Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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Yang was asked if he was aware while working as a lecturer he was teaching English to people training to be intelligence officers, so they could monitor communications.
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“If you define those cadets or students as spies, yes, then I was teaching spies. If that is the case. I don’t think so [they were spies]. I just think they are collecting information through communication in China. If you define that way, then they were spies. But for us, it was just collecting information.”
Yang agreed when he was asked if his students were using the English they were learning to monitor the communications of other countries.
“If you say spying, then spying,” Yang said, before National MP and party whip Jamie-Lee Ross cut in and ended the press conference.
Well, that went well, then.
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Hard News: Campaign 2017: Buy a…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I agree entirely about National's social media scaremongering campaign about extra taxes and their apparent success in disseminating it over the past couple of weeks.
Due to family dynamics, I get a lot of "rural NZ" in my Facebook feed. Those users seem worried about being blamed (and more importantly, taxed) for farm water runoff and generally suspicious that Labour might somehow take their cows away. There's a poem going around people's walls (it has tens of thousands of likes and shares so far) advocating "two ticks blue" due to Ardern's supposed plans to "tax this and tax that" and do various other nefarious things that won't go over well in Ashburton or Masterton.
It all puts in perspective the various self-styled communists who also show up on my feed accusing Ardern of being an uber-neoliberal Blairite shill.
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I got to know Matthew Bannister very slightly in the mid-00s, when we both shared an office in the English Department at the University of Auckland. Matthew was at that stage working on the manuscript of what would become White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock. I was working (not especially productively at that point) on my PhD thesis. No one else really used the room and we ended up talking a good deal about the ideas that were going into his book: the influence of the Velvets on the Dunedin scene, and the influence in turn of Warholian discourses of masculinity and performance on the Velvets. He always had an amazing array of books on music floating around and he'd let me borrow them, so long as I had interesting things to say about them when I returned them. I lent him my copy of Slacker on DVD. Good times.
I last saw him sometime in the late '00s on George Street in Dunedin. He was in town for family reasons; I was attending an academic conference. We found a cheap Vietnamese restaurant and caught up over lunch.
It's great to hear that he and the other Sneakys are making and performing music together again.
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There are similar issues at the moment in the UK, with some unsurprising parallels:
Police in Manchester battling an epidemic of the use of spice attended nearly 60 incidents related to the drug in the city centre in one weekend….
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Phil Spurgeon, a city centre inspector with Greater Manchester police, questioned the wisdom of the ban on the drug. “Spice has been around for the past two or three years in different guises,” he said. “I’m not being judgmental about the legislation, but the reality with the Psychoactive Substances Act is that it has shifted supply on to the streets.
“The product was probably more consistent in the head shops. Now it’s more varied, the makeup is constantly changing. That’s why we’re seeing people collapsing, as the drug becomes more potent.”
Frances Perraudin, Manchester police attend 58 spice-linked incidents in one weekend, Guardian
(10 April 2017).Of course, one of the basic commonalities is hopelessness.
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I was so dreading the impending May dictatorship that I avoided all election coverage after polls closed on the 8th. I only discovered what had happened when I woke at 5 am the next morning to go to Heathrow (I had to be at a conference in Canada the next day) and my wife told me that the Tories hadn't got their majority.
The Brits at the conference spent much of the time clustered around our phones. A colleague of mine -- certainly no fan of Corbyn -- couldn't hide his glee. A postdoc I knew vaguely was disappointed -- she thought Labour would win. When asked why, she replied wistfully, "I was in a social media bubble."
We haven't won anything yet -- not by a long shot -- but there's a greater sense of quiet determination and common cause about than I've felt for a long time.
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Adam Curtis made a similar point in an interview recently. He compared the EU referendum and Trump to giant “f*ck off” buttons presented to disgruntled voters. The thing the buttons ostensibly were for wouldn’t really do people any good, but the very act of pressing them would send that message, and that’s what was attractive.
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Speaker: The Government you Deserve, in reply to Jim Cathcart,
I fear that we have been insufficiently careful to distinguish “neoliberal global establishment” from “amoral robber barons who will use outright fascists as shock troops if it furthers their interests.” Murdoch, who, along with Richard Desmond, is as responsible for this result as anyone, has now come out saying how pleased he is with Brexit.
This is our Waldo Moment. (It’s no mistake that Waldo himself is a bluish purple: an animated Farage.) We may be about to discover that there are plenty worse political arrangements than neoliberalism. My fear is that, in five or ten years’ time, we’ll find ourselves looking back on the pre-June 23 world with the bitter pang of nostalgia and regret.
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Speaker: A Disorderly Brexit, in reply to nzlemming,
+1.
The Blairite conspiracists, meanwhile, remind me of nothing so much as United Future. A bunch of clueless non-entities representing a mythical “centrist” electorate that doesn’t actually exist.
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I don't think Corbyn is anywhere nearly as incompetent as he's being portrayed. Just as I think Miliband would've been a really quite good Prime Minister. The issue here is media framing. The Tories have just presided over the greatest disaster in the country's history since WWII and we're talking about Corbyn?
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Nick Clegg in the Financial Times on Cameron's unforgiveable complacency:
David Cameron and George Osborne ... alone are responsible for bringing our great country to this sorry pass.
This need never have happened. When we were in coalition with the Conservatives I was repeatedly asked by them to agree to a referendum on their terms.
I refused point blank because elevating internal party rows to a national plebiscite is not good enough — especially since we had already enshrined into law in 2011 a referendum trigger to ratify future EU Treaties.
I remember asking the prime minister whether he was sure he could win a referendum designed to settle an internal Tory feud. I was breezily told that all would be well, of course it would be won.
... as the campaign wore on, it became clear that the prime minister and his chancellor were prisoners of their past: having spent so many years denigrating the EU, it was impossible for them to make a positive case.
They were condemned to make a negative case — the EU is not great, but leaving would be worse — which lacked any emotional impact, culminating in the dismal “punishment budget” proposed by Mr Osborne last week.