Posts by BenWilson
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Legal Beagle: Paula's Peril; or The…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Sometimes you come up trumps, others it's snake-eyes all the way. Live with it.
And sometimes there's no need to roll the die at all. To lose your favorite Minister could be considered a misfortune. To give the balance of power to the Maori Party looks like carelessness. She'd have been in anyway.
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Legal Beagle: Paula's Peril; or The…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
And with the enormous amounts of time, energy and money involved I don’t think anyone pulls that trigger casually.
No, but it is rather important this time around, especially considering the chance of Graeme's "Paula's Peril" scenario. If that eventuated, then the whole National party could end up cursing her for going for the judicial recount when she was going to get in on the list anyway, and possibly cursing themselves for not reading Legal Beagle. Was it really a risk worth taking, just to kick Sepuloni out? And Sepuloni, facing electoral oblivion, has time on her hands.
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A little warning to be careful with names.
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Legal Beagle: Paula's Peril; or The…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I do hope there's a petition. No real reason not to try, at least. It matters a lot to the outcome for both government and opposition. Could Waitakere mirror Wairarapa, and flip on a petition, by a very small margin? Magnifying the power of the Maori party hugely.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
A lot of our problems stem from the way the supply of resources that has enabled this is no longer limitless.
I've discovered only recently that both sides of my family were Social Credit advocates. The Westies, urban and working class, but also with elements bordering on the criminal, clearly did not feel great solidarity with Labour. My mother's side, originally rural, were the same, people who essentially believed in property, either to develop for housing, or for produce.
It's curious that that movement in NZ died. One analysis I've seen said that it was soaked up by NZF, but I don't think that's the whole story. Certainly as an international movement it was plagued by racism, particularly antisemitism, because it was deeply anti-banking, and that kind of thinking was simply common at the time Douglas thought of his theories, the Holocaust had not yet happened to show where such stupidity ends. But ultimately it was a theory that was entirely economic, like Marxism, but democratic, unlike Marxism. So it didn't have policies that reached out to hearts of targeted groups. It didn't promise rights to women, or Maori, or anyone, really, other than that they should receive enough of the goods of society to give them the freedom to partake of it as they saw fit. It was quasi-religious (I think that's the main source of the antisemitism, really), and the people who loved it were usually quite socially conservative.
What I think happened was that it split along the Green - NZF axis, that those for whom racism was a powerful motivator liked Winston Peters, and those for whom the appeal was the economics, the rejection of capitalism and the more leftist neoliberalism floated Greenwards. The fact that these groups dislike each other quite a lot makes me think they must once have been unhappy lovers, since their economics is quite similar in some respects. Rather like the factions within ACT, ironically.
Thoughts welcome, this could all be my own prejudices talking.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
Being born rich or poor doesn't mean you have to stay that way, but it sure is easier to be rich if you were born rich.
It's also extremely easy to become poor. One of the least challenging things one could ever do, followed closely by time spent being challenged beyond much that one would have experienced ever before. Whether you are made unhappier by it is not inevitable in any way.
Out of interest, does anyone here (including the obvious candidates) not consider themselves to be middle class?
I've never hidden it. I'd go so far as to say I'm upper middle class, more privileged even than most of the middle classes. This is by virtue of my upper middle class mother, and working class father, and the free education he availed himself off to become a well-paid professional, and considerable luck with property investment. To me it's one of the endearing stories of the culture of NZ that my mother would marry so far "below her station" simply out of love, and that the only resistance was from my mother's mother, who I now see being profoundly upper class.
Apparently my mother's father, a self-made millionaire, was very much approving of my father, when he learned that he had saved up almost enough money for the deposit on a house (Dad told me he had actually saved it up to buy a car) off the back of working class wages, and gifted them with the difference, helped them to purchase wisely (he was a property developer), and felt very vindicated by my father's tireless work at improving his plot, even if he was disapproving of the occasional vulgarity displayed. I fondly remember his cliff-top mansion overlooking Castor Bay, and days spent playing on that beach (with only my older brother as guardian! Different times).
Not such fond memories of the vast Westie clan, though. They were still working class, although mostly on trajectories to the middle class and beyond (more self-made millionaires there). We simply didn't have values in common, although they were all immensely proud of my father, for reasons I'm slowly appreciating. In short, he was the golden-haired boy, a constant center of attention having been forced to learn the piano, and the patriarchs all being keen singers. But also by virtue of the neverending generosity of his mother, whose young life in that clan resembled that of a domestic servant, something her sisters only lately came to admit bordered on abuse, and his father, a classic hardworking bloke who was later discovered by the government to have a very powerful mind as he dug trenches for roads, and rapidly became a well paid and respected civil servant in the MoT.
It's only as an adult that I was able to see a huge part of my personal alienation from these fantastic humans was on account of the shadow of one of the other classes of people mentioned by many here, the disabled. My father's sister suffered profound brain damage and this changed their lives forever. My grandfather I remember as perpetually angry, my grandmother as relentlessly self-pitying. My father's 35-odd years of dedication to the disabled has obvious origins. My own misery when my son developed a brain injury when he was born came in part because I had some inkling of what to expect, and is only reducing as it becomes slowly apparent that we had a very lucky escape thanks to the fantastic people at NICU, and the ACC system, and my luck in my father's profession, and the Great Wonder known as the school system, and well, just luck.
I'm incredibly lucky to be a middle class NZer. I'm lucky in coming from a happy home. I'm lucky in being healthy and intelligent. Yet still, one big misfortune can upend everything. So I'm also lucky to have discovered this community, lucky to know people like Russell and Gio and the rest of you. I do not want to see it torn apart by violent disagreement, nor by creeping conformism. It's very important to me. It helped me get through hard times, and I hope it will continue to.
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I wanted to have this debate some time ago, precipitated by Danyl coming in and being dickish by PAS standards, on the subject of, IIRC, the value of an Arts degree. But I don't think the time was right, or perhaps the precipitate wasn't. Danyl was deliberately stirring, and I don't think he was engaging in good faith in that discussion, although "good faith" is up there with "dickishness", as a criteria that suffers from considerable vagueness. Gio wants this one, and you've all gone and had it behind my back :-)
As in that debate, I'd invite people to reflect upon times that they have felt unable to say something on PAS that seemed quite reasonable to them, and what that felt like. For myself, the worst case was around the time of the referendum about smacking, in which I suggested that it was a very bad idea to ignore something felt so strongly by the population, even if the population is actually wrong. Essentially, I was placing democracy over my personal morality (which is that smacking is the wrong thing to do). But I felt vilified for saying this, conflated with saying smacking was OK, and generally made to feel like an arsehole. I don't want that debate again, that's not my purpose in saying this. It's just to discuss the effect on participation.
I disappeared for many months at that point, but felt I was also missing out on an opportunity to learn, and that the community itself was also missing out, if I never came back. So I decided that I could only do so if I actually physically met the community, something I'd been loathe to do until that point, mostly because I genuinely felt that most of you thought I was a dick, and yet in being the dick I wanted to be I was being the most true to myself, and paradoxically, of most value that way.
So I met the community, and I'm glad I did. It's contextualized everyone far more, added a great deal of richness to my understanding of the commentary. And there's lot of really good people, some good friends made, good times had.
But the niggle does remain. I still have a great many views that are very hard to express, and if you find that hard to believe, that I'm still capable of thinking dickish things out loud, but have found better ways of saying them, consider that this comes with a massive time commitment. Gio wondered earlier if I think in paragraphs, to explain high output. No. The output is from time spent, much as everyone's is. Inordinate amounts of time spent polishing and rewriting. I delete roughly half of what I write. Which means I have written literally millions of words here, half of which are only in my memory. That has actually interfered quite a lot with my memory of what I have written, so I have to look it up a lot nowadays.
I think it's a better way of writing, produces much higher quality. But it does also mean that much of what I think does actually go unsaid, and quite often, I've quite deliberately dialed down the passion with which I believe the things I have said. I'm still undecided whether that's better or worse, but I'm content to continue working in this style until I've mastered it.
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Hungry Minds
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Lurker's Digest
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Rich Lock,
Nah, bro. "Chip's Shop". Note the apostrophe. We're actually a radio station. #threadmerge
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