Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Ten Thousand Maniacs, in reply to Peter Darlington,
It's still the grand adventure and the cold war continuing to play itself out...
After the shooting down of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983 Aeroflot was banned from flying into the US, with the situation to be reviewed after twelve months. Three months later, when the furore had faded, flights quietly resumed.
While the scenario of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was played up throughout the Reagan-Thatcher era, no-one ever refuted the claim that NATO held around an eight day stockpile of small arms ammunition, the manufacturer of which just happened to be Czechoslovakia. Business as usual was never quite what we were led to believe.
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Hard News: Ten Thousand Maniacs, in reply to Russell Brown,
What’s more, rhetoric of that hue has a recent and unhappy history. In 2001, George W Bush similarly hailed 9/11 as a declaration of war.
The Decider back then, doing domestic damage control in his stocking feet.
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Hard News: Ten Thousand Maniacs, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
I'm told there is a bit of a fightback against the French Flag overlay on fb...
There's certainly been a bit of selectivity in how Facebook responds to these kind of events.
Strange, considering that it appears to have a huge and highly sophisticated user base in the Arab world. This from the Egyptian Hani Abbas.
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Up Front: How I Learned to Stop Worrying…, in reply to linger,
And then there was the Smurfs with, what, a 100-1 gender ratio?
Plus they spend most of their time being pursued by a creep dressed as a paedophile priest who's a dead ringer for John "Kiwi/Iwi" Ansell.
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Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to Alfie,
Peter Dunne stands out for his robust criticism
Well yes, though his final paragraph, where he claims that "The political civil war of the last week has done nothing at all for any of the detainees on Christmas Island" is standard Dunne touting himself as Mister Common Sense once he's sensed the direction the wind's blowing. The "political civil war" that Dunne belittles was sparked by the considerable and largely solo efforts of Kelvin Davis.
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Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to chris,
You could have knocked me down with a feather! Didn't she preside over the enhancement of human rights?
Perhaps St Helen was a little rattled over reports that a bunch of natives had been plotting to catapult cows at her and Dubya. A bit like Key taking it badly over being shirtfronted for being "gutless".
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Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to SHG,
Joe Wylie- Christmas Island Detention Centre was opened by the Labor Govt in late 2008.
I'm aware that the current facility was set up by the Rudd Government to handle people attempting to enter Australia by boat. When I said "repurposing" I was referring to the practice of using it as a holding centre for all potential deportees, incuding New Zealand citizens. That happened under Tony Abbott.
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Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to lynne walker,
And to me one of the most important points is that no one should be detained on Christmas Island in such horrible conditions.
Repurposing Christmas Island was a Tony Abbott initiative that Malcolm Turnbull seems happy to continue. He's also retained Abbott appointee Peter Dutton as Immigration Minister, despite Dutton joking about the plight of Pacific nations facing rising sea levels, and his initially denying that private security operators had spied on Green Senator Sarah Hanson-Young on her visit to Nauru.
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Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
The 'truth', as spoken by the Prime Minister and soon widely reported by the media, is that the majority of the detainees are violent sex offenders. The PM even has a document to prove it, although he doesn't think he'll be able to make it public.
Both Martyn Bradbury and Helen Clark played a similar line to what turned out to be a largely imaginary middle NZ at the time of the Urewera raids. It's early days yet.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
a little quaint in the age of ISS and Rupert Murdoch
Rupert Murdoch has moved his Lair to the International Space Station?
Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Sunday Star-Times, SuperSonic Transport - you live long enough, the world runs out of acronyms and recycles them while they're still warm.