I first noticed problems with Scoop’s creaking old community notice board shortly after the Blue Screen of Death roll out and the problems after that broadened and they haven’t been able to update their front page since Wednesday of last week.
When Selwyn Manning (one of the founding creators of The Daily Blog and now host of the best international Podcast in NZ – A View From Afar) was Editor at Scoop it was one of the most important news sites in New Zealand, since he left it went down hill and never stopped.
Alistair Thompson and I do not like each other and I find their new Editor Dr Incremental, Max Rashbrooke intolerable.
Scoop is like The Spinoff, but just in Wellington.
Scoop once heralded itself as the new future of Journalism, now it’s a barely read press release site based out of Wellington.
That’s a shame because Gordon Campbell is the best blogger in NZ on a site no one reads.
For all those organisations unable to get their press releases published, feel free to contact The Daily Blog and get your press releases posted here.
I endorse about Gordon Campbell’s skills. I also endorse the idea of releases to the public coming to TDB. Don’t be faint-hearted all you doers out there – old saying – ‘Faint heart never won fair lady’.
Our society was very fair to look at and trying to be so to the heart, but…. we let some dastardley business accretors concrete a tower separating her from us; Rapunzel let down your hair! I am sure we need to think along different paths to those chosen in the 20th century which have ended up cul de sacs, monotonous, likely moribund, though we are told differently. It seems our future can be achieved better through thinking creatively; thinking in analogies so each can grasp others’ ideas faster.
And that our present can be categorised as being in two opposing camps; a dichotomy of Science (which has been dominated by big business with exciting toys with little or no practical human advantage, even determined disadvantage), and Creativity relying largely on the Humanities with possibilities of perceiving and retaining some human and environmental advantage even out of disaster; using imagination and understanding of our psyche which would assist in keeping actual disaster at bay.
We need plucky, valiant thinkers and schemers to perceive the ways that we can avoid digging potholes for ourselves, to fall into with pain; too busy desiring some glittering outcome that we fail to maintain our wise systems. (Note, this is not an argument to follow the clarion-call for councils to concentrate on good drains and water alone.) (The commonplace wisdom from the Four Pillars of Apathy could be our spirited leitmotif ‘going forward’; note – https://allpoetry.com/Everybody,-Somebody,-Anybody,-and-Nobody.
“We need plucky, valiant thinkers and schemers to…”
…get their feathers plucked , their Valiants repo’d and their schemes to be bureaucratized to the 9th level of Hell.
Love your comments – sure to leave us shaken and stirred bwav. We need a regular dose of that. Some stress is good for you – which we need to remind ourselves as we allow the pretty coloured tv pictures or flicking on the net, to turn our brains to neutral or even porridge.
The Standard also has some issues and times out often.
Gordon Campbell had the ability to describe whatever fault he was writing about that would allow any fair minded person to see where the fault came from. Unfortunately not all people are fair minded so the worst of the rusted on supporters of whoever he was describing would not like his accurate description so hopefully he can stay available online.
GC and SM are both clever cookies.
I did Hons MDIA with Gordon’s daughter a while back and she ain’t too shabby either.
Hopefully they’ll find a way of sticking around.
Maybe RNZ could provide a venue.
I like reading the items from Scoop contributors. The philosophic musing coming from Martin LeFevre is an enjoyable sidestep from the frenzy and angst of much political discussion. This from the latest. Writing about otters and how someone studying them has applied human views to their behaviour and then he questions how we can do this to nature as our higher opinions of how things should be, are so tainted with human artificial (my word) perceptions that we cannot pass judgment on nature’s patterns.
https://beta1.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2409/S07771/resolving-the-problem-of-evil.htm
…Researching them when I got home, I learned that otters can be quite vicious. In a tour de force of anthropomorphism, one writer referred to otters generally as “necrophiliac, serial-killing fur monsters.” He added, “there comes a point at which rational people have to put adorable hijinks aside and recognize otters for what they are: disease-ridden, murderous, aqua-weasels whose treachery knows few bounds. They’re merciless hellspawn who use their intellects for great evil.”
Such projection of the human condition is hilarious. But so successful has the 30-year philosophical and scientific project of blurring the fundamental dissimilarity between humans and the rest of nature, that it’s necessary to unequivocally state the obvious: there is no evil in nature except the darkness generated by the mind of man…
When one sees that evil exists and operates beyond individual consciousness and control, one no longer fears it. We fear evil because we have externalized and supernaturalized it. But though the devil and demons are real, they are very human….
Darkness is the inevitable by-product of “higher thought” because humans are willfully or ignorantly self-centered instead of diligently self-knowing. Evil is the concentration of collective darkness plus intentionality, which pours through porous cells of individual consciousness.
In short, people make or allow themselves to be puppets of collective darkness. Even the most extreme conduits, like Putin, Trump and Netanyahu, are not the sources of evil, but marionettes acting out of collective darkness.
We are not individuals in the sense that society, at least western society conditions us to believe – separate, autonomous entities with “agency” conferred by free will. There’s no such thing as free will, because the will is never free. There’s another meaning to the word individual however, which relates to its root – an undivided human being.
Taking total responsibility for the darkness that exists within us, which is inseparable from the collective darkness of man, we grow as self-knowing human beings. We may not be able to change the world, but we are no longer conduits of collective darkness.
The closest to the truth of how evil operates that I’ve seen depicted on film is “Fallen,” with Denzel Washington. Though the movie lapses into theological mumbo-jumbo, the permeable nature of collective darkness as it passes through unaware people is portrayed with frightening accuracy.
The existence of darkness and evil is no great mystery to me, but the prevalence of it is. Things have gotten so bad in the world that cumulative, collective darkness now saturates human consciousness.
Sapiens is not incrementally progressing, becoming wiser and living more harmoniously on the earth and with each other, but becoming more fragmented as we continue to fragment the earth. And humans are inwardly dying en masse.
…When we begin to non-cumulatively learn from facing, questioning and remaining with our own darkness (as hatred, fear, anger, etc.) we turn the tables on collective darkness,…
My feeling is that if only a million people were non-cumulatively learning through self-knowing, it would spell the end of the rule of darkness and evil in human consciousness and the world.
(Perhaps the film Fallen referred to above would round out the thought.)
Review of Fallen 1998 – https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fallen-1998
This 123Movie offer may be of value.
Fallen Full Movie Watch Online 123Movies
123moviesfree.net
https://ww4.123moviesfree.net › … Whakamāoritia tēnei whārangi
The story begins with the execution of mass murderer Edgar Reese, who is arrested by Detective John Hobbes. But other series of murders happen and how sin …