Posts by Daniel Barnes
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Nice touch including Martin Rev there on Letterman. Girl's got class.
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Well the Bill seems to have thrown the Libz' Lindsay Perigo into tizz. He's calling for the immediate violent overthrow of the Labour government:
"...the time for mere marches is past...It is the right and duty of New Zealand citizens to throw off this government, which has long evinced a desire—nay, a compulsion—to subjugate us to absolute despotism. We should not wait for the 2008 election...New Zealanders must now ask themselves if they are a free people—and if so, are they prepared to act accordingly? Which is to say, are they prepared forcibly to evict all tyranny-mongers from their positions of power?"
http://www.solopassion.com/node/3723#comment-43157
Publicity stunt? Cry for attention? Fortunately I think the powers that be realise there is not much chance of anyone at all following La Perigo into armed conflict...;-)
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Just catching up on yesterday's Herald this morning, only to find these gems from the purveyors of 12:12:
Christine Rankin:"We're hoping it does (have an impact). If it doesn't, then New Zealand is lost."
Check it: if my PR stunt fails, it means _New Zealand is lost.
Thank you, Mrs Jellaby, for my morning comedy.
Then we have Bob McCoskrie on his "vigil" outside the Starship:
"If (the vigil) changes people's thoughts from "Who's going to solve the problem?" to "How am I going to solve the problem?" then that could be the tipping point."
Ah, the "tipping point." A piece of jargon broken off of complexity theory that, through the miracle of marketing speak, invests the trivial and ineffectual act with the mysterious potential for unleashing mighty social change. Or...not!
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Christine Rankin: against child abuse, apparently.
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Thanks Stephen, I was already looking over St John and Rankin's most recent update here:
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Emma:
>As for the effect of sporting or gaming violence, I suspect it's much weaker than the observed effect of real-life violence.Incidentally, I agree with Emma on this point. I recall the poet Kevin Ireland talked about the abusive generation of post WW2 veterans ritually beating their families as he did his paper round as a kid, and Karl Popper made a similar observation about post WW1 vets he encountered. Difference here is obviously we don't have such wars to attribute such large scale psychological effects too, so maybe this is where the mass media effects come in. Animals are imitative. Ever see that program where Robert Winston demonstrates the influence of television on a guppie? Quite an eye opener.
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I wrote:
"..specific policy discussion in general"Heh. Sorry about that...;-)
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Stephen:
>No, you go first. You're the one who brought this up as a potential cause of child abuse, I think the onus is on you to demonstrate that.Oh, well I thought I'd already confessed several times over my relative ignorance of all but the bare bones of the policy, and was lamenting from a completely non-expert perspective what seemed to me to be a lack of specific policy discussion in general. But apparently such a thing is old hat and tired anyway, so I apologise for not being sufficiently up to speed.
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Tim:
>I guess the question is, do we care enough about the kids to 'incentivise' the breaking up of all non-biological families?Whew! Radical...;-)
Seriously tho, I suppose like the seatbelt thing, if you really wanted to stop kids dyiing in car accidents you'd ban all cars and close all roads. Obviously that's not going to happen. However, you can make smaller calls that can make things better or worse.
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Emma:
>Hi Daniel, have you met my point? I think not. If abuse was caused by step-parenting, then every step-parent would be abusive, and no natural parent would.Hi Emma
The theory only argues that it becomes far more probable, not certain. The basic causal deductive argument is one about the parental investment necessary to raise children. For example, biological parents kill their children too in certain circumstances. However, as their genetic investment in the child is greater, this makes them less likely to do this. In contrast, the step parent has a low investment, thus is more likely all things being equal. Hence one might predict high levels of child homocide where high levels of step parenting are present. The empirical evidence thus far seems to bear this out strongly, so it seems to quite a sound theory, if rather morally disappointing.
>You may be trying to look at policy mechanisms, but I find it really interesting that you picked on the DPB and not WFF, which offers a much higher financial incentive for having extra children.
Well maybe that's the issue then. I have no specific beef with the DPB - it just seems to be the policy the op-eds generally pick up on. Would you care to elaborate? A comparison of the incentives of the two policies actually would be really helpful.