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Month October 2008

Vote for me

Nice idea: the NZ Greens have a web­site for cre­at­ing your own online bill­boards: voteforus.co.nz

My favour­ites: free­dom to dance, young girl, nat­ive bush, Tuis, lakes, to glideunspoiled beach, cab­bage trees, swim­ming as kids, romance on the beach, the rope bridge, young lasses, earth, and, my favour­ite, liv­ing in har­mony.

(via No Right Turn)

Update: added mine: kayak­ing down the Whan­ganui River and kiwi road sign.

Why the Maori seats matter

No Right Turn on why the Maori seats mat­ter. Quite something.

Contrasting a prank call with invading a country

A huge con­tro­versy has blown up in the UK after a couple of comedi­ans made a lewd phone call and it was broad­cast on BBC radio. The broad­cast received two single com­plaints on the day but after The Mail on Sunday lead with the story a week later that even­tu­ally bal­looned into the tens of thousands.

As of tonight one of the comedi­ans has resigned, one is sus­pen­ded for twelve weeks and a senior BBC man­ager has also resigned.

The pub­lic out­rage has more to do, prob­ably, with their obscene pay pack­ets than the any­thing else but what I find so repuls­ive about all this is the con­trast between the account­ab­il­ity of people involved in a petty prank and the account­ab­il­ity of people involved in the unspeak­ably more hor­rendous mat­ter of the inva­sion of Iraq.

Here we have a silly but ulti­mately harm­less prank gone wrong. A few com­plain and people are apo­lo­gising and resign­ing left right and centre.

Tony Blair, Gor­don Brown and mob launch a war of aggres­sion, the “supreme war crime,” on a pack of lies, res­ult­ing in the destruc­tion of a coun­try and untold people’s lives des­troyed or ended. The largest protest in human his­tory ensues and not only have these people never apo­lo­gised, resigned or been brought to justice but a plur­al­ity of Brit­ish voters re-elected them.

Hugh Hendry advocates abolishing fractional-reserve banking?

This was hedge fund man­ager Hugh Hendry on Dis­patches tonight. Is he really advoc­at­ing the abol­ish­ment of fractional-reserve bank­ing, a sys­tem where banks cre­ate money out of thin air and are required to keep only a frac­tion of their depos­its in reserve. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see this unbe­liev­able scam ter­min­ated, but does Hugh Hendry under­stand how anti-establishment such a sug­ges­tion is?

Free Gaza makes it into the Gaza Strip again

Des­pite the Israeli government’s threat to for­cibly stop them the Free Gaza group made a second suc­cess­ful sail­ing to Gaza Strip today. Their first sail­ing, on 24 August, made them the first people to freely enter Gaza Strip in forty-one years.

Israel has imposed an immoral and illegal1 block­ade on Gaza Strip since June 2007, in an attempt to under­mine Hamas, who won the elec­tions in Janu­ary 2006, and as col­lect­ive pun­ish­ment of Gazans for elect­ing them.

The block­ade means Gazans have been unable to travel in or out of Gaza Strip to see fam­ily mem­bers or go to uni­ver­sit­ies they’ve been accep­ted into, or receive med­ical care. It also means an increas­ing lack of things like spare machinery parts and all the other things that go into run­ning a civ­il­ised world.

This kind of cow­ardly col­lect­ive pun­ish­ment has been car­ried out before in this part of the world and that is estim­ated to have cost the lives of a mil­lion people, half of whom were children.

Let’s hope Free Gaza is just the begin­ning of the break­ing of this siege.

Notes:
  1. Uni­ver­sal Declar­a­tion of Human Rights: Art­icle 13. Every­one has the right to leave any coun­try, includ­ing his own, and to return to his coun­try. []

National NZ want to go back to majoritarianism

I hear the NZ National Party and the NZ Her­ald have been fos­ter­ing the idea that the party with the most votes should lead the gov­ern­ment, even, it seems, if that party can’t form a coali­tion to rep­res­ent the will of the major­ity of voters.

Sup­pose for a minute that we didn’t have two major parties but instead a num­ber of small parties and the party with the most votes won 5% of the vote. What they’re actu­ally sug­gest­ing, in a mod­ern demo­cracy no less, is that this party should form the gov­ern­ment simply because it received the biggest block of votes.

This is called major­it­ari­an­ism, a throw over from feud­al­ism and a very lim­ited form of demo­cracy that 84.5% of voters in New Zea­l­and elec­ted to get rid of in 1993, when we chose the astro­nom­ic­ally fairer sys­tem of pro­por­tional rep­res­ent­a­tion in MMP.

If National is incap­able of co-operating with other groups in our soci­ety to form a rep­res­ent­at­ive major­ity then tough bick­ies. They’re a mol­ly­coddled bunch of bloody whiners if you ask me and their long record of look­ing after them­selves at the expense of the rest of the coun­try should mean they never have their hands any­where near the levers of power again.

No Right Turn has some thoughts on a recent Col­mar Brunton poll on the same topic and Rus­sell Brown responds to the Her­ald:

The Her­ald is free to make an argu­ment that a National-led coali­tion of three parties would be a sounder gov­ern­ment than a Labour-led coali­tion of four parties, but it should do so without mak­ing pre­sump­tions on the pub­lic will. If a major­ity coali­tion can be formed without betray­ing under­tak­ings made before the elec­tion, then by defin­i­tion it rep­res­ents the will of the major­ity of voters.

Scammer Blossom Goodchild and the aliens that stood her up

Blos­som Good­child, the scam­mer who claimed ali­ens were com­ing to town on 14 Octo­ber, now has her own Wiki­pe­dia page (since deleted).

I can see the point of record­ing it, con­sid­er­ing the num­ber of people she hood­winked, but I won­der how many more book sales she’ll receive as a res­ult of a ded­ic­ated webpage on Wikipedia.

Can we ever be right about right and wrong?

This is Sam Har­ris, author of Let­ter to to a Chris­tian Nation and The End of Faith, speak­ing at Bey­ond Belief.

Har­ris’ thesis is that ques­tions of mor­al­ity are per­fectly within the realm of sci­entific enquiry and, that because human well-being is real­ised at the level of the brain, an emer­ging and matur­ing brain sci­ence will have a lot to say about right and wrong.

While I have an easy time under­stand­ing the idea that mor­al­ity is part of evol­u­tion­ary inher­it­ance I’ve always felt a little uneasy about how one recon­ciles value for diversity with a thesis that seems to sug­gest an homo­gen­isa­tion of cul­tural norms, but Har­ris goes some way to alle­vi­at­ing these con­cerns in this talk.

Noam Chomsky on 2008 U.S. election and U.S. democracy

Bril­liant inter­view with Chom­sky where he gets to the nub of things as usual.

People should vote against McCain and for Obama — but without illusions.

McCain team freaking out that al-Qaida wants McCain to win

Spen­cer Ack­er­man on a con­fer­ence call held by the McCain cam­paign:

I just got off a con­fer­ence call held by the McCain cam­paign to deny that Al Qaeda … is root­ing for their man. To describe the call as pan­icked would be an understatement.

What was absent from the call, oddly enough, was any dis­cus­sion about why Al Qaeda might want McCain to win. And there the case is simple enough. Al Qaeda prefers an indef­in­ite U.S. occu­pa­tion of Iraq and a bel­li­cose U.S. all across the Muslim world to rad­ic­al­ize Muslims to its ter­ror­ist cause and drain the U.S. of its fin­an­cial wealth — what Osama bin Laden calls his “bleed to bank­ruptcy” strategy. Hence, the reason why, as the CIA even­tu­ally con­cluded, Bin Laden tried to help George W. Bush’s reelec­tion in 2004 by releas­ing a late-October tape. McCain pledges basic con­tinu­ity with Bush on the Iraq war. As Sch­eun­e­mann put it, “John McCain will spend what it takes to win.”