Posts by Dennis Frank
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Hard News: The remarkable rise of…, in reply to ,
Yes & no. I was brainwashed by christians until age 13.5, when I told my mother I was never gonna go back to church or sunday school. To my eternal surprise, the usual thrashing from my father didn't happen. Transcendence was the result.
I suspect faith in something is a psychological necessity for most humans. Where you're right is in regard to religion. Spirituality is personal, religion is social (social conformity, from Latin religare = to bind, from memory). I'd say Trump has more faith in himself, and in enterprise culture, than anything else. I doubt any christian affiliation is more than lip service or political convenience.
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That cartoon captured the interpersonal mutuality of style well. Thomsen's piece has one notable reference to "international relations experts, whose discipline unashamedly admits that it believes cultural context doesn't matter." Anyone who thinks cultural context doesn't matter is so obviously a fool as to mask the fact that most i/r experts are top academics.
All meaning is relative to context. Identity derives therefrom. For instance, we got taught in college physics that the electron has the nature of a particle in some experiments and the nature of a wave in others, then had to replicate those discoveries ourselves to prove it. If the Chinese govt suggested to the Koreans that they use their synthesis of socialism & capitalism as a model, and if re-unification proceeds on that basis, it will play out differently in the different cultural contexts of North and South...
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Hard News: The remarkable rise of…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Oh yeah, forgot that. Interesting that the result was obtained via "United Nations Security Council Resolution 418 of 4 November 1977 introduced a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa, also requiring all states to refrain from "any co-operation with South Africa in the manufacture and development of nuclear weapons"."
Presumably this strategy didn't work with N Korea due to Chinese opposition, but maybe China threatening that strategy recently in behind the scenes diplomacy was what got the shift happening.
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Hard News: The remarkable rise of…, in reply to Russell Brown,
North Korea has no intention of denuclearisation. Trump is talking up a nuclear pact that doesn't exist even as he prepares to wreck one, with Iran, that does.
Well, it would depend on the incentive, wouldn't it? But insofar as I don't recall any other nuclear state totally denuclearising, I agree. My point is that Trump's bluster actually worked. As we saw on the news tonight, the sabre-rattling has been displaced by smiles & hand-holding. In the court of public opinion, it makes Trump seem like a guy who gets the suitable result. I bet more people are impressed by that than by leftist moral outrage about his personal life & character.
Yeah, his Iran stance is one to watch. Sounds like he has a problem with the devil in the detail of what was agreed & is keen eliminate whatever it is. Could be just a tweak required rather than ditching it - in which case they'll announce a trip to Iran by Tillerson sometime soon.
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Hard News: The remarkable rise of…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Nothing there I disagree with, Tom. Both main parties in the USA got a reputation for shady dealings in the 19th century, both became notably corrupt during the 20th. The Bush dynasty have been personal friends and business partners with the bin Ladens through three generations in the oil industry, Reagan ran the Contra operation and supported fascist dictators in central & south America, so for me Trump still seems benign, compared to them & Nixon. Crass etc ain't evil.
Democrat regimes maintained CIA direction of coups in an entire spectrum of foreign countries just as enthusiastically as Republicans did, and that same method was used prior to the formation of the CIA, traceable back into the 19th century. Still, it does appear that the mafia has been rendered more marginal in recent years so maybe there's an overall trend toward credibility despite the left/right shambles.
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Hard News: The remarkable rise of…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Seems a feasible thesis but I'd be surprised. Normally when a leader is weakening the fact is signalled loud & clear by the body language. None yet.
I suspect he's weathering the storm comfortably. Republican establishment attacks on him seem to have muted noticeably since election. I see the shuffling of staffers as an exercise in social darwinism. Looks like playing tough with China worked for him - obviously little fat rocket man scurrying toward denuclearisation talks is due to China giving him a private warning of a significant withdrawal of their support. Which lessens his need to buddy up to Putin to form an axis against China. The top influencers in the US political establishment keep any president who shows they can do geopolitics successfully.
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Of course us kiwis find that stuff distasteful. But those Cohen/Russian links just look like US business as usual. Remember some New York bankers financed Lenin. Sure if would be good if capitalism weren't rotten to the core, but we live in the real world. The only evidence that counts is what the prosecuting team of lawyers arrives at consensus on the question of do they want to spend all that money on the court case on the basis of that pile of circumstantial evidence.
Trump seems to lack a moral compass from our perspective, but so what? Will a judge or jury see anything unusually reprehensible in Russian or Ukrainian immigrants getting good at doing capitalism & politics American style? I doubt it. That's stuff's been going down stateside since forever.
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All very entertaining but just shadow-boxing really. Innuendo about hypothetical wrongdoing dressed up by top lawyers competing like knights jousting on primetime. No actual evidence, so media stories have to be composed of conjecture instead.
If you read the deep-state thesis as competing interest groups within the US political/economic establishment (rather than the monolith preferred by conspiracy theorists), then the outcome will be as much dictated by who is using Mueller, who is using Trump, etc, as the weight of evidence that eventually results from the never-ending investigation. Evidence is either suppressed or used accordingly. If no smoking gun is found, circumstantial evidence will only get used in a prosecution if it suits vested interests to do so.
Remember that no president has reinforced Eisenhower's public warning about the US military-industrial complex, more than half a century since. Their tacit consensus has been that the public interest is so obviously subordinated to vested interests as to endanger their life or reputation if they were to follow Eisenhower's example and tell the truth.
The USA has taught us that a republic can indeed be worse than a monarchy. Why would Aotearoa want to adopt such a flawed model of democracy? Remember the fascist coup planned in the early thirties. If General Smedley Butler had agreed to accept the leadership role he was offered, rather than blow the whistle on that conspiracy as he did, we'd be living in a very different world.
Best to read Trump's stance in that light: genuinely anti-establishment, wanting to make America great again via regeneration of the economy and nationalism. Fueled by Tea Party disaffection, seeing the neocon thing as mere establishment window-dressing. The right-wing culture wars get insufficient in-depth media analysis.
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"How do we stop politicians and other powerful interests interfering in news organisations?" Treating this as a non-rhetorical question, the obvious answer is via acts of parliament. A generic design would be ideal. I suspect the reason everyone considers this goal impossible to achieve is the binary nature of the status quo. Media ownership is either public or private.
Just to focus on broadcasting (including websites), legislation that authorises all providers to operate only in the public interest would be resisted by private operators who want to broadcast for the benefit of sectional or sectarian interests only. I wouldn't be surprised if the judiciary were to support their antique right of favouritism.
So the Supreme Court deciding in favour of traditional private property rights is likely to defeat a generic design. Even in regard to public property rights, the judiciary could determine that this notion is so novel as to be revolutionary (so obviously the left would never support it).
Perhaps the best we could hope for is contract clauses that bind all media professionals to provide a public service by means of a broad definition of our common interests. Rather than our traditional binary left/right strait-jacket, it could spell out that contemporary society is multidimensional because it is multicultural, and that politics now includes all of us who are neither left nor right.
Although our media tends to be inclusive nowadays, the pressure from the powerful to exclude participation they don't like remains. Organisational charters and contract clauses must incentivise equity of participation via our right of free speech. For instance, although climate change threatens human survival, those addicted to fossil fuels have a natural right to advocate their addiction in our media.
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to BenWilson,
I don't see that it's MMP's job to make them more cohesive and powerful than they already are.
I share that sentiment. I was endorsing the agreement of Labour/NZF because I believe it is more important that the new government succeeds.
If, at the end of the electoral cycle, it can be seen by fair-minded voters to have served the public interest via genuine collaboration, that will set an excellent precedent for the future. I believe that common good currently outweighs any potential downside.