Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Simon Grigg,
They're looking everywhere including inwards. West, in cultural terms, is almost a redundant word now.
I happen to be using the following quote by Malaysian lawyer Shad Faruki for something I'm writing right now - goes some way towards debunking the idea that the West is not a meaningful category or is no longer an influence:
I am wearing your clothes, I speak your language, I watch your films and today is whatever date it is because you say so.
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Speaker: What PACE actually does, in reply to BenWilson,
It doesn't seem quite so clear cut to me. There's also a lot of successful artists who worked in shitty jobs to pay the bills too.
Yes. Famously Martin Edmond drives a taxy between books - fine and good on him. It's just not for everyone. It pays to consider that some of any generation's most creative minds are often barely functioning human beings - if there are ways to accommodate that, and to recognise that maybe not hassling them for a while might lead to pretty amazing results, they ought to be pursued. But it goes to George's point more generally that we should strive to create a society where people can utilise their skills, as opposed to filling whatever available employment slot there may be at any one time.
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Speaker: What PACE actually does, in reply to BenWilson,
Trying to get my head around what you're saying here. Do you mean that if they take a job, they take it away from someone else, who ends up on the benefit, so the net result for the benefit pool is the same?
Yes - especially if they have to take jobs that are menial, which is often the case. The roll of people who used the dole as a filler between creative projects includes individuals who forged whole industries (Weta) or at any rate whose eventual contribution didn't come out of the available pool, but rather added to it. That's what you lose by forcing your artists or your writers or your intellectuals to become dishwashers.
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There is certainly open contradiction with the line on informants - which hadn't been challenged to my knowledge by any Wikileaks collaborators in the media before - namely that WL had given the US State Department a chance to clear the information of the Iraq and Afghanistan cables before release to protect the sources. I wouldn't go as far as to say that the quote - if indeed correct, and I have no particular reason to doubt it - justifies in any way the treatment of private Manning, but it is cause for major concerns on the operation I would think.
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Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Goody! Look forward to that, and in the meantime thank you for the review - it does put the focus on Assange's personality under a rather more useful light than was perhaps the case at the time of the cable releases.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Andre Alessi,
You jest, but a staunch Labourite friend of mine pontificated on Facebook that the Hurley comments made Key worse than Berlusconi. Oddly, he neglected to pursue that line of argument further after Goff repeated those comments...
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Speaker: What PACE actually does, in reply to BenWilson,
But I find it hard to reconcile with the fact that they're perfectly happy to take money from people who do work, and usually in things that "aren't their dream job", because that's the lot of most working people, doing a lot of stuff that they really wouldn't feel like doing if it weren't for the bills that need to be paid.
Except the pool of jobs is finite, so this relative of yours is not actually taking money from anybody else. The benefit isn't a living wage, it's a small subsidy set well below the poverty line. Artists (or anybody really) who can't cope with dishwashing in between paid work in their chosen fields, in the jobs that they are trained to do and in which they can make a contribution, aren't really making society poorer, or living it up large at the taxpayers' expense.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to andin,
And who is this WE of which you speak? Is someone going to come and take my computer if the RWC loses more money?
Since a lot of it is public money, yes, sort of, indirectly. And if that basement flat of yours happens to be located in Dunedin, quite directly.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Sacha,
Blimey, thanks for that.
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Hard News: Because it's about time we…, in reply to Stephen McCurdy,
I might inadvertently come up with some moderately well informed observation about the behaviour and ethics of various visual media private and public imperia, and run the risk of pissing Danielle off even more than I seem to have already.
Yes, she hates it when people badmouth imperia. (By the way, if you've never been - lovely place.)
Look, I'm not sure what motivated you to come and complain that we talk about stuff that is of little significance, especially since you had to actually dodge more recently updated threads on grief, Egypt and politics to do so, but it is very Usenet ca. 1998 and it wasn't particularly endearing, or indeed productive, back then. If you want to contribute, contribute. If you want to berate, do it either more substantively or less tritely would be my advice.