Posts by Jake Pollock
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Yeah yeah, everyone's a comedian.
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HotChicksWithDouchebags gets linked to on Public Address. My habitual web-browsing circle is complete.
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You seem to have a bit of a straw man factory going on here.
And here I was thinking that making straw men was more of a craft industry. Oh well, a change in technology fundamentally alters the cultural landscape yet again.
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You don't find that amusing? Read your post again, Finn. It sounds absolutely hilarious.
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Did the organisers not realise the A. Fire and Battles were likely to have similar fans?
I think they probably did, as the two bands were originally scheduled at different times, until Tom Morello wanted more time between his acoustic set and the main Rage Against The Machine act. Or so I heard.
As for t-shirts, social semiotics and counter-hegemony: seven or eight years ago I saw a young woman in the University of Auckland quad with a t-shirt that read 'Your lunch is in my pants.'
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The Key photo was taken from a newspaper, i.e. it's in the public domain, at Key's consent. He posed for the photo after all. The Minto photos weren't. They were photos secretly taken of a private house by an individual's self-styled 'political enemies'. It doesn't even come close.
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Well, naturally. But they did it with style . . .
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Writing that it suddenly struck me (heaven knows where I was going with it before) that if you forced everyone to be anonymous you might improve the quality of the discourse. No?
Public discourse, especially through pamphleteering in the 17th and 18th Centuries and through newspapers as the became more institutionally established in the 19th and early-20th was usually anonymous, or at least pseudonymous. This probably started out because pamphleteering during the English Revolution was illegal and dangerous (Harrington's Oceana is published in several different font-types because it was literally carried from one publishing house in London to another whilst being chased around by soldiers), but continued because, at a guess, attaching a name to an opinion could lend a false (not to say fallacious) sense of authority to said opinion.
I was reminded of this during the pledge-card debacle, when 'Rex' was posting on this website, and drew a great deal of criticism for his anonymity. It was the worst kind of argument available, because the author was putting forward propositions that were or weren't true, and did or did not lead to a logical and valid conclusion. Who he was has nothing to do with it. I think our forebears accepted this in a way that we don't.
And Craig, in terms of newspapers not publishing unverifiable letters, in fact they did well into the 20th Century in New Zealand. Many columnists retained that privilege for a long time too.
I'm not really sure why it changed, though. I suspect universal education and the consequent broader literacy and democratic participation began to widen the sphere sufficiently that the costs of anonymity began to outweigh the benefits, or perhaps, as modern campaigning machines became more sophisticated, people wanted to know the bare minimum of who was contributing to these discussions. But the point is that anonymity on blogs is not new but old. And if it was used simply to engage in civil debate (and talk about cats), that would be fine, but unfortunately it is so often a mask for ad hominem attacks that it appears a cowardly gesture, rather than participating in a long-standing tradition.
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I'd be inclined to wear a disguise to avoid all the beggars, and negative attention generally. Nothing too silly, just some local stuff that doesn't scream out foreigner.
LOL They'll never spot you in those ali-baba pants. Hell, if you buy an Om t-shirt in Pushkar before you head to Pakistan, they'll probably mistake you for a hindu.
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I'm no military historian, so from my point of view Churchill's greatest achievement was to get a cuvee of Pol Roger named after him.
According to legend, he'd drink a quart of the stuff before getting out of bed in the morning. That's the way to win a war.