Posts by giovanni tiso
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As for the trolling thing, to hold a position in good faith (and I cannot know whether Danyl actually believes the stuff, nor do I care) and to argue honestly are two quite different things. Danyl simply ignored everything that was put forward that he might have some difficulty addressing. And that to my mind is trolling.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to DCBCauchi,
The few advocates for the public good of free inquiry have not been very specific about that good, nor persuasive about the need for it.
I think I have advanced a couple of arguments, and so have others. It wasn't a debate simply because there wasn't a contrary position worthy of its name to be debated. But the public good of free inquiry is most often seen at work where it's absent. In this country, you could say it was lacking when Rogernomics was pushed through, and there wasn't a public intellectual class capable of strongly articulating the values of society that were worth preserving against the crude economism and short term thinking of the reformers - I wasn't here at the time, but Bruce Jesson for one has written convincingly about this. As for my own country, I have a pretty sharp sense of how much we are missing intellectuals of the calibre of Pier Paolo Pasolini - we need somebody like him desperately.
Conversely, the case for the value of technical instruction that Danyl thinks is so obvious that it's not worth talking about, actually isn't obvious at all, even from a strictly utilitarian point of view. For that I think a refresher of Ken Robinson's talk on creativity in education may prove useful.
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Hah!
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
. I get that people are defensive about the premise, because my assertion means that they've wasted years of their life and quite a lot of money, but defensiveness, outrage and accusations of barbarism are not arguments.
For the record, you convinced nobody because as you correctly point out you have no argument - just a premise and an assertion, repeated ad nauseam, also known in the business as trolling. To which I still think that my original "bollocks" constituted the correct response, if I may so so myself.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
That is a little unfair
You're killing me, Danyl.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
Something we've danced around at various times is the quality of writing summoned by critical studies. As an inexpert reader, I frequently find it unbearable -- and the idea of deliberate obscurantism somewhat offensive.
I presume you have read mostly texts that weren’t aimed at a narrow specialist readership, in which case I can’t say that I blame you – I get a bit frustrated at times myself. It’s a discipline that is essentially useless unless it learns to communicate with the outside, which is occasionally and very lamentably afraid to do, possibly because the conversation so often devolves into having to justify your very existence. But that's no excuse really.
On this point I recall being somewhat apprehensive before a government scholarship interview, anticipating that the person from Federated Farmers on the panel might give me a bit of a hard time. As a matter of fact, he asked a perfectly sensible question that I was grateful for and able to answer in plain English. Right after I swallowed that particular prejudice with the help of a large glass of water.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Jolisa,
...Russell Brown, Giovanni Tiso...
Eh, sorry, what? I might have swooned there for a minute.
A strong focus on arts in secondary school and access to public libraries is going to do a lot more for the intellectual dynamism of the whole country across classes than subsidising the children of the privileged to study Roland Barthes.
So long as you stop just before you get to Barthes, eh? You wouldn't want those underprivileged kids to learn things above their station.
By the way, if you think I'm personally a child of the privileged... but to hell with that, I'm done with your baiting twatcockery. I'll yield the floor to Bill Sutch, writing on education, privilege and the country's stock of public intellectuals in 1966:
In 1965 a march of students to Parliament secured more adequate bursary allowances and forced the government to pay more attention to student accommodation. These facts alone indicate that a system of free education and equal opportunity did not operate at the university level, and probably also that the lower income groups had not made the subject a political issue. In 1966 a much higher proportion of the children of the professional classes and of the affluent were at the universities than of lower income groups. This fact partly explains why the university is a much more conservative body than the New Zealand average and perhaps why New Zealand is usually so moribund in the areas where professional expertise and social imagination are required. [...]
There is a fissure in New Zealand society. There are children of the well-to-do who go through the primary and secondary private schools and do not mix at school with the children from other classes, and are diminished thereby, for in associating with their kind at the university and later in commercial, professional, or sheep farming life, they are deprived of some of the moral qualities New Zealand's egalitarian society offers. They are not an elite; they do not provide imagination nor much leadership, though they are often in positions requiring economic and social judgments. But, in setting social patterns, they do have more money than the average. They get tax exemption to help pay for their youngsters to have smaller classes at private schools and they are, as a group, not very interested in improving state education by, for example, reducing the size of classes by paying more taxes. If they were, radical improvement in education might have been of urgent importance to the National Party; New Zealand might have had a higher school-leaving age, a much longer period of training for its teachers, more specialist tertiary institutions, a better secondary curriculum, and much smaller classes.
W.B. Sutch, The Quest for Security in New Zealand, 1940 to 1966 (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 276-279
Elsewhere he rails against the vocational, utilitarian approach to funding public education but I don't have the quotation to hand unfortunately.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
Why the laughter? We do have some tradition there.
Keith Sinclair, Bill Pearson, Michael King, Fairburn, Sutch. for a start.
Can't help but notice that none of these people are still alive. Hence, perhaps, the laughter, which would have to be sardonic.
ETA: yay for Jolisa who's come up with a couple of live ones!
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to recordari,
My degree in political ideology tells me this is valuable chortle material.
That's what happens when I start mixing my metaphors too early in the day.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
But that's such a huge fallacy the base of my monitor is groaning under the weight. Can I not say that the field of DanylMclauchlanism is of vital importance, and that it MUST be publicly funded, and that the lack of public engagement on this subject is a terrible oversight on the part of our society?
Do you have many more non sequiturs I need to know about? I am telling you why I think we're wrong, not just stating it. You're more than welcome to argue why the field of DanylMclauchlanism is of vital importance.
but advances in post-modern philosophy are simply opaque to him
We're not doing another round on postmodernism, are we? Philosophy is not synonimous with postmodernism. In fact postmodernism is well and truly dead and buried. The likes of Chomsky like to revive the cadaver of their straw man version of it from time to time, but surely the rest of us can just move on (much as reading the Chomsky-Foucault debate is still of great historical interest).