We love having you comment here at Pure Poison but it’s a little bit difficult for discussion to continue uninterrupted on specific posts when off-topic comments land in the middle of them. So each day we’ll launch an open thread where you can leave comments that don’t quite fit on one of the other posts. Remember that tip-offs can be made here.
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7 Comments
Jaysus!
Does Andy really get his prompts straight from FoxNews without stopping to consider just exactly how backwards-arsed the germ of their content is?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/obamas_words_and_obamas_deeds/#commentsmore
Nothing appears to matter apart from Herr Bolt desperately flailing to land cheap blows in the soft minds of his limpets.
Whatever Teh Left is, it sure seems to be responsible for 99.9% of the planet’s shortcomings. Bolt’s playbook only has the one page apparently.
Nothing from B1 or B2 about the situation in Xinjiang. All too complex for them, I suspect. Oppressive China? Check. Racism by foreigners, meaning we can’t be accused of same? Check. Ah, but the oppressed are Muslims. B1 and B2’s snide loathing of Islam contradicts their distrust of the Chinese state and their self-styled commitment to liberty and justice evapourates in a steam of incompatible self-righteous clichés. Better to ignore it, then.
indigo, Glennn Greenwald has an interesting post that relates to your comment.
Despite the best efforts of murdoch’s WSJ to misrepresent what happening with CPRS in senate (saying it got voted down because of Fielding and co), somone over there at least gets it right – complete with Ruddster photo!
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/07/waxman-markey-bearing-fruit-abroad.php
B1 & B2 are probably in a tizz hoping bith ’sides’ in Urumqi lose but unable to figure how to use it to demonstrate their omniscience.
Papers a hard copy of history By David Jones
The latest apologetic for the survival of newspapers (From the Telegraph’s front on-line page)
It’s all here – nostalgia, sentimentality, Motherhood … ?desperation …
Cheez, ta think I spent decades of m’life wallowing in Ancient (& most other) History – a newspaper-free zone! Newspapers/ scandal sheets have only been around 300
If I learned one thing from history it’s that core technologies change (typically in a three-generational movement). Settled food-production replaced nomadic food-gathering; vehicles replaced walking; printers replaced scribes; mechanised transport replaced the horse – if anything was going to resist replacement for nostalgic or sentimental reasons, it would have been the horse, yet the aristos who still love their nags were the first to buy automobiles. We have large collections of Edwardian & WW I period family postcards – once short telephone calls, now often texts – in fading writing; the only way to say, “I’ll catch the 8.33 morning train from Central Saturday morning. See you then.” The telephone will never replace the letter and postcard! Several of the writers installed telephones in the 1920s.
The core technologies of information storage & retrieval, and communication over distance – aka the coding and decoding of speech (reading & writing) was never a perfect technology, since the best communication of speech-in-context (complete with non-verbals) is face-to-face via sight and sound. In addition, reading & writing required teachers & classes. It took us c5,000 years to create sight & sound technology which did let us at least hear & see communication, and less than a century thereafter to arrive at machines which allowed us to interact as if face-to-face – replicate natural communication.
Print and paper core communication technologies – and spin-off industries (including schools as we know them) have been incurably ill for a century; now they’re on their last legs. Time to recognise that.
Indeed, Tobias. And Uighurs wouldn’t have a problem if they were Han Chinese & Communist /Taoist. West & East, hard left & hard right wear very similar blinkers.
(BTW If you’re ever off the beaten track in the wilds of China, Uighurs make the best tidbits-on-sticks & flat breads I’ve tasted. Delightful people, many with good English. You know them by their very distinctive caps.)