Author Archive
OK, now this is getting silly …
Blogger told to stop advising on immigration A blogger who came to New Zealand from Britain has been warned to stop giving immigration advice on her blog – or face prosecution under the Immigration Advisers Licensing Act. The Immigration Advisers Authority says Helen Winterbottom was breaking the law by posting on avalonsguide.com, and has told […]
Q: Where does conflict come from?
A: Our innate Superiority complex It is strangely easy for us as human beings to see ourselves as separate from others … or in an ‘us’ while ‘the others’ consist of a ‘them’ — and, naturally, we regard ‘them’ as inferior to ‘us’ in every measure that matters. In the same way that herd animals […]
Handling the truth… and a parable
Col. Jessep: You want answers? Kaffee: I think I’m entitled. Col. Jessep: You want answers? Kaffee: I want the truth! Col. Jessep: You can’t HANDLE the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? I have a […]
Pushing the boundaries
Now these guys are just playing with us. It works, though. Good for them, no comment about the product.
Potshots from behind a mask of anonymity are, by definition, cheap
I wholeheartedly agree with the court decision to order Google to identify the blogger who [allegedly] defamed this NY model. My view: People need to be accountable for their public statements. Anonymous log-ins tend — in some — to breed a recklessness and nasty damaging discourtesy. And they shouldn’t get away with it. (I still […]
Am I a luddite? Neh!
… [T]he project of digitising the information held in the world’s printed books is too important to be dealt with purely as a commercial venture between rights holders and a potential supplier of services. …. If we let Google have its settlement we will all be the poorer. Not for a while, perhaps, but one […]
Merlin Mann on the internet
The internet is becoming this thing where it’s just people trying to become successful on the internet by showing other people how to become successful on the internet. It’s this unbelievably fractal ponzi scheme. It’s very Escher. Boy, it’s a terrible terrible ghetto of information out there. It’s like a snake masturbating its own tail. […]
A loss of moral authority
There is added moral authority when someone who hasn’t had to struggle sounds a call to help those less privileged. Beyond mere noblesse-oblige, Teddy Kennedy became a leading voice of ‘liberal’ ideology, with an emphasis on equality and innate justice best expressed in the civil rights movement of the 1960s — but applied far wider […]
Groping for the truth
Why does a lie offend us? Why is it that a lie — especially a lie to our face — vexes us so? Our efforts to identify the veracity of a claim (sometimes a very basic claim), can be frustrated by liars and rogues. So much of our lives can be taken up with efforts to […]
The power of an appeal to decency
A recent reference to a made-up threat of ‘Death Panels’ led me to recall a famous political showdown. Legend tells us this interchange sparked the beginning of the end for Senator Joseph McCarthy. While McCarthy was not without opponents to his paranoid demagoguery, lawyer Joseph Welch went down in history as a giant-slayer. Welch was […]
Falling into error: when we think we know why…
Fundamental attribution error It’s intriguing how often you will stumble across someone’s hallucinations about another person’s motives for action. In earlier posts I’ve discussed the character attacks that a critic (any critic) can commonly expect to endure in response to them giving their gift: ‘Oh you’re just saying that because you’re … [fill in the […]
Remembering Karla
They can be strange lands, the pathways of our memory. Our recent discussions about animosity and forgiveness and letting go of disappointment and anger has provoked recollections of a case which I haven’t thought about for long time. When I was a news reporter twenty years ago I covered the search for a young girl […]
“Do I believe in the forgiveness of sin?”
I heard this question in a BBC Heart & Soul documentary today about a family where the father had sexually abused his young daughter. The wife described how she had come to a place where the question, “Do I believe in the forgiveness of sin?” arose when considering her husband’s actions towards her daughter. Her […]
The Paradox of Animosity
I’ve been thinking, prompted in part by a comment from Chowbok who said: Hatred is the easiest of emotions to invoke. Is it possible to be trenchantly, even violently opposed to what you perceive as wrongdoing without slipping into HATRED of the perpetrator? If we agree (you and I) that bitterness of spirit is a […]
Reflections on grief and mortality
A recent death in my family – the latest in what seems like a bad season for us – has provoked some musings about this haphazard procession of events we call Life. Is there any novel thing one can say in response to the death of a loved one (whether parent, spouse, child or friend)? […]
