Posts by stephen walker
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Hello Richard,
Believe it or not, there are decent people who work in PR and journalism
Believe it or not, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I never wrote anything to suggest that I think all journalists and PR people are bad. Such a suggestion would be clearly silly.
I think you've missed my point and invoked some mutant form of Godwins Law (false baby-killing claims in Iraq no less!)
No, I haven't invoked Gowwin's Law at all. I have taken issue with your assertion that "most of the stereotypical observations about the 'dark side' are complete hogwash." So I invoked a famous case in which the world's largest PR firm was shown irrefutably to be completely evil scum. This case suggests that maybe there is something to these "dark side" conspiracies after all. Maybe, since that famous case was exposed, the PR firms have just become more sophisitcated about keeping such intentional disinformation campaigns less obvious.
So I agree with the main point of your comment, but I am pointing out that there are plenty of reasons to be very suspicious of paid corporate and government propaganda. And huge globalized media oligopolies. And NZ's own print media duopoly.
I also find it disturbing that journalism and PR are now so closely linked and
the differences between the two professions are not that huge (and in my mind getting smaller by the day).
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having lived in PR land for a little while now, I'd argue most of the stereotypical observations about the 'dark side' are complete hogwash.
When contemplating war, beware of babies in incubators
More than 10 years later, I can still recall my brother Sean's face. It was bright red. Furious. Not one given to fits of temper, Sean was in an uproar. He was a father, and he had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die. The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad. A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day. "We've got to go and get Saddam Hussein. Now," he said passionately.
I completely understood his feelings. Although I had no family of my own then, who could countenance such brutality? The news of the slaughter had come at a key moment in the deliberations about whether the US would invade Iraq. Those who watched the non-stop debates on TV saw that many of those who had previously wavered on the issue had been turned into warriors by this shocking incident.
Similar unsubstantiated stories appeared at the UN a few weeks later, where a team of "witnesses," coached by Hill&Knowlton, gave "testimony" (although no oath was ever taken) about atrocities in Iraq. It was later learned that the seven witnesses used false names and even identities in one case. In an unprecedented move, the US was allowed to present a video created by Hill & Knowlton to the entire security council.
World's largest PR firm (in 1990) is all sweeness and light, then? "most" is a nice weasel word, eh?
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When you have made decades' worth of planning decisions on quite different assumptions, that's going to cause you some problems.
Yeah, like asumptions regarding the availablity of cheap fossil energy...and assumptions about never-ending economic growth despite living on a finite planet with finite resources.
It's called endemic short-termism. Discounting the future. Leave someone else to deal with the consequences. But a 100-year binge has to be dealt with sometime, right? It can't carry on forever, can it? Or maybe it can, because that's what the economic model tells us. Yeah, right.
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Jackie,
if Tom is your father and he had a yacht called the Buccaneer, then...we share a common set of great-great-grandparents. I think. I can send you my mother's email address if you are interested. She's very into genealogy. -
oh, and the investments needed to take advantage of renewables (solar, wind, tidal), not to mention the cost of coal mining, are going to rise exponentially as the cost of oil and gas rise. and they are never going to be as cheap as what we have grown acustomed to. a lot more hydro seems unlikely, and it won't provide cheap liquid fuels or nitrogen fertiliser anyway.
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considering NZ's domestic dependence on fossil fuels for transportation and agricultural production (not to mention tourism), i cannot share your confidence that "we'll be right, mate".
NZ's per capita oil consumption p.a. is way up there. 50% higher than the UK. (very roughly from memory, 15 barrels per capita/year versus 10)
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NZ is well placed on all fronts to cope with any eventuality...We have everything we need right here.
except the whole economy is predicated on the basis of exceptionally cheap fossil energy.
shipping goods to market by sea is not an issue. but the energy used in production and internal transportation is.
and short-stay, long-haul mass tourism is surely a goner when oil gets to $500/barrel.
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your happy day is here again...
lots of people born in the 60s round here, eh (shock! horror! probe!)a friend-of-a-friend had a Commodore Pet in 1980...we played star trek off cassette tape.
i became part-owner of a Centris 660AV in 1993. Auckland even had a mac bbs. downloaded Netscape 1.0N (no Japanese-language support, so had to wait for 1.1N). -
BTW, Jackie, i'm related to you.
third cousin, i think.
definitely not my auntie.
(can't remember which branch of my mother's family though...) -
of course.
current account deficit: 9% of gdp.
house prices: way out of reach of single-income families
most capital: foreign-owned with lots of dividends and interest whooshing off-shore
savings rate: negative
nothing to see here. move right along please.