Posts by Keir Leslie
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
To expand: philosophy is the foundational academic subject. Economics wasn't even a discipline you could learn at a university until the 19th century. The common law wasn't taught at universities until the 18th century.
Philosophy was never supposed to supplement an education. Rather, philosophy was (and remains) the point of an education. That's why there's a painting of the School of Athens in the Vatican.
Your history is merely wrong.
-
To me the point of a university is to train people in areas that require higher learning to master them, ie: people studying economics generally need to study history, lawyers or mathematicians may need to study philosophy etc, and there’s been a huge amount of mission creep in which the subjects that were supposed to supplement an education become the purpose of (some peoples) education.
This is precisely backwards. (And barbaric, of course.)
-
Blaming the voters may make you feel better. But its the last refuge of the politically incompetent, and comes across as terminally arrogant. Yes, we get the government we deserve. But ultimately, if a party can’t convince people to vote for it, whose fault is that?
You know, as a matter of moral philosophy, if Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, and Abraham Lincoln set up the Mandelaist Party of Saints Secular and Otherwise, and no one voted for them because they didn't have enough TV appearances, I reckon that the voters are at fault. I think that if you vote you have a duty to your fellow citizens to know what you're doing, and learn about policy and so-on. (Contrariwise, if you voted Fascist, no amount of talk about lacklustre Social Democrats or hard-left Communists lets you off.)
That doesn't mean that the Labour Party oughtn't do all it can to let people know what we stand for, and importantly it's our duty to our fellow citizens to do so.
(And in specific point of fact we had dissolved the German people and selected another. It was called the Second World War.)
-
They don’t, but given a set of aims, they’re much better than me at achieving them. It’s easy to criticize them, but try designing a large scale transport network and see if you do a better job.
Given a set of aims is of course the problematic.
(PS. if i weren't an old-fashioned command and control socialist, I'd mutter something about hayek and `designing' being the wrong approach anyway.)
-
I may still disagree, but that comes down to placing different priority on the many, many competing factors, usually placing my own needs higher than the general good (which, of course, they can’t do)
They don't have much better access to the general good than you do though.
-
Because amateurs do a much better job.
To be honest traffic engineering is one of those disciplines that really hasn't covered itself with glory vs. amateurs when it comes to town planning.
-
I like tall buildings, and a city no higher than 6 stories sounds painfully boring to me.
-
And does this country really need any more house builders? If we're going to invest in mass training, make it in this century's high-value export industries.
Why not just adequately fund tertiary education (i.e. ensure it is both free and universally available) and then let it sort itself out?
-
However I suspect the tussle over numbers is more a reflection of the broader power struggle between central (Brownlee et al) and local (Parker) government over who calls the shots – and who gets to dole out the pork.
Parker was truly tragic on the news the other night saying that (paraphrased) `you can't sideline local government on this issue'. Did he learn nothing from ECan? I honestly can't believe him sometimes.
-
He suggested that because of the number of central-city buildings under threat of demolition, Christchurch might develop as a city with large satellite business districts.
I think this is a very bad idea. I also don't really like the idea of Key and Brownlee (or even Parker!) dictating what happens in Christchurch. It's fair enough that they have visions of what they want to happen, but we need to make sure it's the people of Christchurch that get to decide what their city looks like.