Posts by giovanni tiso
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Damian Christie,
Again, we are in danger of me feeling you are deliberately misinterpreting what I'm trying to say.
I was going to apologise but then
I didn't see too many people arguing whether "cafe", "public square" or "salon" was an appropriate metaphor for online discussion when I was in Afghanistan.
you confirmed my interpretation of your comment was in fact correct: discussing class is a first world luxury. Good then.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Tip of the iceberg:
Or, speaking of great New Zealanders, this.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
it means some people are going the other way....
And for a whole bunch of different reasons. Having a child with a disability will help the process no end.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Rob Stowell,
If we're going to talk about class (and it might be invaluable- if we can move past the fraught part :)), yeah, it's absolutely necessary to define terms- in this case, what and who and how and why separate classes are constituted.
I don't think we'd easily come to an agreement on any definition. But I would hope that we might come to agree that class is a broader and more complex concept than what's generally understood by the term in our political discourse (which goes "underclass", "middle New Zealand", "the rich"). Glossing over the differences allows politicians to appear never to go against any interest in their policies, and also to frame anything underneath middle New Zealand - which Goff placed last year at a level of income ludicrously above the median, incidentally - as the citizenship in need of rescuing. As if our economic system wasn't in fact predicated on containing inflation by keeping a lid on wages, a goal that is achieved in turn by ensuring a constant reserve of unemployed people.
But not allowing for the existence of class or a sufficiently honest and nuanced understanding of class impoverishes the political conversation, and so not even the introduction of a CGT (bad for the propertied class) and the extension of the retirement age (bad for the working class) proposed by Labour were able to be discussed in terms of how they affected different sectors of the population differently - but always solely in terms of their effects on the government's books.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Damian Christie,
Not that I'm saying that's right, but I'm not quite sure how to show the appropriate level of self-deprecation
So when you proposed that that link "fitted the general theme of the past few pages", you meant to be self-deprecating, and not characterise the discussion as one long white whine?
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Damian Christie,
Someone forwarded this to me yesterday. It seems to fit the general theme of the past few pages.
The erasure of class in the West is quite nicely illustrated by that meme. On the one hand, it says that since people in the first world are better off than those in the third world, than there is no meaningful inequality in the first world and nobody is entitled to complain (shut up, proles). On the other hand, it says that nobody in the third world has first world problems, which is equally unhelpful.
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I also want to respond briefly on the Grant Robertson thing because I think it’s pertinent: I don’t have much of a problem with the guy, I thought he was weak on special needs in education but liked a couple of his campaigns in Parliament (particularly on the vote to prisoners). I am however enormously frustrated by the tendency on the part of almost all of our politicians – and certainly not just Robertson – to empty their speeches of political content, leaving us to try to divine what they’re about from Hansard or their voting record or inside knowledge of party debates. When Robertson appeared to be supporting Parker, who’s on the far right of the party, it came, if not as a surprise, as a confirmation that I was at a complete loss to work out who he was. And so I asked PAS because here he is well liked, and I figured somebody could enlighten me.
This speaks directly to the issue of the leadership contest, and the topic of this post: we can’t have two aspiring party leaders not say a word about the concrete political direction in which they want to take the party and be okay with it. Politics isn’t a zero sum game, where you provide for everyone across the board, as if every component of society (read: class) had the same economic interest. I would like to know from the leader of a Labour party what they think about unions, about welfare, about taxation, about party organization, about the role of activists and NGOs; what are their political solutions to the country’s problems, not in detailed policy terms, but in broad yet meaningful strokes. I think we deserve that. And I think that our discussions here and in other progressive, independent forums shouldn’t replicate the narrative that the mainstream media and the party strategists foist upon us, which is all about personality and theatre. Otherwise what’s the point? But if we are interested in questioning that narrative, then we might have to concede that there is a problem with the idea (implied for instance in the very popular video by Robert Reich that somebody quoted upthread) that what is good for the middle class – ie, by and large, us – is automatically good for the nation. It is a very self-serving view that is directly contradicted by some pretty harsh data on how liberals feel about the working class in New Zealand. We should face up to this stuff.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Greg Dawson,
(and I could write a book about “don’t be a dick”, I really could)
Umm, I know I'm interrupting something, but can we have that book? Or the discussion and debate that makes that book?
I like Danielle’s answer, but just to expand the sense in which I think it’s pertinent:
Roughly speaking an online community can be run like a bunker, a lounge or a public square. If it’s a bunker, then there will be a strict code on the behaviour that is or isn’t tolerated and the topics that are or aren’t legitimate, so etiquette won’t really come into it. If it’s a lounge, then “don’t be a dick” works quite well, with the caveat that what constitutes being a dick will always be a matter of debate and be a little or very arbitrary. (In the PAS demographic for instance it still seems okay to be dicks about The Feelers, or so I’ve observed.)
Now maybe PAS is in fact a lounge. It used to be called a Cafè and Russell has made variations on that analogy numerous times. But I think it’s also a lounge that aspires to be a public square sometimes. And if PAS is or would like to be a public square, then “don’t be a dick” doesn’t work at all, and much more thought needs to go into the kind of speech that is promoted and the kind of speech that is tolerated.
I happen to think that the nation is in fairly desperately need of a public square, in fact more than one, and that PAS could fulfil that role without losing its conviviality or its liberal core (which I don’t see as a problem per se). But yeah, if it has that aspiration then I think it needs to work a little harder at not foreclosing debate on a range of issues.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Emma Hart,
The reason those discussions work is that no-one is dumb or insensitive enough to be a nit-picky fight chasing arsehole on those threads.
Wow. Really? Okay. Except my working hypothesis is that if Public Address treated sexual orientation the way it treats class, you'd be denouncing it very loudly. From another blog. And you'd be as snarky as the day is long. As indeed you are here, liberally and often, including making comments about commenters in your threads from the twitter feed that runs alongside the thread.
So, being a dick? In the eye of the beholder, if you ask me.
And that's your right. In which case, you shouldn't be surprised if people point out that you are.
I don't have a problem with people pointing out that I'm difficult. When the moderator does it, it's different, and it sets the tone of the place and the limits of the discussion. When he does it for the tenth time for the same reason, and you think the reason is bollocks, in can be exasperating, and pretty much leaves you no chioce but to bugger off - which of course is fine, too. I hadn't posted here for months for a reason. I certainly regret popping back in.
But I don't believe we need a discussion about what counts as "left", more about what counts as human.
It doesn't have to be called Left, for me Left can mean something as simple as a consideration for people south of "middle [insert name of country here]". I do know however that a generic commitment to fairness doesn't cut it - we get that from every single political party. I also agree with an observation that WB Sutch made 50 years ago about the lack of social imagination of our ruling class. We need to sharpen that imagination radically and that might involve the odd impolite discussion about just who is being served by either of our main parties in government.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Russell Brown,
I do honestly think you've been difficult to have a discussion with elsewhere in this thread though.
But that's okay! I don't want to not be difficult. People should be difficult, from time to time. We have had benefits set under the poverty line for twenty years in this country, nine of which under a Labour government. When is it okay to stop being polite about that?