Posts by Alex Coleman
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Graham Dunster,
Al Assad is a ruthless man: He would not hesitate to use chemical weapons if he had to. He is also a very rational man: He would use chemical weapons only if that were his sole option. At the moment, it is difficult to see what desperate situation would have caused him to use chemical weapons and risk the worst. His opponents are equally ruthless, and we can imagine them using chemical weapons to force the United States to intervene and depose al Assad. But their ability to access chemical weapons is unclear, and if found out, the maneuver could cost them all Western support. It is possible that lower-ranking officers in al Assad's military used chemical weapons without his knowledge and perhaps against his wishes.
Another possibility is that Assad believes (or believed) that the international community has no appetite for intervening in a way that will cost him the war. Using chems could have been about sending that signal to the rebels. 'I can do what I want, no one will win this war for you'.
But there does seem to be no way of being sure of who did it. I guess all that matters now is that Assad is being blamed for it, and the US is going to react in some way, probably soon. Because they told him not to do it, and it happened on his watch, so US credibility is on the line.
The main questions I have are based around what exactly the response is intended to achieve, how is Assad likely to react?
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That house exchange is strange knowing what we now know.
In the Knucklehead tape, (to coin a phrase), Key is at pains to explain that he only had 16 seconds, and that he can't be expected to remember all of the damn things, and that he gets up very early and goes to bed late don't you know, and 100% correct is a very tough standard indeed, and if that's what you want, well, he's just gonna have to be getting back to you a bit more in the future.
None of which explains what he said.
He didn't get it 90% right, or even 50. He was 100% wrong in a very specific way and dragged in things he wasn't asked about. It really doesn't look like forgetfulness was the problem.
Pretty sure someone could compile a list of times Key has replied using the qualifications "To the best of my knowledge" or "as far as I can recall". But this one wouldn't be on that list.
God knows why he reacted to that question the way he did, but his backpedaling since doesn't really explain it.
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Why the scare quotes David?
Don't be evil on this.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Rebecca Denton,
I can't believe not one staff member in all the offices that ran kiosks flagged this issue
And the IT people? Surely they noticed that there was no internal security.
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Hard News: The Advocate, in reply to John Sellwood,
I love human interest or soft stories for their rawness and authenticity. The approach may be a little too unsophisticated for some but then human-interest stories also lack many of the distortions found in the manicured messages of ideology, orthodoxy and politics.
Thanks John, for your comment as a whole, and this bit in particular.
i don't think what Campbell Live does when at its best is unsophisticated at all. These stories are just as 'hard' as any other, it's only that the facts being reported are about people, and about how policy affects people. That is going to be a story about the subjective views those people have, about the situations they are in. But those things are actually facts.
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Gosh. Looks to me like he read Metro mag over the weekend.
If we can only get him to read Bat-Bean-Beam next.
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Mallard does seem to be enjoying himself with this; just tweeting thusly:
Don't normally do the tweets saying what I had for breakfast etc but am now doing constituency clinic #inplainview
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Didn't Rupert tweet some pretty strident stuff about pirates?
I guess this would be just about privateering then. Or something.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to BenWilson,
Agreed. It's kind of hard to imagine how a democratic global government could work, or what it might even look like.
I guess the point of it would be that it would have limited roles with lots/most things dealt with at regional levels. The thing would be, that the things it did do would be decided not by nation states, but by the global demos. Good luck with that.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Robert Harvey,
The particular aspect he highlights (for me) is that what is at stake is the question of sovereignty: who governs the Greek people? Their elected government (for better or worse) or foreign corporations (bankers and their investors)? And if it comes down to the foreign corporations, wouldn't this tend to alarm other European governments? Because who are the corporations responsible to?
It's funny how some things stick in the head. one that stuck in minds is Rodrik's trilemma, which explains using Greece as an example here:
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rodrik43/English
Deep down, the crisis is yet another manifestation of what I call “the political trilemma of the world economy”: economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation-state are mutually irreconcilable. We can have at most two at one time. Democracy is compatible with national sovereignty only if we restrict globalization. If we push for globalization while retaining the nation-state, we must jettison democracy. And if we want democracy along with globalization, we must shove the nation-state aside and strive for greater international governance.
Now I don't know how real this is, but it feels like something very much like it might be real.
If it is real, then I'm kind of meh about which of 'national sovereignty' or 'globalisation' gets ditched. Democracy stays though. Which doesn't, however, seem to be the preference of people with more control than I, natch.