Posts by HORansome
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: A Work of Advocacy, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Morse appears as an interviewer in the documentary in so far as the documentarian's film her "interviewing" people outside of court. It's not as if she is an interviewer for the documentary but rather that as a part of her activism she interviews people and the documentarians capture that.
-
As I mentioned to Russell via Twitter last night and this morning, the documentary is great fodder for a chapter in my thesis, a chapter on the use of selective evidence explanations and the claim by conspiracy theorists that the powers that be use disinformation to make their official theories look warranted. I think the documentary, perhaps unwittingly, is both a good example of how selective the official theory of the October Raids is and how the response from the defendants is also selective in its use of evidence. The difference, as I see it (and Russell alludes to in his post) is the whilst we, the public, can't legitimately see some of the salient evidence for the official theory and have to take it on trust that the evidence warrants the official conclusion, we can look at the evidence presented by the documentarians. That difference makes the documentary seem like a more trustworthy account on first glance; we don't have to take the evidence on trust.
What is problematic is the allegation that the police used disinformation. It's not proven beyond reasonable doubt in the documentary, because no evidence other than an allegation of propensity is provided, and whilst I think it's quite possible the police did act as agents provocateur it detracts from the overall story.
Roll on tomorrow's show; I'm going to try and write up my thoughts in a much more academic form this afternoon.
-
Ah, "Perigo." It's very Alan Partridge.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I'm taking Andre's gloss on "agree with one another" to mean that the reader agrees with the writer rather than "We shall have global peace and harmony!" People (not me) study Nietzsche in part because there was a body of other philosophers who agreed with his work and continued it and, in part, because other philosophers thought Nietzsche's work was overrated and had arguments to show why they thought that was the case.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
I used to be fairly active on alt.games.ultima.dragons back in the day, which was a little like here; whilst the group was meant to be about the Ultima series of computer games most of the discussions where political or sociological in nature. I learnt a lot about engaging with people on Usenet and I still check in to the group (now on the rec. branch) to see who is still there.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I beg your pardon?
That is a plausible gloss on Philosophy; one of the members of my Department likes to give talks about how hard it is to pithily define what it is that philosophers do (it is, after all, a subject that ranges from debates about what Art is to the discussion of what constitutes identity across logically possible worlds) but central to the discipline is arguments which, hopefully, have plausible premises leading to interesting conclusions based upon sound reasoning which others can follow.
Of course, other philosophers will disagree, usually with recourse to a good argument.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Jolisa,
It probably is. My friend, colleague and supervisor (all one person) and I wanted to teach a course on "The Philosophy of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Admittedly, we were going to do it for the adult education market and we were going to use Douglas Adam's flights of fancy to cover issues like the mutual intelligibility and translation of radically different languages, issues of personal identity, probability theory and the like, but after the funding cuts it become impossible to get past the relevant personnel.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
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.
I think the problem with this view you are expressing is that, as the research shows, people who train in practical and useful degrees don't necessarily go off to be useful and productive members of society and quite a few people who train in philosophy don't go off to be useless wastrels who suck at the public purse until such time that they are dead.
We just don't know what people are going to do with their degrees, so any argument which says "We should justify spending money on faculty x or department y" needs to take that into account. Lots of physicists become database managers, lots of philosophy majors become documentarians, lots of economists become owners of failed businesses.
Saying something like "We can only justify funding degrees with clear and beneficial outcomes to society" is silly (which is why I suspect you're only expressing this kind of sentiment rather than asserting it); we've had successive governments try that approach and it doesn't work because a) we don't know which subjects people can take at university that will actually lead to such outcomes and b) we do know that a lot of people who train in such subjects then go off and don't use them, reducing the supposed utility of their degrees[1].
There is a lot of things that are wrong with our tertiary education system; Law degrees and Med degrees really should be post-graduate degrees, for example, but, for the time being, we still have a breadth of study options in most of our local universities which makes people (not just academics) jealous. In the States and the UK they are shutting down the so-called "useless" subjects and it's not just people with Arts degrees who are complaining.
1. There's an obvious rejoinder here, which is that the degree could end up being useful to in some other way, but Danyl has ruled that by saying:
and justify retrospectively because they like to think it helped them out in some other career, in rather nebulous ways,
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think what Matthew is doing in the media is very good -- the more so given that he's had to overcome lifetime speech hesitancy to do it. It helps that he's able to talk about something that people are talking about: conspiracy theories.
Oh, stop it, you; praise me anymore and people are going to work out that we're having a torrid affair...
Yes, it does help that I talk about a subject that people (mostly outside of academic) are interested in and it probably helps that due to the aforementioned speech hesitancy I had years and years of speech training, most of which was focussed on public speaking.
However, let's not forget the enablers here (people like you, Russell); the folks who go "She's got talent." It was Jose Barbosa (sometimes known to the public as "Joseph Banks") who first spotted me and put me into the radio limelight that is bFM (and now Imogen Barrer who has returned me to my "rightful" place on the air). That takes a certain talent as well, I think. Especially since public intellectuals (and I'm only calling myself one for the duration of this thread) may very well have a certain skill-set that others don't but that doesn't mean that they set out to air their views in public (and, to a certain extent, we should be wary of people who are seeking such a platform for their views; we could all do well to live in a world with fewer Glen Beck's advising us to buy gold and distrust the Left (or Right)); they have to be found and they have to be nurtured, but not mollycoddled.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Well, if you're willing to work pro bono, then I am happy to welcome you to the club of contributors to my business card.