Posts by Rich Lock
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Hard News: Terror panics and the war imperative, in reply to BenWilson,
How can military policy ever be based on anything but death threats?
Portions of the top brass in a lot of western militaries have been moving more towards attempting to position/align their military arms for a more peacekeeping/policing/nationbuilding role over the last 20-odd years.
Which is all very well, but the infrastructure, equipment, training and mentality is still combat-oriented, and there is quite a bit of institutional passive and active resistance to movement in that direction, both macro and micro.
Once governments have sunk billions into a project like the Eurofighter (so that we can achieve air supremacy over Europe if the USSR invades), it's difficult to pull the plug.
Similarly, if the gunnery sergeant responsible for training a bunch of raw recruits has an old-school mentality, no amount of memos on the soft use of force is going to change the style he passes on.
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Well, it all seems quite clear to me.
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to Jake Starrow,
pompous lecturing
Do your homework.
So, you don't appear to be able to recognise a genuine attempt to engage in reasonably good faith (my second, in case you were keeping score), and your response is, to say the least, unecessarily aggro and combative.
I'm done with you. I look forward to when you step over the line and get banned again. Probably won't take too long.
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to Jake Starrow,
Jake - if you do want to argue here in good faith, as you've stated, then bear this in mind:
We're all Russell's guest's here, but many regulars have been around for a long time, and have got pretty comfortable, as has already been stated. When a new guest comes to the party, starts talking loudly, acts a wee bit obnoxious to the extent that they can't give a straight answer to a question like 'what's your name?', then it's going to put a few backs up. I'm sure you can understand that.
I'm happy to hear decent, coherent counter-arguments to my prevailing view. If you want to make them, be my guest. But I'm not going to accept baldly-stated conclusions. You have stated:
1) Fran is a well-respected journalist (with an implication that because of that there's nothing wrong with her latest column).
OK, why? Facts, arguments, conclusion, please.
2) You think John Key is a good PM.
Same again, please. And I'm not interested in 'he's popular', or variants thereof. Lorde, Ritchie McCaw and Lion Red are all popular, but no-one's suggesting they should run the country. So why is he a good PM?
Like I say, I'd be delighted to hear a good fact-y argument. If you can't or won't provide one, then the rather inescapable conclusion is that you're just at this party to annoy people, because I'll do you the courtesy of assuming that you know that dropping into a group having a conversation and loudly and repeatedly stating an opposing and unsupported conclusion does nothing but annoy people.
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There’s a George Monbiot article here which has some reasonably pertinent points in relation to media echo chambers and self-reinforcing viewpoints. He’s talking about the Scottish independence campaign, but it’s still illustrative of a certain hive mindset.
Those who are supposed to hold power to account live in a rarefied, self-referential world of power, circulating among people as exalted as themselves, the “small number of guests” who receive the most charming invitations.
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Living within their tiny circle of light, most senior journalists seem unable to comprehend a desire for change. If they notice it at all, they perceive it as a mortal threat, comparable perhaps to Hitler. They know as little of the lives of the 64 million inhabiting the outer darkness as they do of the Andaman islanders. Yet, lecturing the poor from under the wisteria, they claim to speak for the nation.
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to Caleb D'Anvers,
When you critique the media … they get very angry. They say, quite correctly, “nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never under any pressure.” Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk … and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like … They have been through the socialization system.
There's a recent example of it's application here:
In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes.
“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”
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Ailes then embarked on a purge of existing staffers at Fox News. “There was a litmus test,” recalled Joe Peyronnin, whom Ailes displaced as head of the network. “He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals.” When Ailes suspected a journalist wasn’t far enough to the right for his tastes, he’d spring an accusation: “Why are you a liberal?” If staffers had worked at one of the major news networks, Ailes would force them to defend working at a place like CBS – which he spat out as “the Communist Broadcast System.” To replace the veterans he fired, Ailes brought in droves of inexperienced up-and-comers – enabling him to weave his own political biases into the network’s DNA. To oversee the young newsroom, he recruited John Moody, a conservative veteran of Time. As recounted by journalist Scott Collins in Crazy Like a Fox, the Chairman gave Moody explicit ideological marching orders. “One of the problems we have to work on here together when we start this network is that most journalists are liberals,” Ailes told Moody. “And we’ve got to fight that.” Reporters understood that a right-wing bias was hard-wired into what they did from the start. “All outward appearances were that it was just like any other newsroom,” says a former anchor. “But you knew that the way to get ahead was to show your color – and that your color was red.” Red state, that is.
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to Sacha,
Thousands of years if we change ‘state’ to society.
We're veering close to a discussion of legal principles, and probably shouldn't encourage he-who-should-not-be-named to make a re-appearance.
Whatever you do, don't say 'Blackstone's' three times while looking in a mirror.
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to Danielle,
“I’m pretty certain that innocent people had or have nothing to worry about.”
People trotting this line out and BELIEVING IT – that absolutely boggles the mind.
My jaw dropped open slightly when I read it, too. Jake's either a far more subtle troll than we've given him credit for thus far, or is taking naïveté to Olympic levels.
Jake - power does everything it can to accumulate more power to itself. That's just it's nature. That's why over hundreds of years we've built up legal systems that gradually accumulate rights of citizens rights in relation to the power of the state, and devolve that power from tribal chiefs, kings, and their henchmen - from their word being absolute, to ordinary citizens also having a voice. Because power is never given away, it has to be taken. The fact that power is always conceded reluctantly is why it took hundreds of years to get where we are now - rights to vote, rights to association, rights to freely travel. And a right to privacy.
Cardinal Richelieu said: 'If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.' You should look him up sometime - he knew a lot about state surveillance, reigns of terror and consolidation of power within a totalitarian regime.
We don't have to give six written lines - they've already taken everything we've ever done. Think about that.
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Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to BenWilson,
something something private servers....? I can't remember the details as it was a few years back, but that point was specifically addressed.
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Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to kiwicmc,
one can only presume they filter out all the minecraft traffic from our house
There was a story a year or two back about terrorists/jihadis/whatever using in-game chatroom to exchange information as they thought it was probably not going to be monitored and/or far more difficult to track.
So don't bet on it...
