Posts by Russell Brown
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Oh dear. Ostapchuk is now accusing Adams of having tested positive.
-
Hard News: Living with the psychopath, in reply to Joe Wylie,
That said, I’m far from comfortable with the argument that just because the media coverage of this case happens to be shallow and sensationalist nobody outside of the judiciary has a right to so much as express disquiet about the sentence.
I don't think anyone's saying that and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. But there were some very sweeping statements being made upthread.
-
Hard News: Living with the psychopath, in reply to Jackie Clark,
This after a STOP programme which lasted, I believe, about six months. He was considered “cured”. He was not. I have no faith in these programmes
Well, that’s up to you I suppose. But an actual study of outcomes from STOP and two other programmes found an average recidivism rate of 8.1% (5.2% for those who completed the programme) – that’s half the rate from the standard probationary approach, and as good any similar programme in the world.
The man you’re talking about wasn’t regarded as cured, simply as having completed the programme. These things are measured by their success after 5, 10 or 20 years. He was the 1 in 20 who completed the programme and re-offended.
STOP also works with adolescents who have sexually abused and children 10-12 displaying sexualised behaviour. In both those groups it’s perhaps easier to draw a connection between being a victim and perpetrator of abuse.
Would you deny them this treatment because you have “no faith” in it Jackie? Would you lock them up for the rest of their lives? Those damaged kids you care for, – what say they go on to abuse? Would you lock them up for the rest of their lives? Or would you want them to have a chance to repair themselves?
-
Hard News: The question of Afghanistan…, in reply to tussock,
They don’t melt back into being farmers, they are farmers. We’re killing farmers, because they make up the resistance.
If you're talking about the Taliban (who are a diverse group, granted) it's much more accurate to call them students than farmers. They partially fund themselves by "taxing" poor farmers. Most of the 46 people killed by suicide bombers last night were ordinary people out shopping for their Eid celebrations.
The majority of the 3000-odd Afghan civilians killed violently last year died at the hands of your "resistance". Jon Stephenson told me that the locals in Bamiyan are so desperate for protection that they were prepared to fake an attack to try and get some more cover. Cover that our troops can't begin to provide.
The actual government under Karzai is hardly any better, of course. It's deeply corrupt and has further eroded the credibility of the occupation. But it's delusional to imagine that the Taliban are some high-minded freedom fighters. Their record in power was truly hideous.
-
Hard News: And so it begins, in reply to Richard Grevers,
I hope that if/when they send the information to Mr Hartvelt our BOT add a requirement that he adds a footnote that 15% of the school roll are ORRS students, some with a mental age as low as 3 months, whose scores have been aggregated.
Wow.
-
Hard News: And so it begins, in reply to Richard Grevers,
That’s happening already. The local Decile 10 school is known to refuse entry to kids whose records suggest they will be “difficult”.
A certain wealthy school a couple of suburbs over from us has been notorious for discouraging special needs kids for a while now. Guess it'll only get worse.
-
Hard News: And so it begins, in reply to John Armstrong,
Given the direction the debate has tended to run in the media so far (further evidenced by the direction of this thread), isn’t it at least possible that the story might well foreground and discuss the shortcomings of the information itself?
The thing to do there would be to target the minister's office with well-formed OIA requests. There'll be plenty to find out, I'm sure. That would be a more difficult path of course -- because Ministers of the Crown are far more evasive about observing that particular law than boards of trustees are.
-
While we’re discussing the OIA, here’s a good example of how it can be used to unmask bullshit: the CTU has discovered that the government’s proposal to drug-test beneficiaries is based on no actual data at all .
-
Field Theory: Never alone with Metenolone, in reply to Sacha,
Clip is fricken geoblocked, but thanks.
Oafs. But there's a non-geoblocked one here:
-
Hard News: And so it begins, in reply to barnaclebarnes,
The public need to make up their minds on whether this is ‘good’ data and if they believe the analysis that Fairfax does on it.
If Fairfax produces anything like a league table, they've gone most of the way towards destroying any actual research value in the data by making league tables an existential issue for schools. By the same token, schools will be forced to "teach to the test" as a matter of survival. Real teaching will suffer, the curriculum will contract and kids who don't fit the frame will be shunned. This isn't just supposition -- it's what's happened everywhere else.
And if you want to educate the public then it will require a major PR push to get the message out (not by teachers, in this instance they have too much of a vested instance, much like you never believe Federated Farmers on anything.)
That's just bullshit. Any degree of self-interest teachers might have here is utterly dwarfed by that in the attitude of farmers towards, say, environmental regulation. It's not even in the same solar system. The self-interest argument is spectacularly weak.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 762 763 764 765 766 … 2279 Older→ First