Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Back in the Hood | Oct 28, 2005 09:53

Just a word about this week's stories on youth gang violence in South Auckland. Without in any way seeking to play down its seriousness, this has been on the cards since a lot of mummies started having a lot of babies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The mini-baby-boom generation has reached the age of youth crime statistics.

The mayor and the police have declared zero tolerance on weapons and violence, which is fair enough, but it would be wrong to think this is the first, or even the worst, spate of its kind.

I didn't grow up anywhere near South Auckland, but we had our local white-trash gangs (I had a talent for ducking the baseball bats and axe handles) and I'm sure other readers had similar experiences. Indeed, from what I can see, New Zealand then had rather more of an atmosphere of frontier violence than it does now. So let's not go too far into moral panic mode.

At the same time, yep, it's a problem, and I think it would be useful for the local hip-hop stars to talk to the kids about this. They might be effective in ways that the churches, police and parents can't.

Oh dear. I'm almost starting to feel sorry for Wayne Mapp. He got handed his ass by No Right Turn on the matter of the Human Rights Commission's alleged "prosecutorial" powers (which don't exist - the commissioner's powers stop at the stage of being a bit grumpy; ie, advocacy) and gets an intellectual thrashing from Keith today.

And over at Fighting Talk, Lyndon and Holly make him look a bit silly. Back at Public Address, David Haywood is just taking the piss. Adam Gifford wades in. Jordan Carter critiques the Mapp speech that started it all.

The MSM (heh) has hardly been any more kind, with the Herald going this morning with National MPs get in a PC pickle. Even in the friendly environs of Jim Mora's 4-5pm panel, Mapp (who joins the panel by phone at about the four-minute mark) wound up floundering in the face of sweetly reasonable questions.

DPF gamely waded in with 10 alleged examples of political correctness, which didn't really work out as planned.

Damian's story about some scallops got pushed down the PA home page by a flood of posts yesterday and today, but you should read it if you missed it. It's brilliant.

Tim Selwyn explores the lighter side of bird flu by rewriting The Parrot Sketch.

Francis Till's NBR assault on open-source advocacy certainly got things going. I don't mean to rag on Francis about this, because we have corresponded in an appropriate humour, but it seems correct to note that he earned his own Slashdot post.

Further, Lex Miller noted that the mission-critical uptime of NBR's Windows-powered website is not very flash. The New Zealand Open Source Society (thanks to Dominic Scheirlinck for the tip) pointed out that Till's own blog is running the open source blogging software Wordpress (which uses an open source language, PHP, and an open source database, MySQL) , which is running on an open source webserver, Apache, which is running on an open source OS, Linux. And Frogblog responds in an impressive we-know-what-we're-talking-about fashion.

And finally, Christiann Briggs pointed out that Rodney Hide has just joined the Linux commies.

Aaron from Intergalactic Records drew my attention to the MySpace page of Rotorua's Slipping Tongue, whose singer Jennie Skulander was named best vocalist at the national finals of the World Battle of the Bands, held at Galatos recently.

And now for your Friday afternoon entertainment: this is brilliant. Check out the guy in the background (our household consensus is that he's playing Quake).

This blog post explains what you're seeing and links to a bunch more of it. Thanks to Phil O'Sullivan in Hong Kong for the links.

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Groupthink Comedy | Oct 27, 2005 09:51

The National Party might have harnessed its talent, old and new and set out on a course of informed opposition to the new government, and the presentation of robust policy alternatives. Instead, it chose to make an appointment that makes it look like a comedy act.

Yes, among the spokesmanships announced by Don Brash yesterday is Wayne Mapp on "Political Correctness Eradication". With its pompous, proper-name capitals, it sounds like something that might issue forth from some totalitarian regime.

But what does it actually mean? Well, although the spin says that Mapp was asked to undertake this weighty task by Don Brash himself, it appears that Dr Brash doesn't really have the details on that one. His interview with Mary Wilson on Checkpoint yesterday included the following exchange:

Mary Wilson: Wayne Mapp on "political correctness eradication" - which I must say sounds alarmingly rather Stalinist.

Don Brash: Hahahaha. Well, Wayne made a very good speech about three or four months back, the middle of the year, in dealing with how to eradicate political correctness. And he talked about the way political correctness had infiltrated some of the institutions of state, and some of the laws. And I made a note at that point in time that if we were in government, I would ask Wayne to spend some serious time dealing with that issue. I decided, even though we were not in government, that he could play a very useful role highlighting some of those issues, and introducing perhaps private member's bills to deal with those issues even in opposition.

MW: Such as … give us an example of what you think is political correctness that could be eradicated.

DB: Ah, well, Wayne's speech talked about for example the way the Human Rights Commission has been used in ways which most New Zealanders regard as over the top or politically correct.

MW: Such as?

DB: Eh, I don't have those things at my fingertips. But I read the speech, ah, some months ago, I thought that was really worthwhile doing.

MW: But you can't actually give us an example of what he would do?

DB: Ah … one of the things he would certainly do is look at the way the Human Rights Commission operates, and the law under which it operates, and endeavour to find out whether we can't produce some more sensible outcomes than some of the ones which we produce currently.

MW: Which you can't give me any examples of.

DB: Look, this is a speech I read four months ago. I've been evaluating portfolios for the last several days. I haven't been reading that speech for the last four months.

Brilliant. When it could and should have begun a programme to present itself as ready to govern, National makes a comedy appointment that the leader can't even address in a straightforward interview.

So what is Mapp on about, then? Hard to say. In the Herald story he does little more than list agencies he thinks are PC: the Waitangi Tribunal, Human Rights Commission and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

The only example Mapp cites is that of the notorious Living Word videos, Gay Rights/Special Rights and Inside the Homosexual Agenda. These videos, brought here five years ago by a fringe American Christian group, made claims about gays that, had they been directed at an individual, would have comfortably amounted to defamation: in particular, they sought to equate homosexuality with paedophilia. (Jay Bennie and Callum Benachie wrote a more detailed analysis of their content.)

They were classified R16 by the censor, then eventually banned on his reading of the Films, Video & Publications Act. The High Court upheld the ban, but it was reversed, in an influential decision, by the Court of Appeal, which held that free speech was the greater good, thus providing a permanent steer for the censor's office. (The Human Rights Commission offers a useful analysis of the issues here.) So what exactly is the problem here?

The Herald story concludes with Mapp's own definition:

Political correctness: a set of attitudes and beliefs that are divorced from mainstream values.

So, er, PC is a failure to subscribe to groupthink? Does anyone detect a certain irony here? Mapp was no better in an interview on Morning Report today, in which he performed so poorly that Sean Plunket resorted to feeding him questions, and, eventually, answers.

The best Mapp seemed to be able to offer was that he opposed "the capture of our public institutions by minorities, and they're basically using that state power and state funding to push their agenda. That's not what free speech is about." He didn't say which minorities: people with freckles? Aucklanders?

Mapp wants to pass legislation to specifically ban any advocacy role for the Human Right Commission or the Waitangi Tribunal. So in the name of free speech he wants to stop independent agencies participating in debate. It's about "respecting the views of the majority." Apparently.

I can't be bothered being offended by National - even after having lost the election - still purporting to speak on behalf of "the majority", because it's just such gibberish. But I'll wager there are members of the National caucus who are furious at having yesterday's spokesmanships hijacked by an incompetent comedy routine.

After all, there were things to talk about, including the revival of Bill English's fortunes and the unprecedented weight thrown behind Arts, Culture & Heritage (Tim Groser as spokesman and two associates). And of course, Lockwood Smith's loss of Foreign Affairs to the statesmanlike Murray McCully. On which matter, Dr Brash said things to Mary Wilson he perhaps ought not to have said:

MW: Lockwood Smith - he has not got foreign affairs. You might have expected that that would be the case. What's wrong with him?

DB: Nothing wrong with Lockwood Smith - he's a very competent member of the caucus, and in fact you're right, he wanted to retain Foreign Affairs. I was very keen indeed to have him heavily involved in Revenue. He did a lot of very useful work in the last Parliament on making the tax system more family-friendly. He wasn't able to complete that work before we announced our own tax package …

MW: Has this got anything to do with the fact that he told US senators there could be a role for an American think-tank to help change public opinion on nuclear ship visits?

DB: That was one factor, but only one. We frankly think that he's got a tremendous contribution to make in revenue and indeed in immigration as well.

MW: And he was something of an embarrassment in Foreign Affairs?

DB: That was one factor - but not the only one by a long chalk.

Ouch.

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NoTunes | Oct 26, 2005 11:02

Looks like I missed the loophole in the new Australian iTunes Store. Computerworld was reporting yesterday that New Zealanders were successfully buying tunes by listing New Zealand as their Australian city of residence - however much that might stick in the craw. I already have an ID and a billing relationship with the Apple Store in Australia, but by this morning, iTunes was rejecting both my credit cards as "not valid in Australia."

Yah boo sucks. And no word yet from Apple as to when - or whether - New Zealanders will be able to use iTunes. C'mon, get on with it.

The MPs who lost their seats last month are, of course, setting about finding something else to do. And the Act Party's tireless Muriel Newman is wasting no time. She has a website - modestly entitled The New Zealand Centre for Political Debate - from whence she issued a work of stunning intellectual virtuousity headed The March to Maori Sovereignty.

In it, she declares that "the mere existence of the Maori Party in Parliament is an abomination." Yes, I know, you thought that it was because people voted for them - twice as many people as voted Act, unfortunately for Muriel - but, for her, the new party's entry into Parliament is, wait for it, "another step towards apartheid."

And then she really gets rolling:

The Maori Party's strategy is based on indoctrinating the public - starting in the schools and imposing their propaganda on the public service. But some argue there are fatal flaws in the fundamental basis of their claims and dispute whether they are indeed the tangata whenua. They point to Moriori pre-dating Maori and a body of evidence suggesting the existence of people before them.

No Muriel, it's not "some people" who believe these things; it's some loonies. The Moriori did not "predate Maori", they were Maori, as anyone who has picked up a history book in the last two or three decades would know. The idea that some mysterious race inhabited these isles 2000 years ago - building the Kaimanawa Wall, among other things - is a crackpot new-age fantasy. And to use such factoids as a way of denying the rights of Maori under the Treaty they signed with the British Crown is basically … racist.

Christ. And people like Muriel say the Greens are weird?

Speaking of Green-o-phobia, feel free to enjoy Open source in government: A delusional cheer from the Greens, an unintentionally hilarious effort by Francis Till on the website of the National Business Review. He notes that "when the government released its rather woeful 'digital strategy,' Nandor had lamented the absence of any reference to open source products."

Till then bags Metiria Turei for expressing similar sentiments and goes on to damn such sentiments as "lamentably predictable", "utterly wrong-headed" and "naïve". He declares:

While it is certainly true that the open source movement has gained much ground in the last five years, revolutionising some practices, the tools it has produced tend to fill specialised, if not niche, needs - and not even those with universal success.

Oh, right. "niche" needs: like, say, serving web pages. Where a single OSS product, Apache, has only 70% of the market, or more than 53 million websites, including the New Zealand government website (Apache on Linux) and the New Zealand Department of Inland Revenue (Apache on Linux) and the Bank of New Zealand.

Sure, State Services has just bought a Novell solution based on SUSE Linux, but surely, he says, as any fule kno, "Novell is a company offering proprietary versions of OSS."

The problem, Till knowledgeably declares, is that local developers haven't really caught on to OSS, which is being pushed only by offshore corporates such as IBM and Sun. This would be why our developers, CactusLab, have built Public Address on Linux. And surely no one's advertising for Linux people in New Zealand? Er, yes they are.

And big corporations wouldn't ever switch from Windows to some flakey open source OS for mission-critical applications, would they? Ask this guy:

IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.
Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his judgement.
"PricewaterhouseCoopers is a Windows shop but we were forced to use open source," he said. "I inherited a real nightmare with servers going up and down. There were e-mail outages and on top of that there was a bad relationship between our users and IT."

I could go on, but I have work to do. Suffice to say that Till's research appears to have consisted of intensive study of Microsoft marketing literature. Microsoft has every right to put its case in as persuasive a way as it can. But I think business journalists who regurgitate that case whole to try and make a misguided political point should be a bit careful about calling other people "naïve".

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