Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think they do good stuff, and that they do far, far more than assist the “children of the elite”, if, indeed, they do much of that at all these days.
Yes, not at all familiar with how it works here. Back home they did organise cultural events - although not at all popular art oriented as I recall - but in the context of a pricey and prestigious English school for the local bourgeoisie.
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Hard News: Spinning and soldiering, in reply to James George,
5 to 2 any response will be on the last little throwaway irrelevancy.
I have much more favourable odds for "eh?"
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I'm somewhat confused.
It's a reference to a conspiracy theory involving Harvard (and Oxford) in Gravity's Rainbow, where it is intimated that they serve as fronts to shadowy tentacular organisations (read: networks of influence).
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Well, fock me.
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Avec the odd exception, designed to make it look like it's all lovely and egalitarian-like, yes. It's pretty elementary PR.
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Except obviously I meant WikiLeaks and not Wikipedia, and the word "comparable" was missing there. :-)
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The British Council in Milan was also the place where the posh got to learn English. I wouldn't underestimate the extent in which all of these programmes boil down to enabling the children of the elites to network internationally.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Russell Brown,
But I'm clearly not talking about the real stories, but the way everything seems to be framed as a consequence of being presented by Wikileaks.
Thus, a venerable and very public cultural exchange programme gets reframed as spy vs spy. Because it must be a conspiracy, right?
But would you call that a failing of WikiLeaks? And besides, couldn't it be treated like a teachable moment?
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I'm sorry to intrude on the whole pronunciation thing, but if you don't pronounce twat like twat and cock like cock, doesn't the word instantly stop making sense?
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Russell Brown,
But suddenly deciding that a longstanding public exchange programme is some secret spy business is a symptom of what irks me about the paranoid culture fostered by Wikileaks.
Sorry, that post of mine was a little carelessly worded - I didn't mean in fact to imply that it was, merely that it's an influence, but then being beholden to your publisher, who also happens to be a commercial interest, is also an influence, and is less explicitly declared than the odd foreign state department sponsored trip.
As for 'the paranoid culture fostered by Wikileaks', man, I think you're so far off the mark I don't really know where to start. I might limit myself to asking you what I asked Keir. Can you look back on the history of the WikiLeaks releases and say 'on balance I wish we didn't know that?' Do you wish that we weren't having this discussion about what needs to be secret and what doesn't? Do you somehow expect there not to be cretins on either side of the debate, for the first time in the history of humanity? Help me understand.