tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54924161579060401432024-03-13T15:07:29.324+13:00You are now under the care of the Goat PlanWoefully infrequent.
For more somewhat more regular things from me check out my podcasts at www.mpr.nz/show/reserved or www.mpr.nz/show/featuredtracks.
@objectiverealty on Twitter.Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.comBlogger58125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-65409052964733755422019-05-19T14:45:00.001+12:002019-05-19T14:45:25.725+12:00Milkshakes<p dir="ltr">A quick thought about milkshakes and eggs.</p>
<p dir="ltr">There was a huge amount of debate when Richard Spencer was notoriously punched about the rights and wrongs of violence directed against fascists. Personally,  despite being anti-punching pretty much anybody, I think that in the majority of cases is the US, armed antifa have a pretty clear claim to be acting in self defence.</p>
<p dir="ltr">However,  I think the egging of Fraser Anning and the throwing of milkshakes at Tommy Robinson and Carl of Swindon, are a hint at a better  tactic for the Left.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Firstly, as Walter Benjamin states, fascism is the aestheticisation of politics - and I think that exists on a continuum. I think the closer a politician is to fascism in terms of right-populism, the more important aesthetics is to them - and there is little less aesthetic than being doused in milkshake or raw egg.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Secondly (and most importantly in my view) it's very hard to make the case plausibly that an egg or a milkshake is a lethal threat. Richard Spencer could and did make a big deal of how being physically attacked proved that people were afraid of his ideas. American fascists were also quick to use the attack to justify an increased level of aggression at rallies.</p>
<p dir="ltr">To respond violently to a milkshake or an egg is a clear demonstration of weakness. Tommy Robinson, Carl Benjamin, and Fraser Anning (and their followers) have all done their best to portray themselves as victims, but it's always come off as faintly ridiculous - and fascism fears ridicule.</p>
Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-29074734518707892842017-05-24T17:46:00.002+12:002017-05-24T17:50:10.241+12:00Thoughts on trigger warningsRecently I had the opportunity to do a de-escalation course run by <a href="http://www.manline.co.nz/" target="_blank">Manline</a> through my work. It might not seem like an obvious requirement for a soundy at a community radio station, but (while they're not common) I have had a couple of experiences at work where people have become threatening with me or other staff (usually after getting craftily drunk in the studio and being told to leave as a result).*<br />
<br />
The course as a whole was really interesting, and I'd really recommend people checking something like that out if they ever get the chance. A lot of the techniques are interesting because of the way that they sort of "nudge" someone (or yourself) from one mental circuit** to another - which is close to Magic, I reckon.<br />
<br />
However, what I want to talk about is a different exercise. What we did was to split into two groups and line up on opposite sides of the room. The group whose turn it was was instructed to identify the person opposite them as a real person from their past who made them "uncomfortable" (first names only, obviously).One by one, the facilitators instructed the people who were playing the roles of the "oppressors" to walk slowly toward the other participant.<br />
<br />
The experience was really unpleasant in a really instructive way. As this person (who I'd met all of an hour previously) slowly advanced on me, I felt all of my self-defense systems come on at once. I found myself involuntarily drawing myself up tall, and holding a breath to make my chest and shoulders bigger. We were instructed that whenever we wanted to, we could tell the other participant to stop, and in my case that felt like an immediate and pressing need once they got within a couple of feet.<br />
<br />
We were given the relevant instructions to dispel the phantom (and related feelings) that we'd just called up - but it was really striking how real the experience was. All the other participants reported the same thing - different specific symptoms, but all had very similar experiences.<br />
<br />
Here's the thing, I'm a pretty mentally and physically healthy person. I'm a white, heterosexual dude in the Anglosphere. I've had the odd fairly unpleasant experience in my life, but nothing I could straight-facedly claim as life-shattering trauma. And the mere act of invoking a person from my past, and then having the person I'd assigned that identity to slowly advance on me in a conference room made me feel physically stirred up and unsettled.<br />
<br />
What would that have been like if I was a person who faced some sort of oppression on a daily basis? What would it have been like if I'd had some really serious trauma tied to the experience that was being presented to me?<br />
<br />
It bears some thought.<br />
_____<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*An especial mention here goes to the charming gentleman who wandered into my office when I was a very young and inexperienced radio soundy, told me that if I called the cops he'd "fucking drop me", and then proceeded to tell me at length about how we were kindred spirits because I was a musician (a fact he'd have no way of knowing - so it was a mere lucky guess on his part) and he was an alcoholic. To his credit, when someone from outside the station called the cops, he was very polite to them.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** There's probably a more accurate term than "mental circuit", possibly even corresponding to brain areas. The point is that a lot of these nudges work by getting someone who's currently stuck in "fight or flight" and gently pushing them toward "reasoning" or "communicating" modes.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-29316142940310738642016-09-22T13:12:00.001+12:002016-09-22T14:39:11.620+12:00The horrible philosophy of the Manosphere<span style="font-family: inherit;">First, a little background: the following post is one I was kindly invited to write by Professor Philip Moriarty as a <a href="https://muircheart.wordpress.com/2016/09/21/how-to-sociably-debate-social-justice/" target="_blank">guest post</a> on his blog "<a href="https://muircheart.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Symptoms Of The Universe</a>". <span style="font-family: inherit;">The invitation came off the back<span style="font-family: inherit;"> of </span></span> <a href="https://muircheart.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/the-faith-and-fables-of-thunderfoot/" target="_blank">a conversation I had in comments on this post here</a>.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">If you're interested in reading that conversation (or rather that series of conversations - there were a few threads) my handle there is "ObjectiveReality". This is because Prof Moriarty has a WordPress blog and my Wordpress login is "ObjectiveReality", if he had a Blogger blog like mine, I'd have been "Wolfboy"(1) as I am here.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">For a very tl;dr version of the backstory, Philip ended up on <a href="http://www.magicsandwichshow.com/" target="_blank">a podcast</a> with another Philip (last name Mason) who more usually (at least on the internet) goes by the name of <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Thunderfoot" target="_blank">Thunderf00t</a>. If you're not familiar with him, Mason is an atheist YouTuber, a sometime science YouTuber, and a virulent antifeminist.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the course of this conversation, Mason expressed the view that the lack of women in STEM(2) fields was due to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism" target="_blank">sexual dimorphism</a>. Philip addressed this view at length <a href="https://muircheart.wordpress.com/2016/03/27/when-atheists-ape-creationists-the-fallacies-of-the-anti-feminist/" target="_blank">here</a>, pointing out that the evidence for such a view was not good (to say the least) and invited Mason to comment. After a long period of silence, he asked again and was treated to an astoundingly puerile exchange via email, which he lays out at length <a href="https://muircheart.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/the-faith-and-fables-of-thunderfoot/" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">To be honest, this is not especially surprising<span style="font-family: inherit;"> (most denizens of the Manosphere(3) are significantly less <span style="font-family: inherit;">intellectually rigor<span style="font-family: inherit;">ous than they like to claim) but it <i>is</i> a deeply irritating<span style="font-family: inherit;"> example of the awful <span style="font-family: inherit;">way in which <span style="font-family: inherit;">the<span style="font-family: inherit;">se people argue.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A better example<span style="font-family: inherit;"> (I hope) after the jump...</span> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">First off, thanks to Phil for inviting me to do this
guest post, which I intend to begin by disagreeing with him about a
couple of things.<br /><br />Phil's made it clear in a couple of
different places, that he doesn't agree with the idea of no-platforming
(or blocking people), or with safe spaces. I get his reasons (and I
think they come from a good place) but I think he's wrong.<br /><br />To
deal with safe spaces first, this concept is usually portrayed by
"SJW-slayers" as a way for person to avoid concepts that challenge them,
and this is, I think, what Phil (rightly) disagrees with. The problem
is that that's not what they are, at least in the forms that I've
encountered them. The "safe spaces" I've come across have been areas,
particularly on a University campus, where a marginalised group can go
and (quite literally) be safe. The best example of this is the Women's
Room at my old university, which was established because there were a
number of behaviours that male students engaged in that made female
students feel quite (justifiably) unsafe. Since it was one room, with
some paper resources if you needed them and a free phone (I know because
my girlfriend of the time called me from there on a number of
occasions) you could hardly use it to shelter your precious worldview.
You could however, use it to call your boyfriend to come and pick you up
when you'd had a distressing encounter with an arsehole at the student
pub. This kind of safe space is, in my opinion, quite hard to argue
against unless you're the aforementioned pub arsehole - and is more
commonly what defenders of safe spaces have in mind.<br /><br />As
regards no-platforming (the practice of preventing people from speaking
on campuses because of their views), and relatedly blocking people you
can't be bothered with on social media, I again see Phil's point. On the
other hand, I remember how angry I was when my university played host
to an Intelligent Design proponent. The issue wasn't that my ideas were
being challenged, or even that I thought this guy would convince anyone.
I was angry that money (MY money - we have to pay for university in New
Zealand (which this guy hadn't when he attended but that's another
angry story)) had been spent paying him to lecture, when it could have
been given to someone, even someone just as controversial, whose views
weren't provably false. It was an hour of my life I wasn't going to get
back, and the man had been paid for wasting it. He wasn't going to
convince anyone who wasn't a closet-Creationist, and most infuriatingly,
he didn't even understand the theory of evolution that he claimed to
debunk. (I should mention at this point that I dropped out of
university, and while I was attending I was a Classics major - and I
still had a clearer understanding of the theory than this guy who
purported to be able to prove it wrong.) </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
To
extend this logic to blocking people on social media, I think it's
important to know when a conversation has reached its useful end. I
understand the principle that it's good to be exposed to views you
disagree with, but firstly, there's no amount of <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNGMlwuN_uwcS0COSCr_s_eatVo9Kw" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke" target="_blank">David Icke</a>
I can read that will convince me that giant reptilians are a real
non-metaphorical problem in the world. There's a point past which a
conversation with an Icke-believer stops being useful as a result. (The
reader is invited to extend the logic to situations where political or
philosophical disagreement devolves into mere fountains of bile).
Moreover, I think that people whose goal is to harass or bully their
intellectual opponents often use this idea (that you should always be
open to defending your ideas from opposing views) as a way to try and
argue that you owe them a continued conversation (even once they've
begun abusing you or bringing in their followers to try for a dogpile)
and that refusing them that conversation is a sign of cowardice. Which
is bullshit - especially if you're someone whose fame and/or status as a
member of a despised group makes you a target for nastier-than-usual or
literally-dangerous attacks, or if your opponent is a well-established
internet presence who can call on a literal horde of faceless howling
zealots to shout you down.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Finally, I'm not
that keen on Rush. Though I acknowledge their technical skill, I've
always been more of a psychedelia guy, and I have a special place in my
heart for the British folk-rock explosion of the 70s (go look up Joe
Boyd, and listen to basically everyone he produced, then work sideways
from there, also the Grateful Dead, and Tom Waits). </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As
you can see from the above, it's entirely possible to disagree with
people while remaining entirely civil. More importantly, it's possible
to disagree with people while acknowledging that they make good points,
or have good reasons for the views they hold. (Reasons can be <i>good </i>even if you think they're <i>incorrect</i>.)
In philosophy, this is called "the principle of charity". The idea is
that to avoid strawmanning, you should ensure that you're engaging with
the strongest possible form of your opponent's argument, given the
things they've actually said. I find that it also helps to ask what
people mean if you're not sure, so you don't end up talking at cross
purposes.<br />
<br />
Which brings me to the various discussions I had in the comments of Phil's blog post <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://muircheart.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/the-faith-and-fables-of-thunderfoot/&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNErV7RLEogtyzMblnBlXdVtyT-ygA" href="https://muircheart.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/the-faith-and-fables-of-thunderfoot/" target="_blank">"The Faith And Fables of Thunderfoot"</a>.<br />
<br />
The
style of discussion I've indulged in above (and attempted to explain
thereafter) is the way I talk on the internet if I'm interested in
getting to the bottom of what people think, or making a genuine point.
I'll talk about the points that got discussed in that comments section
in a bit, but first I want to talk about this style of discourse as
opposed to trolling. See, I agree with Phil that trolling, while
inherently somewhat mean-spirited, can be an art in and of itself (<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.criticalmiss.com/issue9/troll1.html&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNEjB4bSIulRe-svkRzPbqLk4-8IeA" href="http://www.criticalmiss.com/issue9/troll1.html" target="_blank">and some examples can be truly transcendent</a>).
However, the purpose of trolling is to keep your victim(s) expending
energy for your amusement (and that of any onlookers). It's not a form
of argumentation, and if you put more energy into it than your victims
do, you are a very ineffective troll. This is why I call bullshit on the
likes of Thunderfoot and Sargon of Akkad when they claim to be "just
trolling" as a way to avoid defending their arguments and/or actions. If
they are trolls, then firstly we have no reason to accept their
arguments as anything other than deliberately vexatious nonsense, and
secondly (given the average length of their videos) they are <i>very bad trolls indeed</i>.<br />
<br />
Pleasingly,
there wasn't much of that kind of conversation in the comments at
Phil's blog. Instead, two major points seemed to come up:</div>
<ol>
<li>People wanted to know how we could be sure that sexual dimorphism <i>wasn't</i>
to blame for the lack of women in STEM fields (this was the initial
disagreement between Phil and Thunderfoot which led to the email
exchange reproduced in the blogpost - I recommend going and reading it
if you haven't (otherwise some of this post may be quite confusing).</li>
<li>People
seemed nervous of adopting what might be seen as "feminist" positions,
for fear that this might somehow be seen as implicating all men in a
mass act of malice against all women, or that it might lead to them
inadvertently endorsing some position that they deeply disagreed with.</li>
</ol>
To
deal with the first point first (a novel idea, I know), the short
answer is that we can't. We can know very little for sure. On the other
hand, it seems very unlikely that sexual dimorphism is to blame for
women's career and study choices. Phil goes into this in detail <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://muircheart.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/the-natural-order-of-things/&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNHc-MKuP8QuKycYZMccwfrDmKX8gw" href="https://muircheart.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/the-natural-order-of-things/" target="_blank">in this post here</a>,
but I'm not an academic (I'm a sound technician) and I want to talk
about some other stuff as well, so I'll just summarise the main points.<br />
<br />
First off, I need to acknowledge that it's not an inherently silly idea that sexual dimorphism <i>might</i>
be to blame, as humans are a moderately sexually dimorphic species.
Men<span style="font-family: inherit;">(4)</span> tend to be bigger, stronger, and hairier than women, who tend in
turn to outlive them. It's not totally outlandish to suggest that there
may be brain differences as well. However, the evidence doesn't bear
this out, and as Phil points out in both the blogposts I've linked to,
it's very very difficult to decouple social factors from purely
biological ones in humans. The evidence for social factors influencing
women's choices, on the other hand, seems to be pretty strong. It's
easily provable that society used to be much more sexist than it is
right now. Most antifeminists would even agree with this proposition. I
think it's quite reasonable to argue that the recent (as in, last 50
years or so) influx of women into traditionally male fields is more
likely to stem from an increased acceptance of women doing these kinds
of jobs and studying in these fields than it is to be a result of
evolution.<br />
<br />
Which brings me to another point - there were a good
number of appeals in the pro-sexual-dimorphism camp to what we might
call "naturalistic" explanations, including a good deal of recourse to
evolutionary psychology. Now, my good friend <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNElUoBut5vMesLerNfoAamHiOvs8g" href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/" target="_blank">Daniel Copeland</a>
is convinced that there's some merit in evopsych, and he is a very
intelligent guy and makes a good case for the bits he supports. However,
evopsych is probably one of the most abused theories I've ever seen. If
you're not familiar with it, the idea is that you can find explanations
for bits of human behaviour in our evolutionary past, and sometimes you
can discover those bits of evolutionary past by, for example, observing
other primates. There are two problems with this - the first is that
people who don't fully understand it tend to just point to an aspect of
human behaviour they wish to claim is immutable, and then invent an
"evolutionary-sounding" reason for it. The more fundamental problem is
that we're not other primates, and even if we were, the world of animal
sexual dynamics is hugely diverse.<br />
<br />
There was a tendency in the
early days of biology to assume that most animals would follow the
family/relationship structure that those early biologists considered
"natural" - dominant males, submissive females, and so on. <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://comicsalliance.com/animal-gender-roles-cartoons-humon/&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNEjqMcsqFjhK7dUemhFAIK5AwWgog" href="http://comicsalliance.com/animal-gender-roles-cartoons-humon/" target="_blank">The actual picture is much more complicated</a>, and as I noted, <i>we're not other primates - we're humans</i>.
Our whole thing is using technologies (including social technologies)
to overcome our natural limits. That's how come my wife can see, and my
mother can hear. That's how come we developed hugely complex social
structures that let us live stacked on top of each other in cities
without all killing each other (most of the time). There's no reason to
assume that even if there were a natural predisposition that led women
to shun certain fields, we would allow ourselves to be bound by that.
It's not how we work. (Daniel Copeland wrote <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2016/05/innate-inevitable.html&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNGTFPqplzeVqRSNrF2lRZDoEW1z0Q" href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2016/05/innate-inevitable.html" target="_blank">a nice blog post that goes into this in more detail</a>.)
We can also look at evidence (detailed in Phil's post that I already
linked) that shows that the steady decline of sexism globally correlates
with a steady increase in women going into traditionally male fields
both in science and the arts (there are far more female-fronted rock
bands than there used to be, for one thing.) Obviously correlation is
not causation, but it's telling that these changes are far quicker than
the sort of effect we'd expect from evolution, given the length of human
generations.<br />
<br />
And now to point number two. Again, I have some
sympathy for this position. It's completely wrong, but I get it. The
issue is that while feminism is becoming quite broadly discussed (online
at least), it's not as broadly understood. This means that many people
think that they are (or need to be) anti-feminist or non-feminist, when
their views actually align with the majority of feminist theory. This is
certainly the position I was in to begin with(5). Then a very patient
feminist lady on Facebook took the time to actually unpack what we were
talking about, and I realised precisely how badly I had the wrong end of
the stick.<br />
<br />
The first issue I want to talk about here is
terminology. Feminists use a number of words in ways which differ from a
naive dictionary definition. This is (contrary to to what anti-SJWs
would have you believe) not actually uncommon. In my own field as a
sound engineer for a radio station, I use a number of terms which would
be incomprehensible to someone who isn't versed in sound tech, and a
number of common words (for example "wet/dry", "trim", "bright/dark" and
"dead/alive") have quite specific meanings within that field. I'm sure
Philip talks differently about physics to advanced students than he does
to laypeople for the same reason. The advantage Phil and I have over
feminists is that no-one misunderstands or willfully misuses our
terminology against us. The terms that suffer the most abuse in
discussions about feminism are, I think, "patriarchy" and "privilege".<br />
<br />
Again,
since I'm not an academic, and I have already used a significant amount
of virtual ink in this post, I'm going to summarise here. If you want
really detailed discussions of exactly how these terms function, I
suggest you go and check out people like <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGwVAD9f7_yt6paR10giKEg&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNE_binUTK5hcErJiP77kV67tznFsA" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGwVAD9f7_yt6paR10giKEg" target="_blank">Garrett</a>, <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn1bhOC69Z4TplynafVv7ng&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNGqukrpr7O4NeOc1gWDn1Ofk9NPrw" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn1bhOC69Z4TplynafVv7ng" target="_blank">Chrisiousity</a>, or <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.youtube.com/user/drkmwinters&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNFSlwPlkExBKqblPA0Q8xvjaraa2g" href="https://www.youtube.com/user/drkmwinters" target="_blank">Kristi Winters</a> on Youtube. Patriarchy, as<i> I</i>
understand it, refers to a social order which assumes that a specific
sort of masculinity is the "default" gender identity, and judges all
other in comparison (usually negatively). Privilege refers to the
advantages (often small, at least when taken individually) that
individuals accrue by being close to that default. In the Anglospher(6)
the patriarchal ideal is rich, white, physically and emotionally
dominant, heterosexual, and male - the more like that you are, the more
privilege you have. The tendency is for one's own privilege to be
invisible (ie it just feels "normal") so you tend to assume everyone can
freely do what you can, unless you stop and think about it.<br />
<br />
For
example, I live in New Zealand. It is a small and fairly egalitarian
country (we were among the first to give votes to women, and signed a
treaty with our indigenous people rather than just murdering them all
and taking their stuff, for example(7)) and seems reasonably
enlightened on the surface. However, when I got married to a Samoan
woman, I found that I was now conducting a field test into latent
community racism. My wife and I can go into the same store within
minutes of each other and get hugely different reactions from staff,
because she is brown. When I am out alone with our daughters, I get
approving noises from mums about how good it is that I as a Dad spend
time with my girls, my wife gets asked if those little blonde girls are
really hers. This was entirely invisible to me until that relationship
opened a window for me into her world - in other words, a portion of my
own privilege became visible to me in a way it hadn't been. Here's
another example, in New Zealand, the majority of voters want
decriminalisation or outright legalisation of cannabis. Our (Tory) prime
minister has ruled this out, relying instead on "police discretion" to
institute a sort of "de-facto decriminalisation". The problem is that <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://mindhacks.com/2016/06/17/the-mechanics-of-subtle-discrimination-measuring-microaggresson/&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNHziD63aMHbyfjlBXC9M3gt7p-YIA" href="https://mindhacks.com/2016/06/17/the-mechanics-of-subtle-discrimination-measuring-microaggresson/" target="_blank">because people tend to use their discretion in slightly racist ways</a>, this has led to <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://thespinoff.co.nz/featured/20-09-2016/de-facto-decriminalistion-of-cannabis-politically-convenient-and-terrible-for-maori/&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNEKHRsEI-ZCQcB6CeYRgUu5-7cD5Q" href="http://thespinoff.co.nz/featured/20-09-2016/de-facto-decriminalistion-of-cannabis-politically-convenient-and-terrible-for-maori/" target="_blank">disproportionately terrible outcomes for our Pacific Island and Maori minorities</a>.<br />
<br />
This is the result of an organic accretion of values over time - not a
conspiracy. (White, straight) men have not conspired to create this
system, though some men do work to preserve it because (presumably)
they're afraid of losing what power they have. This system also
negatively affects some men - we are expected to be physically dominant
and prepared to fight for family or country, and failure to do so can
lead to <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/people/archibald-baxter&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNGcjD2-N-gV8_FOjhw_Wfvkbc2HgQ" href="http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/people/archibald-baxter" target="_blank">terrible personal consequences</a>.
We are not generally assumed to have as deep an emotional life as women
(because this is not patriarchally desirable) and this leads to
terrible outcomes in mental health. We are expected to be hale and
hearty and this leads to horrible outcomes in physical health. This is
not a state of affairs that benefits us overall.<br />
<br />
I use a pseudonym
in lots of places on the internet because when I started out online (in
the total wild west of pre-internet dial-up bulletin boards) that was
just what people did, and I never thought deeply enough about the habit
to change it. I don't do it because I am afraid that people may harm me
or my family because of my opinions. Anecdotally, my female friends are.
Moreover, because I exist in a fairly privileged position (I am after
all, a straight white dude from the wider Anglosphere) I don't have to
constantly justify my presence online, and my right to an opinion.
Anecdotally, my female friends do. This means that I can get into
arguments about feminism or other social justice causes on the internet
without bringing the fatigue that results from a life of fighting <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://wondermark.com/1k62/&source=gmail&ust=1474591536819000&usg=AFQjCNHhfQOepLb_VFSukiLjU36rjeXvCw" href="http://wondermark.com/1k62/" target="_blank">sealions</a>
along with me, and I can be polite if the situation seems to merit it.
(Also I am a pedantic and argumentative bugger.) While I think that it
can be counterproductive to snap at people, I can totally understand why
many women, POC, transpeople and so on do not have my level of patience
with dudes(8) who barge into conversations and restate very basic
arguments very incoherently. This is because I have a privilege in terms
of online discussion, which they do not.<br />
<br />
Since you're granted
privilege by society on the basis of factors you can't control, you
can't really get rid of it. All you can do is attempt to use it
responsibly. One of the ways I try to do this, is by patiently and
politely asking questions of antifeminists on the internet until they
either make themselves look silly, or become more reasonable. That is,
after all, what worked for me.<br />
_____<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(1)
In case you're a roleplaying nerd and you're wondering, I'm also the
Wolfboy who used to post on RPGnet a whiles back. Why do I have
different handles on different sites? Because I set them up at different
stages of my life and I'm too lazy to change 'em all to make 'em match,
is why.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(2) <b>S</b>cience, <b>T</b>echnology, <b>E</b>ngineering, and <b>M</b>athematics</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(3) By which term I intend to lump together <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mra" target="_blank">MRAs</a>, <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/MGTOW" target="_blank">MGTOWs</a>, <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/PUA" target="_blank">PUAs</a>, <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Sargon_of_Akkad" target="_blank">Classical Liberals</a>, and <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Davis_Aurini" target="_blank">White Nationalists On Paper</a> without having to worry about remembering all the acronyms they prefer. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(4) I'm
going to stick with the terms "men" and "women" here because a) I don't
think trans people are a big enough population to seriously throw out
the averages as far as size and weight distributions, and b) the exact
configurations of people's genitals are largely none of my business.
I'll worry about my own genitals, and my wife's, and that'll do me.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(5) I
had a deeply tiresome "pendulum" theory about how power moved from
group to group in society, and it tied into the death of prog and the
rise of punk and it was <i>awful</i>. I had a bit of an embarrassment-shudder just typing that.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(6) It strikes me as a better shorthand for "mostly-white, mostly-English-speaking countries" than "The West", because West of what, precisely?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(7) If
any of my readers are Maori and about to get cross with me for
oversimplifying and making it seem like NZ's racial history is just
peachy-keen - stop. I <i>know</i> it's more complicated than that and
that the government did plenty of murdering and nicking of stuff
(sometimes by stealthy law-making) and that the situation is far from
resolved. It's also a better deal than many colonised indigenous peoples
got (which is totally shameful, I know).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(8) Let's face it dudes, it's usually us. Like, 95% of the time, at least.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-41290882724325268042015-09-23T18:07:00.000+12:002018-08-06T13:34:41.796+12:00On semantics, and the poor use of movable goalpostsI have three daughters, and one of my least favourite things about this is a recurring argument which goes (at least in form) thusly:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Me: "[Daughter] - stop using that crayon to draw on the wallpaper!"<br />[Daughter]: "It's a felt pen, dad!"</i></blockquote>
or<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Me: "[Daughter] - stop poking your sister with that fork!"<br />[Daughter]: "It's a knife!"</i></blockquote>
or<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Me: "[Daughter], have you been sneaking non-uniform shorts to school?"<br />[Daughter]: "They're track pants! Ugh!"</i></blockquote>
It's pretty clear why those responses make no sense, and what conversational purpose they serve. My kids don't have good reasons for the stupid things they're doing, and want to deflect attention onto arguing about pointless minutiae. Fortunately, none of them is sufficiently good at this for it to be anything more than irritating - and after all, these are arguments from a trio whose ages range from 3 to 11.<br />
<br />
It's a bit weird when you see people attempting this same (and similarly pointless) goalpost shift as grownups, though.<br />
<br />
The first and most egregious example came from a group I'm a member of on G+. The group is called "Suppressed Transmissions" and specialises in weird news, art, and images that suggest hidden Dark Secrets behind ordinary reality. It's supposed to be a setting-mine for weirdness-in-real-life roleplaying games and fiction.<br />
<br />
I shared <a href="http://www.retrospace.org/2015/08/occult-14-witchcraft-is-rising-in-look.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Retrospace+%28Retrospace%29" target="_blank">a feature on an issue of Look magazine from 1972</a>, because it had <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_LaVey" target="_blank">Anton LaVey</a> on the cover and the concept of a reasonably mainstream magazine doing a feature on the Church of Satan amused me. The comment thread got hijacked by someone with strong antisemitic views, who viewed LaVey as part of some grand Jewish plot too complex and stupid to go into right now. The person got banned fairly promptly, but not before responding to being called on his antisemitism like this (sic):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Semite means middle eastern people. Just cause some kazhars converted to judisim doesnt mean they are all middle eastern, does it? Or is it a race Not sure which jewish lie you are gonna use to back the "anti semite" claim"</i></blockquote>
There's this weird kernel-idea embedded in there that somehow by redefining the terms on us, he can prove that by some anthropological-dictionary magic he's not an anti<i>semite (</i>he's anti-<i>Jew</i>, there's a difference, Dad. Ugh!) and that that will make his hatred of Jewish people somehow OK. Or possibly he's a not-especially-clever troll who maintains that particular profile just for Jew-hatin'.<br />
<br />
The more subtle (and thus more troubling) example I've been seeing lately revolves around <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_(student)" target="_blank">Ahmed Mohamed</a>. Just quick, if you've been under a rock and missed the whole thing, here's the teal deer version: Ahmed is a 14 year old Muslim boy of Sudanese parents, who lives in Texas. He took a home-built* clock to school. There was an unarguably racist** and utterly disproportionate reaction which led to Ahmed being treated as a suspected terrorist, and led to the school authorities and the police in the state of Texas looking pretty bloody stupid.<br />
<br />
The official response to this has all been pretty good (Ahmed <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/09/obama-invites-teen-clock-maker-white-house-arrest/" target="_blank">got an invitation to the White House</a> among other things) and my personal internet filter bubble means I haven't seen any overtly-racist nonsense. What I <i>have</i> seen, is a lot of people (Richard Dawkins' view is <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/20/richard-dawkins-questions-ahmed-mohamed-motive-backlash" target="_blank">here</a>, and links to more of the same) questioning a) whether Ahmed really built his clock or just de-shelled a commercial alarm clock, and b) what his motives were for doing so.<br />
<br />
This is transparently the same debating tactic that my 3 year old uses. To answer the second part of the question first, there's nothing suspect about Ahmed's stated aim, which was to impress one of his teachers - and that motivation still makes sense if we assume he <i>didn't</i> build the clock himself from scratch. The first part is the kicker though - because the hidden assumption there is that somehow Ahmed's fear, suffering, and humiliation would be OK if we can just prove that he's not really gifted with electronics. Because the outpouring of support for him wasn't because he built a clock - that's very clear - it's because he was detained and harassed on the basis of his name and the colour of his skin.<br />
<br />
I'm pretty clear on what my three year old wants when she tries to distinguish moral shades in drawing on walls with pens versus with crayons - she wants to avoid a discussion about drawing on walls. What is it that the "Clock Is A FRAUD!" people want, do you suppose?<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Or home-assembled, or maybe not - we'll get to that in a second.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** You can say "Islam is not a race" until the cows come home, but most people when they think "Muslim" don't think of someone who looks like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Thompson_(musician)" target="_blank">this guy</a>, or even (if they're honest) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Muszaphar_Shukor" target="_blank">this guy</a>.</span><br />
<br />Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-29327683676671825792015-09-10T18:20:00.001+12:002015-09-10T18:20:36.376+12:00On dying under things<div>
First off, if you're interested in such, <a href="http://love-and-pop.com/the-thing-on-the-doorstep/" target="_blank">Love and Pop has my review of <i>HP Lovecraft's</i> </a><i><a href="http://love-and-pop.com/the-thing-on-the-doorstep/" target="_blank">The Thing On The Doorstep</a>. </i>It's mostly good but an unfortunate shade of murky green.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
As you're probably aware, even if you're not a New Zealander, we're currently going through a process of referenda on the way to possibly changing our flag. I'm not super keen on this, for reasons that can be tidily summed up by <a href="http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-flagpole-blues" target="_blank">Toby Morris</a> (tl;dr, I think changing the flag <i>eventually</i> is a) inevitable and b) a good idea but I'm suspicious of the current timing, and I'm pretty uninspired by the process).<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
However, there's one particular argument I hear from people in favour of keeping the current flag, which I think needs to be disposed of - the idea that <b>you can't change the flag, because New Zealand soldiers died under it</b>*.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I'm loath to Godwin myself so easily, but here's a flag people died under:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhldokhLlvqEmQrWOMYo8rU0gEMn3MJyiH2Tvwzi1S5RCMRQ8HLzHt9Ya5iCi9zLKkk6fSdagi83hK8LIYPPPaNM00YBGT-9vFA2JcVHlscwktEwRLFtw7WHG0ry6AX42pWQ3FqQ4dlDhzF/s1600/Nazi-flag.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhldokhLlvqEmQrWOMYo8rU0gEMn3MJyiH2Tvwzi1S5RCMRQ8HLzHt9Ya5iCi9zLKkk6fSdagi83hK8LIYPPPaNM00YBGT-9vFA2JcVHlscwktEwRLFtw7WHG0ry6AX42pWQ3FqQ4dlDhzF/s320/Nazi-flag.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
and here's another:</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQRKng4xHd98CF9OnV2cjzjDbYMAXz-_PXxGvRzpoE4L2Fi4qLsa0IVW3y0zE7NjkH6msrtSrEt-dYBYOtk2I55pKhWD1PzcmmfOEWtWnxKe_FOHN7mHiii_cmBOnNNoFPSRljxhgUtz6o/s1600/concommenters0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQRKng4xHd98CF9OnV2cjzjDbYMAXz-_PXxGvRzpoE4L2Fi4qLsa0IVW3y0zE7NjkH6msrtSrEt-dYBYOtk2I55pKhWD1PzcmmfOEWtWnxKe_FOHN7mHiii_cmBOnNNoFPSRljxhgUtz6o/s320/concommenters0.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div>
here's one people are dying under right now:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpL8a5T1w-fjJHTrmPt7Xny1xc7OVY0ELt35xs_jSJDOiJTgV2QPgYB1aJ5gcKDo-rYrvnJpV3uOfUlC5tIISoCE3JXAWYcb884FKicXrIMM-N6MaFiLpVABf-hB8WG3KTfGb6C6yTa1jK/s1600/isisflag.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpL8a5T1w-fjJHTrmPt7Xny1xc7OVY0ELt35xs_jSJDOiJTgV2QPgYB1aJ5gcKDo-rYrvnJpV3uOfUlC5tIISoCE3JXAWYcb884FKicXrIMM-N6MaFiLpVABf-hB8WG3KTfGb6C6yTa1jK/s320/isisflag.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
It is entirely possible for people to commit themselves sincerely to a cause, and its symbols, and be wrong. It is equally possible for people to be misled as to the actual purpose of their actions - this is my view of soldiers who died in WWI in particular. Enshrining symbols and the causes they represent, just because people were willing to die for them is a terrible idea.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Lest you think I'm overstating this, the NZ RSA <a href="https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/-the-first-referendum-doesn-t-respect-my-ability-to-vote-rsa-president-q09065" target="_blank">wants people to spoil their flag ballots for this specific reason.</a></span></div>
Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-32632586389858262952015-05-07T18:11:00.000+12:002015-05-07T18:11:44.152+12:00Turning the lights onMy friend Daniel has a <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2015/04/how-political-correctness-saved.html" target="_blank">post over on his blog</a> about how the dreaded Political Correctness actually seems to have improved (and continue to be improving) people's general behaviour over time. A good part of this post is in response to a comment by another fellow known only as "Mike" on Facebook. Mike is of the opinion that things were better in (presumably) the 50s, when New Zealand society was by and large more homogeneous.<br />
<br />
Or was it?<br />
<br />
One of the things that you notice when you research any dissenting point of view (pacifism during World War I and World War II, to take a recently-relevant example) is that you often find that it was more common than conventional wisdom would have you believe. The thing is, history is a political exercise - and so dissenting accounts are often written out of the primary narrative.<br />
<br />
This doesn't have to be actively conspiratorial - people work according to their own biases, and the science suggests that humans are really bad at being fully conscious of these. Also, if certain behaviours or attitudes were shameful or dangerous at certain points in history*, it makes sense that people who held those views or indulged in those behaviours would tend to be secretive for reasons of self-preservation (and thus not make it into the "official" history).<br />
<br />
My point is that commentators like "Mike" often suggest that the increasing visibility of (for example) gay, trans, and other gender/sexuality issues is the result of a more accepting society making those lifestyles more common; or (for another example) that the recent spate of publicised police violence in the US is the result of criminals becoming more dangerous (or sometimes of police becoming more racist); or that increasing rates of reported sexual assault are the result of a lapse in society's morals.<br />
<br />
I think this it's much more likely that our more accepting society (plus the boom in self-publishing on the internet) is simply making it easier to talk about all of these issues in public, in a form that is semi-permanent and easy to refer back to.<br />
<br />
It's not that none of these things happened in the 50s - they just happened in the dark, and now we're turning the lights on.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<a href="http://love-and-pop.com/" target="_blank">Love & Pop</a> has my review of <i><a href="http://love-and-pop.com/life-of-crime-2/" target="_blank">Life Of Crime</a>. </i>It's a Coen-brothers-esqe people-being-bad-at-crime movie with Jennifer Aniston and Mos Def in it. It's not bad.</div>
<br />
_____<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Homosexuality and socialist views both come to mind.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-17449986847710574682015-04-28T17:06:00.000+12:002015-05-04T12:05:28.977+12:00No one's celebrating anything (plus many many links)I mostly stayed off the internet over the long weekend, but I saw a thing go past on Facebook which I feel needs addressing. One of my friends said they'd been to see the <a href="http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/pages/home.aspx" target="_blank">Te Papa</a> exhibition about the Gallipoli campaign and "no one's celebrating anything". This is a response to an objection to ANZAC Day on the grounds that it celebrates warfare. When my kid's teachers received the news about us not attending their ANZAC ceremony, their response was remarkably similar.<br />
<br />
The thing is, I have yet to hear someone make that particular objection*.<br />
<br />
All of the objections to ANZAC Day I've seen (including <a href="http://thegoatplan.blogspot.co.nz/2015/04/lest-we-forget-again.html" target="_blank">my own</a>) have been around the way in which the day is framed, and the ways in which competing accounts have been dealt with. Specifically, the objection isn't that ANZAC Day celebrates war - it's that it treats war as justified and necessary, and dissent is strongly discouraged if not actively suppressed.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2015/04/remembrance-and-hypocrisy.html" target="_blank">My friend Daniel writes about the awful goals and conduct of World War 1, and the hypocrisy of using its rhetoric to justify sending New Zealand troops to fight ISIS</a>. Strikingly, he also raises the point that without the international (legal) arms trade groups like ISIS would be far less dangerous and less sustainable. <a href="http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/poppy09.htm" target="_blank">The White Poppy campaign</a> funds research on this.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/anzac-day-ii/" target="_blank">Russell Brown has a really interesting post bookended with his presence at the RSA he's a member of</a>. The fallout of war is long-lasting and horrendous - this is why it's a bad solution to problems. Russell's post linked to the way in which <a href="http://campl.us/r4XX" target="_blank">the Herald used its gossip column to interrogate Lizzie Marvelly about her conflicted feelings about the day</a>, and the way an <a href="https://storify.com/number86/geoff-lemon-on" target="_blank">Australian journalist was sacked for criticising ANZAC Day on Twitter</a>.<br />
<br />
It also pointed me to two documentaries: <a href="http://www.maoritelevision.com/tv/shows/anzac-2015/S01E001/anzac-2015-anzac-tides-blood" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">ANZAC: Tides of Blood</a>, which is about Neill's family history with the ANZAC campaign, and the way the ANZAC myth developed; and <i><a href="http://www.maoritelevision.com/tv/shows/anzac-2015/S01E001/nga-ra-o-hune-days-june" target="_blank">Ngā Rā o Hune - The Days of June</a> </i>about Waikato Maori who refused to fight. I haven't had a chance to watch either of these but they look good, and notably both come from <a href="http://www.maoritelevision.com/" target="_blank">Maori TV</a>.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***</div>
<br />
On an entirely unrelated note <a href="http://love-and-pop.com/" target="_blank">Love and Pop</a> has <a href="http://love-and-pop.com/jacques-tati-the-restored-collection/" target="_blank">my review of the Jacques Tati box-set</a>. It's suuuuuuuuuuuper loooooooooooooong (like the box-set itself) but Tati is a pretty interesting guy, and his films have the weird distinction of being highly-regarded, but hardly ever directly imitated.<br />
<br />
_____<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*My friend, of course, may have - but I didn't see any specific mention of it in the Facebook thread in question.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-58281948126086498962015-04-24T18:13:00.000+12:002015-04-28T14:27:14.412+12:00Lest we forget (again)The poppies are starting to appear everywhere again.<br />
<br />
I'm in the interesting position of writing my kid's school a letter to tell them that neither she nor I will be attending their student-led ANZAC Day ceremony while (with my Board of Trustees hat on) trying to help them find a bugler or trumpeter to play the Last Post on the day.<br />
<br />
On a recent bike tour around the South Island, my parents came across the <a href="http://202.124.110.195/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=134" target="_blank">Kowai Peace Memorial</a>. It was built with private money in the aftermath of the First World War, as central government were only willing to fund "war memorials" in the traditional (triumphalist, militant) style. Built, I might add, by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Upham" target="_blank">Charles Upham</a> and friends (or at least in Upham's patch - so presumably with his blessing). It's difficult to find much reference to this written anywhere* but the caretakers at the hall talked at length about how many returned soldiers wanted functional memorials that were explicitly <i>peace</i> memorials and, how the government had refused to fund anything but militaristic and ornamental war<i> </i>memorials. A <a href="https://www.google.co.nz/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=peace+memorials++nz" target="_blank">cursory google search</a> suggests that this was not too uncommon.<br />
<br />
This story neatly encapsulates the way I feel about the day. I acknowledge that many people who fight and die do so in the honest belief that it's their duty, but I feel like that's all we're allowed to publicly remember.<br />
<br />
People don't just die in wars, <a href="https://overland.org.au/2015/04/dont-mention-the-war/" target="_blank">they kill, and rape, and torture</a>. All armies, not just the "bad guys" - because that's part of war and always has been. <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/how-to-kill/" target="_blank">This is a thing that people who fight in wars need to find ways to deal with</a>. This is a thing to remember.<br />
<br />
World War 1 (the one we specifically commemorate on ANZAC Day) was not a "war for freedom". It was a war that made little sense even to its initial participants and involved the ANZACs only because they were dutiful colonials. It was a war that sowed the seeds for World War 2, which in turn created the conditions for many of the ongoing conflicts of the modern world - including the ghastly mess our government has just committed troops to. This is a thing to remember.<br />
<br />
People, recognising the waste and futility of the war, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Baxter" target="_blank">struggled and suffered to protest it</a>. This is a thing to remember.<br />
<br />
Even now, people who threaten the official story about emerging nationhood and glory and sacrifice for freedom are <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/3608427/White-poppy-collectors-threatened" target="_blank">attacked</a>, and <a href="http://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/304771/archibald-baxter-memorial-plan-causes-consternation" target="_blank">denounced</a> as <a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/9951056/Timing-of-white-poppy-appeal-contemptible" target="_blank">traitors</a>. At the same time (<a href="http://naehauf-wayhoose.blogspot.co.nz/2015/04/anzac-theyll-remember-it-for-us.html" target="_blank">as my old friend Dougal points out</a>) the official version seems determined to hit peak marketing-kitsch. This is a thing to remember.<br />
<br />
Any fitting memorial to the people who fought and died and still fight and die in the belief that they're doing their duty as good citizens of their country has to, in my mind, be one that commits to wasting as few lives as we can in future. To that end, I recommend the <a href="http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/poppy09.htm" target="_blank">White Poppy campaign</a> - the proceeds of which go to research into peace and conflict and militarism.<br />
<br />
I'll leave you with Andy Irvine's version of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Turner" target="_blank">Marcus Turner's</a>** excellent meditation on all this. We can do better, that's a thing to remember.<br />
<br />
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<br />
_____<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Apparently <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-sorrow-pride-Zealand-memorials/dp/0477014755" target="_blank"><i>The Sorrow and the Pride</i> by Jock Phillips and Chris Maclean</a> talks about it, but I don't have a copy to hand and shan't before I want to have finished this post.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_memorial#Pacifist_war_memorials_and_those_relating_to_war_and_peace" target="_blank">The Wikipedia article on war memorials</a> mentions it, but only in regard to Europe.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** I'd have played Marcus Turner's version but I can't find it online anywhere - so Andy Irvine is what you get.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-28632720613464908642015-02-12T13:58:00.000+13:002015-02-13T09:16:20.931+13:00That weird feeling when you nearly agree with Bob McCroskie...New Zealand's favourite <a href="http://thestandard.org.nz/family-first-deregistered/" target="_blank">pretend charity</a>* and purveyors of <a href="http://www.donotlink.com/dnis" target="_blank">anti-gay</a> <a href="http://www.donotlink.com/dnit" target="_blank">propaganda</a> and <a href="https://ideologicallyimpure.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/sexuality-education-the-inevitable-reveal-of-the-real-goal-and-did-someone-say-clitoris/" target="_blank">moral outrage about teenagers potentially having sex</a>, <a href="http://www.donotlink.com/dnil" target="_blank">Family First</a> want you to boycott the new movie of <i>50 Shades Of Grey</i>.<br />
<br />
This is because, in the words of FF's Managing director Bob McCroskie:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"The premise of the movie is that a woman who is humiliated, abused, controlled, entrapped, coerced, manipulated and tortured is somehow an ‘empowered’ woman. And a man who is possessive, controlling, violent, jealous and coercive is somehow showing ‘true love’. These are foul and dangerous lies. This movie and the book it is based on simply glamorises sexual violence and should be rejected by everyone who is concerned about family and sexual violence."</i></blockquote>
In a bizarre twist of fate, I think Bob McCroskie is very nearly right about this - just deeply deeply wrong the reasoning that got him there.<br />
<br />
Bob McCroskie, Family First and their pet <a href="http://www.gaynz.com/articles/publish/31/article_11648.php" target="_blank">(terrible, fake)</a> psychologist Miriam Grossman hate <i>50 Shades</i> because they're convinced that anything outside the fairly narrow template that they define as a "healthy" relationship** is automatically dangerous and harmful. This means that the BDSM relationship depicted in <i>50 Shades</i> is inherently damaging and dangerous because a relationship where one of the partners binds, dominates, or causes pain to the other (even if that partner wanted them to and specifically verbally asked them to) is automatically a Very Bad Thing. Here's Miriam Grossman:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"There are vast differences between dark and light, healthy and unhealthy. </i>Fifty Shades of Grey<i> blurs that distinction. It leads your daughter to wonder, what’s healthy in a relationship? What’s sick? There are so many shades of grey…I’m not sure. But with her safety at risk , there’s no room for confusion or doubt. You want your daughter to be one hundred per cent certain: an intimate relationship that includes violence, <b>consensual or not</b>, is emotionally disturbed. It’s sick." </i>(Emphasis mine.)</blockquote>
This is pretty clearly nonsense. If you read anything coming out of the kink**** community you'll know that those guys put a huge amount of effort into carefully negotiating consent so that people end up having the experiences they want to have and still stay safe. In fact, a lot of the current conversations people are having about consent at the moment have their roots in discussions that started (as far as I can tell) with online kink communities.<br />
<br />
So given that I think McCroskie and Grossman are both wrong in their thinking, how come I agree with them that <i>50 Shades</i> is all kinds of gross and weird? It all comes back to consent again - Christian Grey repeatedly violates Ana's autonomy, and this is passed off as sexy and romantic.<br />
<br />
In some ways this is kind of understandable, <i>50SoG</i> began life as a an erotic <i>Twilight </i>fanfic and thus (I strongly suspect) has its roots in some sort of sex fantasy belonging to E. L. James. The reason this is relevant is because when you're having a sex fantasy in your own head, consent is completely irrelevant. You're playing around with figments of your imagination, who exist only to serve the situation you're creating for yourself. If one of those characters is (to quote an example beloved of anti-feminists) raped, that doesn't then imply that you actually want to be raped, or to rape somebody else.<br />
<br />
As long as the fantasies stay inside your head or as short-form standalone erotica***** this isn't really an issue. It becomes problematic when it's applied to characters in a piece of fiction who are presented as having some sort of self-discovery, because the behaviour that leads to the self-discovery is tacitly presented as worthy unless it's explicitly described otherwise. And Christian Grey's behaviour is, from a kink/BDSM point of view, completely terrible.<br />
<br />
If you want an overview of the book from a kink perspective, <a href="http://pervocracy.blogspot.co.nz/p/fifty-shades-of-grey-index.html" target="_blank">Cliff over at the Pervocracy has an excellent rundown</a> (exercise caution before clicking - the Pervocracy is great but sometimes NSFW and links to some DEFINITELY NSFW places) but the teal deer version is pretty simple: Ana rarely (if ever) has a chance to set the parameters for the situations that Grey puts her in, and has no way out if she's not enjoying herself.<br />
<br />
<i>50SoG</i> isn't actually the only offender here - I think it's a wider issue with fiction by people turned on by the <i>idea</i> of BDSM who <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DanBrowned" target="_blank">didn't do their homework</a>. Another good example is the movie <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_%282002_film%29" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Secretary</a> which starts out being about two people drifting into a (mutually enjoyable) BDSM relationship but culminates with an actually-horrible-and-abusive "test" of one partner by the other, which leaves her stuck in a chair sitting in her own urine for three days. Romantic.<br />
<br />
If you're genuinely interested in kink or BDSM, there are lots of great resources on the web, and the Pervocracy (linked above) is a pretty good place to start. I humbly submit that this would be a better and healthier use of your time than going to see <i>50 Shades Of Grey</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>EDITED TO ADD:</b><br />
It's been brought to my attention that <i>Secretary</i> isn't really as good an example as I thought. Lee (the titular secretary) is actually in more control a lot of the time than I gave her credit for. It's obscured a bit because the movie follows the drifty romantic comedy template for characters negotiating romantic or sexual situations (which is its own big bag of problematic nonsense, but waaaaay wider than any single film). Sorry guys.<br />
<br />
Also, this post (especially the first couple of paragraphs) is basically a love letter to <a href="http://www.donotlink%2Ccom/" target="_blank">DoNotLink</a> which you should all be using all the time (assuming you want to link to sketchy places for the purposes of explanation or freakshow appeal). I want to particularly stress this for people who like to link weird stories from the Daily Mail.<br />
_____<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*This may be unfair. The <a href="http://www.donotlink.com/dnix" target="_blank">Sensible Sentencing Trust</a> might actually be New Zealand's favourite pretend charity.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">**They're not specific about this, but a trawl through their respective web presences strongly suggests the parameters are straight married couples having (preferably exclusively) PIV sex. It would be nice if those couples could be white***.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">***This sounds like an unnecessary <i>ad hominem </i>but is a strong hunch based on the choice of stock photos throughout the Family First website.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">****I'm not 100% certain, but I <i>think</i> this term is favoured because it broadens the parameters of "into non-standard sex stuff" in a way that a term like "BDSM" doesn't - like "queer" does for people whose sexuality doesn't neatly fit into a 2- or 3-state switch model ("straight, gay, or bi").</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*****I think people are by in large pretty good a recognising discrete pornographic fantasies as stand-alone things that don't relate to anything else and (importantly) have no bearing on the rest of reality.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-64798505079018076472014-12-21T14:13:00.000+13:002014-12-21T14:13:42.282+13:00Gangs and heroes<span style="font-weight: normal;">When I was in primary school in Scotland, forming "gangs" was one of the games that seemed to be pretty much universal. Someone who wanted to start a gang would link arms with a friend, then walk around the playground chanting "Who wants to be in our gang?" and collecting prospects. These gangs tended not to last more than one lunch hour, but the allure of joining up (even for such a limited time) was potent. </span><br />
<br />
There seems to be something fundamental about humans that means we find being part of a group very seductive, and that seems to make us vulnerable to "hacks" that exploit this impulse to get us to do things, or be less critical of our stated beliefs*.<br />
<br />
This is what sticks out for me from my friend Daniel's recent post about <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2014/11/the-kind-of-religion-im-against.html" target="_blank">the kind of religion he objects to</a>, and is sort of in the background of <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2014/11/this-time-there-is-right-side-and-wrong.html" target="_blank">his most recent post about meme-responses to the situation in Ferguson</a>. In both cases, it seems to me that people's membership of particular religious or ideological groups is blinding them to the unpleasant implications of things they believe. Of course, in relation to religion, this isn't a new idea. In fact, part of the core of the New Atheist suite of arguments against religion is the idea that religion makes people particularly vulnerable to this kind of hack.<br />
<br />
Where New Atheism seems to me to fall down, is in the assumption that doing away with religion will do away with this quirk of human thought. You can see this in the way that New Atheism has itself become a gang of sorts** and begun to suffer from some of the problems that gang-ness tends to cause. In the case of the New Atheists, I'd characterise these as a tendency toward gatekeeping, the construction of various folk devils***, and falling in love with heroes. If you want more on gatekeeping or folk devils, <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/" target="_blank">Fred Clark at Slacktivist</a> and <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nonprophetstatus/" target="_blank">the guys at Nonprophet Status</a> do a pretty good job respectively****.<br />
<br />
What I want to talk about right at the moment is heroes.<br />
<br />
A hero is a person who, as a result of their achievements or statements, has been acclaimed as great and adopted as a representative of a certain group or ideology. This makes them slightly less human (in the sense of being a complete person with virtues, flaws, and frailties) in the eyes of their admirers, and tends to give their views more weight than those of the average person.<br />
<br />
This can happen at a variety of scales, so you can be a globally-recognisably Hero of New Atheism or Feminism or Socialism, or a local hero like a parish priest or the leader of a chapter of the International Socialists. The most complete form of this, I would call something like "sainthood" - the point at which someone ceases to be human at all (usually after their death) and is pretty much pure symbol. I'd call Ghandi, John Lennon and Martin Luther King examples of this.<br />
<br />
The problems inherent in having heroes are pretty clear, when you examine how this tends to work.<br />
<br />
The first issue is that heroes tend to get more allowances for bad behaviour, because their status as group representatives makes them more valuable than the rank and file members. The most famous example of this is the sexual abuse problems within the Catholic church (and in that case it was exacerbated by Church policies designed explicitly to minimise scandal and thereby protect abusers) but anyone who's been a member of a group with an abusive but important member (anecdotal examples I've heard include socialist groups in Wellington, kink communities in the US, and a university pagan/shamanic society) knows that this is not a purely religious problem. There are also more public secular examples like the recent revelations about the <a href="https://www.google.co.nz/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=bbc%20sex%20abuse" target="_blank">BBC</a> and <a href="https://www.google.co.nz/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=paedophile%20scandal%20uk%20tories" target="_blank">British Conservative Party</a>.<br />
<br />
The second issue is that heroes tend to have their pronouncements heard and promulgated regardless of their merits. Having said something intelligent once is no guarantee of continuing to do this indefinitely. For example, I think Richard Dawkins is entirely correct about the logical extreme unlikeliness of God (at least in the majority of Church-doctrinal conceptions) existing. Meanwhile, his pronouncements on any issue relating to rape, sexual harassment (really women in general) or the relative danger posed by non-majority-white-people religions are woefully off-base, and yet are received as wisdom on the basis of his atheist thinking.<br />
<br />
This is also true of other New Atheist heroes like Sam <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/46196/sam_harris%27s_faith_in_eastern_spirituality_and_muslim_torture" target="_blank">"torturing Muslims is super-cool"</a> Harris and Christopher "<a href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2005/seymour261105.html" target="_blank">the war in Iraq hasn't killed enough people</a>, and by the way <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/01/hitchens200701" target="_blank">did I mention how women are biologically destined to be unfunny</a> (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S692f1tnuQ" target="_blank">whoops sorry that was a joke or maybe a secret plan to get more women being funny</a>)" Hitchens. This is dangerous, because while there's no earthly reason for atheism to be associated with racism or sexism, an uncritical admiration of racist sexist people due to their status as atheist heroes is starting to build those links - at least in the minds of the wider public.<br />
<br />
Did you notice, by the way, that in these previous two paragraphs I've stuck with the view that atheism is in and of itself a rational and logical point of view? It's entirely possible for a person to be right about (or good at) one or more things (and receive appropriate acclaim for that) while still being wrong about other things, or even an actually terrible human being. This brings me to my final problem with heroes.<br />
<br />
Communities who have heroes often feel the need to defend them, because of their status as community representatives. More than once when I've raised Dawkins' or Hitchens' problems with women, or Harris's racism in a discussion, I've been told that I'm attempting to smear them in order to discredit their advocacy for atheism (and presumably by extension atheism as a point of view). This is not an uncommon phenomenon in comment threads around the web.<br />
<br />
I was really taken with the article "<a href="http://www.socialjusticeleague.net/2011/09/how-to-be-a-fan-of-problematic-things/" target="_blank">How To Be A Fan of Problematic Things</a>"***** and I think that probably has the core of the principle you need for dealing with problematic thinkers. Unfortunately, heroising someone tends to short-circuit the capacity for that kind of critical analysis.<br />
<br />
___<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* I'm not going to go the route of suggesting that intelligent, well-educated people can't genuinely believe in, say, the Biblical account of Creation (as interpreted by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Ham" target="_blank">Ken Ham</a>) and must therefore be lying. I do think though, that there are probably different levels or classes of belief depending on how much conscious attention has been put into squaring them with the world we live in and their implications for your other beliefs. I think that humans are capable of holding sincere yet contradictory beliefs <i>so long as they don't pay too much attention to the contradiction</i>. There's something disingenuous about pouring mental effort into ignoring or handwaving those contradictions, but I think there are people who simply aren't fully aware of them. Of course, there are also people who deliberately espouse beliefs they don't really hold <a href="http://thegoatplan.blogspot.co.nz/2013/12/magic-part-4-practical-example.html" target="_blank">for reasons of Magic</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** In a recent internet argument I got told that I was wrong to think of atheism as a movement and that I was trying to pull the classic Christian apologist swifty of claiming that atheism is a religion and therefore atheists are religious and should go and vanish in a puff of logic or something. While it's true that atheism <i>per se</i> is actually just a single component of a wider worldview, I think there's such a thing as New Atheism which tends to include a specific set of views in addition to disbelief in god(s). I also think that once you have conferences dedicated to your interest or point of view, you can safely be called a movement or at least an informal organisation.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">***At some point this will be a link to another post where I unpack this idea a bit. In the mean time, what I'm talking about here is a form of demonisation strawman where you construct a position so vile or ridiculous that opposition to it is a basic human response. You then justify your own extreme statements or actions by claiming that you oppose the folk devil that you've built (and covertly including a much wider group under the same umbrella term). Classic examples include "the humourless PC brigade", "delusional religious people", "lazy welfare queens" etc. It's important to understand that I'm not claiming that examples of these classes of people <i>don't exist</i> - just that they're rarer in their purest forms than the constructers of folk devils like to admit.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">**** Fred Clark tends to talk about gatekeeping in an American white evangelist context, and the NS fellas talk more about islamophobia than other classes of folk devil, but they'll both give you some grounding in the ways these concepts work.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">***** For bonus points check out <a href="http://rs21.org.uk/2014/10/16/morris-dancing/" target="_blank">this article about what happens when things that didn't start out racist become racist in a new context</a>.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-57036500570514394872014-12-18T17:06:00.002+13:002014-12-20T08:30:18.691+13:00"Prisoners" and hurting peopleThe US Government has just released a report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, in other words on the use of torture by the CIA. You can get it <a href="http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf" target="_blank">as a pdf</a> if you like >500-page documents full of horrifying details and the word [REDACTED].<br />
<br />
David Simon has written the most basic and heartfelt <a href="http://davidsimon.com/american-torture/" target="_blank">howl of pain and outrage</a> about it, echoed <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2014/12/then-what-makes-us-different-torture-edition.html" target="_blank">here</a> by Libby Anne at <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/" target="_blank">Love, Joy, Feminism</a>. Doug Muder at <a href="http://weeklysift.com/" target="_blank">The Weekly Sift</a> does <a href="http://weeklysift.com/2014/12/15/5-things-to-understand-about-the-torture-report/" target="_blank">a more analytical breakdown</a> which is also good. The fellas over at <a href="http://mindhacks.com/" target="_blank">Mind Hacks</a> have <a href="http://mindhacks.com/2014/12/10/snake-oil-salesmen-selling-torture/" target="_blank">a really interesting article</a> about how the directors of this particular torture initiative either totally misunderstood or criminally misrepresented the psychology that they based their operations on, and how (terrifyingly) the CIA fell for it regardless.<br />
<br />
Between the Doug Muder and Libby Anne piece, there's a pretty good indication as to how the CIA got it so badly wrong here. What Muder refers to as the "bomb in New York scenario"* is seductive because it connects the <a href="http://thegoatplan.blogspot.co.nz/2011/07/society-for-cruel-and-inhumane.html" target="_blank">very human desire for immediate revenge on wrongdoers</a> with the promise of an immediate, tangible, and morally valuable aim. If you read Libby Anne's roundup of right wing US commentary on this report, you'll see the basic structure of the bomb in New York repeated over and over again.<br />
<br />
In his article, Doug Muder does a pretty good job of taking this argument to bits, moral-logic-wise.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, I've been reading a bit of research that suggests that humans cling to stories above all else, and tend to reject facts that get in the way of our preferred story (hence the persistence of Andrew Wakefield's MMR-causes-autism thesis, flouridation panics, so on and so forth). The suggestion seems to be that having a counter-story is a more effective way of dealing with faulty information.<br />
<br />
If that's the case, I would strongly recommend watching <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392214/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Prisoners</a>, and getting other people to do so as well. The basic setup is that two young girls disappear, and in the absence of any progress from the police, one of their fathers kidnaps the initial suspect in order to try and beat the truth out of him. Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, the striking thing about <i>Prisoners</i> is its absolute condemnation of revenge and vigilantism. In this film, without fail, every single act of vigilantism, torture or retributive violence is counter-productive, and makes the overall situation much much worse.<br />
<br />
I think that's a story we need to hear told more often.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* This scenario (and variations thereof) is beloved of people who want to be able to say that torturing people is OK when the "good guys" do it, and it goes as follows: "There's a bomb planted in New York that will kill thousands - maybe tens of thousands when it goes off/ You have a guy in custody who knows where it is, and torturing him is the only way to get that information. What would <b>you</b> do?" </span><br />
<br />
***<br />
<h4>
Review update for those interested in such...</h4>
It's been a while since I posted anything, but I've kept writing reviews so those have been stacking up a bit. <a href="http://love-and-pop.com/" target="_blank">Love & Pop</a> has currently got my reviews of:<br />
<ul>
<li><i><a href="http://love-and-pop.com/muscle-shoals/" target="_blank">Muscle Shoals</a> </i>- a fascinating look at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_Shoals,_Alabama#Music" target="_blank">disproportionately influential Muscle Shoals music scene</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Hall" target="_blank">the improbably tragic life of one of its central figures</a>. It's a must for music nerds (like me) but my less-nerdy co-watchers said they could have used more music and fewer talking heads.</li>
<li><a href="http://love-and-pop.com/lucky-bastard/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Lucky Bastard</a> - a found-footage thriller about murders at a porn shoot which is also a commentary of a sort on male entitlement and the violence it engenders.</li>
<li><i><a href="http://love-and-pop.com/the-angriest-man-in-brooklyn/" target="_blank">The Angriest Man In Brooklyn</a> - </i>a minor Robin Williams vehicle that suffers (I think) from unfortunate proximity to his death. If it could be safely ignored, it'd probably annoy people less.</li>
<li><i><a href="http://love-and-pop.com/enemy/" target="_blank">Enemy</a> - </i>Jake Gyllenhaal plays two unpleasant men who are exact doubles. Giant spiders stalk above the Toronto skyline. Everything is a ghastly piss-yellow. (It's actually frustratingly, tantalisingly good, and will glue itself to your brainpipes tenaciously.)</li>
<li><i><a href="http://love-and-pop.com/savages-crossing-2/" target="_blank">Savages Crossing</a> - </i>an Aussie thriller hoping to capitalise on the menace of John Jarrat's "Mick Taylor" character from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Creek_%28film%29" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Wolf Creek</a>, and the star power of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0572112/?ref_=tt_cl_t5" target="_blank">Craig McLachlan</a>. Falls flat through lack of commitment.</li>
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I'm working my way through a giant boxed set of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Tati" target="_blank">Jacques Tati</a> films, and will be reviewing those in a bit. It's slow going at the moment, though as people in my household are resistant to the (to me) obvious charms of French-language physical comedy.</div>
Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-18805829082363596702014-12-12T11:48:00.000+13:002014-12-13T17:09:54.566+13:00Calling (out) the CopsA while back, I wrote <a href="http://thegoatplan.blogspot.co.nz/2011/10/police-philosophy-or-what-are-cops-for.html" target="_blank">this post here</a> about the philosophies that I thought should underpin policing, based on what we as a society actually want the cops to do for us.<br />
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I think that with recent events in the States, we can see the end point of an adversarial relationship between the police and everyone else. The issue there (as I guessed at in my post) seems to be strongly tied to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/06/i-was-a-st-louis-cop-my-peers-were-racist-and-violent-and-theres-only-one-fix/" target="_blank">a very particular kind of police culture</a>. That link goes to a post by an ex-cop called Redditt Hudson (a glorious name for the Internet Age) and makes, in my view, a very strong case that it's a lack of real consequences for police who misbehave that leads to this kind of culture flourishing.<br />
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Based on my personal contact with the police (I do sounds and play music at a number of community events, and so have a bit to do with Community Liaison-type officers) I had been reasonably comfortable that New Zealand (despite the obvious issues I mentioned in my original post) was still some distance from this kind of scenario.<br />
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<a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/bay-of-plenty-times/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503343&objectid=11373151" target="_blank">I am less confident now</a>.<br />
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We need police who are supported and trained in effective de-escalation, who see themselves as public servants rather than superheroes, and who can expect clear consequences when they act inappropriately.<br />
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We do not need to start having our own <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown" target="_blank">Michael Browns</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner" target="_blank">Eric Garners</a> and <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7275297/tamir-rice-police-shooting" target="_blank">Tamir Rices</a>.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>EDITED TO ADD:</b> People who follow that "I am less confident" link will find that the Bay of Plenty District Commander Superintendent is listed as "pictured" but that the picture has been replaced by an ad. I am sure that neither the Bay Of Plenty Times nor the New Zealand Herald meant to imply that the man in question is actually Skrillex.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-2308970888175253092014-09-30T15:22:00.000+13:002014-09-30T15:22:25.306+13:00Doin' stuff fer free...First things first - <a href="http://love-and-pop.com/" target="_blank">Love & Pop</a> has my review of <a href="http://love-and-pop.com/hentai-kamen/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Hentai Kamen</a> - it's a Japanese live-action superhero parody (based on a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABkyoku!!_Hentai_Kamen" target="_blank">90's manga</a>) about a high school student who transforms into a "pervert superhero" when he wears used panties on his head. Aside from the obvious, a lot of the humour derives from poking fun at the tropes of "superpowered highschoolers" manga/anime. From that description you can probably already tell if it's your jam or not, but if it is you'll probably enjoy it.<br />
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Now read on...<br />
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Gawker's Hamilton Nolan (somewhat contemptuously) reports that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_Dunham" target="_blank">Lena Dunham's</a> promotional tour in support of her book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Not-That-Kind-Girl-Learned/dp/081299499X" target="_blank">Not That Kind Of Girl</a> </i><a href="http://gawker.com/lena-dunham-does-not-pay-1640249043" target="_blank">will feature unpaid opening acts</a>, who have applied through her website for the privilege of performing. I am reminded of the <a href="https://www.google.co.nz/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=amanda+palmer+not+paying+musicians&spell=1" target="_blank">related furore</a> when <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Palmer" target="_blank">Amanda Palmer</a> tried to do a similar thing - crowdsourcing unpaid musicians to back her up on tour.<br />
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Now, as then, I am having kind of a hard time figuring out what the fuss is actually about.<br />
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The primary argument put forward in both cases is that these women have heaps of money, and could therefore afford to pay people - the inference being that they're somehow ripping people off, or depriving other (more professional) acts of work. I sort of get that - I play in a covers band and I certainly get cross when people do pub gigs for free, thus devaluing all the other musicians in the area.<br />
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But playing to drunken punters in a pub is in no way the same thing as being part of a charity event (which I'd cheerfully do for free) or to being included in an event put on by someone you admire, which is what's happening here (and in the Amanda Palmer example). In both cases, these women sought applications from people who'd be interested in being part of their events, and made it clear from the outset that there wasn't going to be any money involved.<br />
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There's an argument that Dunham and Palmer are somehow "abusing" their fame and social status to get stuff for free, but that seems disingenuous to me. The people who applied weren't under any particular pressure to do so, as neither Palmer nor Dunham had any particular power over them that would make the situation abusive.<br />
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I guess the thing I'm getting at is that rich and famous people get free goods and services from people who admire them all the time. It seems suspicious to me that the internet chooses to make a fuss about this when it's women with a history of making people (particularly men, particularly white heterosexual men of a particular sociopolitical bent) uncomfortable, asking for things up front from their fans.<br />
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<br />Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-65972088210493411992014-09-10T14:49:00.000+12:002014-09-10T14:49:00.753+12:00Secondary trickles - vanishing rich people (aka "Y'all are doing capitalism wrong" part 2)Hokay, first things first. On the offchance that people really really like me reviewing stuff and are worried that Cinemania's gone, it's been reborn phoenix-like as <a href="http://love-and-pop.com/" target="_blank">Love & Pop</a> and I'm still writing stuff for them pretty regularly. Most recently I reviewed the <a href="http://love-and-pop.com/river-cottage-australia/" target="_blank">Australian River Cottage spinoff</a> (pretty good, very white), <i><a href="http://love-and-pop.com/river-cottage-hughs-three-good-things-part-one/" target="_blank">Hugh's 3 Good Things</a> </i>(moar comfort-food cooking TV), <a href="http://love-and-pop.com/the-life-after-death-project/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">The Life After Death Project</a> (a horrible doco about ghosts, centred on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_J_Ackerman" target="_blank">a pretty interesting-sounding dead guy</a>), a <a href="http://love-and-pop.com/the-tower/" target="_blank">Korean disaster movie</a> (actually pretty amazing), and <a href="http://love-and-pop.com/adventure-time-the-suitor/" target="_blank">an <i>Adventure Time</i> special</a> (it's <i>Adventure Time</i>, whaddaya want?*).<br />
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Right. Where was I? Oh yes. Taxing the rich.</div>
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I fall pretty squarely on the left in terms of politics. According to the most recent shot I had on <a href="http://tvnz.co.nz/votecompass" target="_blank">Vote Compass</a>**, I'm pretty much in the middle of the left-libertarian*** box. One of the things that goes along with that is that I believe in taxing people (particularly rich people, particularly <b>very</b> rich people) more in order to make it possible for the government to pay for more stuff, allowing the public access to free or heavily-subsidised services.<br />
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To clarify, I'm talking about income tax here. In NZ we have two primary kinds of tax - income tax on the money we earn, and GST (Goods and Services Tax) which is a percentage of the cost of everything we buy. The current government have cut income tax, and increased GST.<br />
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The problem with doing this is that while people with higher incomes will always pay a higher dollar share of income tax, even if the percentage is flat across all income brackets (here in NZ it's not, though I couldn't tell you the precise rates off the top of my head), GST always runs into the "you can only buy so much stuff" problem I mentioned in my last post. With income tax the government will get a bigger share if more people earn more money, while with GST the only way for the government to increase their take is to convince people to buy more stuff - and even the richest person can only eat so much food, and wear so many clothes. On top of this, increases in GST are always passed on in the price of the Goods and Services in question - so raising GST makes everything more expensive for everyone, which disproportionately affects the poor.<br />
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So, I'm in favour of plans (regardless of which party they come from) to cut GST and increase income tax in the top brackets to compensate. One of the most common objections I hear to plans like this is that they "punish people for hard work", and that if we tax them too heavily all our richest citizens will head overseas. To which I say, "who cares?"<br /><br />First off, there's a tendency to misunderstand the way that tax brackets work in New Zealand - or to wilfully misrepresent it, if you want to be cynical. When you enter a new tax bracket, the new tax rate doesn't affect the entirety of you income - just the bit that pushes you into that new bracket. Secondly, if someone makes over a million dollars a year, and you really do tax 50% of their whole income - they still end up with a minimum of $500,000 - which is still more than 5 times the median income.<br />
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And as for people who'll leave if they're taxed - I contend that we can do without them.<br />
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There aren't that many people making more than a million a year in New Zealand, so if they all left at once the impact on our population would be pretty tiny. Moreover, the jobs that they're doing can, I believe, be done at least as competently by people who are willing to accept smaller salaries. I don't believe that people who have the skills to be CEOs of large companies are actually as rare or as superhuman as they like to make out, and getting $500,000 (even $1,000,000) per year instead of $4,000,000 still leaves you pretty well off.<br />
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The question is this: do you want it to be possible for some (not very many) people to be astronomically rich to the point where they couldn't spend all their money if they tried? Or would you rather have free schools, hospitals, and ambulances?<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*What do you mean you don't watch <i>Adventure Time</i>? It's really good! It hits that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moomin" target="_blank">Moomin-flavoured</a> sad-stuff-for-kids button whilst also being actually funny, and has D&D jokes without being self-conscious about its nerdiness. And it's a kids' cartoon where the characters aren't perpetually snarking at one another and the voice acting isn't 50/50 gravel and horrendous squeaking. Seriously. Go do it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">**It's a tool that aligns your personal values with the stated policies of the major political parties here in NZ. If you're a New Zealand resident, I strongly recommend you have a play with it. I didn't find the results especially surprising for me, but I get the impression that others might - and it's always nice to have your sense of where you sit politically confirmed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">***In the sense of letting people mostly do what they want - I'd call it "anarchistic" but the axis on the graph that Vote Compass gives you calls that "libertarian" as opposed to "authoritarian" on the other side. Basically, I'm on the side of Chaos if you're familiar with 4-axis D&D alignment grids. Chaotic Good, I hope.</span></div>
Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-5711199729089538662014-08-07T15:57:00.001+12:002014-09-10T14:49:23.600+12:00Trickles (the "Living Wage" and stuff...)My wife runs a small business, and is doing a business course* to improve her policies and procedures and things. Recently, she got into a discussion with her classmates (and a separate but similar one with the small business group she's a member of on Facebook) about the <a href="http://www.livingwagenz.org.nz/" target="_blank">Living Wage</a>. Obviously you can go find out about the Living Wage at that link if you want to, but for my <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_long;_didn't_read" target="_blank">teal deer</a> friends: it's a recommended wage, calculated based on the cost of living in New Zealand. Notably, it's about $4.50 an hour higher than the <i>minimum</i> wage.<br />
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My wife's course-mates and co-small-business-groupers were resoundingly against the idea, on the basis that it'll make it far too expensive to employ people and cost jobs. This is the point of view currently presented by the majority of right wing parties in New Zealand at the moment as well. Unsurprisingly to people who know me, I think they're wrong.</div>
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<i>Now, a disclaimer: I am not an economist**. I think though, that economics is a less scientifically objective discipline than some economists like to make out - and it's certainly not immune to ideology or fashion.</i><br />
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The primary argument against the Living Wage (as I said above) seems to be that it will cost too much for small businesses. First off, this doesn't seem to be the case. The Living Wage people offer accreditation for businesses that adopt the Wage. They're all over the place (there's a cafe here in Palmerston North that does it) and none of them seem to be keeling over at time of writing.<br />
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I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding going on here. It's tempting for people to see themselves and their families and businesses as somehow sealed off from the rest of the world, with a little door where inputs and outputs go through. That's not quite right though. If paying your employees just meant more money in the salaries budget and nothing else, the naysayers would be right. What actually happens is more complicated.</div>
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Pretty much everyone is familiar with the concept of "trickle down" - the idea that cutting taxes would mean that the rich would spend more, and everyone would benefit all the way down the chain. It was a lie, of course. The problem with trickle down is that while some rich people might enjoy having more money, there's only so much stuff you can spend money on. Some people do buy a bunch of stuff they don't need once all their immediate needs are met, but there's a limit even to that - to put it simply, people don't need to eat twice as much just because they earn twice as much. All this money just ends up accumulating, and doing nothing much useful for anybody***.<br />
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You know who <b>does</b> have stuff they need but aren't buying? Poor people. Not even poor people - below-averagely well-off people. Ordinary people. The people who, for the vast majority of small businesses, make up almost all of your customer base.<br />
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"Trickle down" is a lie, but "trickle up" actually works. Measures that put money in the hands of people who don't have any are going to be more effective at stimulating people to buy stuff, because I can guarantee that there is stuff that those people want and need that they cannot currently afford to buy. Unless your business is selling multi-million dollar real estate****, these people are your customers and their lack of money is what stops them from giving that money to you.<br />
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There are other benefits - the Living Wage seems to greatly improve staff retention, and having done recruitment and discovered how badly it sucks, that seems like a major plus to me. It also seems fairly self-evident that paying employees a rate they can live on would make them less likely to dip their hands in the till or otherwise let the side down.<br />
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There's a counterargument to the effect that if you give one staff member at the bottom of the chain a raise, the other staff members will all expect a commensurate one. I think this is flawed. First off, I don't think that good staff would begrudge someone a payrise that brings them above starvation wages just because it narrows the gap between them. Secondly, the Living Wage is a base rate like the minimum wage - it's something you decide not to go below. You can still address everyone else's pay through whatever mechanism you ordinarily use, you just don't go below the Living Wage.<br />
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This is part of my grand theory "You've All Got Capitalism Wrong". More on that anon.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*It's going well, thanks for asking. Seriously, really well - I'm very proud of her indeed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">**My <a href="http://www.eastonbh.ac.nz/" target="_blank">Uncle Brian is</a>, but that doesn't really mean anything useful here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">***I'm aware that some rich people donate vast chunks of their largesse to charity. This is irrelevant to my argument because a) charity is a terrible way of meeting the majority of social needs, and b) money put into charity patches holes in the social fabric - it doesn't do a great amount to push the economy along.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">****Or brain-destroyingly-expensive jewellery, or painfully high fashion, etc. etc.</span></div>
Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-12479926183445419032014-07-28T16:07:00.002+12:002014-08-19T09:29:23.334+12:00Things that I mean, but haven't wrote my ownselfI have a couple of longer posts a-brewin', but not ready yet. In the mean time, here's <a href="http://addiction-dirkh.blogspot.co.nz/2014/07/getting-spiced.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+AddictionInbox+(Addiction+Inbox)" target="_blank">Dirk Hanson talking about the ghastly clusterfuck that is the ongoing evolution of synthetic cannabis in response to the suppression of real cannabis</a>, and <a href="http://veryrarelystable.blogspot.co.nz/2014/07/i-only-have-one-thing-to-say-about-gaza.html" target="_blank">my very intelligent friend Daniel Copeland with the single sensible thing that can be said about the ghastly clusterfuck in Gaza</a>.Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-22527210115953263942014-05-13T19:48:00.000+12:002014-05-13T19:48:49.313+12:00Well, fuck.So the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill went through under urgency last week. For those not in NZ, that means a) all the synthetic cannabis products excluded from the previous version of this legislation (about 40 products from the previous about-a-gazillion) are now banned until they can be proved to be of "very low risk" and b) the government might well have shot a giant gaping hole in what could have been the first thing to approach sensible drug legislation in this country.<br />
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Russell Brown has <a href="http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/a-law-gone-awry/" target="_blank">a good post about this over at Public Address</a>, but here's<i> </i>my take on what happened. There are two "official" narratives, one from the government and one from grassroots anti-drugs people which are both wrong, or at least, they're quite selective in the ways that they're right.<br />
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The anti-drugs crowd seem to believe that the passing of the original Psychoactive Substances Act put a bunch of synthetic cannabis products on the market as "safe". These products were anything but, and caused massive problems, with addiction and emergency visits becoming rife (see the horrifying photos of queues around the block from legal high stores for evidence). Eventually, in response to public outcry, the government finally acted (after too long) and put a stop to it. The moral tenor of the marketers of these drugs can easily be determined by the fact that they proposed to test this stuff on innocent animals.<br />
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The government contend that they were on the right track, but overlooked the risk posed by the synthetic cannabinomimetics that they allowed to remain on sale. They have now rightly removed these products from shelves, and put the burden of proof back where it belongs - with the manufacturers.<br />
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Actually, these drugs have been around for a long time. Ten years at the very minimum. The first ones appeared all over the place in little metal single-smoke cylinders, and seem to have been pretty close to inactive. The recipe quickly got refined and they started to sell by the packet. The attraction at this point was pretty clear - these products seemed to fairly closely mirror actual weed (which has a strong social niche in New Zealand culture) and were all legal to buy. It's important to note that all through this story,<i> legality</i> has been the main drawcard with these drugs - along with the ability to get high and still pass drug tests for pot.<br />
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Four or five years in, there was the first surge of media attention addressed at these specific "legal highs". I talked about that <a href="http://thegoatplan.blogspot.co.nz/2011/05/philosophy-of-war-on-drugs.html" target="_blank">here</a>. As a result of that, a large number of these products (if you're a New Zealander you'll probably recall the brand names "Spice" and "Kronic") were banned, along with their active ingredient. Because we were still operating under our original drug legislation which required the government to ban individual chemicals one by one, a raft of new products sprang up to take the place of the banned ones.<br />
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It's probably at this point that the real damage starts to get done. The evidence suggests that it's at this point that the chemicals on the market start to be seriously habit-forming and people start having panic attacks, heart palpitations and the like. However, these things are available everywhere - corner dairies all over the country stock this stuff, so if you're an addict it's fairly easy to stay under the radar.<br />
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When the government passed the Psychoactive Substances Act, they did two things. They gave councils the power to control where these substances could be sold, and they reduced the products available from hundreds to around 40 (considered to be "low-risk") which were allowed as an interim measure until councils finished deciding where their OK zones for legal high sale were going to be. Unfortunately at this point councils decided more or less en masse to throw all their toys out of the cot at once. Many protested at not just being able to ban the sale of non old-white-men drugs entirely and refused to zone, while others zoned as punitively as they could get away with.<br />
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As a result, the number of outlets selling these new more habit-forming drugs dropped dramatically. Can you imagine the queues that would appear if, tomorrow, all supermarkets and dairies were banned from selling alcohol and liquor stores were cut down to 2 or 3 per hundred thousand people? Do you think that it might look as though there was a sudden plague of alcoholism all around the country?<br />
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I must stress that this is not to claim that this newest batch of cannabis substitutes were good drugs. They appear to be very bad for their users both mentally and physically, and the people who sold them are probably not nice people.<br />
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The issue is that we're now back in blanket-ban territory, and these drugs have probably been bought up cheap by people who intend to stockpile them and sell them for vastly inflated prices on the street (they still get around drug tests for pot, and there are still addicts out there - money to be made...) Why? Because we had a media panic. I also want to restate that the reason we have this particularly vicious and addictive batch on our hands in the first place is because the previous safer generation were also banned as the result of a media panic. And we got <i>that </i>generation because we swallowed someone else's media panic about cannabis way back in the '50s. This is not a sensible way to make laws - look at the Sex Offender Registry in the US, and its many many abuses if you want a stunning example.<br />
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There are two consolations here. The first is that we do have the Psychoactive Substances Act, which has probably got the government out of playing whack-a-mole with drug designers for the time being. It's been mauled (the government is now in the bizarre position of being legally forced to ignore all data from animal tests, conducted anywhere in the world <i>unless they prove a drug is unfit for sale</i>) and drugs are going to be inhumanly hard to pass through it in the short term, but it's still around - so that's something.<br />
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The second is that this whole debacle does seem to have reopened the debate on which drugs should be legal and why. Let's hope we can actually <i>talk</i> about that this time, eh?</div>
Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-59370780103765579582014-04-27T12:00:00.002+12:002014-04-28T18:30:52.679+12:00Lest we forgetANZAC Day has always made me a bit uncomfortable. I suspect this is partly a consequence of being brought up <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers" target="_blank">Quaker(ish)</a>* - I have an inherent dislike of armies and militarism that makes the spectacle of hundreds of servicemen and women in uniform filling up the streets in the days leading up to ANZAC Day feel a bit like an invasion. I also did a research project about the treatment of conscientious objectors and their families when I was in high school which left me with a very nasty taste in my mouth about the RSA.<br />
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All this is to say that I come from a point fairly widely outside of the mainstream here. I realise that for many people the point of the day is to honour those who did what they felt was right and made the ultimate sacrifice, but I feel like the strong involvement of the military poisons that. It seems to me that the most important lesson we can learn from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign is never to repeat it. Not just to avoid the ridiculous strategic and tactical mistakes that led to the monstrous waste of life, but to value human life more highly and to be highly critical of government's reasons for extinguishing it.<br />
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Of all the wars we have involved ourselves in over the last hundred years, I think only a tiny minority of those have been in any way justifiable. <a href="http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2013/04/26/gordon-campbell-on-yesterdays-anzac-day-celebrations/" target="_blank">Disturbingly, I see increasing attempts to try and recast World War 1 in this light</a>. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/08/first-world-war-imperial-bloodbath-warning-noble-cause?CMP=fb_gu" target="_blank">That can't be allowed to happen.</a><br />
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Moreover, I think it's important (especially in regard to World War 1) to honour equally those who refused to fight. New Zealand conscientious objectors in World War 1 were deported to the front and subject to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_punishment#World_War_I_-_British_and_Commonwealth_armies" target="_blank">horrific punishments</a>, many of which took place in No Man's Land - thus putting them in <i>more</i> physical danger than the actual combatants. You can read about this in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Baxter" target="_blank">Archibald Baxter's</a> book <i><a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-BaxWeWi.html" target="_blank">We Will Not Cease</a>.</i><br />
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Honouring the dead who acted in good faith is a noble thing, but perhaps it's time we paid less attention to <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/103/149.html" target="_blank">Rupert Brooke</a> and <a href="http://allpoetry.com/poem/8528573-For-The-Fallen-by-Robert-Laurence-Binyon" target="_blank">Laurence Binyon</a>, and more to <a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19389" target="_blank">Wilfred Owen</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH3-Gt7mgyM" target="_blank">Rowan Atkinson</a>.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*My parents are anything but dogmatic, but my "mental furniture" is fairly Quaker in the same way that the mental furniture of ex-Catholics includes the instructions on the right calls and responses and when to sit, stand, or kneel in the course of a Mass.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-71968719533075864142014-03-11T21:59:00.002+13:002014-03-11T21:59:48.853+13:00Alphabet TV - B is for.... Big Love<span style="font-family: inherit;">First off, <a href="http://www.cinemania.co.nz/" target="_blank">Cinemania</a> has my review of <a href="http://cinemania.co.nz/review.php?id=992" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Unsolved</a>. In the highly unlikely event you were contemplating seeing this fairly-obscure product of the <span style="background-color: #fbfafa; text-align: justify;">Oklahoma University Moving Image Arts Programme, don't.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fbfafa; text-align: justify;">Second, on with Alphabet TV!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fbfafa; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fbfafa; text-align: justify;">Though actually, I should probably clarify a couple other things about it first. One is, we're waaay ahead of where I'm writing in the alphabet - I've just been slack and busy by turns. The other is that we're not binge-watching things in the traditional sense. The rule of Alphabet TV is that we watch things a season at a time, at whatever season we're currently up to. So for the last post about <i><a href="http://thegoatplan.blogspot.co.nz/2014/01/alphabet-tv-is-for-american-horror-story.html" target="_blank">American Horror Story</a> </i>I should really have clarified that I meant Season 1.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fbfafa; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fbfafa; text-align: justify;">Now, though - B is for <i>Big Love</i>. In case you're not familiar with it, <i>Big Love</i> is a dramedy about Bill (Bill Paxton) who is a fundamentalist Mormon living the Principle (ie, polygamous marriage) undercover in mainstream LDS society in Utah with his three wives and all of their children (I've actually lost count of how many there are). We're currently up to Season 3, but in this case it's actually not super-important for you to know that.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fbfafa;"><i>Big Love</i> is a weird show. On the one hand, the whole deceptive undercover element is pretty interesting - and the various ruses the family use to avoid detection are pretty clever, and when it reverts to essentially being a dramedy about family under pressure it's far from the worst one I've seen. On the other, the central conflict is between Bill and his friends (the "good" polygamists) and the ultra-fundamentalist compound of Juniper Creek where Bill was raised. That is, the conflict is between "good" polygamists and "evil" polygamists. </span><span style="background-color: #fbfafa;">Juniper Creek is definitely warped, but it almost feels like it needs to be in order for Bill to look ordinary and decent in contrast.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fbfafa;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fbfafa;">Bill attempts to treat his wives with respect and dignity, but his actual belief structure dictates that he is priest-king of his own house and that his wives and children are beholden to him as a result. It's a deeply misogynistic and patriarchal structure, and seeing the dictator attempt to be benign doesn't really change that. There are also troublesome elements of the history of Mormonism as a whole which briefly surface, then disappear without much attention. I'm thinking specifically of the <a href="http://mollymuses.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/justifying-polygamy-part-2-doctrine/" target="_blank">overt racism in some of the early doctrines</a>, which is raised by a random black walk-on character and never mentioned again.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fbfafa;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fbfafa;">That said, you don't have to take the characters' beliefs on to enjoy the show. The acting is largely great - especially Harry Dean Stanton </span><span style="background-color: #fbfafa;">who brings a peculiar beauty and melancholy to the role of</span><span style="background-color: #fbfafa;"> the head of the Juniper Creek compound - and the relationships between the characters play out in consistently interesting ways.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fbfafa;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fbfafa;">Maybe check it out, see what you think?</span></div>
Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-18528619629631449522014-01-14T22:09:00.002+13:002014-01-14T22:10:25.208+13:00Alphabet TV! A is for.... American Horror StoryHaving got bored of the movie offerings at our local DVD rental place (and with my wife feeling hard done by because we tend to watch a lot of my review movies that I pick from a list on Cinemania <i>as well as</i> any I pick at the shop) we decided to give TV series a go. However, as mild OCD is a guiding force in our lives, we decided the only rational way to do this was to start with the A's and work forward, watching one boxed set at a time until we loop around.<br />
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It's going well - we're currently watching the closest to a dire series we've gotten, and we're up to L. It also transpires that fitting TV epsiodes into our lives is currently easier than watching movies.</div>
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At this point it occurs to me that I really ought to document this in case anyone thinks it's amusing. Therefore behold and wonder at the awesome force of <b>ALPHABET TV.</b></div>
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<u><b>A is for... Amercan Horror Story</b></u></div>
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I didn't really have any expectations of this - though I was cynical about the capacity of a series to maintain the scares and atmosphere over a whole run.</div>
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I was initially really impressed - each episode seemed to have a new unique scary thing that genuinely creeped us out, and the theme music managed to give us the jitters pretty much every time.</div>
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The premise (only mild spoilers, I promise) is that a troubled family move into a house which for some reason causes everyone who dies there to become a ghost. The collection of ghosts are pretty unnerving (at least to start with) but toward the end of the season everything did kind of degenerate into "<i>Desperate Housewives</i>, but everyone's dead".</div>
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A noble experiment.</div>
Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-81786243591597099562014-01-09T12:33:00.003+13:002014-01-09T12:39:03.509+13:00LobotomyWay back in 2011, in an attempt to stop neglecting this blog so much, <a href="http://thegoatplan.blogspot.co.nz/2011/10/movie-review-asylum.html" target="_blank">I reviewed a terrible movie I'd watched called </a><a href="http://thegoatplan.blogspot.co.nz/2011/10/movie-review-asylum.html" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Asylum</a>. If you can't be bothered going back and reading it my post in full, the movie was about teenagers being stalked and murdered by the ghost of a sadistic psychiatrist who wielded lobotomy picks as weapons. It was really very bad.<br />
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Anyhow, one of the things I mentioned in that review was that it was that the non-stupid bits of the killer psychiatrist's story loosely mirrored the life and work of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Jackson_Freeman_II" target="_blank">Dr. Walter Freeman</a>, the American physician who pioneered and did much to popularise the transorbital "icepick" lobotomy. I thought that it was a shame that <i>Asylum</i> ignored this connection in favour of really dumb slasher-backstory, because I feel like Freeman is kind of a tragic figure. He genuinely seems to have been motivated by what he saw as the best interests of people who would otherwise have been confined to state asylums.<br />
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<i>The Psychologist</i> has just put up <a href="http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=27&editionID=235&ArticleID=2403" target="_blank">a really interesting article</a> about letters to Freeman from his patients and his responses - it's a really fascinating look at the way lobotomy was viewed at the time, and how it was able to continue for so long.<br />
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(Hat-tip to <a href="http://www.mindhacks.com/" target="_blank">Mind Hacks</a> for the link.)Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-32269261367420781952014-01-08T12:31:00.000+13:002014-01-08T12:31:35.418+13:00Pet Hens Fry<a href="http://cinemania.co.nz/review.php?id=988" target="_blank">Cinemania have my review of the big boxed set <i>Stephen Fry's Inquisitive Documentaries</i></a>. Is it good? It's Stephen Fry talking about stuff he's interested in, so if that sounds good to you it's very good.<br />
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The set includes <i>Stephen Fry In America</i>, <i>Last Chance To See</i>, <i>Return of the Rhino</i> (basically just another <i>LCTS</i> episode), and <i>Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press</i>. They're all good, go check out the review if you want more detail on why (it's MAAAAASSIVE is why I'm not going to rewrite it here).Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-56203958175836432442013-12-03T22:02:00.000+13:002013-12-03T22:02:27.816+13:00Magic: part 4 - A practical exampleRemember way back <a href="http://thegoatplan.blogspot.com/2012/03/magic-part-1-not-magic.html" target="_blank">in the first one of these</a> where I said I thought the distinction between "Magick" and stage magic was something of a false dichotomy? Here's what I mean: watch the video below - for as long as you can stand at least. Sorry for the random German subtitles - the version I watched initially has now been taken down.<br />
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Right. That woman's name is Kiesha Crowther, she calls herself Little Grandmother (<a href="http://littlegrandmother.net/" target="_blank">here is her amazing personal website</a>) and she is a Magus.<br />
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Depending on your personal definition of "Magus" you may well have a number of objections to that assertion. Her video is hokey as all get-out, and clearly bunk. Water is demonstrably not entirely made of crystals, there are almost certainly no "scientists" planning to hand out your personal stock of magic crystals to the people of Fukushima and dump them into the radioactive holding ponds because "love is stronger than radiation", and the idea that you personally will definitely have a large stock of magic crystals lying around is bizarre*. Moreover, if you've clicked through to her site you'll see that she's made a number of very bold claims about her supposed psychic abilities and the high degrees she holds in Native American traditional magics - these are all almost certainly lies as well.<br />
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But this misses the point.<br />
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A stage magician is not judged on their ability to actually saw people in half and magically heal them on the spot. A stage magician is judged on their ability to draw an audience into a consensus, misdirect their attention and provide a pleasing illusion that they have sawed someone in half. This takes a level of control over human perception which approaches the truly magical in the hands of a masterful practitioner - for a spectacular example check out <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/07/130107fa_fact_green" target="_blank">this guy</a>. Similarly, you can only judge the power of a Magus like Little Grandmother when you understand their true goal. In this case it's pretty simple - money, and the prestige necessary to create more money.<br />
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For those of you who didn't manage the whole video try it again, for those who did - pay close attention. Notice how crafted the whole thing is. She really does try to cover as many generically-New Age bases as she can, and even goes so far as to vaguely allude to some sort of Evil Big Government conspiracy to suppress True Knowledge toward the end there to try and bring in the survivalists. This is a magical ritual. She is trying to draw power from her followers to increase her stature and pull in some energy-in-the-form-of-money at the same time. The fact that her self-claimed powers are nonsense is entirely irrelevant because it's all misdirection - it's a carefully constructed mirage designed to hook into the cultural obsessions of largely white, fairly affluent, mostly-Americans, and me circa 1995.<br />
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And while she's no Crowley, Kiesha Crowther is powerful enough for her own ends. So long as she maintains her ritual Face Of Sincerity, keeps posing with massive crystals, and refuses to shut up she'll keep on getting speaking engagements and requests to run workshops and do rituals. She wields sufficient cultural force to have at least some of her detractors shouted down and shunned (if you really want you can check out the controversy on the New Age web <a href="https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=little+grandmother&rlz=1C1CHMO_enNZ528NZ528&oq=little+gra&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0l5&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#es_sm=93&espv=210&q=little%20grandmother%20controversy" target="_blank">here</a>, but be warned - it's a hell of a rabbit hole). She's even been smart enough to keep her mythology sufficiently white-bread to leave her a back door out if she ever decides to "renounce" it all and "convert" to a more conservative racket like fundamentalist Evangelicalism.<br />
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Manipulation of the gap between perception and reality, resulting in a massive increase of personal power.<br />
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Magic.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Possibly less bizarre if you're one of the "Tribe Of Many Colours" she's addressing in this video, but still.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-86270265978161718052013-11-20T15:57:00.001+13:002014-01-09T12:34:53.452+13:00Mouldy Sushi<a href="http://www.cinemania.co.nz/" target="_blank">Cinemania</a> has my reviews of <i><a href="http://cinemania.co.nz/review.php?id=980" target="_blank">Dead Sushi</a> </i>and<i> <a href="http://cinemania.co.nz/review.php?id=982" target="_blank">Mold</a>. </i>They're both deliberate attempts to make "good bad" movies, and both unusual in that they (mostly) succeed.<br />
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<i>Mold </i>is a homage to 1980s cheapies that manages to pretty much nail the tone (and horrifying-yet-hilarious practical effects) of its terrible source material and riff on it at the same time. The framing device about an American government desperate for a new weapon in the War On Drugs is an almost total red herring, but that's actually no bad thing as the real issues tied up with America's relationship with Colombia would probably have either been mishandled or have detracted from the film's manic go-forward energy.<br />
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<i>Dead Sushi </i>is the most-recent full movie* from porn-director-turned-total-insanity-director <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noboru_Iguchi" target="_blank">Noboru Iguchi</a> who seems to specialise in this sort of thing. It's completely nuts from start to finish and, aside from a weird sense of permanent slight misogyny, is a lot of fun. All you need to know is that it involves zombie sushi and climaxes with a flying sushi battleship and an axe-wielding tuna-mutant.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>*</i>He directed the "F is for Fart" sequence in <i>The ABCs of Death</i> more recently. This appears to be entirely in character, if you look at his non-porn filmography. Actually, looking at his porn filmography on Wikipedia is pretty fun too, if only because the totally-functional-and-descriptive titles that pornos get are hilarious when translated from one language to another.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5492416157906040143.post-55913663309114754602013-08-26T15:44:00.003+12:002013-11-20T15:58:00.148+13:00The Cherry Psychomaniac and the Darkest Corner of Paradise<a href="http://cinemania.co.nz/" target="_blank">Cinemania</a> has my reviews of <i><a href="http://cinemania.co.nz/review.php?id=955" target="_blank">Cherry</a></i>, <a href="http://cinemania.co.nz/review.php?id=962" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">The Death Wheelers</a>, and <i><a href="http://cinemania.co.nz/review.php?id=964" target="_blank">The Darkest Corner of Paradise</a></i>.<br />
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<i>Cherry</i> and <i>The Darkest Corner Of Paradise</i> both felt like concept overreach to me. They seemed like they had big ideas in the back of their creators' minds which didn't end up actually translating to the screen.<i> </i>In <i>Cherry</i>, this was a meditation on the destructive capacity of human relationships and <a href="http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Nice_guy_syndrome" target="_blank">the "nice guy" myth</a> which got muddied by the general unlikability of all its characters, while <i>Paradise</i> aspired to <i>Taxi Driver</i> but ended up with lots of scenes of a guy walking around in the dark (albeit attractively shot, and with a neat soundtrack) that led up to nothing much.<br />
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<i>The Death Wheelers</i> (originally and confusingly titled <i>Psychomania</i>) is an entirely different kettle of fish - an amazing 70s-kitsch time capsule and a great piece of English spooky-pagan horror. Sadly (I looked it up) the charmingly brutal Nicky Henson who plays the lead seems to have come to nothing in particular. This was also the last movie for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sanders" target="_blank">George Sanders</a>* before his suicide, and there's some suggestion that its poor reception at the time contributed to his depression.<br />
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Really the only downsides to <i>Death Wheelers</i> are its over-reliance on now-dated car chase scenes, and (on the version I got at least) the poor sound quality. Otherwise I'd highly recommend it to anyone who's into that sort of thing.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* The voice of Shere Khan in the Disney <i>Jungle Book</i>, amongst many many other things.</span>Wolfboyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04780236011500530931noreply@blogger.com0