Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: We are all twatcocks now…, in reply to Jackie Clark,
I will say it again – how old are we, people? If you want to let it rip, profaity wise, feel free to do so.
Where I am, I ground my whole class to a halt by referring to oxygen levels in the Archaean as "pretty bloody low". I'm not even touching twatcock in public. (Well. For aspects of public that are not the Internet.)
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Don Christie,
I did see an article recently suggesting that by one measure NZ was a much more generous country but I am buggered if I can find that story so consider it hearsay for now.
Perhaps this one? Which can be summed up as: "Achieve highly when they try, but Could Try Harder."
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Congrats! Staring at the other end, I'm just starting to appreciate what a monumental amount of work goes into a doctorate (for such a small piece of paper.) Hanging around universities or places like PAS, it's easy to overestimate how many people actually get through doctorates, but it's really not that easy. You should be proud.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to giovanni tiso,
It’s a reference to a conspiracy theory involving Harvard (and Oxford) in Gravity’s Rainbow, where it is intimated that they serve as fronts to shadowy tentacular organisations (read: networks of influence).
I thought that was called "rich people". (But thanks; I wasn't about to tackle a six-hundred-page book in search of whatever Neil was referring to.)
“Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas”
This is so laughably far from the real-world effects of the Fulbright programme - both in terms of participants' views and careers - that I'm going stick with amusement.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Neil Morrison,
“‘Harvard’s there for other reasons. The “educating” part of it is just sort of a front’”
I'm somewhat confused.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Andrew E,
I sincerely hope we’re not being so naive as to think that government sponsored exchange programmes are not designed to have influence, however subtle at first, on those participating in them. There’s a fair amount of evidence that government involvement in exchange programmes is not purely altruistic.
Well....yes? I don't think anyone's arguing that it's purely altruistic, any more than any other foreign relations exercise of any government is. The benefit to the US is obvious: on balance, such programs are going to make people more favourably inclined to the US. Living somewhere does that, because it upgrades the place from "stereotype" to "real". Sponsoring people to go to the US gives them the chance to see it up close; if someone has a bad experience, for whatever reason, it could work the other way. These things aren't guaranteed.
Obviously it varies from programme to programme, but I really think you might be overestimating how much control the State Department has over the day-to-day experience of people on these programmes. In my case, that would be "none whatsoever". I'm really struggling to see the "subtle influence" above and beyond having sponsored me here.
(Of course, my husband argues differently, but he has taken to wearing that funny tin-foil hat around the house.)
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to giovanni tiso,
And besides, couldn’t it be treated like a teachable moment?
We've had plenty of teachable moments via Wikileaks already, given that the lesson is "sometimes, people are conspiracy theorists and also kind of twatcocks."
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Mostly they send our MPs, not our journalists. I think it’s partly a relic of the cold war, partly a realisation that the US isn’t too popular around the world and that a good way to spread sympathy for their country and systems is to expose influential people to it.
I'm currently in the US on a Fulbright scholarship, and I don't think it would shock anyone to note that it's fairly obvious the basic idea of the program is to expose successful young people from all over the world to US culture and hope it sticks favourably (and, vice versa, to send Americans out to see other parts of the world - I think people forget that bit.) It dates back to the late '40s, so it's not just about any current unpopularity; it is, I think, about a genuine belief that extended contact helps understanding and cooperation.
Trying to improve relations by improving exposure isn't sinister unless you believe the US is so seductive everyone will be immediately converted to wanting everything they want, or, alternatively, that everyone they send is very easily influenced. Or both. I think it might be slightly more complex than that.
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Hard News: We are all twatcocks now…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Not that there's anything wrong with that right? I for one would be pretty disappointed if we chose commonsensical but soul-sapping words like credit crunch every year. What are we, Herald readers?
And let's be fair, words like "vuvuzela" and "Eyjafjallajokull", let alone "#eqnz" are pretty unlikely to enter the English language long-term, except in circumscribed and very specific circumstances. I feel like the point of the Word of the Year is to sum up the zeitgeist of the year in question, and "twatcock" does a pretty good job of that.
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Hard News: Spinning and soldiering, in reply to recordari,
Why oh why do we insist on following America's lead? On prisoner rights of all things.
In some states in the US, a felony conviction disenfranchises you for life, though this practice is fortunately not nearly as widespread as it was. It's also been upheld as constitutional. We're not quite there yet.
(Kind of puts the whole "paying your debt to society" thing in perspective, doesn't it?)