Posts by giovanni tiso
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Right after Enrico Berlinguer died they (we) got to be top party for one election with 33.33% of the vote versus 32.97% for the Christian Democrats. Still not enough to form a government though, there were no coalition partners.
Around the time when I was born the Communist Party had 15 million voters, and as many as 1.5 million members. Talk about grassroots. [EDITED for functional innumeracy]
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Jacqui Dunn,
chilled bottle of chardonnay
Serving temperature is 9-10 degrees I believe, so pretty lukewarm for a white. (Although my slightly curmudgeonly take on Chardonnay is "best served not at all").
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Don Christie,
Blimey, that's a somewhat optimistic re-writing of the period.
I wouldn't say optimistic, I was right behind the Soviets in my primary school years.
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Considering than before the next decade was out the Soviet Union no longer existed, I think the extent in which the US wasn't hegemonic in the second half of the Seventies may be somewhat overstated.
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Josh Addison,
And she played "Lydia" for an encore
What, the tattooed lady?
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Why this sudden obsession with "purity" of beer. It doesn't make it taste nice and it won't stop you getting a hangover.
Word. I've finally found a beer that is worse than Birra Peroni: the NZ Pure lager. It tastes 100% as bad as the bottle looks.
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Hah...! More Aaron Bady goodness, and this time it's on Holbrooke. It's like the guy's telepathic. Money quote:
Let’s forgive [Holbrooke] for a life spent “placing big-power concerns ahead of human rights,” as Daniel Southerland put it, in one of the East Timor books I still have sitting in front of my computer from writing this post. If you flip through the indexes of all of them for his name, you find nothing but official indifference to the suffering of the powerless alongside a deep and consistent concern for whatever it is that would best enable the United States to continue its hegemony over the world. It’s hard to forget that, but let’s try to forgive and move on. There were times when he — like the United States — was on the right side of a human rights issue, and there are times when they actions he took on behalf of the powerful were in alignment with the well-being of the powerless. But correlation is not causation: when it suits the imperial hegemon to give a shit about death and suffering, they do so because it suits them to do so. And Richard Holbrooke was its face when it did so. Lets remember that and then move on.
And his parsing of Holbrooke's response to one of his critics on Timor is pure Neil:
In other words, (a) You are wrong and this is not what happened, because (b) It’s complicated, and also Jimmy Carter is a good man who would never have done such as deliberately help an ally kill people
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
Carter was at the forefront of turning round US foreign policy away from cold war realpolitic to human rights. But he faced a world that already had people like Suharto entrenched in power.
And so he simply had to gift him weaponry. Really, what was the poor man to do?
I'm beginning to wonder if you read not only the information that is presented to you by others but also the stuff you write yourself.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
The US stopped Melosevic. It's a fact.
For that matter you could say that Bush stopped Saddam. So long as you're quite happy to look at recent history through a straw.
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Although if you think about it it's not at all ironic that Lockheed Martin might want to shift attention away from lying.