Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: Popular Paranoiac Politics, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Just what then is New Zealand's leading Internet-based think tank?
About same amount of thoughtfulness as Muriel and co..
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Hard News: The Public Address Word of…, in reply to st ephen,
egg is good
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Hard News: What about that Welfare…, in reply to tatjna,
Actually, Tatjana, you *are* making the case really well. Thank you. As some of your commenters have said, you could easily submit that to a newspaper op-ed page with a smidge of editing. I like this theme:
Those things are not things that make me better than anyone else. What they do is make me luckier. They make me more employable. They are things that came to me through no effort on my part, and a lot of people out there do not have those things.
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People are on a benefit long term because there are more people available than there are jobs available. Because NZ's wages have not kept up with inflation and therefore single parents cannot earn enough to pay child care costs so that they can work the hours required by employers. Because New Zealand still has prejudices against people with disabilities, people who are older, people who might get pregnant and people with brown skin. AND BECAUSE THERE AREN'T ENOUGH JOBS TO GO AROUND. And because a lot of the available jobs are only accessible to those who've done the ten or so years of upskilling required while earning minimum wage supplemented by a benefit.
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Meanwhile, John Key please shut the fuck up. Yes, you were a fatherless child. That's about all you have in common with the children of those dead miners, or the children of the still-alive miners who worked at the now-defunct Pike River Mine. And don't you ever forget that you got your education for free. "Bootstraps", you say? "You too can be like me" you say? Okay, lets see those straps those kids are supposed to pull themselves up by. Because from what I see, they all got cut before these children were even born (but of course, after you benefited from them).
John Key's family offered him the inherited social capital of the privileged wealthy of Europe (and his mother's father was a leather merchant, speaking of bootstraps). They certainly did it hard during his largely fatherless youth, though as you say propped up by all this nation's state supports so blithely dismantled by neolib nutters from 1984 onwards.
But the individualistic 'boy from a state house made good' schtick is so much easier to sell. As is blaming each poor person for the failings of social and market structures deliberately designed for the benefit of others.
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Thanks, Jake. Wow. I so wish there was anyone locally saying that so clearly and forcefully.
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Hard News: The Public Address Word of…, in reply to Paul Williams,
The Germans probably have a word for expat schadenfreude (though I'm not sure they have one for cricket)..
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Official advice from Columbia University's careers office to any students planning on a US public service job in future not to access or discuss WikiLeaks content.
The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.
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Classic reason we need WikiLeaks - the Herald's perenially-confused John Roughan thinks the cables are only trivial gossip (and Prince William's life is far more important for us to know about anyway).
The latest dump from the WikiLeaks website contained next to nothing we didn't know. It was almost entirely gossip and titbits. We were reading them only because we were not supposed to be reading them.
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Diplomats are supposed to find out everything they can about countries and people of interest to their governments.
The slightly salacious observations they make or pass on about leading personalities would not be classified, and it really doesn't matter very much they they have got out.
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Just about everything we have read from diplomatic email boxes this week accords with what we have been reading from honest correspondents covering the same subjects. But nobody is content to file this stuff for corroboration, it is given a new and lurid gloss. It was, after all, "leaked".
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Good interview, ta - and apt peripheral skeeviness
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Boing Boing raises the role of US industry and trade reps in writing Spain's online copyright law?
The first 35 of the 115 cables have been released, and they confirm the widespread suspicion: the Spanish government and the opposition party were led around by the nose by the US representatives who are the real legislative authority in Spain.
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For a bit of context, The Atlantic address official and journalistic attacks on Assange - though I'm reluctant to feed any more of this focus on the man rather than the content. Perhaps those concerned could get on with posting stuff here about the substance of the leaks rather than whinging?
Assange may or may not be grandiose, paranoid and delusional - terms that might be fairly applied at one time or another to most prominent investigative reporters of my acquaintance. But the fact that so many prominent old school journalists are attacking him with such unbridled force is a symptom of the failure of traditional reporting methods to penetrate a culture of official secrecy that has grown by leaps and bounds since 9/11, and threatens the functioning of a free press as a cornerstone of democracy.