Posts by Simon Grigg
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Or George W Bush is a WAR CRIMINAL, circa 2004.
Not exactly a parallel though is it Angus? The Bush claims were centred around a fairly hefty war with god knows how many dead, engineered by deceit and a failure to observe the finer points of international law.
The Obama claim however is based on....
-
Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Danielle,
I know this isn't quite germane to your point, but I don't think that's entirely true either.
That list is fairly wide ranging and includes events that arguably have parallel roots, albeit still planted in race issues. The Watts Riots, for example, were not about enfranchisement but economic dis-empowerment and discrimination, coupled with buckets of good old fashioned police brutality.
As were the post-Rodney King riots twenty years on.
Most of the Northern troubles were likewise. Suffrage had been extended to all races by the 15th Amendment and was mostly not blocked by other barriers like literacy and income level tests in the north as it was in the south. That took the Voting Rights Act in '65.
-
Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Yeah yeah, I get it – Murdoch Anti-Christ Superstar.
With the NYP you get what was given to you by Rupert. In that city Murdoch was long infamous for taking a respected tabloid and pushing firmly downwards. That direction, once again, infamously, was not done by some editor down the tree but by Murdoch personally.
Too, the paper looses money and is kept afloat by Fox in the US. It may be drawing a string but the station most under the microscope of recent was Fox and its voices.
As said, they ran it. It was /is garbage but somebody made the call. It was a conscious decision to sink lower into the swamp by someone empowered and handpicked by Murdoch.
-
Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
No he doesn't, SImon, Two vile numpites in the meth-head New York tabloid his company owns did, You've just pulled the most frak-witted trollism here on PAS and attributed it to Russell. Stop.
What Russell said!?
And given the acceptable low points that the Murdoch empire sinks to worldwide and that someone up the editorial chain, under their own executive guidelines, made the decision to run with this in the USA and thus play a part in trashing that girl to attribute this solely to the writers is perhaps disingenuous and a hell of a stretch. Or did the paper become a "meth-head New York tabloid" devoid of the hands on direction Murdoch is infamous for?
I suspect you may have found the coffee jar empty this morning, Craig?
But it does bear mentioning that the original story was in the Daily Mail, which is nothing to do with Murdoch.
Sure, but the Mail has no distribution in the USA where running something irresponsibly like this inthe NYP, photo and all in the current climate, will likely cause direct damage to the girl.
The editors of the Post were able to say 'what a pile of UK tabloid shite' and move on. As much as I dislike the NYP, most of the UK tabloids make it look hi brow.
-
Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
There's a tendency to see things that are here and now as the most significant ever.
I'm not thinking that at all - hence my references to the other bad eras. The US has an awful history of political violence - I read last year an incredible 1400 page history of NYC up to 1898 (the union of the boroughs) which simply turned my mind in places with the blood, and I'm well acquainted with the reconstruction and the thirties.
It was a very long time ago though. As were the 1950s/60s and Mississippi & Alabama. And as central as some of those people were in those states, they had no national platform that espoused hate in the way that Fox and many of its talking heads do.
"Quite popular" and a credible candidate for POTUS as some of these voices are, are quite different things - George Wallace was about as close as it got and that wasn't very close - as an independent. Put that next to the various batshit crazy GOP contenders lined up for 2012.....
As someone said up-thread, I think a lot of this is flailing at uncertainty. The USA is about to become a very big country that used to be the sole superpower. The base is in decline and the country is still working out why it's not as the mythology tells them it should be anymore.
It will, I think, get worse before it gets better.
None of which of course makes Sarah Palin, as putrid as I think she is, directly responsible for the gunshots this week, although neither does it absolve her from playing a conscious part in the bigger picture of pure ugly.
-
Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
The events of the 1950s and 1960s in various parts of America counter that.
No they don't, simply because I'm not old enough to remember those events first hand so the statement stands.
The ugliness of the 50s and 60s was a very, very long time ago and had largely abated in a violent sense by the 1980s, even with the attempt to kill Reagan which was by the 1980s a political aberration.
And you miss the point that most of the bombings and such in the 196os were fringe, unless you equate the Weathermen with the likes of the ugly Senator King of NYC. The central political discourse was largely polite even when heated. That is increasingly often not the case now.
The likes of Beck, Malkin and Limbaugh - hateful vicious people - are very close to the political centre-right. There was no such national equivalent in the 1960s.
-
Rupert Murdoch sinks a little further and blames it all on some poor girl:
Her kiss-off sent heartbroken Jared Lee Loughner into a sick downward spiral of drugs, depression and dark thoughts that dead-ended in mass murder last week.
Kelsey Hawkes, the first and only love of Loughner's young life, yesterday revealed how the temperamental Tucson teen "fell apart" after she dumped him in high school.
"My breaking up with him was not the cause of him going off the rails, but it was definitely the start of it," Hawkes, 21, told Britain's Daily Mail.
"I remember his face clearly -- he just looked like he had nothing to live for."
"Something changed in him -- he was not the same person when I told him it was over," Hawkes said, adding that Loughner was a "normal person" and not a "weirdo" when they dated for a year in 2005.
Way to go - may as well trash another life.
-
Fresh from the archives (and long thought lost - thanks to Rob Mayes who is working on recovering a bunch of old vids), this may the correct thread to post this in just to illustrate that political violence is not unknown in NZ.
I'd not seen it for 25 odd years and I'm buzzing off it.
-
Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Alternatively, I'm just all touch-feely because I'm watching the Obama speech and crying a little bit.
It was a fine, hopefully, healing moment and perhaps reminded more than a few why they voted for this particular guy over the other option.
I did, however, have the odd gagging 'As the scriptures tell us' hosanna moment when I had to take pause, but then I'm not the droid he's looking for I guess.
-
Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Frequent bombings, shootings, lynchings followed open threats to do so, which often wasn't punished and was even endorsed by local authorities. Birmingham, Selma, the freedom riders etc.
And there was a civil war in the USA too. All these things were a long time ago.
Between 1865 and 1984 four US presidents were killed and there were serious attempts on the lives of many more. The last was Reagan.
Many Mayors and Congressmen have been killed across the years. The last sitting Congressman to be murdered was however was by Jim Jones in Guyana. The last mayor was the guy who was shot when Harvey Milk was killed.
The last thirty or forty years have, despite everything, seen an ebb in political violence in the US and the threat of violence. Mostly, even in the Bush years, I'd argue it was angry - very angry at times - but rarely violent, at least not away from the fringes.
However, things like the number of physical threats against Senators doubling last year and that very scary time line that both Russell and I have linked to are both perhaps evidence that the tide is in danger of swinging back if it hasn't already.
Add to that the verbiage (which if it doesn't shock you, shocks me) from the almost centre-right - people who are likely presidential candidates or former VP candidates - openly asserting that they wanted people they disagreed with killed as happened last month several times.
Even Goldwater in his ugliest moments, or Nixon (at least not publicly) never asserted that murder was an acceptable political act.
And just to be clear - I don't think anyone is asserting that the current situation was caused directly by Palin's crosshairs, but given the clear escalation they are less than helpful, no?