Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to giovanni tiso,
One could be excused from the way you were presenting it to think that it was the way a substantial number of people, if not one whole side of the debate, looked at the information.
Oh, fine. It was my impression that people were thinking that way, I thought it was unfair to the journalists concerned, and I said so. It does seem to have been a sufficiently substantial issue to generate plenty of discussion.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Don Christie,
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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An interesting comment we've just received from Chris Butcher himself:
The primary thing that needs to develop in NZ is the ecosystem. If there’s only a few key innovators in a market, then it’s a precarious situation for people to move a long way. Whereas movies have a broad base of contract staff who are expecting to “just do one gig” and then move on, games take a lot longer to make and so your developers want to be able to settle in for the long haul. That means there needs to be a breadth of companies in a market, to offer stability and a safety net.
Growing such an industry is challenging. It requires governmental support, IMO – to identify champions, to establish programs of coordination between academia and industry, to provide seed funds for startups, to do international outreach, etc etc. I’m no expert in this. But the UK is trying a lot of innovative things in this area.
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Hard News: The next creative industry?, in reply to nzlemming,
Dave Frampton is seeing success within a small but profitable sector. I doubt he's the only one - he's just the only one I know of.
We tried to get Dave on the show, but he was unavailable. His success via the App Store is very interesting indeed.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Kracklite,
(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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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to giovanni tiso,
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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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Word. Saying admiringly that the US poured half a billion dollar in Haiti would be like cheering them for spending a lot of money in Iraq.
Yep, I'm aware of the history, but the sum of US relief aid since January's earthquake in Haiti -- which I think we'll agree can't be attributed to US foreign policy -- is more than half a billion dollars, and it was all committed within four weeks of the quake. It appears to have been done right, in conjunction with UN agencies and NGOs.
Even if they owe Haiti, I think that's laudable.
PS: So far as I can tell, two wealthy countries with per-capita aid spending below that of the US are New Zealand and Italy. Shame, bro.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Simon Grigg,
And that’s the thing with large amounts of this aid, it does come with the sorts of conditions – political conditions – that taints the goodwill more than a little. It’s rarely unconditionally generous.
Very true. That's why I noted the two big funds, which do seem to be "clean" aid.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Don Christie,
Say what? In terms of %tage of GDP other states make far bigger contributions. You should know that Russell.
No argument there. The top 5 per capita contributors to the WFP are (or were): Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Ireland and Sweden.
But the fact that nearly half of the entire budget of the World Food Programme comes from the US is quite remarkable.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Che Tibby,
@RB. i get that USA does a lot of good things. the trouble is the perception they like to sell of themselves – the one where they could all be crew off USS Enterprise, saving the universe and all that. and that people continuously buy that shit.
Oh, sure. But the contention was that they do nothing good in the world, which
is false.