Posts by Matthew Littlewood
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It certainly passed without incident (that I remember) in my first two years at uni - that was why the 2007 riots were such a big deal; no-one expected it to end like that. Stupid way to end an otherwise entertaining tradition.
Absolutely, but it had been primed by the fallout of 2006*- which was much down to, by all accounts from my Critic mates on the scene, some pretty stupid behaviour by a small group of students and some pretty piss-poor, reactive and confrontational damage control from the police. So in the minds of some idiots the stakes were raised for the following year.
*Incidentally also occured the weekend of my graduation, so I was celebrating quietly with my friends back at my house and then at a mate's flat in Smith St while parts of Castle St burned. I didn't find out about it until the next day. -
Jim Emerson has a great piece on Glen Beck's brand of hysteria in his most recent blog. He points out how he gets away with his sleight of hand rhetorical technique, which sets up a rumour with no basis and forces the slandered to respond.
It's all based on the old logical fallacy known as "negative proof," the implication that something is true only because it hasn't been proven false: "We know Saddam has WMDs because he won't prove that he doesn't." "Where does it say there are no death panels?" "We know these detainees are terrorists because at no time since they have been arrested and held in isolation without charges have they proven they are not terrorists, and the president says they would not be imprisoned if they were not terrorists." (This is where I want to have continuous instantaneous access to a clip from "The Larry Sanders Show" of Artie [Rip Torn] with his shit-eating Producer's grin saying: "Don't start pulling at that thread or our whole world will come apart.") From there, it's only a short hop to: "Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy?" "When did you stop beating your wife?"
This nonsense is usually combined with Pavlovian association and repetition. The more people hear the juxtapositions -- Saddam/9-11, detainees/terrorists, Obama/Muslim, healthcare reform/Naziism -- the more they are inclined to assume a connection where there has never been one. Does anyone honestly think Glenn "Obama is a racist" Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990? I don't know. I hope not, because that would put them on Glenn Beck's level. This site mimics exactly the sort of evidence and logic Beck uses to smear public figures on Rupert Murdoch's Australian gossip tabloid, FOX News. (Apparently he's on the radio, too, but I have heard no hard evidence of that.)
In case you're wondering, the last line is a reference to a parody site linked in the post. It seems Mr Beck is too stupid or cynical to get the none-too-subtle joke though...
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50 over cricket is being abolished and they are going with 40 over innings instead. Expect that to spread around the world like wildfire in the next 2-3 years.
Just to take this discussion on a brief detour, isn't reducing the number of overs not really addressing the issue- namely, the fact that the game itself has become stale and overplayed? I mean, I can't really consider 20/20 the real thing, so maybe this will be a nice compromise, but I think there could be other ways to sex things up- shorter series, for one.
As long as they don't reintroduce the Supersubs.
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Re: RB's comments about ACTards- I wonder whether a high proportion of those who engaged in the antics were exactly those sorts of people. I would put good money on it.
I would also like to reiterate that I have no sympathy for anyone involved in the "riots". Pointless, nihilistic stuff. But there are obviously some surrounding issues that really need to be addressed.
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As someone who went to Intermediate and then secondary school in Dunedin, it always boggled the mind how small the students from outside the place (and they are of course the large majority) had such a small view of the place. Many of them scarcely go out anywhere past the Octagon in the three or four years they study here. I remember writing an article on South Dunedin as a features writer partly because Dave Large (the editor) and myself realised many students would have never got that far out of the place. And the way the flats have been arranged plays a huge part in it.
Graeme Downes is absolutely right in terms of the sheer density of the flat population, by any other standard it's practically unliveable...and yet this "roughing it" aspect seems to one of the ways to subconsciously sell aspiring students the idea of the "Dunedin experience". But something's got to give, especially if landlords continue to bleed their tenants dry.
And then you've got the fact that Dunedin probably has more pubs and off-licenses and drinking establishments per capita than anywhere else- partly that's down to the fact it's a student town, but the pubs, especially the big players like The Cook have become increasingly cynical in the way they've targeted students.
This, by the way, is a side issue and has nothing to do with the sheer fuckwittery which was on display (on TV) for all to see in the weekend. I don't know how this Undie 500 went down, but it seems to have followed a pattern from the last few years. I remember the fallout from the 2007 Undie 500- Critic practically filled its issue within the space of the day, emails, photos, and texts were flooding in, with everyone blaming each other and no one accepting any responsibility.
As far as I can tell, this is who deserves "blame" and should take some responsibility, in relative order.Maybe it's different this time around, but again, a pattern seems to be forming.
1. The students involved in the antics. Front up, you're responsible for this and frankly it pisses me off as someone who would see them come and go every year. It's not big, it's not clever, and it's bloody terrifying for the 95% of students who actually want to get on with their lives. Ultimately, the buck stops with them. I would quite happy if a few of the rioters actually got doled out PD or something similar.
Incidentally, this goes double for the non-students who drive down to Dunedin or join in on the "fun". Seriously, stop it.
2. The council. Posturing about punishment and then sticking their heads in their sand pretending nothing's going to go awry is asking for trouble. Whatever happens, it's now got to the stage where everyone realises that there will be something resembling an Undie 500. So accomodate it, set up a proper, secluded stop-off point, arrange some entertainment (though please anything but the Feelers) and at least do something close to damage control. Maybe by trying to police it before it gets to the end.
3. The police. Although in their case, they're on a hiding to nothing, and you wonder whether they realised it was going to get ugly from the outset. Maybe they needed to show some restraint this time, I don't know, I wasn't there. They're in a bind, and really they should be the last resort. But they need to figure out a way to control the overspill, much like they do in the Hyde St Keg Race and the like.
4. The fact everyone seems to have got it into their heads to hype up the event as a riot before it happens- I remember several years, close to a decade in fact, of Undie 500s without incident. Now it seems that it's going to be this way every time.
5. The VCs of Dunedin and Canterbury respectively- stop pointing the finger at oneanother and actually work together to do something about this.
I'm pretty angry at this, and I'm angrier at the fact that it seems to happen like clockwork every year now and everyone pretends they're going to do something about it and they don't. And it's compounded by the fact that now you get fuckwits driving down from Timaru and the like to "join in".
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"Up"!
and
"Ponyo"!
On these telling depp-creative things, human intellectual life depends--mine, anyway-
Maybe we could take this into another thread, but I was just astounded by the sheer heart of UP. The montage of Carl and Ellie's romance was a masterpiece of economy, as moving and perfect a work of cinematic shorthand I've seen in American cinema in quite some time. Like a film unto itself.
The rest was impressive and sometimes just off the wall (with a new spin on the whole talking-dog thing, and lots of neat little references to old adventure newsreels), but the heart is in its opening 20 minutes.
And it looked beautiful.
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Oh, also, Matt Taibbi's 'we're all dooooooooooooomed' healthcare article in Rolling Stone was an interesting read, I thought.
Oh it's fantastic, up there with his recent piece on Goldman Sachs, not least because he points out for the contemptible and downright disgusting nonsense spewed by the extreme right over Obama's healthcare plan, ultimately it's a side issue. The real issue is that not just the Dems total incoherence on the issue, but the fact there are people like Bauccus and Snowe, both of whom receive substantial donations from Health Insurance lobbies, helping to draw up one of the actual public healthcare bills. I don't know about you, but that's a massive conflict of interest right there.
Two great take-home bits from the piece:
The House versions all contain a public option, as does the HELP committee's version in the Senate. So whether or not there will be a public option in the end will likely come down to Baucus, one of the biggest whores for insurance-company money in the history of the United States. The early indications are that there is no public option in the Baucus version; the chairman hinted he favors the creation of nonprofit insurance cooperatives, a lame-ass alternative that even a total hack like Sen. Chuck Schumer has called a "fig leaf."
Even worse, Baucus has set things up so that the final Senate bill will be drawn up by six senators from his committee: a gang of three Republicans (Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming) and three Democrats (Baucus, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico) known by the weirdly Maoist sobriquet "Group of Six." The setup senselessly submarines the committee's Democratic majority, effectively preventing members who advocate a public option, like Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, from seriously influencing the bill. Getting movement on a public option — or any other meaningful reform — will now require the support of one of the three Republicans in the group: Grassley (who has received $2,034,000 from the health sector), Snowe ($756,000) or Enzi ($627,000).
This is what the prospects for real health care reform come down to — whether one of three Republicans from tiny states with no major urban populations decides, out of the goodness of his or her cash-fattened heart, to forsake forever any contributions from the health-insurance industry (and, probably, aid for their re-election efforts from the Republican National Committee).
But this bit really rams it home:
The much-ballyhooed right-wing scare campaign, with its teabagger holdovers ridiculously disrupting town-hall meetings with their belligerent protests and their stoneheaded memes (the sign raised at a town hall held by Rep. Rick Larson of Washington — keep the guvmint out of my medicare — is destined to become a classic of conservative propaganda), has proved to be almost totally irrelevant to the entire enterprise.
Aside from lowering even further the general level of civility (teabaggers urged Sen. Chris Dodd to off himself with painkillers; Rep. Brad Miller had his life threatened), the Limbaugh minions have accomplished nothing at all, except to look like morons for protesting as creeping socialism a reform effort designed specifically to change as little as possible and to preserve at all costs our malfunctioning system of private health care.
One of the great ironies about the sad, depressing story of the US Health Insurance Saga is that, LBJ aside, the most extensive healthcare bill ever to be put before the house--only to be summarily voted down--was by that great communist sympathiser, Richard Nixon.
Paul Krugman wrote an interesting piece for a while back that pointed out that for all his fervent paranoia, obfuscation and downright viciousness, Nixon (unlike Reagan) didn't hate government. Indeed, the bill he put forward- which pretty much advocated a form pretty close to single-player- would really be the stuff of the far-right dingbat's nightmares.
Still, Obama's speech today was impressive, even if it was a classic "centrist" pitch. Then again, any change is as good as the rest right now.
But you can't help but feel that this is the last time the Dems are going to have a supermajority in both houses, so to cave so easily on the initial plans is worrying. Could you imagine the GOP doing that in the last eight years if they had this much of a lead?
But totally off-topic and on the plus-side, I've just watched Pixar's Up, which was wonderful and even heartbreaking at times (the times when it wasn't genuinely bizarre and strangely exhilirating).
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oops, that should read J Hoberman is a great critc not just because...
(stupid lack of edit function)Anyway, the point still stands- Hoberman is a great critic because he's everything Armond White is not (but desperately wants to be).
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Deputy film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times Jim Emmerson tears Armond White a new one
I can't stand Armond White- it's not that he's a contrarian, it's that he's a contrarian who has a seriously over-inflated sense of his own writing and no real logic to his contrariness (even when Pauline Kael was at her most dogmatic, you knew exactly where she was coming from- in fact some of her best reviews find me nodding my head while disagreeing with her thoroughly).
More to the point, he desperately wants to have the critical acuity of the Village Voice's J Hoberman. But J Hoberman is a great critic because of his wealth of knowledge (few film critics of his, or any generation have been able to bridge the avant-garde/counter-culture and the mainstream as well as him), but because his writing is sharp as tac-he's punchy and eloquent.
White is merely convoluted and turgid.
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Leave a few cultural theory junkies to it for a while and we can turn most threads. :)
Off the top of my head,this thread has included discussion on feminism, advertising, the state of the Listener, dressing up nicely, the Tui ads (and commercials in general), drum n bass, grunge, acid house and Ted Kennedy.
Anyway, what were we talking about?