Posts by Bart Janssen
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Legal Beagle: Questions, but no answers,…, in reply to Adam H,
I call it the Saddam Hussein defence.
Then you can take delight in either watching them try and digest, or pointing out when they miss salient points. Either way you win.
NO
That way you lose. Because that response is exactly the same childish retaliation as National's questions.
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Legal Beagle: Questions, but no answers,…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I can't fix what happened in past Parliaments, but I can try to make sure it doesn't happen again!
Your post did not read like that was your intent. Instead it read as if you were supporting tit-for-tat reprisal as a behaviour appropriate and acceptable for MPs.
Your suggestion of open diaries is deeply flawed as has been pointed out - essentially it's the meta data problem.
The only real solution is for MPs in all parties to behave like responsible adults who are there to do a serious important job.
When they don't, the media needs to call them out on it and notify the public of the poor behaviour and remind the public next election.
It is NOT the oppositions job to disrupt government and an adult would know that.
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This is not a war.
These are not children.
Reprisal is not a valid form of government.
I get that our governmental system has developed a culture largely based on behaviours acceptable to lawyers and 18th century aristocrats. But such a culture does no good to anyone.
They are there to do a job. They need to stop behaving like five year-olds or lawyers and actually do the job*.
And yes that criticism applies to all of them.
*And yes I know lots of five year-olds with better behaviour.
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Hard News: News Memories 2: The Twitter thread, in reply to Carol Stewart,
I remember being pretty freaked by the threat of nuclear annihilation as a child.
And that BBC documentary that dramatised the consequences didn't make me any calmer.
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Hard News: News Memories 2: The Twitter thread, in reply to Russell Brown,
Memories cluster around a relatively small number of signal events
Ok so more nerdy stuff. While memory research is still ongoing, and it's not my field so this is my lay reading of the research - my understanding of the latest hypotheses is that memories do fade, probably never lost but definitely they fade.
BUT
Any time you access a memory it is "strengthened" but probably also "rewritten".
So when someone mentions an event, your memory of that event is accessed, strengthened and rewritten.
That has two effects: first, events that get talked about a lot become stronger memories. Lot's of folks talk about the moon landing, so if you watched it then your memory of it becomes stronger. Which is kind of cool.
But there is a second effect that is more sinister, because the memory gets rewritten it can change. They've done studies where they deliberately alter a person's memory of a trivial event by having people feed false elements into the recollection.
The result is that if you've shared a memory with others it will be stronger - but might also have elements that never happened to you but were part of the other person's experience/memory.
So yeah lots of us remember watching the moon landing because lots of us remember watching the moon landing, but is that memory really all yours?
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It isn't the oldest memory of mine, but I vividly recall my confusion as I turned on the TV sleepily in the morning to watch the news and thinking for some reason we had left the TV on to some channel that was playing a stupid disaster movie about some skyscraper burning ...
And then more confusion as the stupid remote didn't seem to change the channel ...
And the the dawning realisation that it was real
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Memory is a tricky thing, by now every one of my memories from then is a memory of a memory of a memory ...
The one I can picture and still feels real is the moon landing. We hadn't had the TV long and I "remember" sitting right up close for the event. I think I have the newspaper from then still.
My father was a news junkie, nobody was allowed to talk when the news was on the radio so we watched most news.
I remember the pictures from Veitnam but mixed in are the pictures of the protests in the US and NZ - even though they were at different times.
That's the problem with memories, for me at least, the connections trigger different events.
Hence when I think of the moon landing I also get memories of the space shuttle launches and the Skylab/Mir docking all in one montage.
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So if I understand all that, everyone including police are happy with the way the events have been run.
But somehow they got the wrong designation for what they have been doing, and want to continue to do.
And nobody was able to do the paperwork to get them the right designation because ...?
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You called me "default"!
Also the thing that really boggles my mind is the spreadsheets. Totally fine with kids being made aware of and given an understanding differing sexual practices and love, but really - spreadsheets are a step too far!
On a serious note, I actually love PDAs and for some reason acronym PDAs give me even more pleasure.
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Hard News: Lorde, the council and the…, in reply to Adam H,
- the hand-wringing old farts who seem to think that today's kids are far worse than they were with alcohol
I suspect the problem is they think todays kids will be exactly as bad with alcohol as they were when they were kids.
NZ has a totally broken attitude to alcohol, it does more harm than any other drug. We are caught in this weird state between prohibition and complete freedom that seems to make the whole problem worse.
I have some sympathy for the police because they get to deal with the fallout when it goes pear shaped - but allowing the police to decide what our society should be like is ridiculous and scary as all hell.
No idea how we get to a common sense balance around alcohol but I would have thought the Lorde concert would have made a perfect example of getting it right - but instead it's a great example of how to get it wrong.