Agree. Circuses get hyped more and more as a substitute for enjoyable, ordinary lives and as a vicarious shot of the feeling of power for the powerless. The extent of this Americas Cup reporting is just getting silly - and it's only the first morning. A ...
Here's one at least: "Attacking one airfield — at least one of the two runways were still in use Friday — hardly diminishes President Bashar Assad’s military capability. And whatever cache of poison gas or other chemical agents the Syrian government has ...
Context isn't confined to the receiver of a communication. The sender of the communication also provides context. For example, a young German who has environmental values, has invited refugees into her home and is a social justice activist might say, for ...
Smith's notion of a market economy and events such as US slavery and destruction of indigenous populations are closely related. These events of enclosure, expropriation, exploitation and oppression are episodes of 'primitive accumulation' - the remaking of...
... provoking comments. Much appreciated. Regards, Puddleglum
And she's strategically pushing the line that Key's success was so dependent on his 'strong team' and English's steady hand on the rudder. Re-positioning the National re-election rhetoric on the hop.
"roundly discredited"? "debunked"? How can a straightforward standard statistical measure be 'discredited' and 'debunked' and by whom? It's possible to argue that there is a better measure but how can a proportion of the median income be said to be ...
The spanner ('wrench' in America I guess) has now been successfully thrown into the political machinery. Will they listen now? Or just continue to berate the 'stupid fools'? Will they realise that people deserve respect, or just wait - impatiently - for ...
It would be remarkable if the next US President - whoever it turns out to be - did not spread liberal amounts of 'bad shit' around certain (large) parts of the globe. If they didn't they would be breaking with an as yet unbroken tradition, certainly in the...
Thanks for the response Ad. Much appreciated. Individualism: I was pointing out the prioritisation of the individual to highlight why I think that liberal ideology makes it difficult to see explanations beyond the level of individual attributes (e.g., that...
This is one of those perennial issues about the relative roles of individuals and the world they find themselves in. Much of Trump's popularity - and therefore why he has individual power in terms of this political 'race' - is that he isn't a 'regular ...
Thanks weka. You always make me think through - and hopefully express myself - more carefully. I'll clarify my last question about how to 'salt the soil' in order to avoid Trump's politics from taking root. I was referring to what you call the 'ecosystem' ...
The whole 'salting the earth' analogy used in this post distracts from the far more important state of the 'soil'. At just about any other time, Trump's manner and mouthings would be like the proverbial seeds that fall on rocky ground. Rather than worrying...
"more people are voting for Donald because he has an R next to his name" Why do you conclude that Lanthanide? The extract from 538 you quoted said "The most interesting thing about these numbers is how few of Trump’s supporters are his fans.". That's ...
Hi Ad, I'm not sure of what you mean by the 'code' used by Adbusters and Trump but I certainly have noticed that Trump has inherited the supporters that movements like the Tea Party co-opted - the people who Chomsky notes are in favour of broadly social ...
That's a very misleading commentary about Chomsky Ad. "They both talk about a conspiracy of opinion through the mainstream media" First, Trump and Chomsky talk about media opinion manipulation in radically different ways. For Trump it's all about his ...
"Chomsky support of KR in the 70s is public knowledge" If that's the case then the public's knowledge in this instance is faulty and a distortion of reality. Here's a brief rebuttal of such accusations in a letter to the New York Times by Edward Herman (...
Elizabeth Warren's analysis of household savings, income and expenditure over the thirty or so years up to 2008 (see this video) suggest that your underlying assumptions and conclusions are wrong. Median households in the early 1970s had about 11% savings ...
Thanks for your report swordfish. Pretty much the impression I got over here from reading the UK media. Those who control the narrative ... just won't give up their control of that narrative. Makes sense when you don't have popular support and it's the ...
So why doesn't everyone whose employment (and future employment) might be jeopardised by a conviction get similar lenient treatment under that section of the crimes act? Or does only having a low wage job that's at stake somehow make a conviction easier to...
For me the issue is not what effect putting someone in prison has - clearly not a good effect in many, many cases. The issue, however, is that many, many people ARE thrown in prison, and certainly convicted, for just this kind of offence - yet not this ...
" they are going to bounce back as they start pushing into campaign mode." In the Roy Morgan link is a graphic for the long term trend in polling going back to pre-2008. In the months prior to each election since then National's support has declined from ...
Thank you :-)
"If Hosking didn’t have an audience he wouldn’t be paid. Don’t like him then don’t watch him." Yes, this is certainly the most concerning aspect of Mike Hoskings' situation. That so many New Zealanders seem to feel so at ease with the kinds of values and ...
Yes, I thought it was interesting given the obituaries for Labour being written by some well-known commentators as a result of the MOU signing. Still, early days.
See my twitter clip of the Colmar Brunton analysis of their polling pre- and post-MOU signing https://twitter.com/Puddleglum11/status/740101936939044868. Or look at the report itself on pages 10 (percentage changes) and 14 (seat allocation changes).
An interesting analysis in the Colmar Brunton report on the poll between their pre- and post-MOU signing sampling. See here: https://twitter.com/Puddleglum11/status/740101936939044868
And to add my own perceptions of today's world: There's a sense in which it appears uniformly drab to me in that everyone seems so immersed in the semi-commercialist take on social life that there's a predictability even to social activism (now called ...
"Also I would argue that NZ society now is more vibrant, interesting, confident and diverse compared with the boring mono coloured culture that existed pre 1984." I think that's looking at the past through grey coloured glasses. There was a flourishing ...
Don't forget Don Brash.
Recent evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies may well have been egalitarian in decision making. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0515/140515-sex-equality-hunter-gatherer-societies
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