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Lyndon Hood - committed atheist, Lower Hutt

Friday, December 17, 2004

Mormons! Mormons on the Train!

It's probably a sign but I hate to think what of.

I leave a post on Christmas and Christianity unfinished to go buy some presents. And when I get on the train home I find that in amongst the crowd is a flock of Latter Day Saints.

Is 'flock' the word? An ecstasy of Mormons? An persistence? A doorslammery?

I ended up talking to one woman. I'd love to think it was a kind of Christmas penance to spare my fellow passengers but it was probably more to do with the way I'm not naturally impolite and I couldn't get away. And it's always nice to have someone to chat with, however awkwardly.

I'm interested in religion from a kind of outside perspective. So I could have asked about life in the church, rather than, for instance, letting her keep the conversation on my spiritual wellbeing and how best to fix it. I did feel like I was being hard sold.

I also have to note that she had and absolutely unyielding stare and the kind of slow speech I normally associate with words like 'groovy' and discussions of the inner nature of flowers. Her pupils were the normal size, but I'm not sure if she blinked.

When she reached her stop she handed me over to a guy called Elder somebody. He was younger than I would have expected for an elder. As he was American, I had a gambit towards a more ordinary conversation; "So, you'd be from America then," I said. We also talked of the importance of thinking things over from time to time and how their method is based on encouraging people to introspection rather than ramming opinions down throats.

Though they do make sure people ask themselves the right questions in their introspection.

Anyway, we chatted. He seemed a lot less anxious to convert me, but that might just be a more experienced evangelist showing his chops. Or he might have decided I was a lost cause. Or he wasn't quite so stoned on the God-juice.

I got off the train and nobody tried to follow me home.

Anyway, here's the post I was writing...

Bah! Humbug!

I don't have anything against Christmas. I do resent the way my holiday plans are upsetting a lifetime habit of buying the presents just before I have to give them away. Not that I've actually finished shopping. That's tomorrow.

I suppose I should just relax and contemplate the true meaning of the season. Which is, of course, getting stuff. Oh, all right, it's about family and togetherness and giving. Which is what makes it so depressing for those for whom those things are unachievable mutually contradictory.

I personally find the whole birth-of-the-saviour-of-humankind thing kind of peripheral. Of course I am, though not devoid of spiritual instincts, a godless atheist.

But for a fair chunk of the population Christmas doesn't have much to do with Christ. Maybe some people should just deal with that. In much the same way that some linguistic conservatives (myself included) should admit that maybe sometimes it's not that the language is being abused, it's just that it has moved on.

And I do wish that certain Christians (that is, uppity ones with whom I disagree) would take the opportunity of the season to remember which book it is they're representing. I'm thinking of the actual teachings of Christ: the not judging, the not stone-casting, the turning of the other cheek and so on. Rather than all those fiddly rules in the introduction.

Though in fairness I think we should remember two things.

Firstly, in the context of loving the sinner (well not loving the sinner, obviously...) and hating the sin, it can be legitimate to hate legislation that makes it easier or more acceptable to do the sinning. And if there's one thing the Bible has, it's lists of sins.

Secondly, I actually quite like some Christian activists. I'm thinking of the muscular and vaguely marxist liberation theology that has a natural home doing stuff like resisting dictatorship. I don't mind someone acting with the courage of their convictions when what they're on about is, in Douglas Adams' summary of the New Testament, "how great it would be if people were nice to each other for a change".

Then again, as I recall, Desmond Tutu isn't all that pro-gay either.

Incidentally, while I was shopping I wandered by a radio: Linda Clark was asking Brian Tamaki whether that money might be better spent on good works than on Brian Tamaki. I could hear them shouting at each other as I finished browsing.

Anyway, I'm not someone who thinks that getting Israel and the Palestine together over a turkey and singing christmas carols will sort out the world's problems. Though I was interested in Tariq Ali's attributing of the rise of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism to the moral vacuum and collapse of social institutions associated with 80s monetarism. Perhaps they should issue a security risk certificate for Roger Douglas.


Max Johns - missing Geoff Robinson, Blenheim

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Speaking when appointed to

The surprise announcement that Margeret Wilson will be the next Speaker of the House - that is, Parliament's version of a square leg umpire provided by the batting team, who already get the benefit of the doubt - has been met with some pretty harsh opposition. This is more surprising than it first seems, because Speakers are usually given endorsement from both sides of the House (and often appointed unanimously) when they take over the big seat at the front. Even in politics, it's considered bad form to slag off the ref.

Act, who not so long ago were pushing for the job to go to Richard Prebble, are now advertising Ken Shirley as a candidate, but even he admits that he's only standing "as a matter of constitutional principle" (as he did against Jonathan Hunt after the 2002 election) and would prefer current Assistant Speaker Ross Robertson to be in charge. This is all academic, given the support pledged by United Future and the Greens (who support the job not going to an "old boy", but don't indicate which of those two adjectives the emphasis should be on, and claim to like Wilson's sense of humour) to Helen Clark's decision. Gerry Brownlee has led National's charge against the appointment-to-be, attacking both the reasons behind the decision and Wilson's ability to handle the job.

Brownlee claims that the appointment hasn't been made because Wilson will be a good speaker, but because it will remove an unpopular Minister from Cabinet and solve a problem Clark has with working out what to do with Wilson. Already she's been relieved of a former post overseeing the foreshore and seabed mess, and could well be seen as not fulfilling her current duties adequately. But even if this is a convenient reshuffle of a problem Minister, that's not something any opposition could ever prove. That might be why Brownlee left such accusations to the side when interviewed on National Radio this morning, and instead focused on Wilson's suitability for the role. He took issue with her lack of parliamentary experience, particularly given that she has never sat either on the backbenches or in opposition (Wilson first joined Labour's list at number 10 for the 1999 election). Moreover, that Wilson has been working in ministerial capacities since she became an MP means that her time in the debating chamber has been limited more than that of most MPs with five years under their belts. There has already been something of a concession that experience isn't on Wilson's side - she herself told the Herald that she thinks she will "learn on the job".

But should a Speaker learn on the job when more experienced candidates are available? Brownlee was told by his interviewer (who is this mysterious women on my airwaves and what has she done to Geoff Robinson?) that "surely" there must have been Speakers in the past who were appointed before they'd served years in opposition, and on the backbenches, and aged suitably. He knew the answer, but correctly guessed that the interviewer didn't: "Name them," was his simple reponse. The short silence that followed (would Geoff ever let a subject stump him like that?) was good radio, but bad interviewing. "Well...you'd have to go back a long way..." our national broadcaster admitted.

How far back? Is National just making this sound worse than it is? After all, most people can't name the current Speaker, let alone previous holders of the title. Isn't it the sort of job you can flick to anyone with a reasonable ability to memorise a few rules (okay, 402 Standing Orders), regardless of how much they've played the game? I did a bit of hunting, and history would suggest not.

Since 1943, there have been sixteen speakers fill seventeen appointments (with Sir Roy Jack playing the part on two different occasions). The least experienced in terms of time in the House was National's Matthew Oram, who'd been around for seven years before his promotion. He hadn't spent any of that time as a Minister, and so it can be assumed that he'd seen a lot more of the debating chamber than Wilson has. Of the other fifteen, four had spent twelve years as MPs. The rest even longer: Jack waited thirteen years, two each sat through fifteen, sixteen and eighteen years, while others had waits of nineteen, 22, and 25 years. The soon-to-retire Hunt set a record of 33 years from first election win to Speaker appointment. The sixteen post-WW2 Speakers had spent, on average, over sixteen years in the House before their appointments.

History is also on Brownlee's side with his other claims. Every single Speaker since 1900 had spent time in opposition and as a backbencher prior to appointment (before then, the fluid nature of political parties makes "opposition" difficult to define). That this breadth of experience in the House would make a Speaker better in the job seems fair enough - the Speaker is expected to allow balanced debate to take place while also apportioning time to parties depending on the electorial weight they have to throw around. It can't be easy, especially for someone who has only experienced parliamentary debate from one privileged angle. So why is Captain Clark sending someone so inexperienced to judge the run outs? Possibly to remove her from the batting line up without having to make her 12th man, or possibly because, as she claims, Wilson's got what it takes by virtue of her seniority in the current Government and her legal abilities.

These benefits she touts will prove to be only slight at best. A Speaker should be as neutral as is practical while the House sits. This requirement sits uneasily with the inevitable interest that a recent senior member of Cabinet will have in the Government's continued implementation of its policy. Looking at post-war history again, only six out of the sixteen Speakers had ministerial appointments prior to becoming Speaker. Of those six, Sir Peter Tapsell was entirely free of any conflict (being a Labour MP presiding over a National Government), Sir Basil Arthur served as a Minister in the Kirk administration but was Speaker for the first few months of Lange's fourth Labour Government (death cut his reign short), and Hunt held his portfolios under Lange, Palmer and Moore before spending nine years in opposition prior to his appointment by the Clark administration. Jack's first term as Speaker pre-dated his brief membership of cabinet and ended in 1972, when a major reshuffle followed Sir Keith Holyoake's voluntary departure from the Prime Minister's office. Jack filled the roles of Attorney-General and Minister of Justice through the last few months of that National Government (under new PM John Marshall), and next became Speaker after Muldoon's 1975 election win. Only Douglas Kidd and Thomas Burke leapt, as Wilson will, straight from Cabinet to the Speaker's chair.

The legal ability that Clark touts, meanwhile, is no replacement for an intimate knowledge of how Parliament works. A knowledge of rules needs to be backed up with the ability to apply them in the spirit of the game. I read with interest in the short parliament.govt.nz biography of Sir Robert Macfarlane that
Labour had a majority of only one during his term of Speaker in the second Labour Government. Then Labour Party Leader Wallace Rowling noted at the time of Sir Robert's death that no Speaker had worked under more difficult conditions. Sir Robert had controlled the situation by using common sense rather than the rule book, he said.
I hope that similar praise will one day be given to Wilson, and that she will allow common sense to rule over a strict application of rules. But without a reasonable chance for her to first develop her parliamentary commonsense, it doesn't seem likely.

Matt Nippert - navel astronomer, Auckland

Monday, December 13, 2004

Clowns and mirrors

Ever take a look in the mirror? I mean aside from popping zits or spreading the bryl? It's a strange experience, and self-reflection is a lot harder than self-help gurus make out. I've been doing a bit lately, thinking back on how I got into the journalism gig. It wasn't really planned, more a bail-out option after realising the life of a civil servant wasn't for me.

I remember the first place I got a news story published (outside of the crackhouse-cum-club newsletter of student media), in 2001. It was on party drugs, specifically the 'P' of it's day, 'G' aka 'GBH' or 'Fantasy'. The latest issue of Pacific Journalism Review has a good piece by the Herald's Mr Science Simon Collins, and Jeremy Rose, on the paper that printed it: the progressive 90s paper City Voice.

The two founded and ran the Wellington weekly for a decade. I only read it myself for a few years before it folded in 2001, while I was at university sifting through barrooms, boardrooms, newsrooms and the occasional lecture.

I remember City Voice as feisty and, as as with the Shipping News' Gammy Bird, it had a hard bite. The article traces the dream to a sad and messy end, hopefully giving the next generation of idealists something to think about - as well as preserving a genuine media legacy.

By the time the axe fell at City Voice, the Wellington evening daily Evening Post had also been swallowed by the Dominion. If you're a print junkie, this city would send your paralytic. Hence, I moved to Auckland. Although, now as I'm looking across the Pacific, even New Zealand feels small.

Despite the close of the US election, I'm looking eastwards for a reason - naval gazing isn't as fruitless as I once thought. There's the potential for overseas study if I can somehow navigate my way through various bureaucratic mazes, including university admissions and scholarship applications.

Last month the blogosphere intruded into my serious quest. At a scholarship interview in Wellington I fielded questions surrounding media treatment of the US elections ("it's an echo chamber"), the origins of Fulbright awards ("an educational Marshall plan"). I was feeling pretty good, answering a panel of seven including 5 PhDs and the press officer from the US embassy is a little intimidating. But as I was preparing to leave, they asked a clanger that left me flumoxed, ruining my serious facade.

"So, how's the air guitar going?"

DogBitingMen, you bastards.

Fortunately, this was some time ago, and I've recomposed and can end this post on a positive note. In the spirit of adding something new (as I believe all good blogs should do), I've attached below an internet exclusive. Which is, of course, a euphemism for the bulging folder of scribblings I've got stashed under my bed.

But this editorial I wrote for Salient has got a certain spark; I hear the National Party were tossing up legal action after it was published. It's an election autopsy special, written in the hours following the results of the student election being announced. Don't let that put you off though, I'm assured it's funny, and it even has a moral:
Why not to not give a shit (originally published Salient, October 2003)

A lackluster public can provide appetising opportunities. Many years ago now I got involved in party politics for the first and last time. It was part of an experiment into how desperate and corruptible the National Party was. The Rimutaka electorate was ripe for the picking, recently being overrun by New Zealand First and all present party officers well into their retirement years. A vast influx of youngsters would surely convince them all to retire early to fully enjoy their privately paid pensions.

It was easy to begin with, a simple election where showing any interest whatsoever was enough to guarantee victory. Overnight, I became the blue-blooded Treasurer and Policy Officer for a party for which I had no sympathy and even less respect. Too easy, I found. We changed the constitution, and my flatmates and I were able to reach quorum whenever the mood took us. We had sloshed funds.

Many nights were enjoyed at the expense of Shipley and Birch. Membership request forms went unanswered, party membership dropping from hundreds to 50 within one year. Cheques weren't cashed, and my end-of-year financial report was sparse to say the least, dodgy to say the best. Of course it passed scrutiny: my flatmates weren't concerned with my irregularities. We had all gotten drunk on our criminality.

We didn't care about the aims of our supposed leaders. We delighted in contradicting them. Attending conferences became an excuse for getting wasted and feigning respectability, arguing republicanism beneath portraits of Queen Elizabeth in Masonic halls.

But we never were looked down on. Despite subtle insults, a lack of respect for our supposed constituents, and often absolutely outrageous comments (I remarked that Shipley's Code of Social and Family Responsibility was "prescriptive fascism on stilts"), we were never held accountable. Indeed, I was often praised for my commitment to alternative and colourful views, and my passion was attributed to youthful zest. Despite our incredulous agenda, the virtue of our positions meant we had credibility. Faith without foundation is a powerful agent of hallucination.

National politics weren't even beyond our reach. "Our" candidate for the electorate was the most evil man available . He was a former policeman, and a baton-instructor to boot. The Springbok Tour was his proving ground, and his view on race relations and social harmony were a product of his profession. In Upper Hutt, he passed muster, but only barely. The votes of my subversive flatmates ensured baton-man got the nod.

I don't know what I'd have done if our kamikaze candidate succeeded. I'd probably have got a job as parliamentary secretary, but that's an aside, and our best-laid plans came to fruition. He lost heavily, and Rimutaka has been a Swain lock since.

My career as a political saboteur, a sapper beneath enemy lines, came to a natural end. A combination of boredom and a lowered tolerance for conversational pain led me not to renew my membership after only one damaging term. But if real power had been involved, beyond that of frustration and petty machinations, I could have moved beyond being merely tipsy, to being fully drunk.

Until last Thursday this story had been one of celebrating my role in National's misfortunes. While I cannot claim sole responsibility, the paltry performance of Bill English is something I am personally gratified by. However, it also illustrates that when the public, any public, loses interest in who its leaders are and what they stand for, the public's opinions matter for nought. Because a representative unobserved is almost always a representative moving in directions you wouldn't envisage or condone.

Student elections have not had notable participation in recent years. Reasons for this are myriad. Students are busy, there's less time for communal communication and activities. Candidates are boring. Student politics doesn't matter.

But it is when politics seems not to matter, that it really does. When eyes and interest are removed from decision-makers, the decisions made become more removed and odious to those they directly affect. I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest that my experience with the Rimutaka is a humorous anecdote, but only to those outside the National Party. If we could imagine for a moment that we were all members of the Tory brigade, then suddenly the joke is decidedly unfunny. There's no giggling, only lamenting. By the time you realise those around you are laughing, you've long been the butt of the joke.

Despite the fact Victoria's enrolments are the highest they have ever been, the number of people turning out to vote in the VUWSA elections actually decreased this year. We're getting dangerously close to indulging in black comedy, and students won't be the ones laughing at the tragedy - the chuckles will be coming from outside the university. We'll have finally become the sad parody critics have called us: apathetic, delusional, blind while led by real nutcases.

I don't regret gutting the National Party in Rimutaka, far from it, but I am disturbed about how easy it was to corrupt a supposedly democratic process. While I got a decent story to tell, if you leave decisions up to a few the only likely outcome is a tyranny of the minority. Benevolent dictators are few and far between, and amongst opportunists even more rare.

So if you want a moral from all this; 1) Don't join the National Party, even if only to destroy it, and; 2) Pay attention to the world surrounding you, so clowns like me don't play with your future for a few cheap laughs.

Keith Ng, Asshole, Wellington

America - FUCK YEAH!

Team America: World Police is a reductive typological analysis of international affairs. The movie is philosophically underpinned by the premise that there are are three categories of agents in the world: dicks, pussies, and assholes.

"Pussies think everyone can get along, and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through. But then you got your assholes, Chuck. And all the assholes want us to shit all over everything! So, pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes, Chuck. And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you'd get? You'd get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!"

It makes me wonder why I wasted five years studying international relations.

It's hilarious, and it's certainly crass, but it's nothing we haven't seen from South Park. (Except for the puppet sex - nay, puppet porn - which is unimaginably wrong.) It's full of scatological humour and geek references, which is not for everyone, but the political satire is top notch.

The whole movie walks a fine line between mocking its subjects and satirising those who are mocking its subjects. For example, the Arab characters' dialogue:
"Durka durka, Mohammed jihad."
"Jihad jihad? Mohammed durka durka."

It's hardly intended as a mock of Arabs.

I thought Michael Moore didn't come out too badly, whereas the "Film Actors' Guild" (FAG) was brutally... er... taken apart. (Think puppet gore.)

The critics complain that TA depicts "leading liberals" from Hollywood in a very negative way, and is therefore pro-Bush. But this illustrates TA's very point - that these cocksuckers hog the international limelight when they're just fucking actors, with no moral, intellectual or legal authority to "lead" the left.

Moreover, the whole movie mocks the ideas and actions of the hawks/dicks, whereas the attacks on the left have been merely against personalities - morally and intellectually insignificant ones, at that (except for the Tarantino-eqsue diplomacy in the Hans Blix/UN scene).

Still, it would be inaccurate to say that the movie was anti-Bush, either. In the tradition of the darkest satires, it simply denies the proposition that someone has to be right. It suggests that dicks are necessary, but that doesn't make them good, or any less dicks. Same goes for pussies, and maybe even assholes.

But to paraphrase Freud, sometimes, a dick is just a dick.

Max Johns - office dweller, Blenheim

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Supreme Beings

Helen and Margaret's new toy doesn't seem to like playing with them much. It's not long now since the PM and Attorney-General decided to give the Privy Council the flick and build the country a Supreme Court (which is actually more of an average meeting room). As its prime champions, they couldn't have been happier to be rid of those damn part-time foreigners poking all around our laws and telling us what to do. What they possibly failed to realise in all the excitement of creating their own lasting monument to Labour 5 is that a bunch of full-time locals poking around the laws and telling us what to do could get to be a little more difficult to stomach, and could even get personal.

The name-calling and bitching that occured even before any cases had been heard by Sian Elias's gang of learned elders was embarrassing. Two of our nation's leading ladies struggled to share the spotlight, and it showed painfully. But one of the downsides of allowing your latest monument to yourself to speak its mind in an independent capicity is that it might just say what it thinks. And it might just think that you didn't understand what you were doing when you started all of this. And you might think that it should shut up, and just quietly go about its business. And then things might get a little nasty.

Luckily for us cringing observers, the pair of top cats stopped the fighting and got on with their normal lives. Sian Elias judged a court case, and Helen Clark fucked off overseas. The case that Elias and co. chose to take on - Richard Prebble v. Donna Awatere-Huata - allowed the Supreme Court's first run to take place all over one of Clark's most shameless lap dogs, Jonathan Hunt. One of the few men who have successfully sat, rolled over, and begged enough to finally earn a treat has spent a good long while pretending that eight equals nine, somehow convincing himself that a party's number of seats in the house isn't affected by trifling matters like one of those seats' members being declared independent. Difficult to do with a straight face, but easy enough when the loser is an enemy of your boss.

A pity for both Hunt and Clark, then, that the newest, highest court in all the land wasted no time in delivering a maths lesson to all involved and removing Awatere-Huata from parliament for good. That the speaker spent so long blinding himself to the fact that ACT was not as widely represented as it had been, while at the same time accepting that the number of ACT MPs had changed, had all been pretty convenient for Helen. That her shiny new court put everything back to how it ought to have been would have hurt. (And that the new guy in the House, Kenneth Wang, immediately earned glowing headlines for his direct hit on prized Government pooch Michael Cullen would only have made things worse).

Supreme Court 1, Labour 0.

Still, what were the odds of the very first Supreme Court case being so squarely focussed on the Government? Maybe it was just bad luck, and the next case would give Sian something less political to chew on. Or maybe round 2 would be even more likely to take skin off the PM's nose, depending where Chief Justice went fishing for it. Maybe round 2 wouldn't just end a bit of mainly harmless parliamentary game-playing, but would instead wade straight into a mess that Clark, by virtue of her position, is ultimately responsible for (no matter how much she hides behind her outward faith in due process). And maybe that mess would be one of the bigger messes around these days, one that might be described either as "NZ's Guantanamo Bay", or simply as a terrible fuck up.

Terrorism, national security, espionage, international relations, "human rights", Goldenhorse. This case had it all.Two years ago, the Keep New Zealand Safe Brigade announced that Zaoui had admitted to being a terrorist. They were absolutely mistaken, but that's now a trifling matter. Since he might be Osama's mate, they locked him up. The Belgians don't trust him, you see, and so neither should we.

They had two years to come up with a better reason for imprisoning a man. The difficult bit, as far as things like "justice delayed" and "human rights" go, is that he's been in prison all that time. Have they found anything? We don't know. There are at this stage two possible outcomes of the mysterious work that's been done to keep us all safe. It's possible that they haven't come up with anything yet, and it's all proving to be a bit embarrassing that we're actually nice and safe no matter what we do with Zaoui. So they're just waiting around for something to come up. Until then, they're not saying anything. Also, it's possible that some sort of super-secret, incredibly incredible information has been gathered on Zaoui. Something so amazing that the moment anyone's told about it, they'll heartily agree that, yes, he should be left to rot behind bars. Problem is that the work the SIS does in support of global security is so mega-secret that they can't tell anyone what they know, not even a court wanting to grant the man bail. So they're not saying anything.

Funnily enough, winking and nudging wasn't enough to convince the judges. Also, the SIS probably didn't help themselves by admitting that the threat they've investigated can't actually be linked to New Zealand.

Supreme Court 2, Labour 0.

This one was a direct hit on the government. The acidic press release from Margaret Wilson (which I can no longer find a link for, sorry) was scathing in its brevity. Something like "The Court has had its say. Good on it. ENDS." But don't be fooled by all that blank page: this will be far from a white flag.


Steve's Bill

Meanwhile, it's now illegal to smoke in bars. Or to be accurate, it's illegal for bars to allow you to smoke in them. This is all thanks to the the Smoke-free Environments Amendment Act 2003, which was sponsored through Parliament by Rotorua MP Steve Chadwick. By far the most interesting thing I've learnt about this recently is that Steve's a girl.

Lyndon Hood - not a lawyer, Lower Hutt

Friday, December 10, 2004

This morning Linda Clark interviewed a logician. Quite a contrast, I know. A bit like those old movies where one guy was fat and the other one was skinny. The punchline is that she conducted what one Jamie Whyte presumably thought was going to be a promo for his book as an adversarial interview. As in, what's the point of rational thought anyway?

Her arguments made no sense and she looked like a fool. But that's hardly news so we'll move on.

It's often interesting to listen to the headlines on the radio evolving hour by hour as the subeditors come to grips with something complicated. Like a legal argument. For a good few bulletins the tidbit of reasoning accompanying news of the Zaoui bail verdict was the court's opinion that transfer to the refugee centre would constitute continued detention. Kind of a peripheral point compared the finding that there was no great peril in letting him go in the meantime. Even, it seems, taking into account whatever it says on that summary of accusations.

One concludes that even the SIS don't expect him to be blowing up any landmarks in the next few months.

The case was decided much like other bail applications - taking into account the risk to society. From a general point of view, the significant ruling was made the other day: that a person waiting for a review of a security risk certificate can in principle be bailed.

I really have heard it suggested, by persons not unmentioned earlier in this post, that these decisions spring from the Supreme Court's supposed ongoing battle with the Government. Perhaps I'm being overly charitable, but personally I'm prepared to assume it's more due to the weight of hundreds of years of legal tradition with respect to habeus corpus and the rights of the accused, an honest interpretation of the law as a whole, and the facts of the case.

If the Government had meant to deny even the possibility of bail, that's sufficiently radical that they should have said. And to my mind, if the law is changed so it does say that, it will be a bad thing. Those hundreds of years of precident came out the way they did for a reason.

I digress.

I don't mean to imply that the media are particularly stupid. It's just that they're no more clever that the other schmucks. Witness the disturbingly successful attempt by defense lawyers to convince juries that if it wasn't planned in advance, it wasn't murder. Folks, the relevant point according to the law isn't whether it was premeditated, it's whether it was deliberate. And that includes deliberately stabbing somebody lots of times, even if you didn't particularly mean to kill them.

Its like that Jamie Whyte guy said: sense isn't all that common.

Perhaps I should get myself an ivory tower.

But I wouldn't want to slaughter all those elephants.


Lyndon Hood - political corrector

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

The term 'political correctness' has become intensely pejorative since it started appearing in dictionaries in the early 90s. It's ironic (as in, genuinely ironic; not like Alannis Morrisette) that things like gender-inclusive language have been widely accepted but the movement responsible is repressed because of the dominant vocabulary.

And I'm guessing that at least half of the times something is called 'politically correct' it means nothing except 'I don't like this thing', perhaps with the added hint that said thing smacks of do-goodery. This effect applies most particularly to 'political correctness gone mad'.

So I would have though that a group interested in maintaining the quality of the language would dot their eyes and cross their tees when dealing with such a fuzzy concept. Mind you, I'd have thought they'd be more careful about the spelling on their website, too.

The Global Language Monitor* has released its list of the 10 most politically correct terms of the year. I'm not sure how the list was generated, And I don't think even they know what they mean by politically correct language. Any attempt to find an explanation on their site is doomed to painful failure and the list itself is just inconsistent.

About half the list deals with archetypal PC cases of trying to change language with social engineering in mind. Whether for better or for worse may be a matter of opinion. The rest I just don't get.

The first-place-getter ('Device/Captured Device' for 'Master/Slave', a substitution demanded by an anonymous county official for the new computers) is indeed obviously silly. Mr Monitor describes this as "... but one more example of the insertion of politics into every facet of modern life." Possibly. Though it seems to have been then work of a lone nut and it also seems to have been fixed.

And it's more a question of degree. If the primary and secondary hard drives had through some historical fluke been called 'Planter/Negro' or 'Rapist/Slut' then I think even Monitorboy would have to concede the point.

Though 'Waitron' to describe the person giving you food probably won't take off. Here's a hint: the theatre profession eliminated the rather dismissive 'actress' by calling everyone 'actors'. Next time you see a female thespian referred to as and 'actor' you might discreetly point out that she's etymologically male.

On the other hand, is it really fifth-place-gettingly terrible that somebody tried to encourage a religiously neutral descriptor of the absolute ('higher power' for 'God')?

New Zealanders might take note of 'non-same-sex-marriage' (number two on the list). This seems to have appeared in exactly one speech and sounds more like someone having trouble expressing themselves than dogmatic linguistics. I'd certainly like to know what the whole sentence was.

What our man should have said, apparently, was 'marriage'. Since exactly what constitutes marriage is one of the points at issue, I'd have thought some odd vocabulary was permitted or even required.

So I'll be disappointed if I don't see some really stupid suggestions for what to call people bound by civil union. Uniees? Civil unicants? I imagine we'll just settle on 'partners'.

Seems there was a spree of reverences to George W Bush as 'incurious' after the 9/11 commission results were released. This came in at number seven. I guess this is but one more example of the insertion of politics into even politics. Clearly the Language Monitors believe in calling a spade a spade. While Mr Bush does share many qualities with a spade, surely that doesn't mean the media is required to insult the President during a time of war. And anyway: incurious George, ha ha ha.

That is similar to several other items, most notably 'insurgents' for the people rising up against established authority in Iraq, in that it's an entirely accurate description. Sometimes more so than the alleged original.

Still, at least they don't seem partisan.

The rest of the GLM site is kind of interesting. They track buzzwords in media reports and rate how hot they are using some secret algorithm. There's also a user-submitted list of reported words and phrases, though I can't say whether it's for new words or abused words or 'hot' words or just made up words or what (looking at that page I considered nominating 'LanguagePolice' and 'WatchList'). Especially since once again they are shorn of all context.

Someone who imagines that a word can carry much meaning outside a sentence is unlikely to grasp the fraught relationship between form and content in language. So they should probably give up on the political correctness thing.

* From my experience of American English I take it that a 'global language monitor' is someone whose job it is to clean the global language when the teacher has finished using it.


Max Johns - unwilling alter-ego, the dark mind of Matt Nippert

So it’s looking like rain in Sydney today. Nice. Cricket fans can expect a few showers, which don't sound so bad, and thunderstorms, which do. The second ODI against Australia could well be a non-starter. And to think that Melbourne had the foresight to build a bloody great big roof for the first game. With no reserve day scheduled, that throws a spanner into the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy’s debut series. If today's game is lost and the Australians win the next, a tied series is a rather weak start to what will hopefully become a strong and popular (as well as regular) sporting competition.

New Zealand's win on Sunday (ha!) has set up a decent contest between ourselves and the Aussies (at long bloody last), and it's a pity that a spot of weather might ruin it. Especially since, as reported by this pessimistic Australian sports writer (is there anything more rare in today's cricketing world?), there's a lot more than a single trophy riding on the trans-Tasman cricket played this season.

It’s been well-publicised that a World XI is going to be picked to play against Australia next September. But that's not exactly true. The World XI's opponents will in fact be whichever team is top of the ICC's rankings on April 1, 2005, in either form of the game. That is, the top test team plays the World XI test, and the top ODI team takes them on in the shorter game. For years it's been unimaginable that any team other than Australia would be the top test or one day team between now and approximately forever and fucking ever, and so the deadline hasn't been a subject of much discussion. Instead, the assumed World vs. Australia series in both forms of the game has been the focus.

Australia is quite possibly fielding the best team in world cricket ever right now, so it's a quite rational assumption that that they’ll be on top of the world in five months’ time. But what that quite rational assumption fails to take into account is that it's a funny old game, cricket, and anything can happen . It also failed to take into account New Zealand's recent employment of coach John Bracewell, who is something of a King Midas when it comes to one day cricket (and let’s not mention any other sort of cricket for a while, okay?). Not that he exactly had to start with a bunch of mugs, but recent months have been particularly good ones for the Black Caps.

Last year we floated around seventh and eighth positions out of the eleven teams ranked by the ICC. Now, we're well above there. Sunday's win over Australia shifted us to second equal with Sri Lanka. In the last 21 matches the Black Caps played, they’ve won 17, lost 2, and had two end with no result (here's the last twenty). At home, their record is 19 wins of the last 25 matches, and 10 of the last 12. In short, New Zealand is good at this game.

Mouth-wateringly, both Sri Lanka and Australia are coming here later this summer. If we can beat them both – and form suggests we can – there's a very good chance that the World XI will be facing up to a team in black. The only problem goes back to the Australia-related assumptions mention earlier. The three-match series is scheduled for Melbourne.

Keith Ng - Dressed Down, Wellington

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Gardening implements, Simpsons barmen and all that hubba hubba

(This is a guest post from Keith Ng, Salient news editor and student media political correspondent. Apparently, he's on the inside.)

I was in the Press Gallery for the CUB debate today. The minute I walked through the door, I was greeted by the Herald's Audrey Young, who asked whether I was from the NZ Chinese Times. "Err... what?", came my eloquent reply. Then she explained the tie-and-jacket dress-code, and how my Matt-Nippert-inspired bogan attire didn't cut it.

Oops.

It was an auspicious and entirely appropriate start for my term as Some Guy in the Press Gallery for the Aotearoa Student Press Association (coming to a student magazine near you in 2005).

--

Pastor Brian Tamaki was on his way out when I entered Parliament. His Holiness was impeccably dressed and generously greased, as always. The crowd was small and quiet, especially when compared with the Prostitution Reform last year. But it was pretty evenly - and very clearly - divided.

As for the speeches, even though nothing new was said, it was said very well. Stephen Franks managed to convince me that his rejection of the CUB was about not giving Margaret Wilson the power to marry everyone.

George "Loverboy" Hawkins talked of love and romance, and how everyone deserves to have it recognised, etc. The fact that it was *actually* rather sweet just made it more disturbing.

Wayne Mapp suggested that the CUB be put to a referendum, then spent his 10 minutes arguing for direct democracy, which leaves one wondering what his job in the House of Representatives is, if all decisions should be left to the people.

Tim Barnett lamented that, after thirty years, he's still being called a "practising" homosexual. (Maybe he'll get it "straight" one day. Ahem. Sorry.) He recalled some funny stuff from the submissions, like one that claimed homosexual Arab terrorists were roaming the mean streets of Christchurch lobbying for the CUB. Some not-so-funny stuff, too, like a 12-year-old who thought homosexuals deserved to die.

Interestingly, of the ten speakers I heard, the only woman was Georgina Beyers (and rumour has it that she use to be a man). Maybe this whole thing doesn't affect women?

The speech of the day went to Brian Connell, who denounced the "mistruths from the HOE-MOE-SEXUAL! community". (Ironically, the way he said it reminded me of Tim Curry's "I'm just a sweet TRANS-VES-TITE")

Connell described HOE-MOE-SEXUAL! relationships as "notoriously volatile", and the CUB as a "recruitment drive" for the HOE-MOE-SEXUAL! community. Judging from the laughs, he had the best received speech of the day.

Connell's punchline said it all: "Despite all the talk, I have no antipathy towards ho-mo-sexuals."

Lyndon Hood - power fighter, Lower Hutt

Exploding Gas Giants

The commerce commission says some gas companies are abusing their monopolies. I won't pretend to be shocked. I'm sure that if they were in a competitive market they would do their best to abuse that as well. What are people going to do? Stop using gas?

Anyway, the decision invokes the spectre of direct price controls. Nobody likes a private utility and the idea of the people's representatives sending Powerco and Vector a final notice will be appreciated. As with the typical final notice, we can expect howls of outrage from the recipients, followed by immediate compliance.

One assumes they will be falling over themselves to look like good corporate citizens, at least for the near future, and that direct intervention will only come if and when they fail to pull their head in. If price controls eventuate, they 'may' result in lower prices for the consumer.

I've written before about utilities and I do think that private power companies need to be closely monitored and well regulated. But I can't help thinking that maybe gas should be expensive.

This is mostly an environmental thing - the idea that the cost of something should recognise the way it degrades the value of everything else. The price increase would come in the form of a pollution tax, of course, rather than flowing into the coffers of evil corporations. Unless said evil corporations were made to clean up every little bit of the mess they made.

On the other hand, if your pollution tax works and people stop polluting, what will you do for revenue then?

There's also an argument from what they rather over-enthusiastically call 'green' accounting. Fossil fuel in the ground, it's argued, is an asset. When you dig it up you're not creating it at the cost of extraction, you're diminishing your inventory. If companies and countries worked things out in those terms, they might be a lot more reluctant to just throw the stuff away.

Some have suggested, or possibly assumed, that exploration encouraged by rising prices will overcome or delay the projected peak oil (the point where demand exceeds our ability to get it out of the ground). It's also possible that new technology will supercede petrol before things get really horrific. Based on human history I suspect that, unless it's really good technology, we'll go on using fossil fuel until getting it becomes impractical. And it's going to take something pretty remakable to stop us using it up as fast as we can.

So does it actually make much difference if we use it up quickly or slowly?

A higher gas price might encourage people to put what's left to optimum use. If it effected demand much at all, which it probably wouldn't while it's still cheaper than electricity. What are people going to do? Stop using gas?


Matt Nippert - Bigger than (the historical) Jesus, Auckland

Saturday, November 27, 2004

I Palin Comparison

Rumors of my multiple mystery personalities have been greatly exaggerated. I inhabit only one body, can barely organise one life, and run only under one name - pseudonyms are for cowards, obscenity peddlers, and those stuck working as mouthpieces for The Man. Lyndon Hood is his Own Man, although I am tempted to appropriate his name, and location for that matter. With my sweater on, prowling through Epuni with my homies, I'd be "Hood the hooded hood". Killah. All you can do with Nippert is "Nippert's on the buds."

I'll keep this short, as the baton looks to have multiplied in the past week. Aaron needs to find himself a job, playing content manager of the global interweb doesn't fit his talents (may I suggest Breakfast newsreading, or perhaps the Wanganui mayoralty?). Lyndon is a very funny boy, and Hamish can ghost-write my battleraps any time he likes. Dogbitingmen look have a great career ahead of them as event managers. Case closed and onto real news...

The SIS allegations are very entertaining. A serious journalistic enterprise from Hager and Hubbard (not to mention the back-room contributions of Brett and Tucker) is followed by their competitors trying to discredit, what seems to be, one of the scoops of the year. It's interesting to note the catch-up game being played by the Herald, and the degree to which Clark is able to use Old Granny as a personal mouthpiece. Still, it's all still on. Two out of three sources remaining, as appears to be the case, ain't bad. The Sunday Star-Times deserve credit, albeit only grudgingly from competitors.

Speaking of the Herald, whoever approved their web relaunch have done their paper a huge disservice by removing the search function. The depth of content, accessible up until last week, was unparalleled in New Zealand. I suspect you will see far fewer serious visitors to the site, and subsequently far fewer mentions of Herald reports in other media- including academic publications. New Zealand has lost a highly valued, and extremely useful, research tool. One question: Why?

UPDATE: Words taste good. It appears the site is still under construction, and the search function being rebuilt. A relief for sure...

And, as alluded to in my last post, I have the pleasure of scooping Damian Christie, with my Michael Palin transcript. (Speaking of scooping the competition, it is interesting to see month-old features migrate to the front page of the NBR.) Palin here covers topics that couldn't be squeezed into a shortish piece of the Listener; cricket, Mao, the British Empire, old-school Peel and inflammable canines.

Matt Nippert: Circuses have clowns, acrobats, lion tamers and ringmasters. What role did you play in the Monty Python Flying Circus?

Michael Palin: I think probably one of those dogs who jump through hoops.

Would the hoops be on fire?

Yes, certainly if John Cleese was holding it it’d probably be on fire. He likes spicing things up a bit. I never really liked the clowns in circuses, I wouldn’t have been a clowns. I think one of those very versatile small animals, who can balance a ball on their nose and jump through flaming hoops, just a creature of all trades.

You travelled through Nepal and met the King in the course of your Himalaya series. Wasn’t there that strange incident in 2002 that saw eight members of the royal family – including the then-King – killed by a “malfunctioning” AK47?

Yes, “accidentally discharged”, by a mad crown prince who was as high as a kite. That’s a very odd thing, because I met the king, he was about the only survivor of this massacre. There are all sorts of theories about it, but no one seems absolutely certain. Of course, there are some who think the current King was involved, so you really don’t know.

And where do the Maoists fit in with this bloody monarchy?

The monarchy in Nepal is quite … in a way it’s quite powerful and respected, a lot of people want to monarchy to survive. But the monarchy is at loggerheads with the Maoists in rural areas, and it seems to be quite a serious situation. While the Maoists seem to be sporting a discredited political philosophy, they have adapted it what they see as the problems of corruption and illiteracy and poverty in the rural areas. Kathmandu is quite middle-class, with well-educated people, nice shops and all that, while the rest of Nepal is quite different, because it’s a backward rural economy and the Maoists want to change that. So nothing’s getting done, which is why they’re going head to head. Something’s got to give, I don’t know quite what.

Did you encounter much anti-western feeling in the region?

Much, much less than I expected. This was just after the Iraq war. I thought that they’d be waving their fists like you see on television, shouting “death to the infidel!” and all that, but mainly people get on with their own lives, they’re fairly preoccupied. I think you could whip up a crowd there fairly easily if you wanted to, but there were some great moments. We were in Rawalpindi, in Pakistan, and this guy comes up to me and says “you CNN?” And I said “No, we’re BBC.” And he said, “Good. BBC good, CNN shit.” And he was wearing a NY Yankees baseball cap, and he said to me “I have something for you. Videotape. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omah. Together, never seen before. Everyone is looking for them, all over the world, I give to you. Tape.” It’s just so strange, I said “Not at the moment thanks.”

I understand you're a train enthusiast. What’s the attraction?

Are there trains in New Zealand?

Not really up here in Auckland, we mainly use them to transport cattle.

I was born and bought up in Sheffield and did trainspotting, and love the trains. It was partly school, collecting numbers is a big sort of competitive thing – don’t ask me why, but it did – and the other thing was my father was quite keen on trains, loved train travel. I’ve never particularly enjoyed driving, especially on big crowded motorways, I’d far rather go by train. You can sit there, someone does all the work for you, unlike a plane where you’re strapped in like a battery hen. You can walk around, and go out to the bar, and go to the restaurant. I love train travel, it’s a great way to see the countryside, I just think it’s rather sensible, we should encourage it.

Also, in terms of the programs I do – it’s a good way to meet people and get the feel of the country. Go on a train, people are more relaxed, you can’t really interview people in a car on the road, nor in a plane. That leaves boats and train, trains are good, people seem to be quite jolly and relaxed. It seems to be some sort of limbo time, they’re all going somewhere, for a while everybody’s just in a little bit of limbo, they’ll talk and get food out– it’s a very pleasant way of life.

You attended High School with John Peel, didn’t you?

Yes. I was at what they call in England a public school, which is a private school, yes. I was there for one term with him, he was older than me, and we just sort of overlapped by one term.

Even over here the tributes flowed long.

He was very popular here was he? It was quite odd, there was this real feeling of loss in England as well, it went on and on. There’s something about him, he just did his job really well. And he knew so much about music, and he helped so many people. I can remember than when Terry Jones and myself did an rather extremely obscure album called Diversions - we wrote some songs that were recorded by a man called Barry Booth - the only airplay we ever got was on the Peel Show. It was a song called ‘He’s Very Good With His Hands’ which Peel rather liked and played two or three times. And that was all he wanted really, he didn’t go over the top, he was a man of very good taste actually, and never believed in any hype of any kind. I think people really respected him for that, and in a sense, that’s what left a bit of a gap in these hype-filled days, just rather low-key, humorous, but kind of a gentle wit, and very knowledgeable.

Has the declining English empire been a boon for comedy? Perhaps, if not necessarily making the country a laughing stock, perhaps it’s given you a larger stock of laughter – as there's no need to take yourselves so seriously anymore…

I’m not sure if it’s true that that’s caused people to laugh at themselves, although maybe laugh at themselves more. I think the British people have always been quite good at criticising whatever was going on in the country, even at the height of Victorian times there were lots of people writing racey stories, even back to Jane Austen who was quite satirical in a way. If you feel reasonably comfortable and at ease, this is my theory, you can attack in a sense more deeply because people well go “we can cope with that, we can deal with that”.

And then of course in the 60s everything began to fall apart, pink bits, red bits, dropped off the map. I think for a while, certainly the 60s and 70s, there was such an oppressive rump of the old authority system – the army, the church, the monarchy – all these sorts of things were very strong, but they were losing a little bit of relevance. They weren’t able to adapt to the way things were changing in the 60s, everyone was loosening up a bit, and the reaction from authorities was “Shock! Horror! Well, we can’t allow this, close that down.” We had a Lord Chamberlin who made sure we didn’t say anything rude on stage – one completely forgets the amount of censorship there was. It was very good, there were people like Monty Python who thrived on being told not to do something, it certainly makes you want to do it.

I think for a while, that’s when some of the best sort of comedy was done, Peter Cook came along, and even the Goons – although it doesn’t seem to be obviously commenting on the situation, it was actually when you looked at it, you see lots of pompous figures reduced. Those years it seemed as though comedy was an essential part of the loosening up process.

And then the 70s and 80s the decline became far worse than anyone had expected and the entire country was in a terrible mess, completely chaotic, and then the attack switched away from comedy to something like music. Punk came along, and punk had the attitude, "rah, rah, Fuck the Queen". And now, after Thatcher, it’s all a "me" society, it’s all about me me me, as we coast serenely into 90s on a wave of Starbucks coffee and general comfort and materialism, I think it was quite harmful for comedy now. Comedy nowdays more seems to be with certain individuals and certain attitudes that comes down to “Do you like gameshows? Do you like reality shows on television? There are disgusting, shocking!”, says some people “We’ve got to send these up!” Which is a bit superficial. I think what was genuinely in the 50s and 60s and early 70s a feeling that there was a repressive, authoritarian view out there, if you were a thinking person it was your duty to take up cudgels against it.

You managed to get cleaned up first ball playing cricket in Pakistan. How has cricket managed to be so successfully exported to the subcontinent when it is viewed with bemusement by America?

I think cricket's one of the few games England actually invented. Most of them they purloined from other places, like snooker, billiards, polo, all which seem particularly English, taken form India, the Persians, and then given rules and made into British sport. Skiing was just what Sheppards did in the Alps, the English went out, put a few poles in the way, and go round it, and suddenly “We’ve got a new sport! Skiing!"

But I think cricket did begin, as far as I know, in England, a long time ago. The same roots as rounders and baseball and all that. It just caught on in India certainly, and they’re tremendously keen on it now, in Pakistan as well. You find it played all over the place, on waster ground, half-ay up a mountain. It’s quite now, it’s now, through sport and success, of the Indian and Pakistan teams, in that most British of games, cricket. It’s a way of saying “Now we’re the countries to be reckoned with and we’ll scare the life out of the Brits.” So it’s got a slightly political role as well.

Lyndon Hood - another man's freedom fighter, Lower Hutt

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Oh, honestly.

If you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies, then I need to get some better enemies.

Lyndon Hood - "sporadic" blogger, Lower Hutt

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Now, Aaron.

If you're not too busy quoting other bloggers without linking to them or being unelected or something, I'd like a word.

I wouldn't normally be offended (and I certainly wouldn't be surprised) by a right-wing ideologue sneering at somebody who disagrees with him. Especially when said ideologue's name is written in such big letters at the top of their blog.

And yet...

Why are you so angry Aaron? Is Rodney Hide your momma, that you rage so when I diss him? Is that why you were googling alternate spellings of his surname?

I can't deny that I did spell His name in vain. Normally I would care. I was, for example, mortified to realise that, referring in a post to the belief that students' spelling ability is not as good as it used to be, I put the apostrophe in the wrong place.

But it's Rodney Hide and I don't care. I would have made up a spelling for his first name as well if it had occurred to me. Rodneyweiler. That would have been pretty funny.

Perhaps I just wanted to use a joke other than the one that no doubt plagued his childhood but still works admirably ("It's Rodney! Hide!","You can't run, because you're Rodney Hide!").

At any rate, somebody who managed to add no less than ten characters (a p p o i n t e d space) when quoting the personal description in my title line is in no position to cast stones.

By the way, do you actually know what the word 'dramaturg' means?

I admit that it's ACT's economic and social policies that really get on my wick - the fact that one of you occasionally says something sensible about human rights (other than property rights) is just the icing on the razor blade.

Now, by the end of that my little dialogue I was actually talking about the party generally. For instance, I'm aware that Stephen Franks may be one of the very, very few MPs who actually care about freedom of speech. Which is why his response to the flag-burning issue was so striking. And that's what I was thinking of.

I find that ACT's stated policy on cannabis reform is reasonably liberal and Mr Hide is 'strongly supportive' but their actions have yet to earn them a matching reputation. And really, for a party whose overriding principles are freedom of choice and personal responsibility, a reasonable drug policy is well, for pussies. They should be working actively to legalise them all! Let the invisible hand sort it out!

You address neither my main point (the hypocrisy of ACT's particular solution to the Awatere-Huata Question) or, I note, my unsupported general aspersion of Deborah Coddington.

And then, Aaron, you called me names. Though it is the most misunderstood of the seven words they never used to able to say on American radio, it's word that I last used in anger to characterise David Irving. Sure, I called him a cast-iron tit, but I object being placed in the same category.

Anyway, Aaron (if that's your real name), you wrote a post to sneer at me and you'll no doubt describe me as whinging now. So we're even now, right? I promise that, should we ever meet, I won't try to nationalise you. Oh, except...

It was a joke, Aaron.

You know what a joke is, right?

Right?


Tom Goulter - "Actor" - Christchurch

Saturday, November 20, 2004

In Which I Heartily Endorse The Efforts Of Right-Wing Crazies

There's this cat named Daryl Mason. He does not, it's fair to say, like Skinny Puppy much. In fact, he dislikes Skinny Puppy so much, does Daryl, that he has made it his mission to eradicate them from the airwaves. (Daryl's task is made all the more herculean by the fact that Messrs. Puppy aren't really played by real radio stations, per se, and as such their airwave prescence is limited to the insidiously untrackable breeding ground for militants, revolutionaries and stoners that is college radio. DAN-dun-duuhhhh).
Mason, however, isn't alone. Oh no. Mason, as his form letter (readable on most of the links above) would remind us, is part of a majority. He's the status quo, motherfucker. And he has the MANDATE (oh God, that felt good) of PABAAH[1]!
PABAAH - Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood, for those who find it hard to take that acronym seriously - is the harelipped, eleven-fingered baby of Jon Alvarez, who sounds to me like he's just jumped the border to take jobs off decent Americans like Colin Powell, but I'm not here to judge.
PABAAH, however, most definitely are! The folks at Sorry Everybody are branded "Sick, disgusting, dangerous, and irresponsible... traitors", whereas advocating public lynchings and photoshopping your mysogynist fantasies is a Good Idea. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
The problem with PABAAH - well, obviously, there are plenty of problems with PABAAH, such as they're crazy and they want to repeal the 22nd Amendment and they're totally crazy - but the main problem, as I can see it, with PABAAH, is that they're nowhere near complete in their list of dangerous counterculture insurgents whose work must be ignored at all costs.
(It's at this point in the writing of this article that I tried to become a member of PABAAH, so as to explore their fine gallery of hatred further, but they started sending me here wherever I clicked, so I don't know, they must be psychic or have magical computer-seeing powers or something).
Nowhere on PABAAH (before it branded me a liberal moron, that is) could I find a single reference, for instance, to Halo 2. Nor on Boycott Hollywood, of whose misguidedly amateurish [2] design I have fond memories as something of a proto-PABAAH. (And don't go telling me that Boycott Hollywood's function is to highlight artists whose public comments are at odds with the webmaster's opinions, because I'd be interested to see what movies have given Ben And Jerry's icecream above-title billing). Indeed, googling any and all right-wing boycott groups and crossreferencing them with references to Halo 2, you'll find nothing[3].
Which is simply ludicrous. After all, we're talking about - I'm quoting official Xbox sales personnel here - we're talking about "The Biggest Retail Release Ever" here. We're also talking about a game whose writer, Joe Staten, was quoted desribing his work as "a damning condemnation of the Bush administration". Staten later clarified that, actually, a "damning condemnation" was exactly what he wouldn't call his game; but that's exactly what these money-grubbing champagne Liberals would say, isn't it? Bungie? Bunjew, more like. (Just to be sure, Republican Radio put out Staten's response way under their original "damning condemnation" headline and story. It's good to see someone's remaining creative with their slander).
Boycott Hollywood list includes George Clooney ("Now THIS one is a heartbreaker - - he's just so darned cute, isn't he?"), but not David O. Russell, who directed Clooney in the incendiarily subversive Three Kings. Thanks to neglect on the part of Boycott Hollywood, David O'Russell is able to keep on spewing his virulent anti-American propaganda unchecked!!1!!! They also neglect to call for any sort of action against Ed Kowalcyk, who as we speak is making dozens of dollars with his new cd, Awake: The Best Of Live. Live. A band who once fearlessly sang something about "blood and oil on a bayonet" in a song called What Are We Fighting For?
SERIOUSLY, Boycott Hollywood! Your fellow grassroots-nutcases are calling for a boycott of The World's Most Hated Insidious LifeStyle Conglomerate, Starbuck's, because they play Sheryl Crow sometimes in their stores and Sheryl Crow said something sometime about not liking war, and you can't even connect a few fucking dots and not buy Awake: The Best Of Live? Really! Seriously!
Probush.com do a little better: their list is longer, and it's less organised, so you have to read all of it, and they really grab for that brass ring by calling for a boycott of the work of Viggo Mortensen. Oh shit: There goes New Line Cinema, Cause Stone Cold Probush Dot Com Said So.
Also, boycott Tom Morello?? Do these people not remember the crashing-and-burning of the alt.music boom in the late 1990's? Tom Morello was on, like, every fucking record! How the fuck are you going to boycott the missing link between Rage Against The Machine, Prodigy, Puff Daddy, Bone Thugz 'n' Harmony, Atari Teenage Riot, The Crystal Method, Henry Rollins, and - most crucially and - The Class Of 1999?? That's impossible!
Problem, basically, is that none of these people go far enough. Moby, Madonna and REM? Sure, fine, so to boycott all these artists and any use of their work would require you to scrupulously avoid a disgusting amount of fine media, and also The Bourne Supremacy. But what's needed is a grand overarching list of everyone who's spoken against the war or the President, and every piece of art - if you can call it that! - they've been associated with. And these brass-balls-having guardians of truth and justice and paranoid vitriolic raving insanity need to put their fucking money where their mouth is and avoid everything on the list.
And then those of us who are not crazy nutbars can go on enjoying whatever movies and music and artists we like. (In fact, we might do our best to adhere to artists on The List: after all, Carrot Top isn't on anyone's lists yet, and Britney won't be on it anytime soon - which I know will make a lot of you very happy indeed).
After all, as President Bush has noted, all who are not with him are against him.

(NOTE: This line was previously used by Lawrence Fishburne, who is on The List; and also by Jesus Christ, who advocated Loving Thine Enemy, so He's on The List; also, He was in the Bible, which had that whole swords-into-ploughshares thing, which is so anti-war, so it's totally on The List).

[1] If you can read that link, we here at Fightingtalk aren't doing our job very well. Even Livejournal manages to make PABAAH's list of undesirable source links: if you try to access www.pabaah.com from LJ, you get the following message:
Your[sic] coming from a site that we don't like. So why dont[sic] we send you back! [sic]
powered whit Protector System
[sic] - perhaps they meant to say "Powered White Protector System", I don't fucking know.
Policing the parts of the Internet from which people can access your site has always seemed to me like one of the lamest, most insecure things you could ever do. But that's just me.
[2] You can't call for a boycott of the work of Lawrence Fishburne and simultaneously take design cues from his biggest movie. It doesn't work that way.
[3] We who aren't in the journalism business call this "the poor man's Nexus-Lexus".

Lyndon Hood - self-dramaturg, Lower Hutt

Friday, November 19, 2004

ACTing Out

The following is a transcript of an interview conducted in my head during today's Morning Report.

Lyndon Hood: Mr Hyde, you've just proved that it's possible for parties to kick elected MPs out of Parliament by expelling them. How do you feel?

Rodney Hyde: Pleased as punch, thank you.

LH: I discover that ACT is against the party-hopping legislation.

RH: Yep. We voted against it and we're glad it expires at the next election.

LH: So you just went all the way to the Supreme Court to set a precedent for a piece of legislation you don't agree with?

RH: No. We did it to kick Donna out of parliament.

LH: But you're against parties being able to remove MPs?

RH: That's right. It's okay if we do it, though.

LH: You don't think that's hypocritical?

RH: No. I think it's mightily convenient.

LH: It's almost as if you've got two personalities.

RH: I think ...

LH: As in, may I speak to Doctor Jekyll?

Pause

RH: I don't think that's funny or clever.

LH: Is this a new attempt by ACT to seize the moral low ground? I mean, what with the way you are for property rights but apparently dead against drug liberalisation and freedom of expression, and what with, how shall I put this, Deborah Coddington? What do you say to that? Huh?

RH: Duh, look at me, I'm Rodney Hyde!

LH: And we'll have to stop there.

Finish Off the Last One, Have Yourself Another

It seems the people who brought your the campaign against drink-driving are ready to try and make New Zealand drink less. I'm considering pitching an ad where, just as he's starting his third triple bourbon, the protagonist's liver explodes out from under his ribcage Alien styles.

I don't want to go too deeply into the principles of behavioral psychology, but I had issues with the approach of the drink-drive ads. Showing terrible things happening to people who drink and drive won't work nearly as well as show people being rewarded for not drink-driving. For being a sober driver. For leaving the car. For not taking the car because you're going to be drinking. For stopping someone else driving drunk.

Since, in the real world, the reward for driving sober is not injuring yourself or others (or at least being less likely to), there's a place for the negative message by way of comparison. And I understand there has been the occasional positive ad in the drink-drive campaign. I never saw any. Mind you, I haven't had a TV in a while.

The new campaign has been announced amid much tutting about the level of and attitude towards 'binge drinking' in New Zealand. I'm not sure how many of the newsreaders and talkback hosts would be able to keep a straight face if every time they quoted the ALAC study they had to say that a 'binge' is defined as seven or more standard drinks in one session. Ah, yes. How often have we heard it: "I went on such a bender last night. I got through seven-eighths of a bottle of wine!"

Drinking at that amount in one go is no doubt bad for you. Probably worse that drinking rather more but spread over the whole week. And god knows drunk people get into enough other trouble. But there will be a lot of resistance if they expect people to limit their consumption that much.

Anyway, trying to stop people getting drunk is not so much like stopping them drink-driving as it is like stopping them smoking, This can be expected to be much harder. Not only are they both addictions but in both cases the health consequences arrive on a scale of years, quite unlike the immediate results that can be achieved by driving while intoxicated. This makes it harder to sell and, as I say, the negative approach isn't the best anyway. All it will do is make the drunks surlier.

Besides, ads about the dangers of smoking just make smokers realise it's time for a cigarette. And as a matter of fact, I'm feeling more and more like fixing myself a gin and tonic as I write this.

There are other options. Jim Anderton suggests putting the drinking age back up, and there's always more tax. Both of these would vex me intensely, but they would have a noticable effect on the levels of drinking. The Government (though it is talking about more enforcement of the current laws) is dismissing these as 'not enough' and is instead concentrating exclusively on an option which even they expect to take years before it starts working.

Which probably explains why the campaign has the support of the Beer Wine and Spirits Council.

Listening to their spokesman maintaining that it wasn't actually in their financial interest to have people drink as much as they can, I was reminded of a pamphlet I once saw (I think they put it out). It was about the benefits of moderate drinking. As I recall, beer contains some vitamins and minerals as well as many important calories. One the positive side, I don't think they resorted to calling wine fruit.

There was, however, a graph showing the point where the benefits to the heart of drinking was outweighed by the detriments to the liver. It was drawn as a line graph when it should have been a bar chart and the illness curve bottomed out at a liquor consumption that I estimated to be about twice as high as it should have been.

If these people are in favour of an ad campaign, I take it as conclusive proof that it won't damage their sales.

Besides, if the consequences are supposed to make stop people drinking, how come people put up with hangovers?


Max Johns - aimless baiter, Blenheim

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Taking things too far

Someone asked me if I thought I was taking this (here for part two) too far. At first I thought maybe they had a point, until I remembered that it all started with someone telling me that they had US$28,000,000 to give me. I'm way off the pace.

==
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 02:09:10 -0800 (PST)
From: david kwame
Subject: From David.
To: Max Johns


Dear Max.

Do i send you the application letter?

Await your resposne.

David.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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==

Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 09:03:19 +1300 (NZDT)
From: Max Johns
Subject: Re: From David.
To: david kwame

My dear David,

Please do send the letter, with all haste. I will hope to receive it most urgently.

I also have a weekend's fishing to look forward to. Truly these are happy times in this the summer of the globe's south.

Yours as always and ever,

Max.

==
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 00:23:09 -0800 (PST)
From: david kwame
Subject: Application Letter.
To: Max Johns


Dear Max.

Find below the specimen application Letter which you are going to transcribe and send to the bank immedaitely by email. As soon as you contact the bank endeavor to give me feed back.

Await your response .ASAP.

Best Regards.

David.

N/B.


ECOWAS BANK PLC.

37 High Street, Accra,

Ghana, West Africa

+ 233 - 277514420, 21771983-4

Fax : + 233 - 27515005

EMAIL: info@ecowasbank.com

WEBSITE:www.ecowasbank.com

Name:……………………

Address:………………………… …………………………

Date:………………………

RE: APPLICATION FOR RELEASE OF FUNDS.

Ref: A/c D14-A55-096/utb/t of MR STEVEN WITMAN JOHNS

This is to inform you that MR STEVEN WITMAN JOHNS. is my relative, who died in the plane crash, along with some of the passengers and crew on board.

On checking the various records of my relative, we found that he maintained an account with your bank with the above a/c D14-A55-096/utb/t . Some of the deceased's records suggest that there was a credit balance of above USD28, 500,000 (Twenty eight million five hundred United States Dollars) in the account. As next of kin, I would now like to submit my application to your esteemed bank for release of my relative, MR STEVEN WITMAN JOHNS .funds in your bank, in the above said a/c #D14-A55-096/utb/t , and also in other accounts, if any.

Please let me know all the information I am required to provide to back up my claim. You may note that these funds are needed to pay off MR STEVEN WITMAN JOHN'S liabilities, and also to complete some of unfinished urgent projects started by MR STEVEN WITMAN JOHNS . Therefore, I would request you to please process my claim and release the funds as early as possible.

Thanks for your co-operation.

Yours faithfully

AUTHORISED SIGNATORY ................................................

Note The simple information you need about the deceased are:

1. Age: 51 as of the time of death

. 2. Height: 5.10 3. Spouse: none

4. His wife died ten years ago of cancer of the breast.

5. His address was never stated to the bank because he opened a secret domiciliary account, which allows this. This is mostly the important thing, which I can remember at the moment but if I miss out any, I will inform you when I find out


---------------------------------
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==

Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 15:08:53 +1300 (NZDT)
From: Max Johns
Subject: Re: Application Letter.
To: david kwame

Mr. Kwame,

An incredible occurance has occured!! And it's incredible!! I have not replied to you for some days, but only some and not many, because of the thing which I must explain to you.

I had a glimmer of recognition when I first read the name of the deceased, Mr. Steven Witman Johns. At first I considered it to be simply due to the fact the I and he shared a last name. But it played on my mind (though not literally) through a day and a night, and I took it upon myself (in a metaphorical sense, of course), to look into this Steven Witman Johns matter.

I asked my mother, whose memory of the family is long and usually accurate - odd, since she can never remember what happened yesterday, or how she likes to take her tea - if she knew of any Steven Witman Johns fitting the description below. She told me that she did!! My father - may the gods rest his souls and treat him goodly - had one second cousin born in 1945.

He was a strong hunter, a sportsman, one who dabbled in fine wines and politics, who never stood down from a fight, could cook a fair game pie, and was known all around his district. He went by the name "Wittie". Everyone knew him as Wittie, and his real name was soon forgotten. Even at his wedding, in his vows, he called himself Wittie. It was the way his large-breasted, lucky bride wanted it to be. One night, early in the 1980s, before even the new wave, Wittie was celebrating a good day's hunting with liquor. A fight broke out amongst other men, and Wittie tried to solve it. The next details are blurry, but it is believed that both the other men swore to find and kill Wittie once he had interfered with their business. Wittie took this to heart, and disappeared.

His wife and family wept for three years, and accused the men of murder. It was in the newspapers that he was probably dead. But after those three years, his wife, too, and his children, also disappeared. It was assumed thereafter than they had joined him somewhere far away.

Wittie, as a name, was short for Witman. That he had lived as Wittie for so long had meant that people had forgotten that he was also Steven! I believe that you have helped solve the mystery of Wittie's disappearance! The secrecy of his account makes sense to us, as he was in hiding, and he was certainly a fine enough man to earn such riches. I have contacted police here, and they have ended their now decades old murder investigation. This has made us all very happy to have known that he lived, but also very sad that he is, again, dead. The news of his wife is also tragic, but thank-you from many Johnses for having informed us. Do you know where the bodies are buried? Our family may visit the graves.

Yours, and yours again,

Max Johns.

==

Matt Nippert - working dog, Auckland

Monday, November 15, 2004

Pilger’s Progress

The say when the going gets tough, the tough get going. And going I have been, much like a rampant infection of the clappers. As you might have noted, work has been keeping me busy, but fortunately some of the fruits of my labour have been allowed to fall to ground. You can catch an off-the-cuff letter to Democrats asking them to consider moving to New Zealand here. An interview with Rex Weyler and analysis of the origins of Greenpeace is available here. Unfortunately a piece on investigative journalism featuring an interview with John Pilger is off-line, but I am able to offer some tit-bits further down.

I consider writing to be less a science, and more an art, and an ugly art at that. I fully agree with economist, former US ambassador to India and architect of the American World War II economy John Kenneth Galbraith when he said "effortless prose takes at least six drafts". I usually stop my own turgid prose at three. I have no truck with grammar Nazis like Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. (For an excellent dissection of her book, read this review by Louis Menand. Scroll past the tedious section until you get to the part where he describes writing as singing.) Writing is about rhythm, verve and creativity. Rules are guides only and should be bent and broken in pursuit of a better sentence. The world is not going to hell (although perhaps my subeditors might be) because I don’t use apostrophes correctly.

But to the point, writing, nonfiction especially, is about gathering ideas and evidence, and then channeling that into words, sentences, paragraphs. Eventually a piece, fully-formed, emerges. Spooky. It’s painful, tedious and does nothing for my blood-levels or ethereal motivation to quit smoking. That said, I wouldn’t dream of doing anything else.

So, in my roundabout way, I introduce what I hope to be a regular feature at Fightingtalk, peering behind the curtain at the elements that make up a story. This week, it’s an interview with John Pilger. Wanting to avoid a straight profile (and inevitably rehashing the entertaining but pointless tête-à-tête with Kim Hill), I instead discussed his latest book in terms of New Zealand.

Tell Me No Lies rates as one of the best pieces of non-fiction I’ve read this year, and I’ve steered clear of fiction for the last wee while – reality is weird enough for me, thank you very much. A collection of staggering journalistic scoops ranging from the first piece out of Hiroshima (where the reporter sneaked out of the official tour party to dispute the claim of radiation as "Japanese propaganda"), to Seymour Hersh’s first My Lai piece, to this sweet story by Jessica Mitford on craven exploitation by the funeral industry.

Anyway, here’s John Pilger on investigative journalism. I’ll be busy for the next week, but might have something particularly amusing and Python-oriented when I return. Enjoy.

Matt Nippert: Do the journalists whose work features in your book share common characteristics?
John Pilger: Professionally I would say yes. The theme of the book is that these are journalists who have tried to call great power to account, which I’ve described as one of the paramount principles of journalism. I do associate myself with a number of these people and personally they’re all very different, they’re all mavericks, there are a rich range of personalities, as you might have noted.
MN: Doesn’t being a maverick put them offside with both their subjects and their editors?
JP: Well yes it does, although not with good editors. Good editors nurture mavericks, which makes them good editors. Mediocre editors don’t exploit them fully, the talents of mavericks. I think it puts them offside with authority generally, again, that ought to be another principle of journalism. I’ve used, possibly my favorite quotation, on the cover of the book: “never believe anything until it’s officially denied”. That is a truism actually, as we’ve seen over the recent events over Iraq.
MN: There must be motivation for doing this work – after all, it can’t be fun getting heavied by your boss or authority figures.
JP: I think part of it is an affinity with the underdog, believing in social justice, that’s basic journalism. Many of these great mavericks have expressed an understanding of humanity, humanity running through their work. Journalism originally was that, and the idea of the journal, go back to Swift and Dickens and so on.
MN: What sort of world would we be living in if these stories you included were not broken?
JP: I’m not very good at speculation, so really the answer to that is I don’t know. But let’s say if William Burchett had not revealed that nuclear weapons, when they exploded spread radiation. Undoubtedly somebody else would have done that along the line. I think that one disclosure alerted large numbers of the human race to this great threat, to their survival, the world’s survival. Perhaps we’d be living in a differenet world – I don’t know. I think some of these are scoops that almost, you could say almost, changed the world, but you never know if they did or not. And it’s political action, at whatever level government or whatever, that changes things. That’s how human beings change conditions and they do it on the basis of information. Information ought to come from those of us whoa re paid to keep the record straight.
MN: What inhibits investigative journalism?
JP: The answer to that is the same that it is anywhere: those who own newspapers are not prepared to put the resources into what will be long and patient work that may not necessarily succeed. Investigative journalism needs time, it needs resources. These days, especially these days, editors want quick-fix journalism. Investigative journalism can embarrass politically, it can embarrass commercially. There are plenty of cases of investigative work being curtailed because of that.
MN: How can more investigative journalism be encouraged?
JP: I think it starts in the media colleges which have now taken over the training of journalists. When I started this kind of journalism, although it was never called investigative, the term didn’t exist then, this kind of journalism was encouraged by other journalists in a kind of journalist apprentice situation. But now it’s been formalised in an academic, or quasi-academic, setting. So that young journalists seem to emerge thinking that their principle source is going to be authority, government, various people in authority – they are the source of news – and they’re not. And if media colleges taught the Martha Gelhorn dictim, that you report from the ground up and not from the top, I think it would begin to turn out better journalists and investigative journalists. Perhaps one of the problems is editors have become managers, they become economic managers – the cult of corporatism runs through everything. This is all the nonsense that has been exported from America and contaminated practically everything that we do. We have the news last week that Reuters is outsourcing to India. From their point of view it makes sense: they get cheap labour and they make a fortune out of it, but if editors were editors and not managers, if they didn’t have to forever think of the bottom line, if they were allowed to edit and that their principle loyalty was to their staff and to their readers, not to the boardroom, the quality of journalism would change almost overnight.
MN: You recently screened a documentary on the Diego Garcia military base and how locals were expelled extra-legally for military purposes. How was the reaction to that?
JP: Terrific, just overwhelming actually. In the first couple of days I had over a thousand emails, from people wanting to do something about it and demanding why this has been allowed to go on. Others wanting to give to the support fund, but mostly people wanting to call to account the governemnt, because the present government is up to its neck in it. The law firm that has been representing them [the locals who were expelled from their homes] were contacted this week by two Law Lords who said privately they wanted to give their services free to helping this case. It is such an irrefutable scandal, an act of injustice that runs against the grain of all kinds of people and interests in this country. And it’s a British story – it’ll probably be shown in New Zealand, TVNZ have shown an interest in it, and they usually show my stuff.
MN: How did you go about digging up the 30-year-old government documents which proved central to establishing culpability by the US and British governments?
JP: I wanted to do this story for some time but it just took some years to get the right time and space to do it. And then I heard about these documents. These documents have been available, they have been in the public records office in London, for about seven years. It’s a comment on journalism as well that no journalist has gone into the public records office and looked for them and found them. One academic, an historian called Mark Curtis, mentioned them. And then the lawyers went in, we all went in there. There was this treasure trove of documents that fill a long table, just piles of them. It took quite a while just to go through them and pull them together. This year we went to the national archives in Washington and spent quite a long time working through the papers there. We found the American side of it in papers as well. So we showed where it had all begun, the Americans had demanded the lease on Diego Garcia and there’s the correspondence between the officials and how they hid it from congress – there’s no record of payment. Instead $14m was taken off the cost of a Polaris missile that was being supplied to the Royal Navy, that’s how they hid it before Congress found out about it later on. At the center they were hiding it because the Americans wanted the island to be depopulated, which they were.
PS: Did anyone else feel a chill, during Bush’s acceptance speech, when the President-elect called Karl Rove “the architect”? Read it in conjunction with this section from a New York Times Magazine article where Ron Suskind talks to a Bush aide in the heat of the campaign:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'" The aide then said, "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality."
Matrix anyone?

I'd also like to extend my thanks to the Peace Foundaton, generously gave me an award for my piece on the (then) coming prison crisis. Now, with stories "breaking" on prisoners being held for weeks in police and court cells, I almost feel like saying "told you so." Or, as Pilger put it so combatively last year, people just need to read.