Open mike 17/04/2023

Written By: - Date published: 6:00 am, April 17th, 2023 - 29 comments
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29 comments on “Open mike 17/04/2023 ”

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  1. SPC 1
    17 April 2023 at 8:20 am

    When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” Thomas Sowell.

    An expose of the journey of Tucker Carlson who wanted to build a right wing media to rival the Post and Times but who found that GOP supporters were not interested and so ended up working for Fox News doing what he said he despised, lie for a living.

    • weston 1.1
      17 April 2023 at 9:49 am

      Kinda ridiculous msnbc the home of Rachael Madow who for years pushed the entirely fake Russiagate narrative to be accusing another presenter of lying !!

      Mehdi Hassan has recently arrived in the same stable and one of his first jobs was to interview Matt Taibbi [who's been engaged on the examination of the 'twitter files ' and where once i was quite impressed by Hassan as a fierce debater on the quest of truth alas he now appears to be a highly paid attack dog for the establishment . MH has just published a book called ' How to win any argument ' havnt read it but i guess interjecting aggresively every time , over the top of any answer a hapless interviewee or protagonist might proffer , is a large part of the sagely advice !!

      Its quite a lively debate nontheless



      • joe90 1.1.1
        17 April 2023 at 11:51 am

        More an expert filleting than lively debate.

        Taibbi flipped and flopped his way through the interview like a freshly landed fish, he was wrong about everything, and journeyman journalist Mehdi Hasan had him for breakfast.

        (btw, elmo's ditched him)

        https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1644064242419617803

        And this is exactly what the rest of Hasan’s interview (and what I’ve described above) lays out in great detail: Taibbi isn’t just sloppy with facts, which is problematic enough. He leaves out the very important context that highlights how the big conspiracy he’s reporting is… not big, not a conspiracy, and not even remotely problematic.

        He presents it as a massive censorship operation, targeting 22 million tweets, with takedown demands from government players, seeking to silence the American public. When you look through the details, correcting Taibbi’s many errors, and putting it in context, you see that it was an academic operation to study information flows, who sent the more blatant issues they came across to Twitter with no suggestion that they do anything about them, and the vast majority of which Twitter ignored. In some minority of cases, Twitter applied its own speech to add more context to some of the tweets, and in a very small number of cases, where it found phishing attempts or people impersonating election officials (clear terms of service violations, and potentially actual crimes), it removed them.

        There remains no there there. It’s less than a Potemkin village. There isn’t even a façade. This is the Emperor’s New Clothes for a modern era. Taibbi is pointing to a naked emperor and insisting that he’s clothed in all sorts of royal finery, whereas anyone who actually looks at the emperor sees he’s naked.

        https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/

        • fender 1.1.1.1
          17 April 2023 at 12:41 pm

          Exactly.

          Taibbi looks like a fool for trying to appease Musk who has evidently an ambition to be as toxic as Murdoch/Fox.

        • Incognito 1.1.1.2
          17 April 2023 at 2:41 pm

          That sounds like another disinformation project mired in controversy. Pity the academic who researches information flows. Pity the person who points to rabbit holes.

          Religion is not dead. We now believe that we a God-given right to choose our own facts and create our own narratives with impunity. In fact, we believe that we have the right and duty to convert non-believers, slay heretics, and spread the Word. It is clear who are the self-anointed High-Priests.

    • Incognito 1.2
      17 April 2023 at 2:55 pm

      Controlling the message & media by controlling ‘free speech’ is the US model – the rest of the world is collateral damage. The only possible response is inevitable: totalitarian control (and not necessarily by the State but by State-approved corporate players), i.e., the China or N-Korea models.

      https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-free-speech-matt-taibbi-substack/673698/

  2. Ed1 2
    17 April 2023 at 8:44 am

    Communications Staff – my take on numbers is why do they only cover 2020 to 2021? That would be the period when Covid required massive communications staff is that why there was an increase, and were our excellent Covid results due to good communications? Perhaps I mis heard, but as we go into the 4th wave of Covid infection surely there is still a need for good communications . . .

  3. SPC 3
    17 April 2023 at 12:40 pm

    US Elections

    Only 2 states have election day as a holiday and also require time off to vote for those working.

    And 20 states have the vote on a working day and do not require time off to vote.

    https://www.lgbtmap.org/img/maps/citations-election-day-holiday-paid-time-off-to-vote.pdf

  4. ianmac 4
    17 April 2023 at 1:52 pm

    Co governance. Not Democratic say Luxon's lot.

    Neal Jones on nine to Noon explains why the Democracy complaints are irrelevant. He points out that these are appointments from designated groups. Not Elections.

    About 4:50 starting with Bridgette then Neal. (Why hasn't this been spelled out before?)

    https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018886397

  5. joe90 5
    17 April 2023 at 3:40 pm

    Hilarious. A pro-Russian podcaster who's hosted groomer Scotty, Jimmy Dore, Jackson Hinkle and assorted vatniks and pretends to be a woman from Luhansk is an American scammer.

    https://twitter.com/jabuttee/status/1646547974858653699

    https://twitter.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1647199965540646913

    https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1647763010348253192

  7. roblogic 7
    17 April 2023 at 4:52 pm

    The elongated muskrat needs to explain why his own tweets don't come with a warning – crypto scammer, oligarch.

    NPR (american public media org) has left twitter after Musk slapped it with a "government-funded media" label. RNZ is about to do the same.

    https://twitter.com/radionz/status/1647790146245505029?s=61&t=4nyjBVbo16PbRZPJZdlgag

    Equally, other media should be labelled as funded by Murdoch, Soros, Big Oil, Big Banks.

    Musk is showing bias against public media. How about that transparency?

    "NZ Herald – these messages were approved by ANZ, ASB, REINZ and the National Party™"

    Incidentally, Matt Taibbi is also leaving twitter because of its increasingly obnoxious policies – blocking links to other networks like Substack.

    I still think he’s a good journo, by saying the quiet part out loud, calling the powerful to account, and questioning popular narratives. He seems to be interested in telling the truth without fear or favour.

    • Nic the NZer 7.1
      17 April 2023 at 5:05 pm

      Why isn't RNZ taking the Government funded media label as a compliment anyway?

      • roblogic 7.1.1
        17 April 2023 at 7:01 pm

        Because shitty propaganda outlets like Fox News don't have such a label.

        Oligarchs like Musk, Thiel, Murdoch, Trump are opposed to public interest media that might expose their scummy misdeeds

        • Nic the NZer 7.1.1.1
          17 April 2023 at 7:23 pm

          One would have thought such a label was healthy differentiation from Fox, etc… Not something to take to the lawyers and deny.

          • Incognito 7.1.1.1.1
            17 April 2023 at 8:59 pm

            I can think of only one person who would struggle to differentiate between RNZ and Fox News and he’s somewhat of a regular here cheeky

  8. logie97 8
    17 April 2023 at 5:55 pm

    Oh please!!!

    Education

    Chris Hipkins advised last week that a significant change will be announced on Monday regarding class sizes in the middle/intermediate school age group.

    "… the class size will reduce from 29 to 28." I can hear the cries of joy from the teaching profession (sarc). Do me a favour. IF you want to make a real difference to the quality of curriculum delivery then classes of a maximum of 20 might be a start.

    • Gaynor 8.1
      18 April 2023 at 9:07 pm

      I am not against decreasing class sizes but a much more important issue is an overhaul of the curriculum and pedagogy (methods of teaching).

      Standards in reading ,maths and written work are simply appalling.There needs be a drastic change in teaching methods towards more effective direct instruction as was done traditionally. This doesn't mean you have no self directed leaning as well .Most of the methods of teaching in NZ schools have been shown by research conclusively to be ineffective eg Whole language, ( balanced literacy) reading recovery , discovery maths , project work, invented spelling to name just a few.

      It has been ideological driven academics here and overseas who have dreamed up these worthless and untested theories . No good teacher instinctively, would have held onto methods that just don't work .They were brainwashed at Colleges of (mis)- Education and led to believe they were the best. Little did they know they were completely unproven . Teachers are victims as well as students.

      How you purge the entire teaching profession of these damn awful teaching strategies God only knows.

      Middle class parents pay for after school tuition and tutors homeschooling has increased in popularity and private school roles are increasing They all use traditional methods of teaching. But none of these expensive options are available to the "underclass' for financial reasons. We are developing a two class education system . Isn't it time to look hard and long at what the real problem is rather than shifting deck chairs on the Titanic.

      • Nic the NZer 8.1.1
        18 April 2023 at 10:25 pm

        Had a conversation about this the other day. The conclusion was that its a tail of students who education is failing, not the median student, and that this widening gap in education was what lowered the countries education rankings.

        https://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-12-04-2023/#comment-1945242

        [link fixed – Incognito]

        On this basis this didn't strike me as a problem with the curriculum or teaching methods as that appears to still work for the majority of students who are not part of that tail.

        Surely the obvious way to address that is to allocate more or less one on one tutoring to those students who are behind and bring them up in line with their peers. This does happen inside the school system to some degree, though its often a special needs based allocation, not a grades based allocation.

        Do you have an opinion on why targeting the lowest quintiles of education first isn't the way to go here? And on my other belief that smaller class sizes will improve outcomes regardless of the teaching practices (e.g if you wanted to compare teaching practices in a study you would have to compare similar sized classes).

  9. Herodotus 9
    17 April 2023 at 7:13 pm

    Logie, As I read this, FUNDING will be provided not that class sizes will necessary reduce so that no child will be in a class size exceeding 28. 7 sharp onto this now – hope our PM is embarrassed how his statements are not what is being proposed.

    Students in years 4 to 8 have the biggest class sizes, with one teacher funded for every 29 pupils. Tinetti and Prime Minister Chris Hipkins confirmed the incoming change for class size funding on Monday, to bring that ratio down to one teacher for every 28 students.

    https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/education/131786828/class-sizes-to-decrease-by-one-for-years-4-to-8-requiring-an-extra-320-teachers

  10. Drowsy M. Kram 10
    17 April 2023 at 11:22 pm

    Haven't we already had this debate – during Parata's tenure as Minister of Education?

    Should school class sizes be increased? [May 21 2012]

    Class sizes set to increase [25 June 2016]

    Why isn't increasing class sizes still a good idea – too close to the general election?

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