Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: Who Guards the Guardian?, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I mean, if you can get 2/3 of the story out, even imperfectly, before the injunction becomes available as a weapon, you start to reach a tipping point at which an injunction isn’t effective any more.
Perhaps, but that's really easy to say when you're not the one who has to wear the consequences of rolling that dice and coming up snake eyes. It was OK for Greenwald to say "I want to make people in Washington piss blood and mess their pants, and I want it now." Rushbridger actually had some other professional and ethical factors to consider.
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Hard News: Who Guards the Guardian?, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Who knows if that would have been successful, but possibly better to get something out there so an injunction would serve less purpose?
No, not really. If that injunction had come down anyway, and all Rushbridger had on the record was those pretty weak initial stories what "purpose" would have been served? I know this is anathema to the "publish and let someone else be damned" wing of the Assange cult, but under Rushbridger's leadership The Guardian has run stories they've had to take the time to get right, because getting them wrong in the home of libel tourism and Carter Ruck could have been fatal.
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By the time I got there, most of the best places, the big terraces, had gone, but I did live for a while at 70 Bonnington Square, Vauxhall, surrounded by a quirky community in which New Zealanders were heavily represented.
It’s fascinating, also, how the social geography of cities change over time. A friend of my parents re-visited London for what she called her fairwell tour, and I remember her wistfully saying “If I was doing it all over again, I couldn’t afford a decent night out in Notting Hill let alone a flat.”
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Because that’s what Glenn Greenwald, who brought the story to The Guardian, demanded
Yeah, and I still wish Rushbridger had told Greenwald "publish elsewhere and be damned then." I know letting a massive scoop walk out the door goes against every instinct in a good newspaper editor's body (and Rushbridger's one of the greats), but as you say, Russell, a big part of the impact and authority of any newspaper is taking the time to get a story right rather than right now.
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Hard News: Rape and unreason, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Was out yesterday, and while having a restorative beverage was eavesdropping on the (mixed) party of teenagers at the next table. Some guy started in on the slut-shaming trash talk, and got promptly shut down -- by the other men as well. A small thing? Yes, but that's where jamming rape culture starts.
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Hard News: Thursday Music: Doing the Business, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Hey, why are you asking me? Russell's the one with groupie cred. :)
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Hard News: Thursday Music: Doing the Business, in reply to Russell Brown,
O’Connor says. “I’ve always loved hip-hop, but as a fan of hip-hop, I’ve always had to kind of suspend disbelief because, obviously, I don’t have a Bentley. There’s a distance between that and the life I have with my friends going to parties and getting public transport and doing the things that every other teenager does.”
Yes - and re-reading that 'racist Lorde' post, it's interesting how the author neatly side-steps this line from the chorus.
Blood stains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room,
Sounds a lot more Ke$ha than Kanye to me, but I guess that complicates the narrative a little too much...
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Hard News: Rape and unreason, in reply to Russell Brown,
What Emma said. And, yeah, that sound an awful lot like why I didn’t tell anyone what happened to me for almost twenty years. Press charges, are you cray-cray?
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Hard News: Thursday Music: Doing the Business, in reply to Simon Sjorn,
With respect Craig – this song – 99 Problems was from a much earlier album than the one Lorde claims to be directly influenced by and quoting a few lines out of context to make some point about what a dick Jay Z is, does not really seem fair to me
Sorry, missed out a bit of context there. Verónica Bayetti Flores linked to the video with a quote from the lyric.
I don’t have to explain why wealth operates differently among folks who’ve grown up struggling because this shit has been explained already: If you grew up with holes in your zapatos you’d celebrate the minute you was having dough.
Well, I'd respectfully suggest that while Ms. Flores is condescendingly suggesting Lorde raise her false consciousness, she should take her own advice and do some serious thinking about the interaction in pop culture (not just hip-hop) between "aspirational" hyper-consumerism, sexism and bigotry against GLBTI. I don't hear anything to aspire to when gay people are treated with contempt, if not erased entirely.
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Hard News: Thursday Music: Doing the Business, in reply to Russell Brown,
Like the Marixst critique discussed previously here, this is a commentary from someone so caught up in her POV she doesn’t get how goddamn imperialist it is.
Yeah, and frankly isn't it adorable listening to American critics magisterially assume their culture, society and politics are universal norms that the rest of the planet MUST be hyper-sensitive to. Of course, it never seems to be a two-way street. As the marketing machine spins up around Ender's Game, what do think are the odds of anyone getting media time in the US to talk about the rather fraught and complex cultural politics of this appropriation of ta moko. (For the record: I'm profoundly uncomfortable with it, but there's no right answer from the Maori Borg.)
Yes, a kid in New Zealand is going to to see the Jay Z/Kanye album (which is the specific root of the lyrics) as distant and irrelevant to her life with her friends. Fucksake.
And heavens forfend that anyone anywhere would have, at best, a rather ambiguous relationship with pop music. Believe me, when I was Lorde's age I found 95% of what was on the radio "distant and irrelevant" to the life I was living too. (Number One on my 16th brithday? 'Living Doll' by Cliff Richards and The Young Ones.)
One last obervation - yeah, I despise a great deal of so-called "bling culture". Not because I have any great difficulty with the idea of young African-Americans having nice things, but because I'm not buying into the idea that the price of upward social mobility for anyone, of any race, is this:
Now once upon a time not too long ago
A nigga like myself had to strong arm a hoe
This is not a hoe in the sense of having a pussy
But a pussy having no God Damn sense, try and push meI've got more than 99 problems, and with crap like this Beyonce's fella is definitely one of mine.
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