Posts by Kracklite
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Hard News: Time to move on, in reply to Islander,
Red-neckery – it is emphatically not.
That is due to my ironic useage of the term, I admit, as a contrast to my own direct experience – but not my indirect experience. That is, I don’t do that sort of thing, but that I know people who might be stereotyped as such do, and they do like shooting things, collecting things that shoot, using things that shoot and blowing things up and who aren’t, and wouldn’t by any stretch of the imagination have terrorist intent, but superficially, might be seen by those who don’t shoot, explode etcetera, be thought to intend to be terrorists. I perceive an urban-rural culture gap, and that gap can lead to profound incomprehension and mistakes as to motives and intentions.
Part of living in rural/remote areas – it is very much part of our lives.
Which is what I meant to say.
The ‘muddying of the waters’ wasnt all that helpful.
Sorry, I meant to say – flippantly – that the use of firearms and explosives is not in itself clear-cut as proof of evil intent
I’ve spent too much of the day talking about diegesis and come over all postmodern. As a consequence, I can’t make a straight statement about anything.
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Hard News: Time to move on, in reply to Islander,
That suggests “redneck” and “things blowed up real good” to me. Not, I hasten to add, that it necessarily applies to this case in particular, but (a barrage of disclaimers may be taken as granted here?), speaking as a bookish urban liberal intellectual myself, people who like setting things on fire and blowing up things and hunting things (because they need something to eat or because they enjoy it) are a world away from urban blah blah etceteras like myself and others. I do detect (project?) a slight incomprehension and anxiety towards people who are, for want of a better term, “rednecks” (notice my delicate use of quote marks, my ironic use of stereotypes)? Oh yes.
Anyway, there are people who like blowing things up for fun, who like fireworks displays, and just luuurve the do-it-yourself kind and the urban liberal etcetera does not always comprehend that… and there are people whose fantasies of vengeance against “the man” take identical form to redneckery and so, maybe, I might concede a little sympathy for the police then in erring on the side of caution with Iti and co – but not the Tuhoe people, let alone the peace and anti-[police] rape activists.
Am I trying to muddy the waters? Oh yes.
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I'd like to call attention to this though:
The police leaked illegal evidence entirely out of context to poison the well, and the government retroactively allowed them to use such illegal evidence in other cases. They raided left-wing political activist groups throughout the country, including truly dangerous types like organic farmers and pacifists. They took all those people’s computers and copied out all their contacts so they could spy on everyone they’d ever communicated with, just in case, and the government is still busy giving them more surveillance powers, less oversight, and more bullshit laws to charge harmless people with.
Whatever the case with Tame Iti and his close associates - and there's no way on Earth I'm going to like, respect or trust Valerie Morse either - I must admit and the best that could be said of them is that they are "copulating phallocephalloi" - but the police did use some very tenuous connections as an excuse to intimidate peace and anti-rape activists who had been irritating them for years in Wellington and elsewhere. In many cases the associations were so tenuous that they may as well have arrested Kevin Bacon (as in six degrees of-) and the "incriminating" evidence that they seized included cake knives and avocados - but of course it was the computers and the contents of their hard drives that they were really after. There was definitely a lot of payback and opportunism in the wider raids.
I don't think that we should forget that the real crisis of 9/11 was exploited by authorities to crack down on democratic dissent, and it would be very naive to think otherwise, or to allow it. (And that's another of the very many reasons why I didn't forgive or vote for Goff and his mates last year).
I do think that we have to make the distinction, and judge (or reserve judgment) differently.
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Muse: The Curmudgeon's Guide To The…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
it was the best prune-and-simplify adaptation
Indeed. Oldman’s Smiley is not the Smiley I think of from the books and the BBC series, but it’s one I can believe in almost as much as le Carre's secular priest.
One thing that struck me about the film was that it was very obviously directed by a Swede brought up in an egalitarian society. The book and the BBC serial (see, I didn’t say “mini-series”!) made much of of the importance of class. Oliver Lacon, for example, in the film could be a redbrick university professor, but in the book and the serial, he, Smiley and especially Haydon are products of Eton, Oxbridge and London’s gentlemen’s clubs. It’s been speculated that Philby turned traitor because born to the aristocracy, turned against it in particular out of disappointment rather than England…
And that Citroen DS, oh my…
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Muse: The Curmudgeon's Guide To The…, in reply to Sara Bee,
+1
My thoughts too.
It's astonishing, isn't it, her potential range?
Seeing her in The Girl with the Azhdarcho Tattoo is a revelation. Lisbeth Salander could easily be a one-dimensional fanboy cartoon, but her performance, particularly her body language with her stiff, brisk walk, hood up, head down shows her fear, her agoraphobia, her barely suppressed rage and how she has used all of that to create mechanisms of survival to deal with the damage she has suffered. Acting like that is marvellous.
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In case that seems a little fantastical, when people talk in metaphors such as "level playing fields" - which no-one has here, but which they have abundantly elsewhere - I really want to know what they mean when they try to translate their metaphors into the real world.
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Hard News: This Is Not A Complicated Issue, in reply to Islander,
Well, what exactly is the gravitational force on the planet in question? Can the goldfish swim among the branches of the tree on an ocean planet when all of the air breathers would drown?
Rather than being facetious, I’m raising the question about the so-called “level playing field”. I submit that every planet has its own “level playing field” that are perfectly “natural” and therefore “right”. Some of them have gravitational fields forcing the accelerations of free-falling objects to be 8.87 metres per second squared, endure or welcome rains of sulphuric acid, have atmospheric pressures of ninety-three bars and mean temperatures of four hundred and sixty degrees celsius like Venus. Other “level fields” are cold, have a gravitational field zero point one four of what we normally experience and have a drizzle of methane rain, feeding rivers that flow into methane seas – just like Titan.
What is a “level field”? What is the importance of what we experience on one little mote in the cosmos? Now some cretin named "James" liked to say on the Dimpost that "The Universe", a personal friend of his, dictated rules to him,but he could never explain what it had to say about the connection between physical laws and social needs. Therefore, the question remained open about how, in society, that most arbitrary and contingent of constructions, what is any “level playing field” anything but an elaborate and yet ramshackle contrivance?
Whatever it is, what we have here and now in this place somehow seems to benefit those most bizarre and pointless of beings, outdated Thunderbirds puppets such as Lackwit Smirk.
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Hard News: This Is Not A Complicated Issue, in reply to Islander,
That's really interesting - it's not a problem, it's a puzzle. I'd love to see the diagram.
(Oh, and Daleks don't need to climb stairs {even if they can - "El-e-vate!" as one said} - they just level the building).
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Hard News: This Is Not A Complicated Issue, in reply to Kracklite,
Poor, poor fellow.
Did anyone get the Dark City reference? :)
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I’m currently reading a thread at the Dimpost on Mallard’s latest phuqueup and thinking of straws, camels and asses. I suppose it’s interesting to compare the different forms that a fundamental sense of entitlement can take, and hope that in both cases, the law, obligations to UN conventions and suchlike will actually matter… and that real advances will be made.
Personally, stepping aside from one of my personae, instead of saying that the glass exceeds requirements by a factor of two, I think that the Mojo Mathers case will in the long run set a positive precedent. There, that’s optimistic!
nzlemming:
What’s interesting is that some people who talk about a “level playing field” really mean that “no-one should be allowed to get anything that I don’t get!”
It’s too late at night for me to bother to find the links, but sociobiologists <cough> evolutionary psychologists like to note that we’re a jealous lot, angry to see others getting things that are “undeserved”. The crudest response is indeed provoked by an awareness that someone is getting something that one is not also getting, without the empathic comprehension that someone else is in need… hence the subhuman Leighton Smith and Lackwit Smirk being unable to comprehend that Mojo Mathers is already trying to climb out of a pit in the artificially raised and slanted level playing field.
Still, you’ve got to be sympathetic. Consider the recent film, The Muppets and the problems that the characters faced. Think of poor Lackwit Smirk – think of the discrimination he has had to face for years.
As a poor Thunderbirds puppet living long after the series has been cancelled and “Supermarianation” has been superceded by techniques that have themselves been superceded by CGI, Lackwit has had to face endless humiliation for being a grinning wooden caricature of a human being, accepted by no-one as an authentic puppet or a real live boy like the triumphant Pinocchio – let alone an actual flesh-and-blood human. There is no place for him; instead he has been crammed awkwardly into positions where his essential lack of identity has been irrelevant, such as Speaker of the House, and soon, High Commissioner to London – but all the time he knows, we’re all sniggering at him behind his back, whispering to each other, “You know he’s not really real, and yet he tries so hard to show that he is… it’s a joke, isn’t it – do you think he knows?”
Yes, he does. Poor fellow. Poor, poor fellow.
Think of the added humiliation he has had to face: Mysterons, Autons and now Cylons – all so, so much better, all so much more authentic and finally, to cap it all, the Cylons are accepted as real people! Even Frankenstein’s creature sneers at him, and as for what bloody Isaac Asimov had to say… and Alan Bloody Turing, to add insult to injury...
Have you seen The Adventures of Tintin? Can you possibly imagine the pain that that might cause, you heartless swine?!
There he is, with that huge sense of entitlement… and no-one cares. I weep, I truly do (…ah, no, I tell a lie, sorry).
The poor fellow, I really feel sorry for him, in measurable quantities and times – all with negative exponents.
Still, does anyone know Eric Cartman’s number? We should put them in touch with each other, don’t you think? I can imagine dear Lackwit and his underage protege at a bar, crying into their milk in unison, “No-one respects mah authoritah…”
Trev can look on in bewilderment, saying “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”