Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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Wow. And seeing that several (heavily urban, overwhelmingly D) counties in IN and NC haven't fully reported yet, it's possible that they too will go Blue. It's going to take a while for all this to sink in. With Shiraz and a pizza.
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Has anyone come across any empirical evidence that political junk mail actually works? I know people who've been swayed by good old school 'kiss every hand, shake every baby' personal contact with a candidate, but junk mail? Not so much -- it either goes in the recycle bin unread, or just annoys people.
Hey, there's always the low pleasure afforded by drunkenly annotating it and sending it back to the party concerned. This can be especially rewarding with ACT pamphlets, because there are usually lots of grammatical and spelling errors to point out.
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Now would be a good time to introduce laws prohibiting cross-media ownership.
To me, the failure to do this has been one of the more glaring shoot-self-in-foot aspects of Labour's time in Government. If they were at all serious, they would have bought out the Herald and the Listener long ago and set them up under Guardian-style non-profit trust arrangements. And why didn't they buy back the Radio Network? Labour's shown an extraordinary naivete about the extent to which a monopolistic, privately owned news-media can dictate the terms of public discourse.
What would Harry Holland or Peter Fraser made of Labour's touching faith in the power of markets to deliver equable political coverage?
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And National can't even look to the bench for inspiration. It's full of wizened veterans of the 1991 World Cup, rather than fresh new faces from the Provinces ...
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The concept of copyright hasn't actually evolved that much. Only the duration has really changed in 300 years.
This is actually highly debatable. There's a young copyright historian at the University of Birmingham, Ronan Deazley, who's been arguing that the 'strong', author-centred version of copyright we believe has been around since 1710 (or 1774) is actually mostly a creation of the last 100-150 years. The original purpose of the 1710 Act was to 'encourage learning' (it's in the title of the legislation). Deazley argues in 'The Myth of Copyright at Common Law', Cambridge Law Journal 62, no. 1 (2003) that the idea that authors have had sovereign rights over their works since the late eighteenth century is basically an historiographic myth:
In [1774], the House of Lords understood the copyright regime, first and foremost, as addressing the broader interests of society .... copyright was fundamentally concerned with the reading public, with the encouragement and spread of education, and with the continued production of useful books. In deciding the case as they did, these eighteenth-century parliamentarians did not seek to advance the rights of the individual author. Rather ... they acted in furtherance of much broader social goals and principles. (132-33).
He's also written a book outlining the distortions he believes have marred the history of copyright and their implications for IP law in the present.
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And looking at the current American campaign, you could be forgiven for coming to the perfectly well-informed conclusion that "experience" is an assertion that needs to be tested rigorously. If Cullen really wants to run the experience card, then he's going to have to accept the risk that comes with that hand.
Except it's not Cullen and Clark that Key's having a go at here, is it? It's the politically neutral public service. Who then have to walk past all those giant Stephen Franks billboards scattered around Wellington Central inviting them to vote for the party who will 'review' their positions in the interests of 'efficiency'.
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Caleb: Do you really think Kiwisaver and the Cullen Fund have no exposure now? Come on, reality-based critiques please.
Of course not, but I still think that actively cutting government revenue in the current climate is a really stupid idea. I also think there are considerable cross-overs between the Republicans' 'folksy' anti-intellectualism and the Nats' cynical hits on 'bureaucrats' and the public service generally. It plays to a particular kind of uninformed suspicion of expertise and experience, and we've got the American example to tell us how that plays out in the long run.
I'm also more than a little tired of the Nats' 'OMG business is so tied up by big bad regulations!' routine. New Zealand has the second most business-friendly environment in the world. It seems to me that if businesses aren't succeeding to the extent that they gosh darn believe they are entitled to, it isn't the evil government's fault.
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I'm utterly fascinated by the American presidential elections this time around, but I can't help wondering if it's because I'm trying to ignore what's happening locally.
I see John Key has just announced how National's going to be funding its tax cuts. Briefly, it's going to be trying to 'stimulate growth' through further deregulation. Cos, you know, that's worked so well in the past, and of course deregulation policies have had nothing at all to do with the impending worldwide economic trip-to-hell-in-handbasket.
Secondly, it's going to be reducing minimum contributions to Kiwisaver. Because New Zealanders have such excellent personal savings records, and this exposes us at no risk at all to the global credit crunch.
Thirdly, it's going to be cutting the R & D tax credit. Because what economy in its right mind, particularly one wanting to 'stimulate growth', would want to be encouraging research and development?
God. Following this election campaign is like hitting one's head against a concrete wall repeatedly. Back to marvelling at Sarah Palin's epically rectalinear glasses.
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As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments ... a new pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.
I'm painting with a broad brush here, but sometimes I feel like American government completely missed out on the nineteenth century. Using a position of authority to fill places with your friends and family members is so ... so pre-modern. It's like there's no real concept of an impartial, credentialed, professional bureaucracy over there. You know, like that new-fangled British civil service thingy.
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Craig, the Herald's been a right-wing -- at times radical right -- newspaper for over 130 years. It used to be edited by this guy, the closest New Zealand's ever come to an Oswald Moseley figure. During the '30s, it took a consistently hostile editorial line the First Labour Government. It castigated Michael Joseph Savage for criticizing Chamberlain's position on Czechoslovakia, for instance.
Denying that newspapers in New Zealand are biased, one way or the other, by the political beliefs and financial interests of their editors and owners is just silly. Disseminating those beliefs and furthering those interests is what newspapers do. It's one of the primary establishing functions of newspapers -- look at the history of the Dominion, for instance. Politicians realize this. Back in the day, it was not unheard of for a prospective candidate to buy the electorate's local newspaper for campaign purposes.
What's changed in New Zealand recently is that practically all of the traditionally Left newspapers that used to counter the influence of the conservative rags have disappeared. And that, I suspect, has played a not insignificant role in fostering the current 'mood' in the country, especially among older voters.