Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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If your study plan has a tangible financial return to 'me' as a taxpayer in the foreseeable future, then carry on. Otherwise go to the library, you burden to society who is wasting our meagre resources.
I'd replace the word 'tangible' with the word 'probable' but yeah, that's pretty much it. Perhaps it helps if you bear in mind the opportunity cost: ie each year paying someone to study Lacan, or contemplate Middlemarch is a sum of money that don't go into health and welfare, or into training doctors, engineers, research scientists (cough) etc.
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To be fair, you didn't ask as such, you merely dismissed the humanities as worthless. Not quite the same thing.
To be slightly fairer, I didn't dismiss them as worthless - I quite laek that thar William Faulkner feller, etc - just questioned the wisdom of paying for people to dabble in them.
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Danyl’s argument represents the most shallow form of utilitarianism – “If it is not of immediate discernible benefit to me, then it is no benefit whatsoever.”
This is otherwise known as solipsism. Maybe philistinism. Perhaps reductionism. Very probably egotism.
The hysteria speaks for itself. If you ask professionals or scientists what society gains from their training then they just laugh, because the answer is so obvious. If you ask people who study philosophy or literature why the rest of us should fund their studies then they fly into a rage. Philistinism! Egotism! It's hugely important! In abstract ways that can never be quantified! But nevertheless put our entire civilisation at risk if they are ever questioned!
Also, I think that many of the words you used to describe me don't mean what you think they mean.
if nobody was trained to be, say, a historian, it's not very clear who would get to write the books that you could read in your spare time and be as good as somebody who's had to study the stuff. Is Danyl suggesting historical research be carried out by amateurs?
There's a very vigorous attack going on against a straw-man argument I never made. I'm all for professional historians, post-graduates learning research skills etc. My original post was a response to this comment:
a society where a scattering of folk have made an intellectual investment in history, art, literature philosophy et al, knowing it's not leading to any specific career or ability to improve their earnings, but just because they want to know more about cultural stuff.
If someone is passionate about history and wants to become a professional historian then I'm all for that, and happy for my tax-dollars to subsidise it. If someone thinks it would cool to learn about the French Revolution, because they've always been kind of curious about it, then I'm lost as to why my tax dollars should pay for that, when they can just go to the library instead.
Personally I feel history is in a separate category to the other humanities in terms of social value. Historians play a role in the national conversation in ways that modern literary critics, art-historians, philosophers etc generally don't, for reasons I don't really understand.
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In her Q & A interview she mentioned that she'd finally heard from Goff and Little (I think) a day earlier. After a week of bad media.
It seems like this whole thing could have been avoided if they'd phoned her up and been polite and reasonable instead of making rather high-handed statements through the press, and that after several weeks of people criticising Labour for having poor communications and decision-making processes, they still make poor decisions and communicate them badly.
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I want to live in a society where a scattering of folk have made an intellectual investment in history, art, literature philosophy et al, knowing it's not leading to any specific career or ability to improve their earnings, but just because they want to know more about cultural stuff. I'd like to think we all benefit.
But you don't have to go to university to study those things. If you're interested in literature or philosophy or history you can just read about those things yourself, without getting the rest of the country to pay to indulge your interests.
I think the social value of people going to university and studying literature, philosophy etc is currently a negative value, since the net result is generally a person who is unable to communicate their ideas about art/philosophy/whatever to a non-academic audience.
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A circuit breaker is needed and I’m still inclined to agree with dc_red earlier. It mightn’t be the Leader who has to change.
It might not be the leader who has to change. But the party needs to wake up to reality, realise they're failing and determine to make changes. Instead they seem willing to blunder on, moaning about how mean the media is and irritably wondering when the electorate is going to 'wake up' and vote them back into their rightful place as the government.
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Policies aren't sufficient, unless you wed them to values and a narrative. The percentage of the population that actually reads political speeches and evaluates the policies laid out in them is probably around the 0.001% mark.
In 2008 we knew that John Key was a self-made multi-millionaire and that he would use his economic brilliance to bring about a 'step-change' in the economy, and that his policies were wed to that vision. You didn't need to read any speeches to know that - it was the central element of National's political marketing strategy.
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The electorate voted for MMP thinking they’d get better representation with greater accountability. Ironically, the very concept of a list MP is the most unaccountable, unrepresentative politician in any jurisdiction outside Libya. Or maybe Zimbabwe.
In reality the accountability and representation has greatly increased with the introduction of list MPs. In the major parties they almost all want to be electorate MPs - so their careers aren't subject to the whims of the leadership - so many electorates have two MPs advocating for them instead of just the one. And the list MPs feel accountable to the electorate that they aspire to, as well as the wider population.
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It's a strange thing - if I remember correctly the Worth Affair was handled similarly by Key when it blew up, but the media never questioned his leadership.
You do not remember correctly. The first thing we found out about Worth was that the PM had sacked him.
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**Re-**position?
Are KiwiSaver, Working for Families and the Cullen fund the policies of a conservative government?