Posts by Russell Brown
-
Am I right in thinking the protesters have done reasonably well for now?
A government statement said that Suleiman, who is apparently playing an increasingly powerful role, agreed to a number of measures including the formation of a committee of political and judicial figures to oversee changes to the constitution which would scrap provisions that limit the ability of the opposition to run for the presidency
The government said it will also immediately release "prisoners of conscience of all persuasions" and end legal restrictions on the press. However, it gave only a partial commitment to lift the state of emergency, which gives the president considerable powers and has been used to jail opponents, saying that it will be rescinded "based on the security situation and an end to the threats to the security of society".
The meeting was greeted with scepticism by Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, who is now a prominent opposition voice.
"The process is opaque. Nobody knows who is talking to whom at this stage. It's managed by Vice-President Suleiman. It is all managed by the military and that is part of the problem," he said on NBC.
Another member of ElBaradei's group, the National Association for Change, who attended the talks with Suleiman, said they had been "positive" but did not go far enough.
-
Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
Seems a tad patronising to me. The implication being that if the young were not westernised, this revolution would not have happened. Ummm.
I've used the phrase "west-facing" before, which I think is more accurate than "westernised", which implies some sort of mental colonisation.
-
Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I think they’d whinge a lot and still bid. Whether the government would get a better price if all pricing was transparent is an interesting question.
When you consider that government = us, it's a very interesting question. Can we get an economist up in here?
-
Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to George Darroch,
Honesty in foreign policy. Now there’s a thought.
A thought: which countries would top the Honesty in Foreign Policy Index?
-
Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
if they were to get into the wrong hands they could reveal details about the vehicles’ configuration that would be useful in planning an attack.
The information noted by Jon was of that order.
-
Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
A former colleague was a transparency absolutist, who believed that even tactical response plans to terrorist incidents should be public information. The problem with that is that terrorists will read the plans, adapt their plans accordingly, and their attacks will become vastly more successful through the expedient of hindering, if not killing, the responders.
Jon Stephenson pointed out to me an apparently innocuous piece of technical information relating to the NZ Afghan contingent that was revealed in the Afghan war diaries and expressed the view that it would be highly useful to anyone who wanted to attack the NZ troops with an IED -- in the event that it actually came to to attention of such people.
Both the war leaks diaries were, of course, a great and valuable thing on balance, but I found his point quite fascinating.
-
Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Let’s just hope we’re not being primed for another Operation Leaf…
No, not that sort of story. Just grubby Sunday paper bizness.
-
Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Idiot Savant,
Sure. The problem is precisely that our government’s don’t behave virtuously, and use secrecy to hide the fact and to avoid being held to account.
And held to account they should be.
But there's been a good deal of absolutist rhetoric expressed since we all started talking about Wikileaks, and some people clearly believe there should be no public secrets. At all.
That seems unrealistic, to put it mildly -- because even a purely virtuous government would find it necessary to maintain some secrets, or to take advice in confidence.
Even simply releasing the quarter of a million Cablegate documents into the wild would be reckless. It appears that the Guardian's redacting team may already have placed Morgan Tsvangirai in mortal peril by failing to remove his name from a diplomatic cable from Zimbabwe.
In that case, the US government was behaving exactly as we would wish it to do in taking counsel from Mugabe's opponents -- but it could only safely do so in secret.
Wikileaks' "not our problem -- it's the Guardian's fault" response via Twitter when that problem emerged was spectacularly unhelpful.
-
Speaker: What PACE actually does, in reply to George Darroch,
I had the misfortune of having to go onto the dole in 2005. Misfortune, because my experience was entirely similar to the first part of this story. Rather than endure Work and Income try and shoehorn me into the very first job that required a warmed-up corpse, I went back into education, and then to Australia. I will very likely face similar circumstances again in a couple of weeks.
I was lucky enough to be in that position at a time (1991) when the then-National government was very keen to move people to Taskforce Green and/or Job Plus. We did Planet magazine on that basis for about 18 months.
It paid only what the dole paid, but instead of being hassled to do something where my skills would be wasted, I was able to do something that developed my skills – and which, I think, had beneficial effects for businesses around us. I certainly increased my own value in the employment market, and thus paid more tax than would otherwise have been the case. I also worked bloody hard.
The irony is that TFG and Job Plus operated without anything like the level of accountability demanded by PACE. They were very loosey-goosey indeed. But that was then, this now …
-
Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Don Christie,
Journalists have their own, often narrow, agendas which are not generally those of the public interest.
Woah. You're talking about some very, very good journalists here. Leigh faced down an intimidating lawsuit from the corrupt British MP Jonathan Aitken, stood by his impeccably-researched story -- and saw Aitken eventually jailed for perjury. Davies has also shown courage and dedication, most recently in the phone-hacking case.
They're not exactly Jonathan Marshall.