charities, sports clubs, iwi and churches. Social justice is at the heart of a free, just and compassionate society and it makes demands of each one of us: to care, to give and to be involved in the communities in which we live.
Since then I've spanked at least two children and rang up some gay friends to tell them their lifestyle is an abomination and they should not get married. After saying a few prayers for their souls I'm off to buy a Bible, perferably one without that liberal New Testament bit, and then I'm going to ring up all the women I know who've had abortions and inform them they're baby killers.
You can too. Just Do It.