Saturday
November 19, 2005 |
 Decentralisation, and Those Who Oppose It
by Peter Cresswell
What's wrong with choice, and letting people exercise it? What's wrong with a cornucopia of choices, an abundance of options, a profusion of possible housing choices? Why can't you leave people alone to choose for themselves their own manner of living? When you strip away the veneer of buzzwords surrounding the planners' latest fads, you're left with the express intent that these people don't like the choices you make about how to live, and they will make you pay any price to avoid letting you do so. (Read more...)
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Russia: Hail the Good Revolution
by Peter Cresswell
The October Revolution of 1917, commemorated today, leaves nothing to celebrate. But the October Revolution wasn't the only Russian Revolution that year, and it wasn't even a real revolution .... (Read more...)
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Unintelligent Design - Part 2
by Peter Cresswell
There is one single reason for the birth of the Intelligent Design chimera, and that is to smuggle Creationism back into American schools and so allow the continued indoctrination of impressionable young minds with supernatural nonsense. By giving equal measure to science on the one hand, and to faith on the other, its proponents hopes to give belief in faith and the supernatural some legs for a few more years. It's not intelligent, in fact it's completely transparent, and it amazes me that in the Twenty-First Century such stupidity still gets house room. (Read more...)
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Unintelligent Design - Part 1
by Peter Cresswell
Why do these fundamentalists bother? They do so because fundamentally they haven't gotten past the primitive explanations of primitive man. The explanation provided by primitive man to 'explain' things is still with us -- God did it! -- even as the reasons for honestly saying "I don't know" have diminished exponentially. (Read more...)
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Wednesday
September 21, 2005 |
 Who Needs Great Art?
by Peter Cresswell
Painting, movies, literature, sculpture, music, architecture ... all have the ability to make us cry, to make us laugh, and -- just occasionally -- to make us feel ten-feet tall. Why is great art so powerful? -- why does it have this profound ability to affect us? (Read more...)
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Tuesday
September 13, 2005 |
 Protecting Our Property Protects Our Lives
by Peter Cresswell
New Zealanders who once themselves understood the crucial importance of property rights now seem bemused by their absence, until perhaps they themselves find they can’t build on their own property, can’t cut down their own trees, can’t use their property in ways they always have, or find that control of their property has been passed to someone else ... and that someone carries a clipboard and must be called ‘Sir’ ... and we must pay that person for the privilege of asking them permission to do what we want to on our own land. It’s not right. (Read more...)
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Legal Snouts
by Peter Cresswell
A polite letter to the New Zealand Law Society explaining why lawyers are held in such high esteem. (Read more...)
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Speaking for the Speechless
by Peter Cresswell
Too many people spend too much of their time speaking either on someone else's behalf, or as a spokesman for people or causes that can't speak for themselves—and they spend too much of our time telling us what we should be doing on behalf of those for whom they claim to speak. And in the name of those "without a voice," they often seek to silence those who do have a voice. How do they all get away with it, and why do we let them? (Read more...)
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 The "Problem" of Initial Acquisition
by Peter Cresswell
Philosopher and academic Gerald Cohen has a problem with how values come into the world, with how they came to exist. He calls this "the problem of initial acquisition." I call it trivial idiocy, but he and his supporters set great store by it.
(Read more...)
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We Are All Londoners Today
by Peter Cresswell
"We are all Londoners today." Doesn't that describe the way all people with a soul feel this morning? The vibrant, tolerant city of London is today's front line in the battle for those Western values that makes cities across the West the great places they are. The smiling, celebrating faces that were in evidence in London yesterday celebrating their Olympic victory will be back, and when they are it will be a victory for all of us. (Read more...)
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Live 8 Losers
by Peter Cresswell
Being a sanctimonious cretin never harmed anyone's musical or political career, as the careers of the Grateful Dead, Bono and Kofi Annan all attest, but it's never done a damn thing to feed the world. The Live 8 lose-a-thon promises to be yet another tune-free festival full of far-out sanctimony and flatulent pieties and — like its 'Live Aid' little brother — a dead loss as far as its stated aim of helping starving Africans. (Read more...)
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 The Miracle of Breakfast
by Peter Cresswell
The 'miracle of breakfast' is that it is no miracle at all. It is the fruit of freedom. (Read more...)
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The Sharp Test for Films
by Peter Cresswell
I like adult films. There, I’ve said it. And as my video store doesn't know what I mean by that, I’ve sorted out my own ten working rules for finding good adult movies. As a public service, to help you avoid wasting valuable minutes of your life watching crap, I offer them here for your guidance. Thank me later. (Read more...)
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Loving Wealth
by Peter Cresswell
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, don't they? And those rich bastards are busy getting rich off the backs of the poor, aren't they? Well no, they don't and no, they're not. (Read more...)
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Blair's Post-Election Blues
by Peter Cresswell
Blair's principled stand on the liberation of Iraq has made it possible to actually enjoy his election victory, for where his political opponents and spineless other European 'statesmen' vacillated and wavered (Bonjour Monsieur Chirac, Herr Schroeder and the miserable Michael Howard) Tony Blair has been absolutely solid on the necessity for the Iraq invasion. And he was right to be so. (Read more...)
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Reading List: So You Want to Study Architecture?
by Peter Cresswell
So you want to study architecture? You want books and readings I might recommend for someone beginning architectural education? Here’s a ‘top twenty’ list to get you started. (Read more...)
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Kant Really Wasn’t (Including a realistic reading list on the Catastrophic Spider)
by Peter Cresswell
Kant's view is that we can have no more (or less) belief in reality than we can have belief in the existence of God. According to him, both notions have equal validity. That's Kant's idea of realism. If he's a realist, then Kevin Costner is an actor. And if he's a fan of identity, then it's only because he explicitly pits the identity of the senses against reality. What could be more fantastic? (Read more...)
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Something Better than Rage, Pain, Anger & Hurt
by Peter Cresswell
There’s nothing inherently more rational about a violin than a guitar – as Eric Clapton says, ‘It’s in the Way That You Use It!' It just so happens that over the last three centuries or three most violins have been asked to do more than have most guitars. That’s just the way it is. If art is our shortcut to philosophy then music is our shortcut to our own soul. Good music enables us to hold up a mirror to ourselves and to see what it is our own soul looks like - and it isn’t always pretty, and we’d sometimes rather not know ... (Read more...)
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Wednesday
September 29, 2004 |
Kant Didn’t
by Peter Cresswell
Peter Cresswell’s reply to Fred Seddon’s disgraceful defence of Kant as a ‘Proto-Objectivist.’ (Read more...)
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Thursday
September 9, 2004 |
Kant Couldn’t
by Peter Cresswell
The all-wise and ever-virtuous Fred Seddon appears every so often in these parts to tell us how wonderful is our sweet Uncle Kant, and how we’ve all got the poor fellow all wrong, and how – like Tony Soprano - he’s not really evil scum at all but just a regular guy who’s been misunderstood; the sort of home-loving guy we really should have around to tea and toast of an afternoon. Who's right? (Read more...)
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Saturday
September 4, 2004 |
A(nother) Big Bang
by Peter Cresswell
I spent this last fortnight in some of the world’s great Opera Houses.
I made it to the Met, moseyed around Mantua, cavorted over to Covent Garden, blitzed through Bayreuth and then sashayed across to Stuttgart’s Staatsoper. What a week! Such a wonderful experience -- and all without jet-lag, and not once having my belongings inspected by customs!
How did I do it? I’ll tell you ... (Read more...)
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 'Making the Genius Quicker': A Complete Hiftory of Man According to Hif Divers Delightf (Part Two)
by Peter Cresswell
With the brief exceptions of Classical Greece and Julius Caesar, human beings celebrated the arrival of beer for the next several thousands of years by being permanently plastered. Talk about overdoing a good thing.
Eventually, from out of the east appeared The Great Redeemer ... (Read more...)
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'You Smell of Goat': A Complete Hiftory of Man According to Hif Divers Delightf
by Peter Cresswell
When wildebeest and wild beasts roamed the plains thousands of years ago, early man roamed with them ... and often provided them with a good meal. A successful hunt was all such poor creatures had to celebrate: the high point in mens' bleak existence was (very occasionally) roasting a wild beast over an open fire. Then, for just a few brief moments in their short and brutal lives, when their bellies were full and their bodies warm, their thoughts could (at last!) roam to higher things. With the kill they had bought themselves time to think.
And what was it they thought about? What great realisations did they come to? After much skull-sweat they concluded that , in the immortal words of Tom Waits, 'twere better to be a good liver than to have one. (Read more...)
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Troy: the Tragic Blockbuster
by Peter Cresswell
What of 'Troy'? Blockbuster or Tragedy? Sword-and-sandals gorefest or noble filmatic transformation of Homeric myth and legend? Those who have grown up watching on-screen car chases, explosions and shoot-’em-up film finales in which goodies triumph over baddies are probably going to understand little of what good tragedy might consist – which is why this review is here to help you out. (Read more...)
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Italian Idol
by Peter Cresswell
A man sits on the battlements of a prison, deep in thought. In the distance the sound of shepherd boys can be heard, their clear voices filling the starlit sky. Dawn is imminent. In less than an hour the man will be shot. What thoughts go through a man’s mind at such a time? And who best to sing them? (Read more...)
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