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Human Space Invaders | Mar 29, 2007 23:42

I'm in Wellington today at Chasing the Long Tail: Audio-Visual Archiving in the Digital Era, a seminar staged by the Film Archive, so I don't have a whole lot of time to blog before the dread 7am flight.

So I asked Leo to recommend a couple of movies, it being Friday and all. He offered:

Human Space Invaders

And …

Mac vs PC, Gmod Style (embedding disabled).

And indeed, both are rather good, and both make excellent derivative use of other people's ideas. In which vein, you could do worse than read The Ecstasy of Influence, an essay on artistic appropriation, from Harpers Magazine.

OTOH, if you really want to bum yourself out, you could read some of the crazy stuff people are sending to the Herald's Your Views feature about the Bradford bill:

Abbe
We are more than likely leaving NZ for Australia. I don't want to end up a criminal when my son who is 9 now, gets to early teen years and uses this as a weapon against me.

And this is really how you see your child?

Cedric
Another step closer to the day when we'll all be forced to hand over our children at birth so they can be raised in State institutions to be perfect little brainwashed clones.

Of course. Much better that they be paranoid loonies.

Stace
I will just have to smack my kids so hard that they cant tell anyone about it.

You know what? Never mind whether you'd actually do that. You're a fucking scary freak for even forming the thought that let you write that sentence.

The odd thing is that everyone who wrote this stuff had to wade past the first post there:

Danna
Please pass the bill unamended. My mother broke three of my ribs using reasonable force, and to this day maintains that beatings with the ironing cord and Dads belt were appropriate means of discipline.

Yes, I know not every opponent of the bill is a weirdo. There was a good deal of intelligent discussion and respectful disagreement here on Public Address System. And I know the bill's backers are on a screaming loser with the public, at least in the short term. But the kind of people this thing is bringing out of the woodwork, and the way they think, does my head in.

The Fundy Post backgrounds the pro-smacking flying squad from Focus on the Family.

Meanwhile, scientist Bart Janssen emailed yesterday:

Just watched the morning TV and saw Sue Bradford defending her Bill. She was bemoaning the attacks on her Bill and the fact the most of the polls and most of the media refer to her Bill as anti-smacking. And that when she gets the chance to actually explain the facts people generally support the Bill.

All of which I agree with. I think it's horrifying that the TV news continually refer to the Bill as "the anti-smacking Bill". When its clear intention is to prevent "parents" getting away with beating and abusing their children - with fists, steel capped boots, hosepipes and most firmly in my memory a 4x2 - all of which the law in its current form allows as "discipline". It would be more rightly called the anti-child abuse Bill. But I guess that would be too boring for the media.

However, the irony of it all was here was Sue Bradford complaining about ignorance and misinformation distorting a serious public issue. And I couldn't help but remember the marches and protests and speeches by Ms Bradford against genetic engineering. A time when much of what came from her was ignorance and misinformation intended to distort an important public issue.

oh the irony

Lets hope she has more success against the misinformation than we had during the GE "debate".

And if that's not enough, Paul from the Fundy Post has compiled an actual Carnival of the Intellectuals from his recent reading.

Righto …

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Feeling good | Mar 29, 2007 10:02

Attitude TV came to see us this week, to record an item that will screen in a few weeks' time. It's the kind of thing that we wouldn't have thought about before the fundraiser, but it was quite a good experience.

Leo, as he increasingly tends to be when people come and visit, was charming and talkative. He isn't the angry, inarticulate refusenik in the classroom last year. He showed off his stuff in Gary's Mod and help set up some shots of Colin the kitten.

By chance, the tutor we've chosen for Leo also came around for a meeting with Fiona and I to confirm the details of his work. I can hardly believe we've found someone so well qualified: a retired school principal with Correspondence School experience and a clear plan of action. It's really exciting. He starts Monday.

Later in the day Jimmy came home from school and indicated he'd like to talk about who he is. Linda, the director, asked him whether he saw Asperger's as "a disability, or an ability?"

"I think it's both," he said, explaining that it sometimes made it hard for him to think, but that it also mean he had different ideas from other people, and he liked that. He enjoyed being different.

His speech is still very mannered (and often a bit loud), but I felt some pride as I eavesdropped. Jimmy used to be much more down on himself.

As we've opened our lives to some degree in the last few weeks, some people have told us what great parents we are, which I'm not sure is warranted: you just do what you have to, and the fact of the fundraiser has actually given us a useful boot up the bum.

But to hear Jim expressing such a positive self-image … I granted us a pat on the back for that.

Yesterday, I banked the bulk of the money raised from the Hustle for Russell - and got to see a few of the names on the cheques. It was humbling. There are people I know who I'll thank personally when I see them, but, again, to everyone who contributed: thanks. This is a good thing that's happening. And for those who've expressed an interest in the humans.org.nz website, thanks, and I'll fire up the listserv soon, honest.

I feel bound to note that in the Herald story yesterday listing cases in which the Section 59 defence has been successfully used (the print version doesn't seem to be online), at least two cases involved the hitting, with objects, of children who were clearly disturbed. I know it's not easy when your child behaves in an extreme or unacceptable manner - believe me, I know - but I can see no sense in which systematically striking either of our kids would have helped them. Quite the reverse.

Meanwhile, yet more pro-smackers you wouldn't trust to know the meaning of "reasonable force": the CYFS Watch nutters publish the home address of Labour MP Sue Moroney, who has young children. And National MP Katherine Rich, who will vote for Sue Bradford's Bill receives phone calls uttering threats against her school-age children.

And the Libz mingle with the fundies outside Parliament.

---

Oh, and the embargo has expired and I'm now free to tell you about attending the preview screening of This Is New Zealand on Monday. I was surprised: my memory, and that of most people who recall seeing it first time around, is almost all about the scenery,

But there are plenty of people - and farms and factories and nightclubs - the film. It's sort of an odd mix of public service film and art movie. I got to meet the creators, Hugh Macdonald and Kit Rollings, and the interviews with them will feature in Public Address Radio, 2pm Saturday on Radio Live.

A word, also, for the quality of the remastering at Park Road Post: the new film looks and sounds brilliant.

One thing I can't do (I didn't actually sign the NDA but I feel bound by the commitment) is describe Park Road Post itself. It is forbidden. But I guess it's okay to say I thought it was pretty cool.

Meanwhile, our friends at Spare Room have some video goodies for you. The Campbell Live cross to John Key's 40 Below doing-it-for--the-kids party that went a bit off the rails. And a report from the Onion News Network on the dark threat of immigration.

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The Solipsistic Left | Mar 27, 2007 10:53

In this week's Listener, Simon Wilson has an interview with Nick Cohen about his new book What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, which asks, says Cohen in the interview "why people in the West who are thoroughly liberal will make excuses for and even openly support the extreme right - the misogyny, the homophobia, the anit-Semitism, the support for Adolf Hitler across large chunks of the Islamic fundamentalist world."

Crikey. Who exactly are these dreadful people, and do I know them? Let's back up a little ...

The book's intellectual wellspring is the Euston Manifesto, a statement crafted by Cohen and others to revive and unify the "democratic left". There is almost nothing in the text of the manifesto with which I disagree. It's a primer on secular liberalism. But I have a lot less time for the self-serving spirit in which the likes of Cohen present their ideas. In particular that "The Left" has lost its way, and they, the enlightened, must bear witness.

One of Cohen's signature pieces, The great liberal betrayal, did actually have the good grace to name some villains, rather than simply spewing generalities:

The Stop the War Coalition is dominated by the Socialist Workers Party, the most unscrupulous and unprincipled of the far-left sects. When the SWP takes over a cause, agendas are rigged, meetings are packed, and debate is suffocated. Everyone with experience of the left knows that the SWP is a totalitarian organisation both in theory and in practice, but they rarely say so in public, and nor do the liberal media. Yet the anti-war movement marked a new low, even by the standards of the SWP's grim record. The supposedly Marxist party allied itself with the Muslim Association of Britain, which supports sharia law, with all its difficulties with democracy, women and homosexuals. The unlovely couple then claimed to represent the millions who opposed the war, and those who marched under the slogan "Not in my name" did not go out of their way to contradict them.

Well, yes. But so what? The SWP has been hijacking other people's causes for decades; always cleverly running up placards du jour with its own red banner at the top. I can recall people on the poll tax marches of the late 1980s in Britain tearing off the tops of the placards to make it clear that the SWP didn't speak for them.

I wonder too if Cohen et al are as reconstructed as they like to think: they simply embrace a new sort of ogre. In another well-known piece, this one for The Observer, Cohen spoke up for the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who was facing charges of inciting religious hatred. He generously grants that Fallaci was a "raging prime donna", but rather forgets to say that she was a deranged racist bigot, who claimed that Muslims were breeding "like rats" and would consume Europe. She had some pretty scary things to say about Jews and homosexuals too.

Indeed, Cohen and his friends have also given their time to some disgraceful bigots on the US conservative right. They seem guilty of something very similar to that of which they accuse others.

Oddly, Cohen came late to all this: he stridently opposed the US invasion of Afghanistan, and as recently as 2002 declared in the New Statesman that it was "right to be anti-American" (the Euston Manifesto specifically condemns anti-Americanism). But having undergone a sudden personal enlightenment, he set about castigating all about him for their acquiescence to tyranny.

I'm put in mind of some sort of Naomi Wolf-like mid-life crisis, in which Cohen and his chums generalise their personal journeys as if they apply to us all. Or perhaps it's the innate tendency of former Marxists to simply lurch to a new polar alignment.

Anyway, now that the Iraq war has turned out to have been a terrible idea, he's changed tack: it's not about the rights and wrongs of the war in Iraq any more, but " how to prevent a sectarian bloodbath there." Isn't it a little late for that? And isn't it a bit rich to simply take a topic off the agenda when it gets embarrassing?

Anyone who has been reading Baghdad Burning since it first appeared will be more than familiar with the steady erosion of secularism described by its author, a young woman called Riverbend. It's not an endorsement of Saddam to observe that religious bigotry has flourished in Iraq since 2003, or to point out that anything resembling a peaceful democracy there will be governed by hardline Islamic political parties.

It's not some quisling betrayal to contemplate the near-disintegration of Iraqi society - four million displaced people - and wonder how the hell it came to this.

So, yes, I disagree with almost nothing in Cohen's manifesto. But until he and his chums discover a little more intellectual honesty, they can keep their smug little lectures to themselves.

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There's a new Repeal Section 59 site which lets you email MPs of your choice to lobby them about Sue Bradford's Bill. It's backed by Barnardos, EPOCH NZ, Every Child Counts, the National Collective of Independent Women's Refuges, Plunket, Save the Children NZ and Unicef.

I gather some people have had trouble with our main RSS feed lately. If that's you, could you get in touch with the details?

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