Hard News: Dirty Politics
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Rachel Stewart has written a great piece in the Taranaki Daily News -- You can't unknow what you know John Key -- on the national embarrassment of having a PM who thinks rape jokes are funny. And other stuff.
It's refreshing to read some journalism from the heart in our MSM.
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I recall an incident back at school where a student was sexually assaulted in the shower with soap; big cover up – the perpertrators were suspended for a week or so, the victim left school, the police were not called.
Massive question marks hanging over a growing list of organisations on this. One of the comments below the article you linked to states:
There was another open thread running on the subject.They not only closed the comments, the also delete the entire string of posts.
Mind you that being said it was being swamped with nasty fanboys club and their typical “leftie are this” type rants. when its hardly a case of a left / right side of the political spectrum issue.
This appears to still be the case days later
*Comments on this story are now closed.
Far longer than would be necessary to moderate out the filth and present the criticisms of the PM by commentators.
Even diving through the rabbit hole and giving John Key the benefit of the doubt:
White Ribbon reached out to the prime minister and were told he had no idea what he was about to be involved in. Key also did not understand the rape reference.
It should be clear as day to him now. White Ribbon publicly state:
White Ribbon Day celebrates the many men willing to show leadership and commitment to promoting safe, healthy relationships within families and encourages men to challenge each other on attitudes and behaviour that are abusive.
The clock is now ticking on Stuff.co.nz to represent its readerships’ views against rape culture, it’s most prominently ticking on whether John Key’s actually has the courage to challenge abusive attitudes and behaviour after the fact and it’s arguably ticking on White Ribbon’s preparedness to put consideration for victims and awareness of what constitutes abuse ahead of celebrity endorsement.
Some agitators have gone to pains to point out that White Ribbon as an organisation is specifically focused on violence by ♂ against ♀. It’s possibly also now worth asking just how useful such a delineation is in protecting the widest scope of individuals and maximising awareness of the spectrum of issues that society faces.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
It’s refreshing to read some journalism from the heart in our MSM
But oh, my, god, the comments!
I'm with Chris on this, too... -
Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Key 'facts'....
It’s refreshing to read some journalism from the heart in our MSM.
Michele A'Court weighs in on Key's lack of facts, in fact just making stuff up, as well... she consistently tries to properly inform people, unlike the PM.
Last week a report from the Children's Commission revealed nearly one-third of Kiwi kids are living in poverty. Our Prime Minister says that's partly because their parents are too whacked out on drugs to get a job. "Go ask any employer… they'll tell you, if they drug test people, some of those people that they are testing they cannot hire because that's the issue."
Sure, that's not backed up by stuff like facts. Figures released last year suggest very few beneficiaries are taking drugs. Of about 8000 beneficiaries sent for job drug tests, only 22 tested positive or refused to take the tests. -
izogi, in reply to
But oh, my, god, the comments!
I’d like to propose a toast to Stuff.co.nz, with it’s seemingly random and anonymous moderation staff who appear to do everything in their power to let through whichever comments are most likely to provoke more comments, and suppress those which might reduce future page loads.
Okay, not so random.
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Alfie, in reply to
But oh, my, god, the comments!
Stuff... a venue where village idiots are free to voice their opinions and air passionately-held prejudices.
I must admit that I've had all Stuff comments turned off in Ghostery for ages and rarely see them anymore. I like it that way.
A quick peek with a different browser shows that, rather than representing any genuine exchange of views, the majority of comments probably stem from a coordinated call to action from the low-IQ wing of the Young Nats.
Dirty Politics is still alive and kicking. Because to some people, kicking comes more naturally than intelligent debate.
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This story deserves a mention in the Dirty Politics thread. Lynton Crosby of Crosby-Textor fame is in line to score a knighthood in the UK, presumably for his role in the tories' election win rather than his sterling work promoting big tobacco.
The local equivalent would be smarmy John bestowing honours on Slater, Ede, Glucina, Odgers and Graham for their dedication to undermining democracy.
UKIP is strongly denouncing Cameron's gongs-for-chums mentality.
Knighthoods should be for those who've served the UK with distinction. Lynton Crosby served the Tories with distinction. Not the same thing!
Labour MP Paul Flynn also expresses his disgust.
I welcome this appointment because it will drive the honours system into deeper disrepute. The more it is abused, the more people will come to regard it as at best arbitrary, and at worst corrupt.
Mind you, PM Pig Porker has form in this area. He gave his barber an MBE last year for "services to hairdressing".
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Friends in high places...
Lynton Crosby of Crosby-Textor fame is in line to score a knighthood in the UK
In a similar vein Dame Margaret Bazley is one of the 10 nominations for New Zealander of the Year 2016 - which honours "people who have achieved extraordinary things in a Kiwi way."
Surely they mean in the Key way as far as Bazley is concerned - and perhaps a special award for services to water pollution and supporting the erosion of democracy.Not sure if Julie Christie is on this judging panel too?
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The Herald cartoon today
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izogi, in reply to
the majority of comments probably stem from a coordinated call to action from the low-IQ wing of the Young Nats.
From what I've seen it can go any of multiple ways, but it's not a great forum for anything resembling rational debate. The moderation system, and apparent random bias, maybe depending on the whim of whichever anonymous staff member's doing mod on the article, let through cruel and vile comments just as much as it blocks the opposite, no matter what the underlying view of the poster.
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Sacha, in reply to
I've had all Stuff comments turned off
Have achieved this accidentally. #huzzah
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The spies the limit...
http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/74734722/kiwi-nobel-laureate-maurice-wilkins-investigated-by-mi5-in-the-1950s-for-spyingNew Zealand Nobel Prize laureate scientist Professor Maurice Wilkins was one of several Kiwis suspected in the 1950s of spying for the communists. No evidence was ever found that he had been a spy.
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"We have nothing concrete against Wilkins except the somewhat tenuous fact that he was vehement in the defence of (Alan) Nunn May and the right of physicists to pass on their knowledge as they saw fit," a minute on the file, dated June 12, 1953, said. By then, Wilkins was working as assistant director of the Biophysics Research Unit at the Medical Research Council in London.
A Home Office Warrant was issued to allow the security service to intercept Wilkins' mail..Just what was the trigger for this story's re-emergence today?
Re-accusing the cleared in the media, so cheap.
Let's them have another dig at Sutch, too.
Does Ric Stevens have history in this area
or is he doing someone else's bidding?This strikes me as inverse 'cyber-bullying' somehow
The NZ Stasi wishes you a Happy New Year
and instructs you to be ever vigilant
All 'queer fish' must be reported.
We have always been at war with Science! -
Joe Wylie, in reply to
This strikes me as inverse 'cyber-bullying' somehow
You really do have to contort yourself to read that piece as anything other than a deliberate posthumous smear. Something similar was attempted twenty years ago in Australia when the Brisbane Courier-Mail attempted to portray the late historian Manning Clark as a possible Soviet agent.
In that case the motive was clear. It was simply another offensive in Australia's heavily politically charged history wars, where academics such as Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle have espoused theories on the the treatment of indigenous Australians that bear a disturbing resemblance to holocaust denial.
Without a clear point, Ric Stevens's piece reads like an isolated fart on the final day of the silly season. Having recently finished Ginger Strand's fascinating The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic, about Kurt Vonnegut and his older scientist sibling Bernard's work for General Electric in the immediate post-WW2 years, the scenario of denigrating scientists who held genuine moral concerns as enemy agents is instantly recognisable.
While Ric Stevens has obviously done some digging on Maurice Wilkins, it appears to be in the service of skullduggery rather than in illuminating the achievements of a distinguished New Zealander fallen into obscurity. The only other Stevens piece I can recall, memorable mainly for its contempt for whatever might be left of its readers' intelligence, was his convoluted and pretentious defence of the paper's abysmal "cartoonist".
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Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
— Winston Churchill -
Sacha, in reply to
Just what was the trigger for this story's re-emergence today?
Documents only just declassified and released, I gather.
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linger, in reply to
Exactly – the point of the story is that we now have access to MI5 files on Kiwis suspected of being spies in the early 1950s, including Wilkins. The article may be badly written, with poorly selected and organised information (the potted family history, in particular, seems supremely irrelevant), but it does not seem in any way a deliberate attempt to smear Wilkins. The point is explicitly and repeatedly made that though Wilkins was one of several suspects at the time, there was no direct evidence, and it is highly unlikely that he was actually the person sought by the MI5 investigation.
Neither are these descriptions of Wilkins especially new: see e.g. this BBC radio program about him from July 2015 (MP3 available for download).
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I'm not sure why the Maurice Wilkins story is news just now. The relevant files were released in 2010.
It might be interested to see, whether over time, further information becomes available to confirm the cases against other suspected spies. -
Joe Wylie, in reply to
The article may be badly written, with poorly selected and organised information (the potted family history, in particular, seems supremely irrelevant), but it does not seem in any way a deliberate attempt to smear Wilkins.
Thanks for the BBC link. Perhaps it's simply ineptitude on the part of the author of the Fairfax piece, but it's hard to see the focus on Wilkins's having been of interest to the security services as anything other than mean-spirited and sensationalist. Introducing known Soviet agents Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, who hadn't the remotest connection to Wilkins, seems a cheap attempt to juice things up. If your readers need to be given that kind of information by way of context, a sentence or two on the McCarthyist paranoia of those times might have provided a little balance.
John von Neumann, who was rather more central to the Manhattan Project than Wilkins, and whose mathematical work provided much of the basis for Wilkins's work on the discovery of the structure of DNA, died under military guard in a Washington DC hospital. The official fear was that he might reveal military secrets during his drawn-out suffering from terminal cancer. If he'd had a "kiwi connection", perhaps that alone might have been enough to inspire a little latter-day muckraking.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Please explain?
Documents only just declassified and released, I gather.
Just where did you 'gather' that from, to sound so authoritative?
The documents were released in August 2010 that ain't 'recent'! (except for geology).But I do see that Ric Stevens did run this story on his own blog in late November 2015 - so he has a personal interest in the story, and a laudable recycling ethic....
Personally I think a story like that is too easy to use as clickbait for the anti-science brigade in the current climate. Many won't read deeply enough - linger and Sacha's tag team of support aren't enough to dissuade me of its innocent intentions - my grimmer worldview posits that for every person who reads that article and says 'gosh we live in different times' there will be a mob of lunkheads sharpening their pitchforks and retarring their torches...
And it is still only half a story - far too common in Fairfax and APN articles these days - who was 'the Australian' - if the writer is going to air old suspicions against one he should do it for all (disclaimers aside).
in possibly unrelated news - there was a 5.1 earthquake near Wilkins birthplace yesterday a mere 100 years and approx 20 days after his birth (Wilkins was born at Pongaroa, Wairarapa, on December 15, 1916) - a quantum entanglement perhaps?
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linger, in reply to
Aha! Repeated media attention on Wilkins in the year marking the centenary of his birth seems less of a coincidence -- though that particular argument for timeliness was not explicitly made in either the BBC programme or the Stevens piece.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Though that particular argument for timeliness was not explicitly made in either the BBC programme or the Stevens piece.
Which is my case – there are various ‘good reasons’ for this piece surfacing, none of which are properly addressed – so I always wonder what are the ‘real reasons’ then…
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linger, in reply to
The real reason might be the most boring one, that Stevens heard the BBC programme and thought it might make a more interesting story for a NZ audience if the Kiwi connection were emphasised more.
Sure, he also jettisoned the nuance and scientific detail of the BBC account (and the fact that MI5 concluded Wilkins was innocent and closed the file in 1955) – but do we expect anything else of our news media now? -
Sacha, in reply to
Documents only just declassified and released, I gather.
Just where did you 'gather' that from
From the RNZ interview yesterday. Obviously wrong.
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linger, in reply to
There’s a few ways it could still be true.
(i) The MI5 investigation into Wilkins was initiated by a request from the CIA [who were concerned about a combination of three things: Wilkins had once been a member of the NZ Communist Party; he had been working on the Manhattan Project; and he was openly in favour of sharing scientific knowledge to facilitate collaborative research across borders]. The MI5 documents were declassified in 2010; but the CIA documents may have been declassified more recently.(ii) The MI5 investigation spanned five years, so if documents related to the start of the investigation were released in 2010, that would mean documents relating to its completion would be released now.
(iii) It’s also very likely, given the sheer volume of material declassified, and its release in nonelectronic form, that journalists will have taken several years to find any particular story in the mass of data.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
the time bandwidths...
the RNZ interview yesterday. Obviously wrong.
Not obviously wrong
I think Noelle misspoke.
The Stuff Wilkins story goes online at 5am.
Noelle sees it.
Later that day she says "..in the news today according to released declassified documents..." or similar -
she meant 'in the newspaper', in the science section, but linked to on news pages - loosely 'news, today...'
She does not specify when the 'declassified documents' were released, just that they exist - and I can find no newer released documents - it becomes a conflation of bare facts, neither wrong nor necessarily temporally related......ergo, there was an illusory or ambiguous view created,
dynamic communication relies on clarity and trust.Language is coding-magick, spell-binding sentences do work.
Sloppiness on message, while the staff of life for fiction, can be a minefield in the real world...
:- )
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