Posts by 81stcolumn
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Okay some questions on education.
Depending on how you see it, the Student Green card is a nod or bribe to the student vote. However it is no substitute for a teritiary policy. The value of the graduate premium is going down, the individual debt burden for students is going up, bulk funding for Universities/Tertiary has dropped in real terms and the growth caps on Universities have left a number of instuitutions with large debts accrued through underfunded infrastructure expansion. So what is the future for the HE sector? Where will the money come from and is the current model sustainable or indeed desirable?
The current fixation on league tables and ineffective zoning rules have led to an extensive growth in pupils being driven from some distance to so called "good schools". This would seem to be a green issue; is the only answer more public transport?
Oh and while we're at it, what's the policy on standards/testing?
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Oh I forgot the...
"at the end of the day ordinary New Zealanders aren't interested in three year old news..."
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Unfortunately I failed to recall.....
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A certain misplaced vanity will allow one to become the reflection of "dirty work done for good causes". I wonder how many times young Cam has watched this... no points for guessing with whom he empathises. The perfect antihero;
Well oil be pwned. -
Also, as I went to bed, I remember thinking “Ah, crap. I have to like something about Gaza,” as I hit the Like button on a post with a pro-Israel message.
By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right. I’m offered the chance to like the 2nd Amendment and some sort of anti-immigrant page. I like them both. I like Ted Cruz. I like Rick Perry. The Conservative Tribune comes up again, and again, and again in my News Feed.
This is from the wired post I linked to earlier. Facebook it appears can function as a robotic enabler for extreme views. What we are seeing in terms of Gaza and covert antisemitism may in part be the product of bots that didn't exist in 2011.
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anywhere on the globe wherever you find conspiracy theorists who repackage themselves as scholars.
And those who are conspiracy theorists and scholars?....perhaps no hope.
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Anyone remember these while we are off topic?
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No, they don’t need to. It’s their choice
Which is also a choice to be extended to our prime minister; who when presented with effigy burning could have pointed out that such things are unlikely to be at the behest of any of those seeking election. It would have been good to hear him declare that such acts be condemned by all. However JK chose not to, allowing more breathing space for a damaging inflammatory meme that amounted to a convenient untruth.
To be clear, for your argument to be sustainable it is incumbent on all politicians to condemn this activity. What we have here is a case of one group being expected to condemn the issue and another engaging in some undignified trolling.
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I unfriended someone recently after years of anti-Israeli FB posts culminated in a wave of nonsense during the height of the fighting in Gaza. The pattern of selective emphasis ultimately implied something really unpleasant.
I don't think this is uncommon. On the one hand it isn't unreasonable to be upset with something that does appear to be at best a string of wrongdoings over an extended period. Where nothing changes and the broader narrative seems difficult to justify it is also easy to fall into some pretty unpleasant ranting. My concern is how similarly easy it is to consign those angry ranting souls to an echobox that just makes things worse.
It seems possible that Facebook has begun enable such stupidity.
This is well worth a read;
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I'm trying hard not to say this is wrong but...
As younger chap I often struggled to articulate my frustrations with what I saw in the middle east and specifically Israel-Palestine. This was not helped by the wilful conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel as a way to excuse what has beeen described here as abuse of power.* I don't think I am the only one to have felt that way. In the nexus between frustration and confusion may well live a brief but predictable tolerance for those true anti-semites who lurk in the shadows. This I believe to be a distinct discourse from that which merely uses offensive means to demonstrate a wider dislike of authority, state and circumstance. Both these issues still warrant debate without it frustration I suspect will grow.
* I don't think this fully captures a long history of trying to erase Palestine structurally, culturally and geographically from occupied territories; this I agree isn't genocide either though.