Hard News: The Wellington Cables
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To amend, as I missed the edit deadline…
Lie Down with dogs, get up with fleas.
More seriously, I don’t find that merely amusing, I find it sinister. Moral fundamentalism allows no compromise, no grappling with the issues of the real world where we are all compromised. If all judgments are absolute, who cannot be condemned?
To insinuate that those who took Fulbright scholarships and the like were willingly cogniscant of the moral corruption of the US and, rather than forego their venal ambitions, they willingly took a demon lover rather than decide that despite the flaws of the host nation, the institutions involved had aims that were at least in part idealistic and thus worthy of support is… naive at best. I could say worse. Maybe I could say that it’s the equivalent of a sweeping essentialism that construes absolutely everything American as being tainted by association, and those who associate themselves with it as being similarly corrupt.
This sort of essentialism suggests something indistinguishable from a word beginning with “r” and ending in “ism”.
No, I’m too mellow, I won’t drag the heavy mass of the rest of that word out from its pit.
("Out, damned spot!", I hear)
(See what Scotch does? It makes me pompously grandiloquent and self-important. Keep me away from it!)
“Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas” does indeed clarify things and remove ambiguity, but alas, in the wrong way; it backfires because it’s obviously a lazy, judgmental essentialism. One needn’t think about the complexity and tensions within American society because there is an easy slogan available that removes the need for thought. Yes, one can say that noble aims have been co-opted to corrupt purposes, but does that negate entirely the nobility of those initial aims? Were they a lie from their very origin? Can not any good be achieved by dealing with nobly-intended institutions in a flawed regime in order to perpetuate the noble? Is everything “American” irredeemable then because it is American?
I know plenty of Americans who have to live with a system they do not like. Should they emigrate? Where? How? Should they head to the hills and live on lentils? Will that be enough? If they do not, are they corrupt and evil hypocrites?
Admiral Gorshkov said, pragmatically paraphrasing Voltaire, “Better is the enemy of the good enough”, meaning that systems that could actually be fielded under the exigencies of (cold) wartime were better than any number of paper studies (to digress, this is something that NASA has forgotten in an example that we should all observe, leading to its nickname, the “Need Another Study Agency”, and so, almost forty-two years after Apollo 11, they can’t get out of low Earth orbit). Gorshkov got results: he made the Soviet navy a real force for good or ill, but for his aims at least.
Demanding perfection and nothing but perfection is not only a path to futility; I suggest that it’s a betrayal, establishing a fantasy as a tiny oasis, nay, a mirage amidst corruption versus real incremental gains in the long term.
Thus spake Kracklite, the tipsy Fabian.
P.S. You know, I could have been much more succinct just by referring to the People’s Front of Judea.
P.P.S. Giovanni does cut rather a profile indeed. Very much the up-and-coming senator in a black and scarlet interpretation of the white and purple, I thought.
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
Kopassus
The really nice guys - a steam of horrendous civil rights abuses including the mass rape -murder of Chinese-Indonesian women in 1998 and all sorts of nasty shit in West Papua as I type. They have immunity from civil law in Indonesia and are almost a state within a state.
These, just to be clear, are the guys that even Bush wanted nothing to do with but Obama has lifted sanctions on and is training and arming.
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See what Scotch does?
Here, I've poured you another one :)
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
I did see an article recently suggesting that by one measure NZ was a much more generous country but I am buggered if I can find that story so consider it hearsay for now.
Perhaps this one? Which can be summed up as: "Achieve highly when they try, but Could Try Harder."
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@AlexiMostrous live tweeting with the judges permission from the Assange courtroom.
And the Guardian has crashed I guess from the live blog hits.
If this is just a hearing, one wonders if the US have any idea what a trial would be like.
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There seemed to have been a rush to get the first tweet out when bail was granted.
@newsbrooke seemed to beat @AlexiMostrous to the punch. You can almost see the smoke rising from Washington. -
Che Tibby, in reply to
You can almost see the smoke rising from Washington.
nice to see the rule of law working in some countries though.
although, The Guardian has him still in the slammer after the Swedes appealled.
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nzlemming, in reply to
Not because of the appeal, initially, but because he couldn't be released until the bail was actually posted. It takes time to raise the cash. Initially, the Swedes were reported as not going to appeal, but it seems someone changed their mind.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
These, just to be clear, are the guys that even Bush wanted nothing to do with but Obama has lifted sanctions on and is training and arming.
That can't be, because with Obama in charge things have changed and we don't need WikiLeaks and we'll have peace in our time.
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. . . with Obama in charge things have changed and we don’t need WikiLeaks and we’ll have peace in our time.
Not even kids' bedtime stories are safe from that awful Mr Assange. What a horrid, horrid man.
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Martin Lindberg, in reply to
Moral fundamentalism allows no compromise, no grappling with the issues of the real world where we are all compromised.
Word, Mr Kracklite.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
To insinuate that those who took Fulbright scholarships and the like were willingly cogniscant of the moral corruption of the US
Who suggested that? I'm asking unrhetorically here. Was it something that I/S said? Because all of a sudden Russell started trotting out names of past Fulbrights and I kind of missed the connection with the WikiLeaks cables.
I would expect a Fulbright to be aware of who's funding their research, just as I'd like them to be aware of what their research might be used for ('o look, I've mounted a sensor on this robot which now can move around the campus freely and evade all kinds of obstacles. I see nothing sinister in that at all, look at it go!') and what kind of work their wider universities are engaging in. Incredibly in my research (and yes, I'm an Eng-Lit major) it is possible to get funding from the US Defence Department, they're quite happy to listen. And even if I couldn't see the military applications, maybe they could. But then I also like to think I was quite aware of the funding I was getting here, from the New Zealand government, and why I was getting it and what that meant.
Giovanni does cut rather a profile indeed.
It was lovely to meet you.
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Che Tibby, in reply to
Incredibly in my research (and yes, I'm an Eng-Lit major) it is possible to get funding from the US Defence Department, they're quite happy to listen
that's because sometimes with weapons it's the cultural imagination that counts, not the original purpose.
who ever thought "bells + gunpowder = cannon"? not the chinese.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Who suggested that? I’m asking unrhetorically here. Was it something that I/S said? Because all of a sudden Russell started trotting out names of past Fulbrights and I kind of missed the connection with the WikiLeaks cables.
The Fulbrights are established under the same act as the supposedly scandalous International Visitor programme. If you accept the blood-on-their-hands argument, they, too, are tainted.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
(See what Scotch does? It makes me pompously grandiloquent and self-important. Keep me away from it!)
I find it makes me exceptionally wise and articulate.
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Richard Holbrooke is one of many examples of how the US has been a force for good.
I find it very reassuring that Obama has such people handling foreign policy.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
Richard Holbrooke is one of many examples of how the US has been a force for good.
I find it very reassuring that Obama has such people handling foreign policy.
You do realise he was the principal person responsible for making sure that the US congress turn a blind eye to the massacres in East Timor, yes?
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Was it something that I/S said?
T'was.
Here, I've poured you another one :)
Evil! Evil!
It was lovely to meet you.
...Reshiprocally ... hic
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You do realise he was the principal person responsible for making sure that the US congress turn a blind eye to the massacres in East Timor, yes?
The Indonesian invasion was in 1975, Holbrooke joined Jimmy Carter's administration in 1977.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
The Indonesian invasion was in 1975, Holbrooke joined Jimmy Carter's administration in 1977.
At which point he proceeded to ensure that the US congressmen that were trying to raise issues about the occupation be silenced. He's also the Richard Holbrooke who cut his teeth in the Phoenix Program and who worked on the Pentagon Papers. Lovely bloke by all accounts.
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Yes. I forgot that Jimmy Carter has long been a destroyer of human rights as well documented by various left wing web sites. Much like Obama now.
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If you want to defend Carter's record in Indonesia, I suggest you do it based on facts. Same goes for Obama. It seems that you're quite happy to take politicians at their rhetoric - sorry, it won't cut it.
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supposedly scandalous International Visitor programme.
You know, the only person I have seen using the word "scandalous" with the International Visitor programme is you Russell.
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Greg Dawson, in reply to
But presumably better per capita income...as I believe a fair amount of US aid money is given to US corn farmers and the like?
wikipedia gives GNI per capita (using exchange rates) as:
US - USD47240
NZ - USD26830I haven't confirmed that these are for the same period as those used by the OECD figures quoted earlier.
However, that disparity in GNI is indeed why we rank higher on the percentage of GNI in foreign aid, despite their higher per capita aid (the US 0.2% vs NZ 0.29% figure).
To answer your second question - the figures I quoted are net official development assistance, as defined the OECD. They define ODA as net contributions by govt agencies to countries and multilateral institutions, where the aim of the contribution is to promote economic development and welfare.
So it definitely excludes any domestic subsidies. I have nfi if it excludes military aid. And I don't full understand the interaction with 'OA'.
ETA: More scotch for you Kracklite - it does wonderful things. Although I may have chosen to interpret
("Out, damned spot!", I hear)
as being because Spot had fleas...
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Russell Brown, in reply to
You know, the only person I have seen using the word “scandalous” with the International Visitor programme is you Russell
Well, I/S described it as a " journo conversion program" and said the journalists had been " recruited by the US as agents of influence". That sounds fairly scandalous.
There are also quite a few comments like this around:
What is the US Government doing inviting (paying for?) top NZ journalists to the States for exactly? Is this why NZ news seems so, so, censured and biased? Are all these journalists working for the US government? What is going on here?
I think I'm not just making it up.
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