Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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God, this is frustrating. All New Zealand has to do is hold out for a wee bit until the weather closes in, but they lack the technique. And, it seems, basic nous.
It's interesting just how much more effective Harbhajan Singh is on this pitch than Vettori was. Vettori looked barely interested; now, Harbhajan seems unplayable.
What a shower this bunch is. I'd probably have more fun supporting England.
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If you mean cultural theories in relation to Foucault, we should probably say post-structuralism.
Except Foucault wasn't a post-structuralist. He was more a member of the old French history of science school, a la Gaston Bachelard. And the other interesting thing is that Foucault and Theory in general are, I think, becoming increasingly unfashionable in academia. It's been quite a noticeable trend since about 2000. Those of us who had Theory shoved down our throats as grad students in the '90s tend to be quite hostile to it, or at least ambivalent. The real Theory die-hards in academic departments are often baby boomers.
So Phelan's article is actually, I think, a bit of an outlier, even in the humanities. Most humanities scholarship, outside of media and cultural studies anyway, tends not to be that intensely invested in Theory. The Phelan piece -- incisive though it was, in parts -- seems a little mummified, like something preserved in amber since about 1986. It doesn't accurately reflect what's going on in most local academic departments, outside of a particular branch of cultural studies.
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More alarming than: "His solution includes...abandoning MMP for [a] system that allows the Government to make "bold" decisions."?
He sounds like someone playing a really bad game of Civ. Oh no! We've had a couple of turns of anarchy! What do I do? I know -- DESPOTISM!
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That's a wonderful quote, Philip.
I just came across this, in an old essay by W. J. Cameron:
What is to be deplored is ... the general tendency to foreshorten history, to isolate geographically or culturally ... Present-mindedness, nationalism, parochialism, and anti-intellectualism abound in [New Zealand], and it useless to fulminate against such an inevitable trait of an intellectually underdeveloped country.
It's a pity so little has changed since 1968.
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life experience is far more useful when you're face to face with the mother of a dead child than an understanding of what some French philosopher has to say on deconstructionalism [sic].
Right, but I'd like it if trainee journalists were exposed more to the question of why such stories are covered. Whose interests are served by putting a grieving mother on the front page? How is that story created, and why? A mother's grief might be pure, unmediated experience, but it's anything but once it's crafted into a 'story' and put into a newspaper. One would hope that journalism students are made aware of the fictionalizing and role-assignment (who's demonized or scape-goated here?) that go into creating these narratives. Is there a particular view of reality that's being drummed into the public consciousness by the constant repetition of apparently 'simple' human interest stories?
Similarly, it would be nice if journalism education covered ideas like moral entrepreneurship or moral panic, and the press's often shameful history of furthering these kinds of social epidemics. What does it mean, for instance, when the Herald decides to devote a section of its website to crime, despite static or falling actual crime rates? How does this influence public opinion? What are its political consequences?
Foucault's a stimulating theorist (though I wouldn't want to rely on him for particular historical details), but there's more involved in the Theory/practice debate than his merits, or Derrida's, or Bourdieu's, or whoever's. It's that journalism is both pervasive (one might even say hegemonic) and oddly unreflective as a profession. It's an incredibly powerful medium whose practitioners often seem comfortably inured to their role in manipulating the way people think and vote. Sure, exposure to critical theory in journalism school might help in some small way, but the problem is larger. It's that many journalists in this country don't seem to think very hard about anything, and then mistake this for 'clarity' or being in touch with the 'real world'. And that's dangerous, when they have so much influence over public opinion.
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If I was Richard Worth, I'd be looking hard at my page...
Speaking of Richard Worth's wikipedia page, there's an interesting pattern of editing there in the wake of the latest semi-scandal.
Poor old Richard Worth, eh? Missing in action in Cabinet, but he does , it seems, have time to remove unflattering information from his own Wikipedia page.
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I think Tessa Laird puts it best:
I hate the over-mediated nature of much of Te Papa .... The museum is no longer a place of meditation, it's not a haven, it's not sacrosanct in any way. It just gives us what we know already, only more so. Sure, there's something for everyone...to hate.
The Ian Wedde quote that Russell links to expresses everything that's wrong with the Te Papa approach to cultural guardianship. The museum experience as television or mall shopping; the museum as pure commodity (exemplified, of course, in its excellent gift shop).
But it's more than that too, I feel. In its veneration of the untutored child's perspective, its celebration of the kinetic and the loud, its equation of silence with boredom, and its fear of anything that resembles independent thought, there's something truly authoritarian about Te Papa. Wherever you go inside, there is only one message, one interpretation, and it's the one the exhibits are screaming at you with all possible force.
It's elitism posing as cultural democracy.
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Australian economist John Quiggin's been running a series called refuted economic doctrines over at Crooked Timber. The highlights for me so far: trickle down and the myth of the 'efficient market'.
Here's the latest installment: central bank independence.
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If only they didn't collapse with such monotonous regularity.
Oh dear.
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The problem with private prisons is the same as with the health reforms of the '90s. Social justice is put into direct conflict with private interests. the purchaser/provider split in health meant that patients became a commodity. Hospitals and other health care providers had to focus on output -- good practice became confused with productivity in a commercial sense. There was an incentive to produce sickness, if you will. Increasing sickness, in a perverse way, became seen a sign of the system's health .
Yet, in terms of social policy and epidemiology, one would want to decrease the amount of sickness in a society. The privatization model therefore works against both basic epidemiological principles and social justice.
It's the same with prisons. Any criminologist will tell you that the more people you have in a population that spend time in prison, the more dysfunctional that population is going to be. Prisons poison communities. They corrupt policing. The more of them there are, the worse things are going to get. I mean seriously, do we really want to end up like the US or South Africa? Because that's where we might be heading.