Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Friday Music: New Zealand's…, in reply to Downbeatdan,
Leroy’s solo EP as Taste NASA is here:
Yes, I gave this a nod in the blog at some point. Great to see him doing so well.
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Hard News: Friday Music: New Zealand's…, in reply to TracyMac,
Woo, spinning some classics at Splore! Nice gig, RB!
I'm pleased!
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Hard News: Friday Music: New Zealand's…, in reply to Downbeatdan,
This just in… Pirongia songwriter Leroy Clampitt has a songwriting credit (track 6) on the new Justin Bieber album.
Nice! That guy's quite the dark horse.
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Hard News: Judicial caprice is no way to…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
“Having said that, I do allow it’s a stern sentence that has been imposed.”
Well, quite. All that guff from McDonald J about being "troubled" by the sentence he supposedly had to impose was tosh. Good grief.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Kyle MacDonald,
I do have a problem with the whole concept of “False Memory Syndrome” though in that it reifies something in a very unhelpful way. It is true that interview techniques of children used to be problematic and that children are inherently more suggestible that adults (although adults are too).
I've never looked at it the same way since I saw a presentation by Dr Maryanne Garry of VUW at a Skeptics conference, which was literally about how false memories can be quite easily created, particularly through repeated interviewing. Although the key message from that is, of course, using proper interview techniques.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Kyle MacDonald,
Yes, that was a great piece of journalism by Tim Hume, and pretty much put a stop to any further influence with ACC. It was beyond shocking that she had been let anywhere near the treatment of sexual abuse survivors.
Do you think she's been able to maintain credibility through attachment to the cases of Peter Ellis and George Gwaze?
I'm convinced Ellis actually was the victim of false memory syndrome, thanks to the incredibly inappropriate interview processes employed in the investigation, and it does seem Gwaze was charged because the authorities misinterpreted acute HIV-related symptoms.
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Polity: Canada voted, in reply to Emma Hart,
She's not talking about economics. She's very happy with the election result because of Trudeau's views on women's rights, on abortion, on Native rights, the number of missing Aboriginal women. His promise of a gender-balanced cabinet. This, too, is "the left".
On the other hand, a Canadian I know is less than pleased and points out that Trudeau (and 29 other Liberal MPs) voted for Harper's explicitly xenophobic Barbaric Cultural Practices Act.
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Polity: Political strategy and Canada’s NDP, in reply to Rich Lock,
*obviously, given the number of political wonks here, I’ll shortly be taken to school with a detailed analysis of the results of the Swedish Federal elections of 2003 or whatever.
I didn't want to say ...
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I will say one more thing. I don’t know that this type of story is a path toward healing for those that need and deserve healing. I’d rather see a book on the life history and profile of the paedophile that was Bert Potter. And such research needs a professional criminologist and a clinician’s involvement. And it needs to not only inform us of the profile of a sexual predator – so that we can better recognise them amongst us – but it also needs to explore why, in particular mothers end up exposing their children to this potential for abuse.
Shit, there's a lot to unpack there, but I simply can't agree that a psychopathology book about the chief abuser is somehow more valid than one that bears witness to the wider story . They're not interchangeable.
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Polity: Political strategy and Canada’s NDP, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Yeah – whatever NDP did it doesn’t seem to have worked at all. I’m getting the impression it’s their voters moving to the Liberals that have been the biggest swing.
Sorry Rob, it’s not working to script.The Ottawa Citizen report tends to agree:
But the concerns NDP strategists had going into the campaign lingered on the hustings. Many Canadians still didn’t really know Mulcair that well and weren’t certain whether to trust the NDP as the face of change federally.
“One of the things we always noticed is the softness of their vote,” said pollster Quito Maggi, CEO of Mainstreet Research. “Some of these votes were just visiting. They were kind of parked with the NDP.”
Those votes, say some longtime NDP strategists, slipped away as Mulcair ran a safe, frontrunner campaign that took fewer risks than the Liberals and didn’t embody some of the dramatic change the party was trumpeting.
For example, the NDP took a similar position to the Conservatives in promising to balance the books over the next four years. The policy was meant to demonstrate strong fiscal management, but sparked questions about whether the NDP’s economic plan, which also included some big ticket items, was realistic. The Liberals, meantime, said they would dip into the red to fund infrastructure pledges.
“The deficit versus non-deficit position of Trudeau and Mulcair … it did hurt in that it got a lot of attention and it did frame (the Liberals) as being bolder than Mulcair,” said one longtime NDP strategist.
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