Posts by Keir Leslie
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To be honest, the Labour Party's arts policy is kinda embarrassing. It's a hodge-podge of special interests, and pet desires. (I mean, I fully support a memorial to dead sailors, but that is not a manifesto commitment.) There may be good stuff in there, but it is lost amongst general waffle and repetition. There isn't any principle underlying any of it. It is just a shopping list.
There's also far too many things caveated with ``over time and as resources allow''.
At least National let you know their vision for the arts: private sector funded, cuts to civil service, and lots and lots for the film industry. I honestly don't have a clue what Labour's vision is.
Edited to add: who the fuck let `seamen' go out in a policy? Gender-neutral language isn't just for funsies people.
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If they’re a one-man-band, they can often get these things just by turning up and agreeing to confidence and supply.
I don't know how true this actually is, and even if it is, it is just the tail-wagging dog, and is equally applicable to the Greens, say,
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What is wrong with personal vanity parties? I mean, why shouldn't the `Jim's a good bloke' faction get their man in?
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The Greens have a problem with branding though, as they veer between unpolished sincerity and slickness. I don't quite know what is happening to the Greens at the moment, but they seem worryingly uncool.
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Nah, it is very calculatedly not hammer and sickle. It is Old Labour if I may be excused the Anglicism. There's someone who has a very precise finger on the pulse, in terms of a targeted retro-but-hipster-but-modern look that is really really in right now.
(Wells' correspondence between the old logo and the Warehouse was pretty much on the money. This is a conscious rebranding exercise, and I think it is going far better than I would have expected.
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Oh, that it were so… Once upon a time I could swan into University of Canterbury library and sit and read for hours, now it seems ya need student pass cards and other security devices to open gates, etc. – Bah! Humbug!
Erm, you can just walk into the James Hight Building at the moment, ditto for Law and Macmillan Brown, though not the EPS 'cause that's still earthquaked. Just so you all know.
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Everyone has that responsibility. Ones ability to comment technically on a specific field is limited by technical ability, but issues of morality and conscience should always cross all boundaries. There are no morality specialists. Anyone claiming to be one is selling you a religion.
I dunno, I reckon that there's a further duty on academics as people who are paid to think, and have been put in a very specific part of society, to go beyond the general responsibilities of citizens in this one area.
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Salmond's noble ideas of how society should work were nice and all, but I'm not entirely sure we should treat her opinion piece as being an important part of the conversation, especially given that it's long on rhetoric yet vague on solutions. For an academic to play the role of critic and conscience of society they need to more than just an academic but rather a suitably qualified academic in a field relevant to the discussion society is having.
I think this is a really bad misreading of any concept of conscience and critic.
Academics have a duty to be conscience and critic beyond their field, and this is pretty obviously accepted. Einstein, Oppenheimer, etc etc. It's one of the ways to distinguish academics from other professional, who all also have roles as critics and conscience.
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You don't need figures to know that the European Championship is bigger than the RWC, to be honest. (Just look at the New York Times website; the RWC doesn't rate a mention until the `Global Sports' section. I can't even find the RWC on the Times of India sports page. The Hindu puts it below the fold, roughly. All of those papers have visible coverage of football which would no doubt be even more prominent when it is the European Championship.)
It's pretty obvious why no one resolves it. It is a nice bit of marketing fluff the IRB sticks in a press release, and journalists don't have the time to check this kind of thing. Also, the IRB is not above producing dodgy viewing figures, so figures are not as reliable as you would hope. (Nor for that matter are FIFA or UEFA, but there's more eyes on them than there are on the IRB.)
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The `third biggest’ claim comes from the IRB I am pretty sure, so take with a very great deal of scepticism.
In terms of things that I suspect are bigger than the RWC, I would imagine that most if not all of the Tour, the Superbowl, the Champions League final and the European Championship would be bigger on almost any conceivable metric. (Even the Spanish/Italian/English leagues are probably bigger in some ways, but it is a bit of a nonsense to compare year long leagues to quadrennial tournaments.)
(not that the RWC isn't a very big thing; it is just it is almost impossible to underestimate the heft of the European Championship, for example.)