let phil burgess go back to america and his wet dreams.

sorry but have all you people at club troppo been asleep since 911?

umm, you know, the patriot act, the dangerous concentration of executive power in a warmongering president’s hands, the usurpation and belittlement of the congress by the president’s authoritarian whims, the stacking of the supreme court with neoconservative stooges who are willing to shred the bill of the rights and the consitution in general, the total corruption of the us electoral system to corporate bribes and the american israel public affairs committee
(see video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2894821400057137878. god, the list could go on.

where the hell have you “experts” been?

suggest you take a rather large dose of paul craig roberts as quickly as possible, make a very strong cup of tea and sit down. the news is not good.

See, not so much difference after all…

Yours, I didnt bother reading.

Then why did you read the last one, Trotsky.

My comment was in response to Laura’s. Yours, I didn’t bother reading.

But you basically accuse him of being bad mannered because hes suggesting the US system has certain advantages. Thats not being bad mannered for a person of his background: hes calling it as he sees it.

To which Trotsky says:

Wrong again!

Referring to this:
B

ut I have a problem – one might call it a problem of tone. Its not just bad manners and bad politics to turn up somewhere in a powerful position and tell the locals that they dont quite measure up to standards back home.

You wanna try again, Trotsky.

If you want to address my points, go right ahead. So far you’ve rehearsed what we both know.

His bio and credentials to speak on the matter are not at issue – at least from me. Indeed it adds piquancy to my point. The way he speaks on it is a pity because with a little more self reflection he might have offered us more, and if not more, then something better judged.

There are obvious downsides to the checks and balances of the US. Big ones that the US is famous for. From my quick reading he didn’t mention them. Kind of undercuts his cred – which as I said, as an admirer of some of the content of the speech, I think is a pity.

Nic, It appears he was asked to give a speech on the subject -comparing the two nations. He could be considered an expert seeing he says he was an academic teaching comparative political systems.

F

or 15 years, during the academic part of my career,
I taught comparative politics. We always covered the various forms of parliamentary
government, including the Westminster system practiced in the UK and throughout most of the
Commonwealth.7

Put another way, I understand very well the differences between the presidential system of the US
and the parliamentary system of Australia and I especially understand how the fusion of
powers in the parliamentary system concentrates enormous power in the hands of a
minister. That is very different from the US.8

Its a fine speech that seems to have been given by a thoughtful man. If he thinks the US system is far more open to debate etc. hes probably right especially with the congressional function of oversight playing a more important role over there than it does here. Furthermore one could make a strong case against majoritarian system we have here compared to the US.

And Australias reaction to Bali was dignified, sombre and sane in contrast to the hysteria of the USs reaction to 9/11.

Bali isnt Australian territory. 250 marines were killed in Beruit in the 80s and US reaction wasnt hysterical. Our reaction is exactly what one would expect of a nation with almost next to no means of projecting power.

He has a pretty reasonable bio to be talking on this subject.

Phil has a long record of leadership in public policy and communications with broad experience as an academic, business executive, media commentator and writer on economic, political and cultural trends in the US and around the world.

Prior to his appointment with Telstra, Phil served most recently as president and chief executive of the National Academy of Public Administration in Washington, D.C. Phil also served as President of the Annapolis Institute, a U.S. think tank established in 1993 to help leaders manage change – at every level in both the public and private sectors.

Phil also serves as a Visiting Professor of Policy Studies at UCLA’s public policy school, where he teaches in the graduate program on communications and culture.

If it’s the unrevised text of a speech, though, I understand and forgive the bolding.

You can get a sense of the music of the psalms by not saying these phrases, and by reading them as antiphonally sung, with one voice saying the call up to the caesura (these poems are very carefully pointed in the same place as the Hebrew text) and a second voice saying the response.

I recommend saying both voices yourself, and basing each of them on your choice of character actors from the Carry On movies.

But I have a problem – one might call it a problem of tone. Its not just bad manners and bad politics to turn up somewhere in a powerful position and tell the locals that they dont quite measure up to standards back home. Its bad in another sense.

Have you seen Phil Burgess’ bio? He taught comparative political systems at university.

My assertion is based on what I know of the history of punctuation (from a course reader) and second, readings of McLuhan.

History of punctuation in a nutshell:

Inthebeginningwasscriptocontinua
(the first punctuation was rhetorical – the addition of marks to indicate pauses and stresses required in reading aloud – but that was done by the reader).
Irish monks started putting spaces into written text in the seventh and eighth centuries CE to assist their Gaelic speaking readers. This conversion of rhetorically punctuated scripto continuo (with positurae to mark the ends of statements, phrases and questions) made the development of silent reading possible.

The next big phase after that is the development of standardised typographic punctuation, and attempts to standardise grammar in the eighteenth century.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan describes the process of book production before the printing press, in the universities of the Medieval schoolmen. One interesting feature is that students in the universities learnt grammar before they began to write; it was a preparation for accurately recording the words of the lecturers who would dictate their texts to them from memory. I’d suggest a more subtle emphasis is indicated for “… all our days are passed away in they wrath; we spend out years as a tale that is told“: one where pitch and volume wane towards the end of the statement.

So, I figure what you’re seeing in those old bibles is the use of typography to convey rhetorical inflection. Actually delivering the correct rhetorical inflection in reading the text aloud would depend not just on the use of italics, but also an intimate knowledge of established rhetorical conventions. Some of those inflections are obvious to a modern reader, e.g:

I will fay of the LORD He is my refuge and my fortrefs…

The inflection of your verse 9 is less obvious. That’s possibly because we moderns work with a very narrow range of rhetorical emphases; we emphasise statements by asserting them more loudly, “raising the pitch” (quite literally). It may be that the intended inflection there is for the speaker’s voice to wane away a little on “that is told” (almost, but not quite, plainsong) to enhance the metaphor.

That was always my first assumption, but it certainly is a pretty odd list of emphases on that page if that’s the real reason.

For example, verse 9 above:

For all our days are passed away in they wrath; we spend out years as a tale that is told.

What is your source for this claim?

Then said Pilate unto them, Take ye him, and judge him according to your law. The Jews therefore said unto him, It is not lawful for us to put any man to death: That the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled, which he spake, signifying what death he should die.

Then Pilate entered into the judgment hall again, and called Jesus, and said unto him, Art thou the King of the Jews? Jesus answered him, Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?

Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done?

Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.

John 18: 31-36

Arrogance isn’t any less of an assumption. But it’s a less motivated assumption. It doesn’t discount the content in the way that ’sour grapes’ does.

Actually, perhaps I shouldn’t concede so much. How’s this – arrogance is a quality of the text. The text is arrogant. Whether it’s motivated by sour grapes seems to be more speculative – or really entirely speculative.

In any event, my point is that sour grapes comes with an ‘he would say that’ kind of explanation which invites us to simply ignore what he says as lacking not just bona fides but, as you implied in your comment, content. It was just sour grapes.

James,

I still can’t see the problem.

I presume, as you suggest, that the heavy bolding was for busy executives, thought it could also be bolding for himself, so it serves as a background full text of the speech which people can read after the event – or he can read from – at the same time as allowing him to speak while skimming between the major points. Either way, it provides a way of reading the piece at two levels of detail – a bit like footnotes do. I actually prefer the bolding to be there, because I like to skim when I’m not that engaged. And there were parts of the speech – like the bit about Telstra at the end, that I wanted to skim.

Reader, speaker . . . everyone’s a winner

How is “arrogance” any less of an easy assumption to make than that of “sour grapes”?