Posts by giovanni tiso
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You can use a blank for the other z, without recourse to executive privilege.
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Brzezinski is only there for his point-value, actually. Obama hates losing at Scrabble.
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Bady is at it again (I know, I know, I should just turn my PAS account into his RSS feed), this time specifically on the fissures in the debate on the merit of the charges against Assange. He concludes thusly, although as always you have to read the whole argument.
One thing the case has clarified, then, is the extent to which a different worldview shapes the “progressivism” that Sadie Doyle and Michael Moore might ostensibly seem to share. L’Affaire Wikileaks has revealed so very much more than what was in those cables, and — as Millicent put it on twitter — here “it’s exposed the tacit faultlines we knew existed between many male progressives & feminists.” Those who attack the corporate state and those who attack our rape culture are not necessarily doing the same thing, from the same place, or sharing the same presumptions. The fact that George W. Bush was everybody’s enemy has left us ill suited, again, for thinking about politics in an era of the neo-liberal security state Democratic president. And being both a feminist and a leftist, for those of us who want to be both, requires us to merge both these worldviews, a task which many of us are not doing very successfully (to the extent we’re trying, since, as usual, the fairly empty category of “progressive” does a great deal to obscure real political fault lines). So let’s try harder.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
I could, off the cuff, give a reasonably historically detailed account of the mis-use of US power in Nicaragua under Reagan if there's some need to prove moral and historical credentials.
And I could provide a passable blow-by-blow account of the Punic wars. Too bad that's not the topic. The topic is the continuity in American foreign policy under the Democratic and Republican administration since at least Vietnam. You see a discontinuity under "good" democrats such as Carter and Obama that doesn't appear to be borne out by the evidence. Given your completley uncritical praise of Holbrooke, it doesn't seem possible to take the discussion any further, since you choose to respond to historical facts with moral assertions, as if your opinion of somebody could change the things that they actually did.
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Speaker: It's called "planning" for a reason, in reply to Joshua Arbury,
if you look at the statistics you'll find that Auckland's population density is around 2200 people per square kilometre
What counts as "Auckland" in those tables? Because the population is listed at a smidgen over 1.1 mil versus the figure of 1.4 mil that is bandied around most often about the Super City. Could it be that the figure is calculated leaving out lower density outer areas that account for the balance?
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Tony Parker,
Lhaws opinion of them just increases his twatcockness
Gosh, this reminds me I forgot to nominate Lhaws for word of the year. And it was my word! This is terrible.
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A conspiracy doesn't have to be secret. The Project for the New American Century was one hell of a conspiracy and its mission statement was on the Internet or could be sent to your home if you asked for it.
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Jacqui Dunn,
And, congratulations, sir!
Thank you!
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I thought Leonard Cohen was excellent. Although Justine and I hadn't been to a "proper" concert (defined as something you have to buy tickets for) without kids since 2001, so it could have been James Blunt and we might have enjoyed him anyway.
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Damian Christie,
Exhibitions, concerts, weddings, parties... life.... I can't understand people who essentially miss a gig because they decide to capture all two hours on a 1"x1" Nokia screen. Which presumably no-one ever sees, because it is shaky, distorted and to all intents unviewable.
When I took my son to Italy with his spanking new birthday present camera two months ago we took off from Dubai and flew over one of those artificial islands they have that look like plants, it was really quite a sight. When Joseph went to take the picture he found that the batteries were dead and I fully expected him to be quite disappointed but he said "Oh well, it will just have to be a memory". Good man, I thought.