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Good things | Apr 08, 2004 10:52

I don't know that Easter really made sense to me until I lived in the northern hemisphere. Most years in London, spring really would push through over Easter Weekend, signalling that the climb out of the long English winter had begun. It clearly meant something.

Here in the colonies, we still have the Christian observance, but the underlying pagan festival is topsy-turvy, the rebirth embodied in spring turned into winter foreshadowed. Ah well. I don't subscribe to the belief system but I do like their holidays. (At the risk of sounding terribly new-agey, the old Cornish churches I visited one Christmas, built on much older religious sites, are the holiest places I've ever been.)

So goodwill to all, then. And, in the interests of being positive - something we in the blogosphere sometimes forget to do - allow me to muse on a few of the things I like …

Blogging, for one, obviously. The culture is essentially the same one that greeted me when I first got online in the early 90s. I don't do Usenet any more (it got a bit shrill and nutty after 1996) but it's fair to say it helped teach me how to think.

The bloggers - even the grumpy ones and the ones no one reads - are doing something interesting and important, and I'm pleased to be part of it.

(We had our biggest ever day at Public Address on Monday, chiefly because of the Michael King interview transcript, which has now been viewed more times than anything else we've posted since we launched.)

Being back on live radio is great. I still press the wrong button occasionally (there's a shitload of buttons these days) but my Wire interview with John Tamihere yesterday, a few minutes after the foreshore policy embargo expired, was the reason you'd want to do this thing in the first place.

I like Tamihere: passion is an over-rated quality in politicians (in that it tends to cover a multitude of sins) but it sits well on him. Bic Runga was great on the Wire too - warm, intelligent, articulate - and Chris Knox and Vicki Hyde are always good to talk to. My producers, Patrick and Damien, are clever young men who will amount to something. So, yeah, being on the radio? Lovin' it.

As a long-term Macintosh user, I am obligated to declare an affection for my computer. The 466Mhz G4 powering it is getting a bit wheezy, but I'm hangin' out for the G5 iMac.

Also, non-comprehensively: Scoop (where would we be without it?); Camillia on NZ Idol; music (still the art form that gets into my head); watching sport (even when the team's a bit shabby, Eden Park's a good outing); Pansy Wong (so happy!); pinot gris (definitely the new chardonnay); the Checks (so young!); good-quality cookware; Maori Television (those old documentaries!); visiting Wellington; South Park (so smart!); magazines (the New York Review of Books - the bluffer's guide to everything); Prego (I'm off there to be wilfully compromised by the music industry after I post this); the land, sea and sky we share here; and my family …

Clearly, it could be a lot worse than it is.

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Ill Semantics | Apr 07, 2004 09:57

So are we to see the crucial foreshore legislation fall over semantics? It's shaping up that way, with the two minor parties, New Zealand First and United Future utterly at odds over whether the legislation will decree the foreshores as Crown property or as public domain vested in the Crown.

The Waitangi Tribunal has already said it can see little functional difference between the two (although others take the view that public domain provides better security against future attempts to dispose of property), but it's almost not about that so much any more as a power struggle between the two minor parties. There are votes - especially that of Georgina Beyer - to be counted yet …

Anyway, better get this published before my 10am embargoed copy of the proposed policy arrives. If you're interested, I'm interviewing John Tamihere about it all at 1pm The Wednesday Wire on 95bFM. The live Internet feed is here. That Bic Runga's coming in at 12.25pm.

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersch has a fascinating story on The Other War - Afghanistan. The sypnosis - again: stability and reconstruction in Afghanistan were sacrificed to the obsession with getting into Iraq. Hersch also quotes an internal report commissioned and then buried by the US Defense Department, which says, in part"

What was needed after December 2001 was a greater emphasis on U.S. special operations troops, supported by light infantry, conducting counterinsurgency operations. Aerial bombardment should have become a rare thing …The failure to adjust U.S. operations in line with the post-Taliban change in theater conditions cost the United States some of the fruits of victory and imposed additional, avoidable humanitarian and stability costs on Afghanistan … Indeed, the war's inadvertent effects may be more significant than we think.

Hersch's story mentioned the Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, an "alleged war criminal and gunrunner" who recently had Alan Gibbs over for a feast. Yes, that Alan Gibbs. His Afghani travelogue, published in the Herald yesterday, is interesting. He's not optimistic about prospects for democracy either.

Propaganda News Network appears to have decided become my personal fisker, which is fine: one shouldn't object to being scrutinised. But he'll really have to try a bit harder. He claims I'm a "mendacious weasel" over what I've said about Gerry Brownlee's view of civil unions. You can weigh up adjectives all you like: in his outburst at the bishops Brownlee quite clearly placed social sanction of same-sex relationships in the same basket as the prostitution law reform he claims is producing child prostitution, as a social evil.

I quoted his exact words the first time I mentioned it, and it still pisses me off. Brownlee was, of course, at it again yesterday, smugly declaring to 3 National News that the National Party had no need of a gay branch, the day after poor old Pansy Wong, with Brash's support, had held a meeting to set one up. The National Party needs to decide what it stands for, and I actually don't think it's what its deputy leader believes. It's a bit better than that.

He also takes issue with my suggestion that the relevant health professionals and the research seem to support the current targeted health policies for Maori. He says he'd like to see evidence of that (it's been all over the news, chum) and offers that "we shouldn't pander to any Maori who are too racist to trust whitey to give them an injection."

Charming. Like most textbook modern conservatives, his anger seems to derive from the fact that the world does not function as he believes it should.

There's been some odd stuff going on over at PNN's friends' place at NZPundit though. I'm always wary of taking Gordy literally, but his comment a few days ago that "I'm not saying the US should just go in and raze Fallujah, but FFS get in there, clear out the more innocent looking women and children, and THEN raze Fallujah" rankles even as a bad-taste joke. Let me get this right: get the "more innocent" women and children out and then kill the menfolk on the basis that they happen to live in the wrong place? And it's the good guys doing this?

It appears Gordy may be getting his grim wish anyway. Coalition forces have sealed off Fallujah and are strafing parts of it from helicopter gunships, with the inconvenience of the media observing it. Meanwhile in Sadr City, civilians are claiming to have been picked off by snipers, just for being there. The hospital is reporting 50 civilian deaths since Sunday. The big problem with killing people by map reference is that, as the Christian Science Monitor points out, most Shiites, for now anyway, don't support Sadr and just want to be safe. I would have thought the risks of brutalising them would be obvious.

Still, at least the War on Smut is well on track …

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Could be better | Apr 06, 2004 12:02

Things are not going well in Iraq. With 20-20 hindsight, it would surely have been better to allow Moqtada al-Sadr's al-Hawza newspaper to continue to publish its bile to a small audience. The closure of the paper by the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the subsequent insurgency, have set in motion the coalition's worst nightmare.

Suddenly remembering that there's a months-old arrest warrant active for Sadr isn't like to help much either. The guy's holed up in a mosque surrounded by his own do-or-die militia. Who's going to go and get him out of there?

Meanwhile, Juan Cole points out that one of Sadr's henchmen has called for an immediate withdrawal of Australian troops. Cole also looks at the CPA tactics in the past week or two:

I have long been a trenchant critic of the Sadrists. But they haven't been up to anything extraordinary as far as I can see in recent weeks. Someone in the CPA sat down and thought up ways to stir them up by closing their newspaper and issuing 28 arrest warrants and taking in people like Yaqubi. This is either gross incompetence or was done with dark ulterior motives that can scarcely be guessed at.

I defer, naturally, to Cole, but I can't imagine what the "dark ulterior motives" might be. I think it was just plain stupidity.

Meanwhile, mostly bad news at home for Bush in the latest Pew survey:

Public support for war in Iraq has been unaffected by the murders and desecration of the corpses of American citizens in Falluja. However, continued turmoil and violence in Iraq may be taking a toll on President Bush's approval ratings. More Americans now disapprove of the way he is doing his job than approve, though by only a slight margin (47% disapprove vs. 43% approve). Just four-in-ten approve of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, his lowest rating ever and down from 59% in January. Bush's evaluations on other issues – the economy, energy and even terrorism – have fallen as well. And by a wide margin (57% to 32%) the public does not think he has a clear plan for bringing the situation in Iraq to a successful conclusion.

Nonetheless, nearly six-in-ten Americans (57%) continue to believe that the United States made the right decision in using military force against Iraq, which is unchanged from a mid-March Pew survey. However, public attitudes toward most aspects of the U.S. mission in Iraq have turned more negative since January, in the aftermath of the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Just 50% of Americans favor keeping troops in Iraq until a stable government is established there, while 44% support bringing the troops home as soon as possible. In January, the public by nearly two-to-one favored maintaining U.S. troops in Iraq until a stable government is formed (63%-32%).

This would seem to more than balance the last survey, which showed John Kerry struggling to convince the public of his merit on several key issues.

Riverbend's still writing well from Baghdad. She comments on the Sadr business and life in general, and tells another harrowing tale of arbitrary arrest and internment. Raed has his own blog now and he also has a rant about recent events:

Believe me, Bremer and Bush are totally lost; most of the time they don't know what they want to do, and when they do, they don't know how to do it. Believe me, they are playing with fire.

While Don Brash packs-'em-out in the provinces, Pansy Wong presided over an inaugural meeting of National's new gay branch in Auckland last night - apparently signing up 20 new members. I think this is a good thing. As OtherPundit points out, there's no law against being both gay and politically conservative. But they'll have to stick a muzzle on Gerry Brownlee some time: otherwise it's going to be hard staying in a party whose deputy leader has publicly equated same-sex civil unions with child prostitution.

Meanwhile, the Herald's editorial column has weighed in on the TV violence debate, quoting the AUT report on TV violence, but slamming the conclusions of its authors:

Astoundingly, they mocked the most compelling of recent research, and parental instinct, by suggesting the link between the high incidence of violence on TV and real-life aggression was "relatively modest".

The compelling research, says the Herald, is the 15-year (1977-1992) longtitudinal study conducted at the University of Michigan, in which children were surveyed for their viewing habits and then assessed again as young adults, finding that "Children's viewing of violent TV shows, their identification with aggressive same-sex TV characters, and their perceptions that TV violence is realistic are all linked to later aggression as young adults, for both males and females."

The Michigan study was published in a journal of the American Psychological Association, which would instinctively make me cautious. The APA applies some remarkably loose standards to research approval: it is a stronghold of the now largely debunked recovered memory movement, and it has declined to criticise its members' work in such wiggy fields as the hypnotic debriefing of UFO abductees. But it does oversee sound work too, so let's assume that the TV study is relatively robust.

The lead researcher on the Michigan study, L. Rowell Huesmann, is something of a star of the TV-begets-violence lobby. He has published a series of studies over the years and testified before a US Senate committee. Pulp Culture had an interesting column on him.

The only references I've been able to find for which shows were rated as "very violent" by the researchers in 1977 list Starsky and Hutch, The Six Million Dollar Man and Roadrunner cartoons. Oddly enough, I was 15 myself in 1977, I watched all of those (not so much Starsky and Hutch) and I struggle to imagine my parents forbidding me from watching Roadrunner.

The researchers found that girls who identified with "aggressive same-sex TV characters" - at the time, those in Charlie's Angels, Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman - were more likely to be aggressive and commit crimes (throughout the study, incurring traffic tickets is counted as "aggressive" behaviour) when they grew older. So teenage girls should be protected from Xena, Warrior Princess, presumably. Superman and Batman or any of the other heroes kids might have fight their battles for them are also out, apparently.

In full, they said that "those who were found to be particularly prone to violent and aggressive behavior as adults had, as children, viewed large amounts of violent programs, identified with aggressive same-sex TV characters and perceived violent programs as realistic."

So we're not, it would seem, talking about your average kid here. But Huessmann dismissed that idea: "It is more plausible that exposure to TV violence increases aggression than that aggression increases TV violence viewing." It's all about television apparently.

But it's a bid odd that in casting around blame and implying that somebody ought to do something, the Herald editorial neglected to convey the Michigan researchers' advice, which was not to unplug the television altogether, but to watch with your kids and discuss what you're seeing. It's my bet that the author of the editorial hasn't actually seen the programmes he or she is talking about. A bit like Sue Kedgley.

I'm not at all a fan of visual violence. Reservoir Dogs left me cold (to what end? I asked myself) and I have no intention of seeing either Kill Bill or The Passion of the Christ. But I have seen what my boys see, and frankly, I'm less concerned about that than I would be if they were watching the relentless dry-humping that passes for daytime pop videos these days. They are quite clear on the fact that what they're watching isn't real. The younger one plays Warcraft and other strategy games, which I guess would count as violent, but are really intellectually demanding. I'm just, as ever, wary of moral panic …

If you missed it, you might also want to read Fiona's This just in: Rugrats is corrupting our children

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Gratitudes | Apr 05, 2004 10:16

Gilbert Wong's feature story on Don Brash in the new Metro is very good. Unlike most of the Brash profiles so far, it seeks to determine who actually wrote the Orewa speech and from what sources, and how faithful it is to those sources.

It also makes me think that we will in the end be grateful to Brash and his party for their influence on our 20-year modern search for a place to stand on nationhood and the Treaty - and that that influence is simply part of those 20 years, and not a conclusive critique of them.

In the story, Mai Chen expresses what was my initial response to the speech and its accompanying briefing: that it's all very well to promise to put forward a bill to repeal all Treaty clauses in every piece of legislation where they appear, but, after two decades of legal precedent and tribunal decisions, you're best be prepared to spend a long time in court afterwards.

Amazingly, according to Wong, "Brash says he will have to get advice on how to go about what he promised before he could comment on the practicality of it."

Pardon? And this is National's problem: it has charged up a number of intellectual and political blind alleys. You've promised far-reaching alterations to the statutes whose practicality you can't vouchsafe. You've condemned to death public health practices that the relevant professionals, and the research, seem to endorse. You've departed from your party's core respect for property rights and due process on the foreshores and demanded that the gummint wade in. You've demanded a debate, been offered consultation on the terms of reference for a royal commission, then snubbed it because you're right anyway and there's no need to discuss it. And you've set ideology against practical merit.

Wong walks Brash through a scenario: if it is more efficient and effective for Maori health providers to treat Maori patients, but we don't have enough Maori doctors, how ought we respond? Not, of course, through any direct facilitation of Maori doctor training, which National has merrily ruled out as racist. Brash winds up simply denying the evidence.

The story concludes with Chris Trotter predicting - again - the demise of the Labour Party. I think not, and not just because the polls have started to turn back.

Now that it has been woken up, Labour will be more nimble, and less hidebound, than National on this, although it will continue to be stung by the benign neglect of recent years. Although it has earned itself (or perhaps regained) a constituency, National, having humiliated Georgina Te Heuheu, lacks anyone to carry the debate forward in a constructive way. Brash lacks warmth (and, judging by the Metro story, any real affinity for the issue) and Brownlee lacks dignity. The basic good faith of the National governments of the 1990s seems to have gone missing.

In respect of the Treaty, you can expect to hear less of the word "partnership" (a significant source of irritation and uncertainty in the whole debate) and more of the word "co-operation" in government rhetoric. "Reasonable co-operation on major issues of common concern," was the wording in the 1989 definition of Treaty principles by the Justice Department: it implies just as clearly the need to consult, without the torment of working out what the hell a partnership means. If this does happen, and it does create more clarity and certainty, then by all means thank Dr Brash.

One more thing: Trotter, like quite a few others, including Pamela Stirling in The Listener, is derisive of the idea that education about the Treaty would aid the debate. I've never known a situation in which the very idea of education has developed such a bad name.

This is counterintuitive. Are they saying that people don't make better decisions if they know more? Trotter, with a sort of proletarian fondness that would seem to defy speculation that he's turned into a proper right-winger, praises the "almost intuitive grasp" of the issues displayed by ordinary Pakeha in the Study of New Zealand Values, which indicated that a third of us think the Treaty of Waitangi should be abolished.

I don't think so. I think, as Michael King contended, we are people with a tradition of commonsense and decency - and we'll carry on working out who we are, revelling in our recent history and not just flushing it away.

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A rum day ... | Apr 02, 2004 11:02

It's hard to describe gout pain, but I'll have a go. At maximum welly, it's a deep, inexorable throb, as if a paralysis in your foot (or other extremity) is spreading outwards. It's hot. There are little razor-edge high notes. And then there's the wave of pain that makes you just moan.

It arrived on Wednesday night as I was recording a comedy show, which didn't make me feel very funny, and it was in my right foot, which was unfortunate, given that I had to drive home with an automatic transmission. I called Big Gay Paul to say I wouldn't be able to toast his turning fortysomething again, stopped off to buy Voltaren and Panadeine and decked out on the couch with a 1kg bag of frozen mixed veges on my foot.

It was a rum end to a rum day, which got that way at 9.05am when I clicked over the Herald's home page to find a story and was confronted with the awful news that Michael King and his wife had been killed. I was completely undone, and got teary several more times during the day.

It took me a while to rationalise my response, and I guess this is it: if I'm any kind of nationalist, I'm a cultural nationalist. I'm not much of a one for saluting flags or singing anthems, or for walling off the national economy, and I don't spend long grieving if the All Blacks lose - but, as I have said before, a good McCahon can make me cry. One of the great things about Michael King's Penguin History of New Zealand is that it is, in part, a cultural history. King himself was part of that cultural history and I'm still finding his sudden absence from it unsettling and upsetting.

Nonetheless on Wednesday, I still had to go in and host the Wednesday Wire on 95bFM. That was rum. The CD player started making death metal noises the moment I pressed the play button for my first tune - and it wasn't actually a death metal CD. Unfortunately, the RCS system that holds all the ads, stings and playlists had just crashed, so there was no bail-out option. We had a little trouble with the phones too.

But it was okay. I just played some tunes, after the fancy CD player had restarted, and did the interviews: David Small on passports and the war on terror, David Haywood on coal and carbon, and David Madigan on the gigs going to Aussies on The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. It was kind of serious, but quite good, although I must get on someone I can have a raging argument with, some time.

The gout, ironically, came after several days of non-drinking clean living in preparation for a busy social calendar these next few days, starting with a Public Address dinner last night with our new friends at Craft (love that pork belly). The culprit may have been the anchovy content of a Trident noodle dish I made on Tuesday. I turned it into a kind of chilli beef salad for Tuesday lunch, and was well pleased with the result. Dammit. Every time I think I'll sneak a little gout-food, I pay for it …

Still, it's easing now, in the face of what I have determined to be the appropriate range of treatments (the proper medications still look a little scary to me): buckets of nettle tea, celery seed extract and Voltaren. I do not recommend Artemis Arthritis Relief Tincture, which I purchased and used for a while before realising that the salicylates it contains are contraindicated for gout - except in very high doses, they actually make it worse by blocking the excretion of uric acid from the kidneys (for the same reason, don't ever take aspirin for gout). Artemis bills the remedy as a gout treatment. I queried them on this, and they said they'd get back to me, but they didn't. Not impressed.

I might also, of course, be paying a little for a big night out Saturday, on occasion of the impending nuptials of my old friend Andy Moore. We were a bunch of thirty and fortysomethings on the town, and we were courteous and cheerful with all we met, and we were treated in kind.

Somewhat inevitably we wound up at Mermaids. I'm pretty easy with most of what consenting adults do, but I'm not a habitual visitor of strip clubs. Or ever, actually. And I know it's different now, and women come along and everything, but I was quite surprised at how agreeable I found it. I thought it might be, well, grimmer, but in fact the atmosphere was pleasant and relaxed and we stayed quite late. Mermaids, I am assured is much classier than The White House …

OtherPundit has royally missed the point in dubbing Winston Peters a "scumbag" for making claims about the Nelson Family Court case that are perpendicularly opposite to those of National MP Nick Smith:

Nor do the parents have any way to test Peters' allegations in a court of law without themselves facing contempt charges. Call me cynical, but I wonder if Winston really does want people to rush to judgement" - that is the judgement that Smith is a shill for child abusers.

Perhaps Craig believes that Peters' depiction of the case is false and Smith's is true. That the family is the victim and the caregiver (accused by Smith of "child-stealing") is the villain. But he doesn't know that. I don't know that. And you don't know that. What we do know is that there were claims and counter-claims of a nature properly left to the scrutiny of judges who have heard first-hand evidence from all parties.

The difference is that Peters has not, so far as we know, brought direct pressure to bear on one of the litigants, and he has made his claims in Parliament. But Steven Price tells me that Parliamentary privilege is a form of qualified privilege that covers defamation. The papers that carried Peters' claims might not have been as safe in doing so as you might think. Anyway, I'm not comfortable with this sort of public tit-for-tat, especially as it becomes more and more politicised.

Best new blog (of sorts) of the year, no contest, is Ghost Town, which several people have pointed me to. One Russian girl on a fast motorcycle, ventures into the Chernobyl dead zone. Awesome.

As Maori Television winds into its first week one, I get the impression that people are quite enjoying it - and specifically, its simple, relaxed, not-formatted-up-the-wazoo approach. Kai Time and Mana Tangata have been good, and I hear that Marae DIY is too. One of the flagship shows, Coast goes out live tonight at 9pm (a tip for the MTS web designers - you need to put the day and time at the bottom of each programme page, and not just in the daily schedules). It's a live-to-air music show produced by Richard Driver and it looks really promising. Mareko and Ill Semantics feature tonight.

There might yet more of an incentive to come home early from the pub on Fridays when James Griffin's Serial Killers kicks off on April 16. Shades of The Office, I hear …

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