Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: The question of Afghanistan…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Afganistan is not and never has been one unified country.
Indeed, and the bloodiest part of recent history was not the Russian or the US invasions but the civil wars of the 1970s.
I suspect the aftermath of the withdrawal will look much the same.
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Hard News: The question of Afghanistan…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Saudi Arabia is a fundamentalist religious society. It chooses to impose its cultural imprint on Pakistan/Afghanistan region. Pakistan/Afghanistan has become increasingly religious. Simple.
It's a little more complex than that. The increasingly educated and wealthy Pakistani middle class - with years of westernised secular schooling - has also become radically conservative and religious, confounding predictions that the nation would centralise like, say, Indonesia is slowly doing despite huge Saudi cash flowing into the Madrases there in the same way.
The US's drone wars have played a huge part in that (the resentment is massive) and at that level at least, it's perhaps less to do with Saudi Arabia, whose funding has been targeted at the lower socio-economic classes.
What it has done is force the Pakistani centre further and further to the religious right and provided the Taliban with a funding base they didn't have a decade back.
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Hard News: The question of Afghanistan…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Their record in power was truly hideous.
Quite, and their time in power is often poorly understood. For a long time they clearly had broad popular support, even for their most heinous actions. Of course if you openly didn't support you were marked.
We look at something like the demolition of the statues of Bamiyan as a bizarre devoutly religious act - mostly inexplicable in so many ways to us - but internal political posturing played a bigger part in the final act.
The "Taliban" is a far more complex entity than our media finds easier to portray, just as the 'insurgency' was in Iraq. It may have been a single headed beast led by Omar (although even he was vulnerable) but it was a mess of jockeying as it went down the hierarchy, accentuated now by a decade plus of new blood from the schools in Pakistan and the ongoing wars there.
I suspect the Taliban in 2012 is quite a different beast to the grouping that took Kabul in the 1990s.
And the fact is we (as in the the western alliance we are desperate to be part of) supported one grouping of ruthless, bloody bastards over another . How the awful Northern Alliance became the good guys in 2001 is really only understandable in the context of the way the USA has always been able to anoint one set of gruesome thugs "good" subject to their need and whim.
Those divisions haven't gone away.
Jason Burke's 9/11 Wars is a pretty decent - and widely praised - overview if anyone has the inclination.
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As we used to say at the time: Gordon Bennett.....
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Speaker: Selling the Dream: The Art of…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Oh yes. We have been asking visitors what they think of New Zealand since there has been New Zealand.
I've mentally noted too that I can no longer express opinions about the homeland as somebody based in the outlands without being pulled up sharply by those still in-country.
That I would express mostly the same views if my address was still in Auckland and I spend up to three months every year in NZ (and am about to spend much more) is irrelevant it seems.
I love those posters, even if they were mostly fantasy - we had a unique twist to the sales pitch, sadly MIA now.
As Ian says: railway stations. I'm sure I remember as a kid the Dennis Beytagh poster in Auckland Station.
I think I need this book....
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Wicked stuff, thanks Russell. I'm just thrilled we were able to get it out again as it's a hugely important NZ album long MIA. We intended to reissue it back in 2004 but as you say we didn't have a copy - none of the band had a copy and mine had been used to put together a NZ hip hop comp years earlier and never returned by the compiler. The plan was to make it a bonus with the second album but the time passed.
It had been nagging at me for years and thus when Peter said he had a copy there was no reason not to push the button and do it. It will also go out in the first batch of the new Amplifier lossless releases which should happen any time.
As to where they are now: Mike owns a flooring business in West Auckland, Chris splits his time between Te Atatu and Greece - he still does the odd vocal session for Alan Jansson - and Lance was last seen in the late 1990s in Queensland. He had no involvement in the 2003 number 1.
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Hard News: The Music for Occasions, in reply to Isabel Hitchings,
Bowie for funerals? For me it has to be this:
If I had to pick a David Jones song to say goodbye to, I'd be edging towards this:
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Hard News: It's NetHui Week, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
(I use US growth as a proxy - that country probably has the highest level of Internet adoption).
It's 27th.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to SteveH,
I think the onus is on the purchaser to ensure that they are comfortable with the T&C before they buy the thing. It's not like they can't find out in advance.
I had a guy in MBK (the huge phone mall for those unfamiliar with Bangkok) tell me that he was selling five or six to families in one hit when the iPad first came out - guys were buying one each for mum, dad, the kids and grandma and so on as the new gadget in a gadget-fetish town. Hundreds were being sold daily across the mall. Not sure the T&C were that important - owning it was - whether you used it or not.
I guess the bulk of those ended up in boxes until the grandchildren or the maid took them away.
A friend who owns this pretty cool iPad accessory company in Melbourne said his research was similar - a huge percentage of those sold in the early flurry to buy were hardly, if ever, used. I'd image that's changed since V1 but it must've helped Apple's bottom line at the time.
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And other news, Apple loses to HTC in the we-invented-it-first courts.