Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Russell:
Looks like you made Bomber cry… .
I have just received the equivalent of a drive-by shooting from a Lexus hybrid.
As Sean Plunket once said to me on K Road: "Russell, we live in the cauldron of ideas."
Sometimes, we will be harsh about each others' ideas. It's best not to take it personally when that happens.
But I do feel bound to point out that the family car is a 12 year-old Mazda.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Isn’t that what Hone himself did, ammended and apologised? ;)
That did occur to me. But it took him two goes, and I was more graceful ;-)
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to HORansome,
Well, the tāngata whenua of this place are the Māori. No idea what these “Maori” people keep writing about, though. It’s a common word and I’ve come to think that it means the writer doesn’t know how to spell key words in one of the country’s official languages.
I’m more convinced by the practical argument that the long or short vowel sound can distinguish two words that are spelled identically otherwise. Other writers get around this by using the double “a”.
Oddly enough, we can only have this discussion about daily use because the technology has improved to enable it, and allow the Maori Language Commission to recommend the use of the macron.
And it’s far from universal. Mana magazine, for example, doesn’t use the macron or the double-a. Waatea News uses the double-a for its name, but not to spell “Maori”, or a macron. Maori News Online uses neither. But Maori Television even has the macron in its logo.
So I’m not sure you can go as far as telling people they can’t spell their own language.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Che Tibby,
might just be the same quandary as well-heeled hipsters in Che t-shirts.
Good comparison. (And I say that as someone who long ago owned a Che shirt as a popular culture statement rather than a political one.) Che Guevara was a thug -- although not on the millennial scale of Bin Laden.
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Hard News: Playing the Man, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Irrespective of who's wrong or right, I wonder if Jon Stephenson has set off an Assange Effect - airing the establishment's dirty laundry which rattles them, who then try to shut him down by hook or crook.
Sorta, in one way. But Stephenson hasn't set himself up as an enemy of the body politic. He's saying the system should work as advertised.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Che Tibby,
i think the issue is that what OBL might have thought of maori is irrelevant. you can argue that misguided people like the old duffer Walker shouldn’t see OBL as any kind of hero, but you’re ignoring the old maxim ’the enemy of my enemy etc”.
That's my point, though. Anyone who sees Bin Laden in those terms simply doesn't understand what he believed.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Simon Grigg,
I would’ve preferred the Hague or something/somewhere that reflected that this was not just an American hell
Me too. But you can imagine how that would have gone down in the wingnutosphere.
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Ewan Morris,
Just for the record, this is my transcription and translation of the most relevant part of the interview with Hone Harawira on Te Karere. I have no wish to defend his comments, but I think we should be accurate about exactly what he said.
Thanks for that. But I think the full transcript, including Morrison's question, makes it look worse.
Harawira is specifically framing his statement as a rebuttal to what "non-Maori" say about Bin Laden. He's pretty close to presenting what he says as a Maori perspective there, isn't he?
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Simon Grigg,
But it’s a pity that the U.S. chose to pursue a massive ‘war on terrorism’ as a response to bin Laden’s violent campaign, a war in which far more innocent people have been killed and injured than bin Laden’s initial attacks. Their deaths are also part of this story and must be counted and acknowledged in our reflections on the real costs of this so-called act of ‘justice’
Indeed, and I’ve written about that a lot. The other blog post I wrote this morning is about accountability for civilian victims in that war.
But the Iraqi death toll also includes more than 1700 suicide bombers, most of whom took others with them. Human Rights Watch published a report on the many thousands of civilian victims of insurgent groups, the most prominent of those being al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunna and the Islamic Army in Iraq, which all deliberately targeted civilians:
They have assassinated government officials, politicians, judges, journalists, humanitarian aid workers and those deemed to be collaborating with the foreign forces in Iraq. They have tortured and summarily executed, sometimes by beheading, persons in their custody. And attacks against legitimate military targets, such as army convoys, have been carried out in such a manner that the foreseeable loss of civilian life was far disproportionate to the military gain. All of these attacks are serious violations of international humanitarian law-war crimes-and in some cases they are crimes against humanity.
The US and its allies are absolutely complicit in that they created the conditions for this to happen. But let’s not forget who killed and tortured those thousands of people, and how.
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Righto, I've amended the intro for clarity and accuracy, and added a note that I'd changed it:
We have, inevitably, seen expressions of sympathy for the late Osama, Bin Laden, a man who deserves no sympathy, let alone credit for his actions and beliefs. But expressions from one quarter strike me as particularly misguided. Those Maori who have expressed sympathetic sentiments in the memory of Bin Laden seem to have no grasp of what Bin Laden would have thought about Maori culture.