Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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Yeah I've never really 'got' the whole Op-Shop thing... I remember going to an NZ music showcase a few years back that featured them alongside Brooke Fraser, Evermore and Katchafire... And I'll be honest: I was BORED.
Am I alone in finding Brooke Fraser downright sinister? It's not just the Christian thing. It's like she's the dark heart of some precise, calculating machine whose intentions we can only guess at. If ever the Antichrist were loose upon the land, it would look -- and sound -- like Brooke Fraser.
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That document is bizarre -- page 12 -- "Pave the way for the creation of a new military service -- U.S. Space Forces".
Yeah, that's pathological indeed. The aim there is to produce a worldwide web of orbiting satellites, each armed with projectiles that can be rained down on any point on the earth's surface using GPS data. Essentially, it represents a desire to apotheosize American military force into some kind of vengeful, Old Testament God.
Hopefully, we'll run out of oil before it gets to that point.
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Sorry, Russell, your 'analysis' is as lame as the thesis, for which Mr Stoddart was awarded an academic diploma.
A graduate diploma at VUW consists of at least 4 papers, so Stoddart would have to have submitted more coursework than just the research paper. But whatever.
Frankly, the research was pissweak -- but that's all that's needed at universities these days.
And the research backing up that assertion is?
I have to say I found the piece illuminating in a few ways. I hadn't realized, for instance, that 'sociologist' was some kind of right-wing smear term. Greg Clydesdale's Kim Hill interview makes a lot more sense to me now.
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Some background on Brash and youthful Marxism, for what it's worth. OK, I admit, calling the Student Christian Movement a radical organization was probably a bit much. But certainly, Brash identified with Marxism until 'converted' while doing his Ph.D. at ANU.
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And again, we come back to the stylistic and rhetorical links between the extreme left of yore and the poo-flingers of the 21st Century. They are the embarrassing Marxists of their age.
Which makes sense, considering how many prominent local right wingers started out on the furthest fringes of the Left. Deborah Coddington, Peter Verschaffelt, Tim Shadbolt, and Don Brash were all members of various '60s radical movements, weren't they? And of course Perigo himself grew up in a Communist household.
One might be forgiven for thinking of youthful Marxism as a kind of warning sign of impending trouble.
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Claims of gender symmetry [in domestic violence] are often made by those who do not understand the data: what the various studies measure and what they omit. Others make claims of gender symmetry based on disingenuous political motives, attempting to discredit women’s suffering by offering abstract statistical equivalences that turn out to be chimerical.
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Since 1975 at least ten ...investigations have confirmed the fact that women hit and beat their husbands. Unfortunately the data on wife-to-husband violence has been misreported, misinterpreted, and misunderstood. Research uniformly shows that about as many women hit men as men hit women. However, those who report that husband abuse is as common as wife abuse overlook two important facts. First, the greater average size and strength of men and their greater aggressiveness means that a man’s punch will probably produce more pain, injury and harm than a punch by a woman. Second, nearly three-fourths of the violence committed by women is done in self-defense.
(Both quotes from Michael Kimmel, '"Gender Symmetry" in Domestic Violence', Violence Against Women 8, no. 11 [2002]: 1356, 1357.)
Just sayin'.
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And, finally, a fascinating essay on the Pew website about the changing face of evangelical Christianity in America, in a year when the decisions of people of faith may have great political bearing.
There's an interesting article on this in the June 30 issue of the New Yorker (not online as far as I can tell): Frances Fitzgerald, 'The New Evangelicals: A growing challenge to the religious right'.
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Not to go all Godwin or anything, but I thought there were some interesting local resonances in this piece from the Guardian:
... the BNP's rise tells us more about Britain than just racism. It is a canary in the mine - an early warning system signalling the complacency of our political culture in which our political class has been complicit. Trapped in a hopeless spiral of negativity, people will vote against anything - immigration, the Tories, Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson, Scottish nationalism, Gordon Brown or Europe, to name a few. But it seems a long time since large numbers of people voted for anything.
So the fact that the BNP has performed best in Labour strongholds should come as no surprise. Its rise and New Labour's demise are linked. The government is failing even on its own modest terms. Child poverty and pensioner poverty are up. Economic inequality is now greater than under the Tories. Inflation is rising, house prices falling, and last week workers were again asked to tighten their belts. Never mind no return to boom and bust - many feel like they are about to crash and burn. People are desperate.
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I talked to someone involved in an electorate campaign for Labour at the beginning of the year -- they mentioned strong signs of "mortgage belt poverty" coming up in polling in places like the North Shore. I guess it makes sense that the most over-extended people will feel the strongest sense of grievance in a credit crunch.
And it's interesting, isn't it, just who isn't getting blamed or scapegoated here. Mortgage-holders and credit-card-debtors aren't, it seems, looking sideways at the banks that enticed them to take on debt in the first place. Those complaining about the price of food and petrol aren't thinking about who owns the supermarkets and the fuel pumps, or the role of commodity traders in creating speculative bubbles in those markets.
No, clearly it's all the Government's fault. And I love how the solution to the problems caused by (among other things) rampant and poorly regulated speculation in the finance markets is to elect a government with a former currency trader as its head. I guess it makes sense, in a topsy-turvy, Hegelian kind of way.
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Given the historic patterns of MMP representation in NZ, miraculously abolishing the Maori seats, is pretty unlikely, and almost sounds like scare-mongering.
Although with a large enough National majority this year, the 'right' media campaign, and a quick-and-dirty Referendum early enough in their term, MMP itself might not necessarily be on the safest ground.