Posts by giovanni tiso
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Oh, balls. I do think the method is pertinent, but I've actually said that I find nothing sinister in what English, Lockwood Smith and Nick Smith actually said.
Not the last two, I agree. What English said was extremely interesting, I thought, although again not sinister as such. But pretty juicy, no? It was an open admission that Labor's policies worked and are popular, and that therefore National has been forced to co-opt them. Pretty much an open secret, but to hear it put so candidly was startling. After a term in government, they'll try to get a mandate to do the things they really want to do, and again I find that to be an extraordinary admission.
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I think I'm going to find it pretty hard to muster an interest in the sports part, I have to say.
Press release:
August 6th. Today in Beijing, Chinese authorities shut down the press conference scheduled to release and screen the Tibetan made film, Leaving Fear Behind, at Beijing’s Hotel G. Journalists present were blocked access to the screening room and were forced to leave the premises.
I was involved in translating the previous presser and had grave doubts at the time that the conference would go ahead - easy to be prescient sometimes. The two farmers-turned-filmmakers who made the film and managed to smuggle it out of the country before the March demonstrations were 'last seen' some time ago in two detention centres in Eastern China. Their cousin in Switzerland is the guy behind Filming for Tibet and the website where one could watch this doco, except the You Tube link is not there, and a search directly in You Tube as of two minutes ago draws a blank too. I'm not going to claim foul play by the Google guys since there is a problem on the film's site to begin with, and it's not hosted in China.
So that leaves five short WMV clips for now, less then ten minutes all up. I'll take this in lieu of the opening ceremony.
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I think I have singled out the most damaging admission made by the Nats this week:
In hindsight Dr Smith realised the man could not have been a Young Nat - he was too "hip".
(Obligatory link to the article) (Love the photo of Key's rubbish strewn across the lawn. I'm trying to picture him taking it. "The public must see this!")
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As for making conventional coherent arguments; we are talking about communicating knowledge linearly. I suggest that explaining things in essays has significant limitations, constructing arguments as a series of points lined up one after the other could be seen as inefficient.
I'd agree is not the only way to exhange ideas, nor always the most compelling, but it's pretty darn useful, and I think it has a place in academia. Besides, Russell here - who if memory serves didn't finish his degree - is an absolutely brilliant essayist, the place is literally built on that particular skill of his. Can't be a bad thing to teach and to expect students to learn. But I agree that it shouldn't be an exclusive focus, even in the study of philosophy or English - there are other media out there that could be brought to bear.
In the first year of my dissertation I toyed with the idea of writing the thing as a hypertext consisting of three main chunks in a non linear squence, since the topic lent itself to it. My supervisors were definitely in favour, but we quickly figured out it just couldn't be done, the rules wouldn't allow it.
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Apparently, this is too much to ask!
It's one of the great mysteries of contemporary politics, how they managed to sell to us the idea that releasing policies too early gives an unfair advantage to the opponent. Political journalists seems to think it makes perfect sense, which drives me absolutely batty. It's not the bledisloe cup, for chrissakes, you are supposed to reveal your tactics in advance...
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You sure as hell don't have any right to caricature my views because you don't like some uppity peasant disagreeing with you.
You should so make business cards that read "Craig Ranapia, uppity peasant".
(Although somebody should probably also mention that you're a past master at caricaturing the views of others. I can't remember right now if I'm a neocon wingnut or a pinko commie, must remember to check.)
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And can I just for a moment on this subject plug the fifth series of The Wire? One of the main plot lines is about the very thing. And the treatment, as usual, is sublime.
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The New York Times significantly tightened up its standards regarding the use of anonymous sources in 2004, after the Jayson Blair scandal, which included stories partially or even wholly based on anonymous sources that didn't exist.
Sure. We have recordings here though, and Hager had emails. Nobody seriouly suggested that either were forged (okay, they did briefly earlier today with the recordings but soon changed tack).
I agree that the sanctity of a journalist's sources leaves open the possibility that the source may be the journalist him- or herself. But it's a tradeoff that an open society needs to live with, I don't want to have to contemplate the alternative.
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And with only a few exceptions, politicians of all sides have a bad habit of telling the listener what they want to hear...
And we all know about the slipping standard of the listener.
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Watergate and those secretly recorded conversations. Unethical but not illegal? Perhaps
He set up the recordings himself, though, right?