Posts by mark taslov
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I thought it was quite an apt pun.
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Hard News: Starting the cannabis…, in reply to Alfie,
It’s promising, but again disappointing that Labour continues to trumpet its faith in age regulation by the black market.
"I have a personal view, as do many colleagues about wider liberalisation of broader cannabis use, and that issue is about the risk of access to younger people and the public health issues that go with cannabis use, by people who are not fully developed and not fully mature.
“Understanding that the brain is not fully developed until the mid-twenties, more access for people around that age creates a public health risk."
We know about the risk of access to younger people because younger people have access.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to WH,
I'm all ears.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to WH,
Do you have anything to contribute but an ad hominiem squeak?
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Rich Lock,
In my opinion, making the distinction is crucial.
It is, but being able to make such a distinction is a privilege, contingent on education among other things, in a country where 40% of black males graduate from high school. (NZ: Maori 31% Pacific 29%)
As for the Pentagon’s incendiaries, they won’t need dusting off that’s for sure, we’ve been watching the world burn for quite some time.
So when, for example, Trump talks about overturning Roe v. Wade, my first thought is for the thousands of Middle Eastern and Asian women the US has bombed and executed over the last 50 years, my second thought is for American Women having their access to abortion rescinded, and my third thought is that we have just inherited a Prime Minister who would – if he had his way – ban abortion, a Prime Minister’s wife who actively refuses to offer access to this basic medical necessity, who through her schooling with the nuns decided her calling was to study for 5+ years on the Government dime in order to gain a qualification that has enabled her to actively pursue God’s work as a gatekeeper between people and their bodies. A kind of angel of our Lord if you will.
In localities with better human rights legislation for this issue she’d be struck off. And somehow – through the fractured lens of our media – this is glossed over as relatively acceptable behaviour – in this Gloriavale paradigm we’re instead fed narratives that these people – our Prime Ministerial couple – are not fundamentalist Christians but reasonable, coherent human beings whose oddball ideas don’t impact the lives of everyone with a functional uterus – as if it’s not absolutely normal in other localities for a person to go to a hospital, ask for an abortion and get one then and there, as a basic human right in the 21st century.
You’ll no doubt have heard that New Zealand was the first country to win Universal Suffrage, we tend to talk about it quite a bit, we don’t get a lot of firsts, and we’re prone to overlooking that what is special about this achievement is not how marvelously quick we were but how we have the power to meaningfully improve the world by setting better standards.
So the PM didn’t make it to the ’Tangi, but he did receive a call from the POTUS. One wonders though, if our PM had really had his mitre screwed on, he might have remembered that parable – one of the biggies – The Good Samaritan, and knowing that poor Donald is a profoundly compromised individual, he could have done him and our neighbours a solid and offered to take those 1250 refugees off their hands or at the very least offered to present this option to our country, for the greater good.
Instead they talked about golf.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Rich Lock,
I hope this might provide some perspective:
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/16/politics/white-nationalists-trump-losing-faith/
As the second paragraph of that Wikipedia entry you linked to clearly states:
The term is also typically used to describe a political ideology that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical and/or industrial domination by white people (as evidenced by historical and contemporary sociopolitical structures such as the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow laws in the United States, and apartheid in South Africa).
I may have misinterpreted, but is “So fucking what?” a response to this more palatable form of white supremacy? I’m not being facetious, it’s a serious question, because being genuinely concerned about card carrying white supremacists and yet nonplussed by actual white supremacy itself strikes me as a dangerous contradiction.
Today we remember the signing of the treaty. That means as many things to as many people and is often a source of conflict for obvious reasons – none less so than this insidious form of white supremacy it ushered in. For those of us whose ancestors – both Maori and Pakeha – were on these islands before the signing of that treaty, it’s difficult to ignore that this idea – an idea latterly named “New Zealand” is essentially a white supremacist ideology, albeit a white supremacist ideology corralled not by self-proclaimed white supremacists but by representatives of the British Crown, people cut from the same fabric as those that enacted the genocide of 95,000,000 to 114,000,000 Native Americans, snipped from the same Hessian fibre as those that have enacted the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern civilians this century.
Russell’s original post – which is awesome – wasn’t specifically dealing with The USA’s internal situation but also the impact that Trump’s administration might have globally. Of the 7 billion people currently on the planet, in almost any country you’d care to name, very few need reminding about white supremacy and the impact it continues to have on their lives.
About 8 years ago you and I had a debate on the merits of democracy based on Winston “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement.” Churchill’s quote:
’Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.’
I thought you made a fairly compelling argument at the time and It informed my thinking to the extent that as long as their democratic checks appear to be functioning, it remains very difficult for me to split hairs between the gamut of racist ideologies on offer in the 21st century.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Rich Lock,
Does that not cause you any concern at all?
Is there a middle option available? I see white supremacy everywhere I look.
Average (median) wealth for Māori in 2010 was about $18,750, far less than the $125,500 for Pākehā. This reflects the historical alienation of Māori land and assets, as well as other factors. Average wealth for Pacific peoples was lower still, at $8,500.
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Hard News: Starting the cannabis…, in reply to Craig Young,
Sorry, but for understandable reasons, my priority has to be directly getting gender identity into the NZ Human Rights Act. The transgender community should not have had to wait **twenty three years* for that.
Good on you Craig. No doubt you will have observed the number of articles published here expressly dealing with transgender rights since you raised the issue five years ago is zero. What you may have well noticed in their place was an abundance of heated threads discussing issues of rape and violence within a 99.9% exclusively heteronormative and cisnormative frame. And as I’m sure you’re well aware, without visibility battles like this go nowhere, so it’s important to note that in the intervening period New Zealand has gone from a world leader (according to Georgina Beyer 2010) in transgender rights and protections to well outside the top 10 as other countries have granted their transgender communities better legal recognition.
Obviously platforms like Stuff.co.nz have served up an array of testimonies from “functional” trans people often endowed enough to gain limited recognition
I’m happy that, at least in principal, medical transition is covered by public health. I have however had a hard time trying to get access to this theoretically covered medical care – from a GP who wants nothing to do with me anymore, to months waiting for appointments, to referrals which were never put through by hospital doctors.
I gave up and went private
So while on the surface things appear rosy, it never feels good bursting someone’s bubble and this can both drive the voiceless deeper or it can strengthen resolve to find an ear in certain nooks without derailing threads..
Rerailing this. With regards to cannabis, I’m proud to admit that I partake, but unfortunately unlike most of the readership here, I’m not flush enough to actually afford to purchase cannabis – luxury – so I have had to pull up my sleeves, apply a bit of elbow grease and get my hands dirty from time to time – if and when I’ve decided I might want some – 6 months in advance.
Unlike your average purchaser the risks are obviously far greater, because the charge for supply is not contingent on actually selling the plant but on the quantity one is in possession of, exacerbated by the ultra-dodge prison/transgender issues.
So for the obvious reason that I violate one law – I strongly support Russell and others’ activism on this issue. But a look in on transgender and intersex actual human rights – I can’t say I’d complain.
If the Government were to decriminalise “possession of cannabis” but then repurpose these police resources into further clamping down on suppliers and minorities – I wouldn’t be at all surprised – because if we’re not quibbling over fines – in the recreational branch of the industry – that’s not so far from the reality.
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Up Front: Dear Dudebros, in reply to Deborah,
#notallmen..#notallmen..#notallmen..#notallmen..#notallmen..#notallmen..#notallmen
Deborah I thought Emma wrote a really great post here, and what I liked most about it was that it was almost genderless – ascribing dudebros as an attitude more than anything – see Margaret Comer. As a victim of sexual assault I was disappointed that you chose to address Steven in this way, peppering the post with a hashtag explicitly designed – as Emma pointed out – to “ridicule” members of one gender group, a #hashtag so transphobic that Georgina Beyer would qualify as a man:
A man is an adult male of the species homo sapiens. To clarify, “adult” here does not mean someone who’s able to pay their own rent, or treat others with respect. Adult simply means that this male has gone through puberty and is no longer a boy.
Obviously our intersections with the victims here may differ. Yours appears to be that you are the same sex.
As a transgender person in the lowest tax bracket working in the adult entertainment industry I see the issue – like yourself – as gendered, but I am also quite aware that this is but one intersection among many. In Scarlette’s case it’s also about rich versus poor, predator and prey, humanisation vs objectification, powerful vs weak, individual vs institution. It’s about many things and to be honest with you, speaking from personal experience I’m far more concerned about being beaten or raped by either gender than whether someone might question me walking alone after the fact.
In Scarlette’s case the incident raised crucial questions about the treatment and safety of AEI workers in New Zealand, about internalised misogyny, about institutionalised rape culture, about the power of money and profile to influence public perception.
In Kuggeleijn’s case, the issue raised questions about the fitness of our justice system’s handling of rape cases, it highlights the ineffectiveness of the jury system for cases of this nature and reiterates exactly why I would never dream of pressing charges against those successful members of our society who sexually assaulted me.
I likewise have no doubt about your good faith, but it’s worth considering whether that kind of challenging gendered sloganeering is the most sensitive way to publicly address a victim of sexual abuse.
As a top tier highly paid Caucasian academic equipped with networks to present your views about rape culture on national media platforms, it is worth contemplating whether you might have less in common with either Kuggeleijin’s (alledged) victim or Scarlette than some men do, #notallmen, but enough that greater sensitivity doesn't feel entirely uncalled for.
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Hard News: About Chris Brown, in reply to william blake,
It’s not that we believe and absorb violence from pop culture it’s the fact that Brown does, and has enacted it, that makes him a criminal.
It’s arguable whether Brown absorbed his violence exclusively from pop culture or whether watching his step-father beat his mother might also have been an influence.
“(I told my mother) ‘I just want you to know that I love you, but I’m gonna take a baseball bat one day while you are at work, and I’m gonna kill him.’ He used to hit my mom…He made me terrified all the time, terrified like I had to pee on myself. I remember one night he made her nose bleed. I was crying and thinking, ‘I’m just gonna go crazy on him one day…
Perhaps we might better understand this chaos that he perpetuates if we too had been raped at 8 years old.
I for one am not in the least surprised that “behavioural problems” persist- this toxic masculinity is rampant in a society resolutely focused on “symptoms” while systemically erasing and marginalising victims of abuse.