August 2008
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Month August 2008

CNN interview with Vladimir Putin

Tran­script of CNN inter­view with Vladi­mir Putin.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Update, 2 Sep 2008: video added.

Never a better time to boycott U.S. goods

U.S. second-quarter growth came in a little higher than expec­ted today, on the back of exports which grew at a 13.2% annual rate, thanks to a weakened dol­lar. Res­ult: fears of reces­sion this year quelled.

Seems to me there’s never been a bet­ter time to boy­cott U.S. goods.

Free Gaza boats successfully break Israeli blockade

Over the week­end a group from the Free Gaza Move­ment, includ­ing my good friend Ken O’Keefe, set out in boats from Cyprus and suc­cess­fully broke Israel’s contempt­ible eco­nomic block­ade of Gaza. Ken emailed through a few pho­tos today, with this message:

Some pic­tures to share of a day that may have largely ignored in the West, but was deeply power­ful and mov­ing to not just the people of Gaza, but to the Arab world and beyond.

And a news report from France 24:

The grotesqueness of inequality

I was reluct­ant to post this at first because it sug­gests the Demo­crats will save the day. They won’t. How­ever, it’s nice to know this sort of thing gets talked about occa­sion­ally in the halls of power of the United States of Amer­ica. Of course it’s not a prob­lem isol­ated to the U.S. either.

Via one­good­move.

It’s a good thing, Jane

Jane Clifton muses on the emer­gence of blog­ging and it’s rela­tion­ship with old fash­ioned journ­al­ism, com­plain­ing that “it’s hard to tell whether the inform­a­tion pro­viders are accur­ate, biased or simply malicious.”

The Blo­ger­ati” responds in good fash­ion, but what I like that blog­ging brings to the table is exactly what Clifton fears: uncer­tainty about who is telling the truth. One of con­ven­tional journalism’s biggest traps is that it pur­ports to be the con­duit of truth, when in fact — and cer­tainly from my exper­i­ences of being repor­ted on as part of a story — this claim couldn’t be fur­ther from the truth.

Journ­al­ism, espe­cially in the form of for-profit media, should have never staked this claim, and it now has much to answer for.

Blog­ging and the inter­net encour­ages us all to treat everything we read with a crit­ical eye; not simply to accept some­thing because it’s writ­ten down. And that’s a good thing Jane.

A glitch in the media matrix

The NZ Her­ald has pub­lished a remark­able edit­or­ial today which offers rare insight into just how well our “free” media sys­tem serves to under­mine demo­cracy, while the back­ground story offers great insight into how much National Party politi­cians deplore demo­cracy and how deplor­ably dis­hon­est they can be in the lead up to an election.

As an aside: the only politi­cians I know of that don’t deplore demo­cracy are the Greens.

The back­ground story, if you haven’t heard, is that National Party politi­cians have been secretly taped admit­ting that they need to say whatever it takes to get elec­ted, then, once in power, they can get their real agenda through of redis­trib­ut­ing the New Zea­l­and people’s wealth to a tiny minor­ity of rich. Here’s Bill English’s and here’s Lock­wood Smith’s.

What’s remark­able about the Herald’s edit­or­ial isn’t simply that it tries to spin the story by pre­tend­ing National is simply “com­prom­ising on its desired policies,” rather than that National is actu­ally lying about its policies so it can drive them through once it’s in power:

The coun­try now knows, if it did not before, that National has com­prom­ised some of its policy desires for the sake of its elect­oral prospects.

It isn’t simply that uncov­er­ing a party’s real agenda — some­thing of vital pub­lic interest in the run up to an elec­tion — is dis­missed as “par­tisan politics”:

First, it is not fair to release a reporter’s tape or tran­script unless … the record­ing could serve a pub­lic interest some­what more com­pel­ling than par­tisan politics.

It isn’t simply that it admits the means of report­ing on politi­cians is broken:

Second, the pub­lic­a­tion would dam­age the gath­er­ing of fur­ther inform­a­tion. Once bit­ten, a pub­lic fig­ure is twice shy.

It isn’t simply that it admits to keep­ing secrets:

Noth­ing revealed from National’s con­fer­ence sneak so far offers insights to its inten­tions that could not have been obtained by a journ­al­ist trus­ted to use a private con­ver­sa­tion responsibly.

No, what I find remark­able about this edit­or­ial is that by put­ting for­ward this argu­ment it is openly admit­ting that it can be trus­ted by politi­cians but can’t be trus­ted by its read­ers and that it is com­pletely inef­fec­tual in doing the job of report­ing politics.

External links:

Gotcha! | 4 August, 2008
Choos­ing words | 5 August, 2008
Whoops, they did it again | 6 August, 2008
The Her­ald sup­ports secrecy | 7 August, 2008

Email bankruptcy

I recently cleared my email inbox at work and put meas­ures in place to keep it that way. It took a couple of solid days hard graft to make sure things were prop­erly filed or oth­er­wise taken care of.

Now I’m giv­ing my per­sonal email the same treat­ment. The prob­lem here is that I’m deal­ing not with thou­sands of emails but tens of thou­sands, going back years.

So rather than go through every single email I’m declar­ing email bank­ruptcy, archiv­ing the lot — read or not — and start­ing afresh! I’ve also removed myself from a myriad of email sub­scrip­tions accu­mu­lated over the years.

Upshot is you should find me a lot more respons­ive to email from now on. If you’ve sent me any­thing import­ant in the past month (or year!) and I haven’t respon­ded please accept my pro­fuse apo­lo­gies and resend it. I’ll respond as soon as I can, from my new found state of email nir­vana. :)