Recent Posts...
Page 113 of 266
Archive
Living together | Dec 01, 2005 10:19
I was hoping the Herald would change the headline on a story about the West Auckland stabbings that went up on its website yesterday afternoon - Stabbing latest in series of attacks by psychiatric patients - because it was frankly misleading. The most recent case cited in the story is from 2002, and the short list of incidents cited hardly qualifies as a "series of attacks".
Happily, the story has re-emerged under a more sustainable headline: Mental state of knife attacker had caused alarm. Which, indeed, it had. At 1.27am on Sunday, police visited the home of the attacker after a call from his landlady. She could not cite a specific threat, and the police did not perceive one, but arranged for a visit from two mental health workers later the day. Fearing that the man was becoming ill, they arranged for him to meet with his case worker the next day.
But before that could happen, he killed one man and injured two others, before running at police as they fired bullets into him. (Who else heard the reports on Tuesday and thought: "another P case"?)
Charlie Norcross, father of badly injured fishing shop owner Robert Norcross, has been vocal about the incident. He told the Herald:
"Some years ago we had hospitals in place to take care of these psychiatric weirdos and the Government in their wisdom have just decided they'd save some money and close them down and let them drift around in society. None of us are safe. You could go down the road shopping and anything could happen."
Today on Morning Report, he further declared that "we've got psychiatric people on the rampage … a large number of potential killers in our society" and put to Sean Plunket that "it's going on all the time Sean, isn't it?"
It's impossible to begrudge a man who has nearly lost a loved one such anguish, but no, it's not going on all the time. According to Mental Health Commissioner Ruth Harrison in the same segment on the programme, a survey has found that "the incidence of homicide by people who experience mental illness" has fallen from 20% to 6% since deinstitutionalisation.
It is not that this man had been abandoned by the system: he had been engaged with it, living in the community, for 13 years. It's just that, sadly, this happened very quickly and no one saw it coming. (A good friend of mine used to do emergency interventions in mental health. It's not a job I could do.)
This does, nonetheless, oblige us to think about the balance between risks and freedoms. And implicit in the recognition that it was simply wrong to incarcerate the mentally ill for most or all of their lives is the recognition that mentally ill people in the community - like any of us - present a risk that they would not were they locked up. And yet, it is likely that 50 years ago, we would have been urged to deliver up our own two, mildly autistic, children to a state institution.
This issue is more than theoretical round our way. A psychiatric survivor has moved in to a Housing New Zealand property over the road. His neighbour, who had just paid a pretty penny to move into the street and has a young daughter, is freaking out and keeping a notebook. There have been some incidents: blaring music, comatose bodies outside on the driveway one morning, a visitor overdosing on his meds.
The new tenant knocks on my door a couple of times a week, to borrow batteries or a pen, or use the phone (in one case, to call an ambulance). I know his name. He is always polite to the point of being apologetic when he comes, and he has the troubled look of the mentally ill. He seems a decent guy and I figure he has had a much harder life than me. The troublesome incidents seem to be trailing off, and, unlike the woman who lived in the other half of the duplex (and who was way too crazy to be living on her own) when we first moved into the street, he seems to have whanau support. I think he just doesn't yet know how to live in a house, or with neighbours, and I'd like to see someone come and put up some curtains for him, and encourage him to wash more.
I hope it works out for him. After all, things have quietened down down the road, where the schizophrenic who'd done a long jail lag was moved in a while back (although I'd have to say he's the one I'm still not happy about). But I really think we've had our turn: Housing NZ can send us a nice retired couple or some refugees next time, please.
PS: Got stuff to do today, so I'll leave it here, but look out tomorrow for readers' dispatches from the coffee frontlines …
Coffee and culture | Nov 30, 2005 10:07
Somebody served me a long black without a crema last week. In Wellington. The café had everything else: nice décor, convivial company, Cafenet connectivity, that capital city buzz. But no crema. Certainly, I am a bit of a nut about this sort of thing. I am currently sipping a home-made espresso that is of superior quality to what I could buy at 95 out of 100 Auckland cafes: intense, complex, with a touch of sweetness. And a big, fat fuck-off crema.
Stilll, there's always L'affare and The Astoria (although the last time I was at the latter, it was well past coffee time and someone was filling me full of wine and political gossip). And it could be London, where according to Nick Smith's interesting Listener story on New Zealanders in London you still can't get a decent coffee in the old town, excepting that you visit a New Zealand-run establishment. Testify. I went back to London for the first time in a decade several years ago (I lived there for five years) and made a beeline for Bar Italia in Soho, which had once seemed to me to be coffee central. It was horrible. The long black was thin and when I tried a milky coffee next it bordered on the incompetent. On the whole trip, the only decent coffee I found was in one place in Amsterdam, and it cost the equivalent of $NZ6.
I fear that we have established a certain domestic coffee culture and simply expected the world to follow. I occasionally swing by for a chat with Derek Townsend of our partners in crime, Karajoz, and he points out that the Italians make a very different espresso: sharper, more bitter and always with sugar. Derek seems to spend half his year on international coffee reconnaissance, so he clearly knows, but it still seems wrong to me.
Anyway, Wellington. I was down on Thursday for the conference to launch the Council for the Humanities, and gave a presentation revolving around what we do at Public Address. I was surprised to discover what a gulf there was between the Internet culture we inhabit and the world of these clever academics, but the audience was certainly receptive to what I was saying.
I enjoyed hearing Moana Jackson, who gave the most convincing argument I have heard for the distinctiveness of a Maori intellectual tradition and "way of knowing" but I'd like to interview him some time about his plans for engagement. Walking backwards into the future is all very well, but surely one of the most impressive things about some of the Maori leaders in the years following contact with Europe was their boldness and intellectual curiousity. My Internet culture (I spoke a little bit about layers of cultural identity: Tze Ming framing a debate between two young Chinese New Zealanders as Worf versus Tuvok seemed to strike a chord) tells me that an open system prospers and a closed system withers.
Afterwards, someone asked me what "institution" I was associated with (heh), I dined with the celebrated Australian historian Ian Donaldson (a lovely man) and someone else suggested I was unfairly bagging Te Ara. I don't really mean to - it's a laudable project - but I do strongly believe that some part of the official online cultural presence has to get out of monologue mode and if it's not Te Ara, then it needs to be something else. If it ever was, culture and heritage is no longer something practiced by experts while the rest of us keep ourselves busy.
Last week was conference time in Wellington. Had I been able to spare the time, I'd have done something for the National Digital Forum, but family duties didn't permit. Synthetic Thoughts got down there and has an informative post on archiving issues and enhancements to the national metadata discovery portal, Matapihi.
Ben Metcalfe assesses the potential hackability of the Xbox 360 and declares it to be "tighter than a nun's arse". He also covers a Firefox extension that pretty much qualifies as a work of evil.
As intriguing new evidence - the longest ice-core record ever obtained - lends even more weight to climate-change models, the US tries to sabotage work towards future carbon commitments. I guess that even if it takes 20 years to make these people perceive reality, that's a blip in the long picture, but I do marvel at the intellectual dishonesty here. Anyway, OneGoodMove has some great clips from the Earth to America Global Warming Comedy Special: Larry David, Robin Williams, Bill Maher and the truly amazing Blue Man Group.
AmericaBlog dubbed these people the American Taliban. That's hyperbolic, but not entirely inaccurate. Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools have a list of books they want banned from American schools. This list includes One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (sample passage deemed injurious to young people: "...the plump brown face had been deflated and patted flat like a cow's ordurous dropping"). It would be funny if they weren't apparently serious.
Things not going well at the Trial of the Century. And likely to get worse with the arrival of former US attorney general Ramsey Clark on the defence side.
And finally: next year will see the market arrival of holographic storage. Maxell will be making DVD-sized discs that hold 300GB (that's, like, a day of hi-def video) and is tracking towards 1.6 terabyte removable discs in five years' time (that's the Library of Congress on six discs), with unprecedented transfer rates. Freaky. Wikipedia backgrounder here and Slashdot thread here.
Brute Farce | Nov 28, 2005 10:53
I groaned when I opened the paper last week to read that Susan Wood and Paul Holmes will be required - by subpoena if necessary - to give evidence to the Parliamentary select committee inquiry into TVNZ. The word "sideshow" comes to mind. Are our members of Parliament actually trying to miss the point?
As someone who works in the industry said to me, it's already shaping up as a farce.
Great weekend for sport, wasn't it? First the All Blacks, looking like the "C" team by the time the final whistle went, scratched their way to Grand Slam glory versus Scotland, and then the Kiwis opened a can of vintage whup-ass on the Kangaroos. Wow.
The English press is still disinclined to show good grace about the rugby. In the Times, John Aizlewood had a sneer in the guise of offering a background to the haka, concluding with this nugget:
They're still doing it today, which is sweet, although the new Kapa O Pango was unveiled to an overseas audience in South Africa in August. In the country with the world's second-highest murder rate, it climaxed with a throat-slitting gesture. This has upset many rugby purists, who feel that it oversteps the mark in its aggressive gesture and has little to do with the sporting dance that set out to inspire generations of All Black teams. The jury is definitely out on this one. Watch this space.
This, folks, is just making shit up. Kapa o Pango was not unveiled in South Africa, but at Carisbrook, in Dunedin. It has never been performed in South Africa. And so far as I know, there was no complaint made or offence taken thousands of kilometres away in the republic. But don't let that stop you, chaps ...
There was also some more of the wink-and-nudge stuff about Polynesians in the All Blacks. Having belatedly shown some grace in his assessment of the current All Black side, Stephen Jones also said this:
Fiji had two contenders, of whom the super-charged Sisa Koyamaibole makes the team - way above the next No 8s in line. A second excellent Fijian forward, the lock Ifereimi Rawaqa, was edged out of my squad, but only just. Coming across these players reminds you yet again that Fiji and Samoa can still produce some gems, and it makes you even more angry that their key players have been annexed by New Zealand for so long.
And an Observer story contained this passage:
The fact remains that an All Blacks starting XV - with 13 changes from the team that started at Twickenham - including a 19-year-old on debut at full-back, finished off the grand slam with a final tally of 138 points scored against 39 conceded. They scored 16 tries to three. No one played better, or more confidently, than the debutant, Isaia Toeva, whose deft handling figured in two tries. Like many of the tourists he is Samoa-born.
And there lies the key to assessing New Zealand's current pre-eminence. When one thinks back 27 years to the previous grand slam team it is to a side, captained by Graham Mourie, that was full of Anglo-Saxon names and rangy body shapes, much like that of Colin 'Pinetree' Meads. Now the Polynesian influence runs through the team from front row to fullback, and the alchemy of two races has delivered power, passion, and poise under pressure. It is a potent mix.
Like "many" of the tourists? Like, five from a party of 35. Collins, So'oialo, Toeava, Masoe and Muliaina: all of whom (with the possible exception of Masoe, who I'm not sure about) went to school here and have represented New Zealand through age-grade and schools teams. Is anyone really suggesting they should have been denied the chance to be All Blacks?
In addition, Taumoepeau and Lauaki were born in Tonga, and Rokococko and Sivivatu were born in Fiji - as far as I can tell, all of them also attended school here (Joe, who played for New Zealand Schools three years in a row, came here with his family at the age of five). However much it may confuse the British, they are Pacific Islanders and New Zealanders.
I find the hypocrisy here really annoying. Britain's most celebrated track athlete, Linford Christie, was born in Jamaica. The great black footballer Cyrille Regis was born in French Guyana. Liverpool and England player John Barnes was born in Kingston, Jamaica. The England cricketer Gladstone Small was born in Barbados. There are many other examples. I can't recall a whispering campaign to suggest that they were anything other than British.
I see the press has got onto the trials of Matt Bowden's would-be ecstasy substitute, Ease, being conducted via Biggie.co.n [NB: Just to make clear - Biggie have been in touch to say that they carried a Stargate banner ad, but apart from that have no connection with the Ease people or the trials.] David Fisher also wrote an account (not online) of necking some at home with a mate, and feeling quite nice.
I've tried Ease too (like Mr Fisher, purely for purposes of journalistic inquiry): it's really pretty good; like ecstasy without the rushes and wonky eyes, but with a similar sense of well-being and sociability. And I got up the next morning and did a full day's work. It seems much less noxious than the piperazine-based pills currently widely available, so there would be a certain irony in it not being eventually declared legal. On the other hand, Matt Bowden may well be right in saying that it lacks the neurotoxic effects of ecstasy, but I would like to know exactly what it is sooner rather than later.
On a related tip, David Amsden has an interesting piece on Salon about the booming use in America of respectable drugs of social adaptation sold by pharmaceutical companies, and wonders at the distinctions between the recreational and the medical:
It seems especially stubborn -- dare I say immature -- that the medical community refuses to acknowledge just how much certain psychotropic drugs blur the line between the biochemical and societal. Even more peculiar is that while we usher in a state of being permanently medicated, selective dosing is still viewed as "recreational" and "risky." What's interesting about ADD drugs is that they are remarkably effective regardless of how your brain looks when scanned, achieving what for centuries we've turned to coffee to accomplish, with about the same potential for side effects.
So here's a radical thought: Why not just put them in the same category? After all, what's worse, continuing to find ways to define the everyday in terms of disorders until we're all taking pills to curb the effects of other pills, or admitting that we've synthesized substances that can help, from time to time, in different doses for both adults and children, take the edge off in a way that doesn't throw you off track? To me it seems more honest this way, more grown-up, and less likely to rouse our collective inner voices into an anxious chorus constantly wondering what's "wrong" with us.
The argument against this pro-enhancement mind-set, of course, is that it breeds addiction. Though to refute this, one need only look at a fact D.A.R.E. counselors hate to admit about illegal drugs -- that most people who do them never become addicted, that many people smoke pot and do coke much the way they "drink responsibly," and for many of the same reasons (relaxation, focus, confidence boosting) that people ask their doctors if a variety of pills is right for them. Really, it comes down to whether we want to view lifestyle pharmaceuticals as something indulged in passively or actively -- a healthy reinvention of adulthood or a submissive rejection of the difficulties and responsibilities that come with growing up. There are no easy answers here, but until these questions are the ones brought up on the "Today" show -- instead of the dog-and-pony act of whether the drugs are being "abused" -- we are, as a psychiatrist might say, in a state of denial.
Meanwhile, scary bastards like this are still charging around on P binges. To be honest, I have never encountered a violent P-head; I have, however, endured some hideous bores. Too much P makes people vocalise their interior monologue - and the interior monologue of a P-head is numbingly banal.
And Blogging It Real's bennyasena finds some reefer madness reporting in Gisborne.
One to file under just fuck off: music and film industry interests want the European Parliament to extend the scope of anti-terrorism laws to help them prosecute illegal downloaders. Because they're exactly the same as people who commit mass-murder, aren't they?
Good piece from British Tory MP and Spectator editor Boris Johnson about the bomb-al-Jazeera memo and the Blair government's move to close down the issue by invoking the Official Secrets Act. Johnson says he'll risk jail by publishing the suppressed information.
Anyway, on a happier note, my warmest congratulations to the Phoenix Foundation and SJD for their theatre gig at the St James on Friday night. It was a novel experience to be seated comfortably at a table with clear sightlines of a superb production. SJD in particular seemed to reinvent themselves for the occasion: not folky or white-funky so much as out-and-out grunty. Nice one. Please do it again.
Egregious Examples | Nov 23, 2005 09:21
Cushla McKinney alerted me to the list of the 10 "most egregious examples of politically correct language found in 2005 by the Global Language Monitor in its annual global survey," whose carefully contrived novelty value has earned it any amount of international press in the past week.
What exactly is Global Language Monitor? It claims to provide "Media Tracking & Analytical Services", but it doesn't look to me like the kind of outfit to which I would open my chequebook. For a start, its website looks like it was knocked up with an old copy of FrontPage: it's that ugly. But mostly, it's full of crap. Its list is confused and contradictory, and it is topped with an unintentional howler.
The "president" of Global Language Monitor, Paul JJ Payack, is quoted as saying that the phrase "misguided criminals," is one of several terms the BBC used so as not to use the word "terrorist" in describing those who carried out the July 7 bombings in London. He adds: "The BBC attempts to strip away all emotion by using what it considers 'neutral' descriptions when describing those who carried out the bombings in the London Tubes."
You could be forgiven for thinking that BBC management had, say, dictated that "misguided criminals" be used in place of the word "terrorists". Or that it was on a list of suggested terms. Or that it was commonly used by BBC editorial staff. Sorry, none of the above.
"Misguided criminals" has been used a grand total of once by anyone connected with the BBC, in the middle of a sentence in this opinion column by storied BBC correspondent John Simpson. This is it in context:
Now that the bombs have exploded, and thousands of newspaper pages and entire days of air time have been devoted to the horror of it all, and to the poor, decent people who are dead and missing, and to the misguided criminals responsible, perhaps we can stand back from it all and catch our breath.
Simpson goes on to recall the IRA bombing campaigns and conclude that the British police strategy "to treat political violence like any other crime" was ultimately successful, along with the fact that the supporters of both the IRA and the protestant militia groups eventually realised they "had nothing to offer but violence and chaos. It was the effective end of the IRA."
But Simpson's column (or rather, the two dread words) was picked up and waved around like a flag by the odious Melanie Philips who claimed that it "downplays acts of depravity" to fail to call "such an act by its proper name".
Then, just in case anyone had missed it, Philips plagiarised herself (makes a change from being plagiarised by Bruce Logan, I guess) to run the same line in her Daily Mail column, thus using the phrase "misguided criminals" twice as many times as the entire BBC, ever.
In the same column she described Islam as a "death cult", and demanded the repeal of Britain's Human Rights Act, the establishment of new "judge-only courts" whose workings would be opaque to the public and the arrest of anyone who visited a website containing bomb-making information (whoops, best get Wikipedia out of your bookmarks immediately).
Simpson's column, you may have noted, was a caution against hysterical over-reaction ...
Thereafter, a hundred foam-flecked winger blogs helped inflate the "misguided criminals" meme, which culminated in Payack interviewing Google for his half-assed list. The funny thing is, these people are all seeking to dictate the thoughts of others by prescribing what words they may acceptably use. Doesn't that sound really politically correct?
As it happens, the BBC does have a policy on the use of the word: not a ban - as it points out here after the London bombings "we have used the word 'terrorist' on our main news bulletins and the perpetrators have been described as such on numerous occasions in recent days by BBC reporters and independent commentators" - but, as noted in the minutes of a recent BBC editorial meeting (Word doc), it is eager to avoid being seen to be making value judgements on conflicts around the globe, and thus undermining its perceived impartiality. Certainly, it's easy enough to call the London bombers terrorists - and BBC reporters did - but then you run into the selfsame problem. The BBC serves parts of the world where it really is taking sides to use, or not use, the T-word.
I note that since I first read his list and wrote the bulk of this post, Payack has acknowledged the BBC's rebuttal of his claim. Sort of.
Anyway, that wasn't actually the reason Cushla alerted me to the list. That was that she had noted that at number five on the list was the phrase "not in the mainstream". She thought that given Wayne Mapp's recent utterances about being in the mainstream, that was pretty funny. Me too. Ha ha.
---
Couple more things: from Canada, Shane Telfer took issue with what he saw as a dismissive attitude towards Japan's claim to host a Rugby World Cup ("Does this mean that Japan should never hold the RWC? Let's put things in perspective here: NZ ran a smart campaign and deserved to win. Let's be gracious in victory and accept that the bids of the other countries also had their merits ... and that yes, one day soon, success will hopefully be theirs.") Fair enough: what I should have said was that the merit of taking the game "global" with Japan didn't trump the fact that Japan appears to have mounted a rather poor bid and New Zealand, this time, put together a very good one.
From Britain, Craig Lucinsky watched some rugby television:
On Sunday following the Test against England (as if that morning's papers were not bad enough) the BBC rugby Special that afternoon, hosted by John Inverdale, and featuring a panel of ex-England players (Guscott, Healey and a prop whose name can't remember) just continually bagged us as a nation that steals Polynesians (also a favourite line of The Guardian's Eddie Butler), and which should never have got the World Cup. According to them Japan was the best option, a missed chance to grow the game, and we only got it because of whinging that "If you do not give it to us in 2011, we will never again get the chance." They also harped on about lack of infrastructure and (6 years out) labelled it 2011 as a "World Cup of Campervans".
Man, I try to keep an open mind here, I am trying hard to follow the English game (football IS boring at the moment), but the negativity displayed by media and pundits is just jaw-dropping. Well done All Blacks and well done NZRU ... I'll be home in time for the opening ceremony!
A couple of other people said that the British scribes' qualms about the haka ought to be taken more seriously, given that the All Blacks are guests in another land. I disagree. The home unions are only too keen to reap the financial windfall of hosting All Black games: well, the haka is part of the package. Deal with it. And Stephen Jones' intimation that the All Blacks shouldn't perform the haka because there are pakeha and PIs in the team is fatuous. Samoa, Fiji and Tonga all perform their equivalents before test matches. It's part of rugby culture. And Stuart lamented the lack of objectivity in my rugby posts: dude, it said "one eyed" in the first sentence, didn't it?
Finally on the rugby, with Tracey Nelson too busy devising ways to kill bugs to do her game stats, Hadyn of Grabthar's Hammer has provided some useful statistics on the rugby commentary. Most amusing.
Out there in the scary world, Digby highlights an amazing Jason Vest story on the use of torture, interviewing some old-guard CIA staff. Money quote:
"If you talk to people who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people who do it," he said. "One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, 'Why didn't you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?' They said that their torturers got so involved that they didn't even bother to ask questions." Ultimately, he said -- echoing Gerber's comments -- "torture becomes an end unto itself."
And, as a thousand wingers prattle on about how of course white phosphorous isn't a chemical weapon, Think Progress unearths a Pentagon document in which Saddam is said to have "used white phosphorous (WP) chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels". So, like torture, it's only bad when the bad guys do it, silly.
Anyway ... this is my last post for the week (but I'll have a couple of guesties for tomorrow), because I'm going to Wellington for the launch of the Humanities Council of NZ, and coming back in time for the SJD/Phoenix Foundation theatre show at the St James (we've got a table). I have a party invitation for later, and, for the first weekend in a while, no work to do for two whole days. It's going to be large ...
Page 113 of 266
Archive