Posts by Rob Stowell
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Just ’cos noones giving him the nod: Ed Keupper
Sooo love the electrical storm album: not a dud track. For me, very evocative of arriving in Sydney (in something of an emotional storm) in 1987. -
The same writer on her Dinner with Rumsfeld. Worth reading, even now :)
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Double B-side is a stunner, eh. 'Cos "The Other's Way" is pretty damn good too.
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This thing is symbolic, and you treat it as such, unwaveringly. It’s futile trying to make it be about, or mean, anything beyond that.
Yes. I’ve been pondering this too. The symbolism of the twin towers falling was profound, for the western world that created the towers, and for the many peoples who felt excluded or attacked by that western world.
Some of that symbolic power is eroded, or changed, perhaps, by this rather horrible event- pretty close to assassination, though that seems to be a word the world is avoiding. (Are there legal reasons for this? I seem to remember assassination being explicitly ruled out as a option by US law-makers).
Symbols and stories have great power: advertisers, politicians, writers know this :) The symbolism of the falling towers has been used to do shameful things- curtailing freedoms, invasion, torture… If there’s anything hopeful to come from bin Laden’s demise, it’s a sort of symbolic closure- taking away the some of the symbolic potency of '911'. -
Beautifully put- thanks.
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Sigh, I’ve tried and I just can’t “do” Latta. Something about his voice sends me spiralling into yelling at the screen very quickly
Indeed. Smug, glib, prurient trawling through the garbage-can of someone's life... The inane populism implied by the name 'politically incorrect' also makes me want to throw things. Like a teenage temper-tantrum.
No thanks, and no, g'bye, won't see you latta. -
I don't imagine even teh nats WANT it to be like this. It's probably a case of:
Joyce: We promised the natives fibre, but dammit, noone wants to pay for it.
Key: Well, the natives can pay for it, they wanted it.
English: Don't look at me. No money. Nada. Broke. Taxation is theft.
Key: Hmm. So how we structure this to make the natives pay for their damned fibre, but hide it from them they are paying?
Joyce: Leave it to me. Just a little snake-oil and- what size gag and cuffs do we need for the commerce commission?
English: I think we have some left over from ECan, Auckland City Councils, School Boards of Trustees... -
Here's what it's like in most western universities today: The Market Colonization of Intellectuals
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I ... would much appreciate insights into how people handled being the outsiders in some debate in this forum.
Much the same as you, without gaining any of the insights :) Unlike you, it meant I felt less engaged, and consequently became less engaged.
Not for the first time, I have to say big props to Ben for that comment.
Me too. Community vs debate is fascinating cos it hits at the heart of many things that make us human.
Our species of primate evolved in tribes for - I dunno, a couple of million years at least? Tribes have great evolutionary advantages. They can do all sorts of things individuals can't.
And they're the source of much in our nature that's good (selflessness, community, empathy) and much that's bad (us vs them, bigotry, obsession with status).
Many forces in modern life obscure our tribal origins. But sometimes one can see these forces played out on the pages here with great clarity :) -
But a course that teaches, say, Harry Potter and C S Lewis, for people to take because they’re not sure what they want to do with their lives, and justify retrospectively because they like to think it helped them out in some other career, in rather nebulous ways, is not – to my mind – a good way to spend the public wealth.
How, then, do you respond to Megan C’s theory that courses you consider ‘trivial’ may not be useful for their subject matter necessarily, but because they teach analytical thinking and writing
I just disagree more-or-less completely with premises that include measures of the 'utility' of study to be primarily simplistically economic or immediately practical. I think understanding the world has its own value; and other people deepening their understanding of the world has a social value, to me, as well as to them.
I understand some people think the varieties, vagaries and mysteries of human culture are less worthy of understanding than those of streptococci or gravity. But that seems just as self-evidently wrong to me as Danyl finds it self-evidently correct.
Is it trivial to study the reasons an engaging, moderately well-written saga about teenage magicians fighting The-Forces-Of-Evil has dominated our children's cultural lives (and made JK the world's wealthiest woman)?
Does understanding that tell us nothing about who we are, what we are, and how we are? Me- I think it could tell us quite a lot.