"I just read Anand's new book The Persuaders [Anand Giridharadas: https://thepersuadersbook.com/]. He evinces or quotes a theory of messaging that says; you should start with an appeal to shared values, then identify a problem... then identify a villain."
"... we now have this world where that foment and dynamism has ended. We live in an ossified time. A time when tech, entertainment and other sectors have merged not just with each other, but with the military and the state, so that we have just an increasingly concentrated, dense ball of corporate power that is intermingled with state power in a way that is very hard to unwind."
"And I think that our challenge is to get people to locate their criticism in the right place, to understand that it's unbridled corporate power and the officials who enable it, that it's not the special evil of tech or a highly improbable mind-control ray. Or, I'm sure it goes without saying: it's not immigrants, it's not George Soros, it's not queers. It's unchecked corporate power."
"In a modern democracy... You have to have responsiveness and you have to have public involvement in the decisions all the time, not just the time of elections.
What happens in NZ is we tend to go to sleep between the elections and there isn't enough public involvement in the decision-making system. We need in this country much more deliberative democracy if we are not to go the way they've gone in the US or Britain ..."
@scattermutant
> I am a complete amateur when it comes to history or any field of the law. Just spouting my opinions.
Same, same. Keep it up!
I think Rata is profoundly wrong on many points (see the rest of the thread), but counter-intuitively I value her willingness to be so badly wrong in public. Listening to many experts, especially where they disagree, and debating it out in public fora, is how knowledge generated by the work of experts is translated into democratic consensus.
"I think that as politicians we also have to look in the mirror and say; are we engaging the public? Because actually when the issues are put in front of people, and it seems like it's going to be a very important decision and there are real alternatives, turnout does go up."
I recently realised that a lot of podcasts I listen to provoke anger, sadness or annoyance. Can you recommend me podcasts that makes you feel calm, inspired, happy or thoughtful?
"...we backtracked on our election pledge to remove the surtax on superannuation. Because morally I couldn't justify to myself that we would give a tax concession to the wealthy retirees - which removing the surtax would do - while we were taking some off those who were in much poorer circumstances."
If you earn $50k from one income source you pay some of that at the lowest tax rate and some at higher rates. If you then have another income source you don't get to pay some of that at the lowest tax rate as well. The progressive tax system is based on your total income for all sources.
@scattermutant
> If you then have another income source you don't get to pay some of that at the lowest tax rate as well
That makes sense, sort of. But it doesn't explain why people on benefits have to declare casual or part-time income under a Secondary Tax code. There's a hard limit to what we can earn before our benefit get rebated or cut. If tax thresholds are set sensibly, surely benefit rebates would keep our total income under the second tax threshold?
"... people who cannot meet their most basic needs; that is where you want to see the growth of their incomes, and the growth of public services that serve them, right? ... That's where - if anywhere in the world - we want to see 'economic growth' ... and it's got to be distributive, so it's actually shared, and it's got to be regenerative, so it doesn't destroy the planet as it happens."
I tend towards abandoning “growth” entirely and focusing on questions of well-being. Gets much more to the point of why we (should) even care about economic aspects of human (and non-human) life.
@scottmatter
> I tend towards abandoning “growth” entirely and focusing on questions of well-being
Makes sense. The current NZ Labour govt went all-in on this, with "wellbeing budgets" and building social indicators into the Public Finance Act. The theory being that the failure to improve on these would be seen as an indictment of a govt's performance, on par with (ideally more important than) poor fiscal performance. Sadly, COVID returned our political discourse to the arms of neoliberalism.
"As one famous Australian constitutional lawyer said, and it remains the case even under MMP... NZ is an Executive paradise. The sovereignty of Parliament in NZ - which means Parliament can pass any law it likes - is actually the sovereignty of the Executive, not of the Parliament. And that is why so many Opposition MPs have such a frustrating life, because they have very little influence over anything."
This is what "foreign investment" looks like. If the Overseas Investment Commission had teeth, corporate raiders would never have been allowed to buy our major news media companies, and then downgrade or asset strip them when it's not profitable enough to own them.
Could a staff buyout save NewsHub? When Stuff was facing a similar fate at the hands of overseas owners, a member of staff bought it for $1. It's now a much better news service for being journalist-driven, instead of profit-driven. It would be even better if it put social enterprise principles into its constitution to enshrine that.
"This is exactly the same mechanism to what free speech campaigners always complain about, which is called 'cancellation', which is just social media mobs disagreeing with you en masse, right?"
No Hayden, cancellation is not people disagreeing with you. It's people trying to demonise you by willfully misrepresenting what you said or did, or making things up. Then trying to get more people to ignorantly echo them.
@musicman
> to be cancelled means exactly what it says on the tin. you are done. anything less than that is an attempted cancellation
The more I think about this, the more it seems like a weird choice of hair to split. Are we less concerned as a society by attempted murder than we are are by successful murder? Is there an ethical difference between failing to murder and successfully murdering?
Also I reject the all-or-nothing framing implied by;
@musicman
> anything less than that is an attempted cancellation
Every public shaming campaign does psychological and reputational damage. Even if it falls short of the (presumed) goal of completely destroying the target's life.
"I'm basically [Joe Biden's] age - which means I shouldn't be in charge of anything - and I grew up in an era in which Leon Uris framed the debate. We all grew up very admiring of what we thought Israel represented. I don't think Biden's ever discovered that it doesn't represent those things."
In that his (likely) opponent is equally ancient, true. But I agree with the more general point Freeman made in mentioning it.
> he's handling Israel as well as could be hoped
There are plenty of ways he could be handling it better. Freeman goes into details in the interview, based on his extensive diplomatic experience, including his time as US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
"I think if you go back to the 1980s or 90s you don't actually hear about militaries... talking about information as a 'space' that they need to dominate. It's much more considered a kind of tool, or... even a weapon, but not up there with air, sea, land and space itself as a theatre of war."
"My fear is Bad Actors will weaponise relationships, build new workflows... that will speak to people's swirling sense of loneliness. They'll use those friendships to recontextualise people's grievances, make them feel like they are part of a wider struggle that has something to do with their identity, and use that feeling of struggle to drag a lot of people into these parallel epistemic worlds."
That's your fear? That what manipulators on both sides of the Culture War have been doing, for at least a decade, will keep happening? If only that was all that was coming at us in the information warfare space.
The US government wants to make sure only they can use DataFarming platforms to spy on and influence US citizens. They're following the example set by the CCP, which has been blocking foreign-owned platforms for years, for similar reasons.
@austin
> I think EU's end goal is a sovereign internet (esp. how they posture against big tech), it's just that they lack teeth and also incentive for alternative platforms
🎂 8 years ago today me and @johnvoorhees released the first episode of @ruminate and we're still going! Our first episode featured this horrendous pizza from Pizza Hut with micro-burgers in it.
@robb Before I'd written a single story at MacStories, I was making Ruminate with Robb. It's a fun show that's worth trying sometime if you haven't before. https://ruminatepodcast.com
Intriguing to see an up-and-coming ACT MP and a long-serving Nat MP debate each other;
"I don't think we have to have this obsession with wanting to cut New Zealanders' jobs. In fact, people are important. I don't care whether they're in the private, sector, the public sector, or a politician like myself, they're all people, and this obsession to just go and cut 15,000 jobs is not the way forward."
@stemps@henrik Also for sleeping - not sure if this would work at all, but I have continuous play turned off (it's in the Options/Gear icon underneath "Nitpicky Details” - so if I do fall alseep, well, it's stopping at the end of the episode. I'm probably unusual in intensely disliking continuou s play, though. 😃
@henrik@stemps Exactly the part of Pocket Casts I like the most. Their queue implementation is very nice, but I only use that on the rare case when I'm listening to podcasts while driving on a longer trip.
I go back and forth between the two occasionally. Overcast is the "simple" experience (at least how I have it set up) and Pocket Casts is the "elegant" experience.
The new "bookmark" support in Pocket Casts (coming soon to Plus accouns, which I have) might make me switch full time though.
Something that I really makes me feel good is listening to #podcasts
And in the spirit of sharing things that I enjoy, here’s a thread 🧵 with my current favourites, complete with notes on topics covered and why I like them.
The list is presented in no particular order (as I personally dislike rankings), but I must admit that my absolute favourite #podcaster is journalist, debunker and “Methodology Queen” Michael Hobbes, who appears to be on Mastodon as @rottenindenmark - anything he (co)hosts is a must listen for me!
So… let’s start with #MaintenancePhase, co-hosted by the above mentioned Michael Hobbes and “YourFatFriend” author and blogger Aubrey Gordon. The two take turns in presenting and debunking a famous diet or other wellness fad / book / influencer. It’s often tragic, but hilarious. Who would have thought that dismantling #FatPhobia could be this fun?
"The problem with, say, Meta, is only partially that Mark Zuckerberg is personally monumentally unsuited to serving as the unelected, unaccountable, permanent social media czar for 3 billion people. The real problem is that no one should have that job. That job shouldn't exist.
We don't need to find a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need to abolish Mark Zuckerberg."
@strypey@pluralistic Something I've been keen to do for well over a decade. sadly, I didn't get an orbital mass driver in my stocking last or any previous Christmas, Bah.
HAHAHA, ich bin gerade so am Herumsurfen und auf der #Suche nach einem #Namen für das #Hirngespinst meines eigenen #Podcasts und dabei stolperte ich doch glatt über diese #Kosenamen Tafel 😂
#GuyonEspiner: "You'd hoped for a majority in 2002. The polls said it was possible."
#HelenClark: "I think with MMP it was probably never realistic. Whatever the polls said... kiwis in the end quite like the government not having it all it's own way, having to talk with others..."
@thomasbeagle
> They get even more progressive when they retire!
Indeed. I think Grant Robertson will be much more useful to the country now than he ever was as an MP, now that he's not hamstrung by Labour's neoliberal rump. BTW if you want to understand how entrenched that rump is, I recommend listening to Guyon Enspiner's 2017 interviews with Mike Moore, and to a lesser extent, Helen Clark.
2022: #JohnNaughton lays out the well-known propertarian and Hayekian side of crypto evangelism, then this intriguing observation;
"Lots of people will point out that the Satoshi memo, which released the idea for blockchain, more or less coincides with the fall of Lehman Brothers, and... [that] being a token for the corrupt, uncontrollable nature of financial capitalism and it's untrustworthiness."
I love listening to #podcasts, but it's not my number 1 source of entertainment. As such, I only get to listen to them when I can't watch videos or write code, which is usually my job commute. When I started working full-time, I finally got the opportunity to process my listening queue.
Well, 2024 hasn't been that productive, so far. I started working remotely, then I went on a holiday, and then I got sick, so I'm back to 100 episodes, 3+ days of listening 🙃
1/2 In a #podcasting masterclass I learnt: ask your target audience when they listen to #podcasts, there are good and bad times. Have the courage to change them. I found: the end of the month IS bad for #NatureMatchCuts (the new episode won't come today). Now surveys!
When do you like to listen to a MONTHLY #podcast?
Feel free to comment and explain your choice (or a different idea) and to #boost it for a better result!
@NatureMC
I usually listen to podcasts during the week while I'm working, but I also very rarely listen to New podcast episodes because I like going through the backlog so I just keep adding more podcasts to my queue until I catch up.
"You know how capitalist are always like, 'we need profit to motivate people...', which... is bullshit in general. But in this case, you're going to tell me there's no motivation, without profit, to develop a vaccine during a global pandemic? ... The idea... that these corporations would withhold the vaccine unless they were given payment, is absolutely bonkers and insane."
@nosat
> you are completely lost, there was no pandemic and there even isn't any globe... you are not able to make any sense of what is happening because you believe in non-sense
Not all tall. I believe in the SLACK & POWER of J. R. "BOB" DOBBS!
Despite decades of rumours of a reboot of the cult classic BBC TV series Blake's 7, I don't think it will ever happen. Listening to a podcast called Star Fall;
