Posts by Russell Brown
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Fluffy?!?! This means Jack might just be able to play against South Africa this weekend! This is HUGE news!
Er, sorry to disappoint you, but he's still having the family time.
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I've read this sort of thing on numerous occasions - one of the lasting legacies of the Iraq war will be the death of Liberal Interventionism, no more stopping Milosevic etc etc.
Really?
Yeah, really.
Try thinking of it this way and see if it makes a difference: assuming the occupation of Iraq was not intrinsically all-advised, if it had been conducted in an orderly, competent and legal fashion, would that have strengthened the case for future interventions?
Yes.
So why insist that the failure, arrogance and incompetance, and the attendant loss of moral authority and likely international co-operation, wouldn't have the opposite effect?
Even in purely practical terms, where will the US find the resources to lead any new internevtion when it's deeply over-committed in Iraq?
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A pity you couldn't wangle a mention of Millie Holmes into your paragraph about drugs in Vietnam, Russell!! I note 4 responses, 358 views for this blog; compared with 59 responses, 1314 views for David Slack's piece on Millie's arrest. Kinda puts it in perspective, eh? PA readers say they want 'Hard News' but they are still drawn to 'Hot Gossip'.
Always been the same. PA had a big traffic bump before the last general elections in NZ, but it wasn't actually the campaign that triggered the ramp-up, but the celebrity drug scandal.
Which is why I led with commentary on said scandal for three days running ...
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Singapore feels to me like a festering crisis waiting to explode. You can't throw that much education into a population without them sooner or later saying no.
I had a good yarn today with Greg Wood, who is quite positive about the new official emphasis on creativity, which has hitherto not featured highly in Singapore's strategies . Of course, if you're going to let people do art, that's going to get messy too ...
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"This particular commentator has shown his colours, he has shown his tactics and he will be judged by these tactics as well."
That's completely unwarranted, especially given the bullshit that Coddington threw around in the course of the Press Council process. Including, of course, her baseless claim that I was the secret hand behind it all so I could work out some decade-old grudge against her. Then there was her lashing out in her HoS column at "insane bloggers" and "blog nutters" - clearly targeted at Keith.
What I admired about Keith and Tze Ming's approach to the complaint was their determination to stick to the facts. It seems to Press Council thought the same way.
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Thompson didn't sound like 'a member of the concerned coddington clan'. He mentioned Keith's response in the context of saying that both sides made it personal; therefore such tit-for-tat scrutiny should be expected. Besides, it was the interviewer who brought the matter up.
That's a relief.
Thompson seemed to make a genuine effort to understand the criticism of his newspaper, but also defended the right of the press to publish what they want.
It was the shrieky tone of The Press's stories and the way it pitched its demand for racial statistics as some sort of crusade for press freedom that I found odd. There were other ways to write that story.
The press should continue to be free to target ethnic or special interest groups deserving of criticism, in the same way that they are able to target, say, boyracers, as long as they have facts at hand.
The problem is that when you "target" per se a particular ethnic group (and more particularly a catch-all category like "Asians") you're making generalisations, which is obviously perilous. Such generalisations are not usually issued with respect to, say, white folks. (Well, they are sometimes, including on this site, and are frequently met with indignation.)
Generalisations might be alright if they have some substance. I'd want to check my facts before, say, publicly venturing as fact the impression that too many Pacific Island families still hit their kids too much.
You also want to make sure you have the right story. Damian Christie's Close Up story, which turned the camera around and looked at Chinese New Zealanders as victims of crime and prejudice, and had them tell their stories, was much more compelling that the general sense of "menace" that the N&S story was pitching.
Perhaps some people would like to apply a different set of standards to criticising ethnic-based groups to what they applied recently when criticising Bish Tamaki or the Exclusive Brethren?
Not the same thing at all. Tamaki is an individual public figure; he can easily enough be criticised for what he says or does. And the EB is a clearly demarcated relgious organisation, which is also criticised for the actions of its leadership. There's no corresponding Head Asian directing things.
I think Keith made the point when he first wrote about the Coddington story that there was probably a genuine story in there: she just didn't write it.
If you ever see iBall, Lincoln Tan's gleefully tabloidy English-language Chinese newspaper, it's worth reading. They get some real stories, and really piss people off sometimes. I think they're actually quite brave.
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It was interesting to here a member of the concerned coddington clan, Paul Thompson from the Christchurch Press targeting yourself for overt scrutiny if not a black listing in 17June07 Media Report.
Can you tell us a bit more about what he actually said? What's Media Report? And was he perhaps pissed off in the first place by Keith's excellent article for the AEN Journal?:
http://www.aen.org.nz/journal/2/1/ng.html
If he even hinted at anything like a blacklist, he would be a disgrace to the profession, but I guess I should wait to find out exactly what he did say.
Pauls wee piece on Lincoln Uni & Asians rested on a Pakeha sitting an exam for his Asian girlfriend. To my eyes more of an affair of the heart than anything else.
Really? Wow. That paper's hysterical demand for the racial profiles of exam cheats was fairly extraordinary.
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I love that line about the future...I may borrow it if that's ok. This is an incredible country, no?
I have the same feeling from my very brief visit to VN. You read all this stuff about it being the Asian Century and everything, but you don't really grasp what it means until you get close to it. Oddly enough, I don't get that feeling from Singapore, which is just ... Singapore.
In Saigon I had 74 channels on my TV. In Singapore it's illegal to own a satellite dish.
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I wonder Russell what's your thoughts on the "have to respect the people who got me here" vs "freedom of reporting" in relation to this. I know sometimes that organisations pay for you to travel to conferences and report on them, and whatnot, which I don't have a philosophical problem with.
But the first sentence of that paragraph seems to indicate that you're falling on the "have to respect" side in this instance, and my first reaction was "Well that's not exactly hard news." and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Hope you're happier with the post I just made. I didn't say "have to respect the people who got men here", and that wasn't my point. I have no instruction whatsoever from from the Asia: NZ Foundation and I wouldn't contemplate taking on a grant that had such strings attached.
My point was that I wasn't going to list the government's failings in that particular blog post where I had a bunch of names and faces of people who had nothing to do with my thoughts on the matter, and could conceivably have been embarrassed or worse as a result. I don't really know what the chances of that would be, but it just seemed a prudent way of handling it.
As you'll see, I had mixed and conflicting impressions of the place, but I really did like it.
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If the workers in these factories were paid Western levels the "turmoil" that would lead to would be 1) less vulnerable Western workers losing their jobs, and 2) an increased proportion of profits staying in-country rather than being repatriated to the West.
Of course, that would have factory workers earning the same as skilled professionals, so the professionals would have to get a commensurate pay rise. What period would you implement that over to avoid runaway inflation? (Something Vietnamese are grateful to have left behind - one million dong = <$NZ100.)
As it is, people begin to prosper anyway. South Korea managed it, and even become a democracy in the process.
I can see three problems here:
- Lack of political freedom - not a minor matter. It's still a one-party state. But it seems to me that the government is authoritarian, not a plutocracy. The investiment capital coming in means roads and schools and jobs. You'd rather live here than in certain former Society republics, for sure.
- Queenstown Syndrome: not here yet, but certainly in some Indian cities, where property prices are going through the roof.
- Environmental impact. They're very efficient at clearing farmland and planning and building factories, but you don't hear a lot of green talk. Although there was a news item this morning about a successful project to develop an organic fertiliser at one of the local universities.
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