Posts by chris
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to BenWilson,
Sorry I had to nip out midway through editing there for a rod of dowel, but coming back to this:
It seems to me that you’re rather bitter on Rob Salmond. I think this is misplaced. It’s perhaps a sad truth that a party like Labour has to consider positioning strategy, with all the winners and losers that that entails, but I’d rather they did it with data under the guidance of a guy like him, than with the kind of knee-jerk reacting that often mars their decision making.
I’m not sure they do really “Flit back and forth along this line”, since their position is an aggregate of many positions, and overall there’s not much flitting
This is not so much the Labour party considering strategy behind closed doors, as a blog on a web forum, followed by a discussion from more or less whoever wishes to participate. There are 17,000 views to date. I find what you’ve written to be well considered and informative and most of all well measured, perhaps flitting back and forth along the line is an unfair dismissal on my part, but the tenor of the discussion wasn’t set by us:
But “pulling the centre back towards the left” is massively, massively hard. You win those people over by being relevant to them as they are, not by telling them they’re worldview needs a rethink.
I do think Rob makes some salient points throughout these pieces, the second sentence above is a good example, so I don’t understand, with this in mind, why one would then follow up with an attack on Stephanie Rogers, a misrepresentation of some PAS posters, a dismissal of Mike Smith, and then a rejig of Chris Trotter’s world view. That makes so little sense to me and is one of the reasons why this series is still on my mind. It’s especially confounding when in amongst it all Rob presents a lot of good sense, well formulated ideas and informed propositions:
Instead it’s about – for want of a better word – “narrative.” And issue emphasis.
It all becomes part of that narrative.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to BenWilson,
It seems to me that you’re rather bitter on Rob Salmond.
No, not at all, his work this year and the lack of confidence this work has given me in Labour’s future direction definitely irks me, but Rob Salmond, I don’t know him, it’s never personal, he’s just another number on a graph. That he’s put himself in the position to be the butt of Gower’s ‘name’ joke on the Nation wouldn’t trouble me in the least were he not widely identified as being loosely involved with Labour strategy. It’s all visible and campaigning never sleeps.
what flits is their position on particular issues along that dimension – they trade one off against another
At this point they seemed to have traded everything for more or less nothing, as you say:
(I basically don’t really know what they stand for)
I feel the same. Relative to the other parties this aggregate will be more fluid. They wish to increase tax revenue, but they’d rather ban than tax offshore investors, their website states that they want to introduce a CGT, their press announcements state that they’ve dumped the CGT. It’s sloppy. One year they’re railing against rushing through increased surveillance legislation, a couple of years later they’re supporting the rushed passing of a law that called for an “intrusion on people’s freedoms” while claiming that it needed to be held up to greater scrutiny.
As Stephen says above:
has developed a certain amount of authoritarian tendency that bugs me
Compared to Labour under Norman Kirk or even Lange, it's a palpable shift.
When they actually ever get some power, I may live to regret supporting them, as their compromise is likely to be every reason I voted for them in the first place.
This^
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Where I stand and what I see.
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Hard News: The GCSB and the consequences…, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Probably for the benefit of all the journalists, and those they’re writing for, who keep asking “so just how many of these people are there?”
Perhaps my question lacked emphasis, what is the benefit? Journalists get paid to file in and hold their mics and report it, including the numbers means their arms get a little heavier, perhaps that adds muscle tone but I’d be hard pressed to quantify the benefit of a couple of extra seconds of this type of exercise. As for those who keep asking, I’ve yet to meet one, though I don’t dispute that you may know some, and yet once again I’m hard pressed to pinpoint the actual benefit of being told a number.Diminishing our sense of security in this case is enhancing the sense of terror, is achieving exactly what the terror troops set out to achieve; to make us feel less safe in our home countries. I know it’s a cliché but that’s arguably one of the main reasons we have what this organisation, i.e so that our children aren’t lying in bed at night worrying if their Muslim classmate’s mum is one of the 40 people who could potentially undertake domestic terror action right now.
There are so many many ways to die, they could set up a watch list of people who could potentially drink a crate, get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle and kill a family in a vehicular accident, right now, and the SIS would have as good a shot of averting preventable deaths, but then there’s always one who slipped under the radar.
Feeding paranoia is not a a benefit to society, paranoia is sometimes a symptom of very serious functional disorders. Feeding paranoia exclusively against Muslims, as is the case, is a divisive action. I have little doubt that there is a causative relationship between the SIS’s continued emphasis that potential terrorists must be Muslim and the opposition to the increasing the refugee intake, for example, as we saw on this very site not 3 months back:
I think you over complicated my comment about a potential threat, what I meant was that people who do not possess legitimate documents to verify who they really are, or if they are associated with terrorist groups. New Zealand is a peaceful country, and the last thing we need is a potential threat, which can be diffused if proper documents are provided.
Because it’s never simply 40 people. It’s 40 Muslims, in every press release and every interview. We don’t hold their purse strings, we have as much chance of cutting SIS funding as delaying another MP payrise, whether they conduct themselves secretly or keep insecurely broadcasting their work on the 6 o’clock news, regardless it sucks to be one of the 40k+ Muslims in New Zealand because man, women or child they are reminded once every two months that there’s a 1/1000 chance that they’re on the Government watch list.
Is the number for their benefit, or is it for the benefit of their potential non-Muslim friends, lovers, employees. Is the benefit to remind us that every time we meet a Muslim there’s a 1/1000 chance that they are one of the 40 who could potentially undertake a domestic terror action right now. Meanwhile it remains patently obvious that for a terrorist to succeed the first thing they need to do is simply drop their religious affiliations, because the NZSIS’s PR campaign is so focused on the dreaded Muslims that it’s standard practice for journalists to also include a quote or two from some or other Islamic spokesperson to provided some much needed perspective to the SIS’s scaremongering, is Hazim Arafeh on the watch list? Who knows, odds are 1000 to 1.
I would also expect 40 to be a round number. In regard to complaints the number doesn’t seem to change, well, I wouldn’t expect it to change much. Why should it?
Rebecca Kitteridge is best placed to answer that question:
The SIS was seeing online radicalisation, where groups and individuals use social media “to connect with susceptible people and distribute material that incites or encourages extreme violence”.
On this conveyor belt of terrorism the number being radicalised would appear to be almost exactly equal to those being deradicalised, an abstraction which conforms with her statement:
Kitteridge had told the committee that the number of Kiwis on a terrorist watch list remained about the same, but the seriousness with which they were viewed had escalated.
Are they terrorists or are they radicals that we are now viewing with more seriousness? Are they viewing propaganda or are they researching bomb making? Are they watching the wrong videos, reading the wrong literature, thinking the wrong thoughts or are they making comprehensive plans to kill us all by extracting enough of the radioactive substance polonium-210 (a decayed form of the element radium contained in the mineral Apatite which is used in the fertilizers on the radioactive tobacco that we can buy from the dairy and which the Government derives a healthy profit from) in order to build a bomb or poison a spy? Terry Jones comes to mind.
As Sacha asked above:
isn’t she the head of the inward-focused SIS rather than the outward-focused GCSB?
In terms of our national security it’s an important question because that does still appear to be the official brief and yet this does appear to have expanded to also include chasing honeymooners around the world like Carmen Sandiago. I have grave doubts that these honeymooners have the capacity to enact acts of terror via telepathy so I’m at a loss to pinpoint exactly what threat they present to New Zealand’s domestic population or infrastructure from 16,000 km away and why the head of the NZSIS has expanded her role to speculating on peoples’ relationship status.
Andrew Little seems convinced by the intelligence so Kitteridge deserves the last word.
"It’s not your average person going out to work and happily married and raising kids… it’s a pattern of people who are kind of disengaged in some way with a productive life."
So paraphrasing, watch out for Muslims, especially unemployed single Muslims, without kids, whether they’re divorced or just haven’t yet met that special someone yet – and if you happen to know a Muslim who’s recently gone through a divorce or a difficult break up, whether they lack virility or are infertile, do take the opportunity this ‘silly season’ – as the white people are prone to call it – in the spirit of the event, to invite them over, make friends, let them know they’re not alone and without attempting to ply them with alcohol do attempt to help them forget just how much energy our Government and our security services have put into vilifying and alienating them from the fabric of our society over the last year.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to BenWilson,
Thanks Ben that was illuminating both in terms of how much it revealed as much as how much it didn’t, very impressive work. I guess to be a little clearer about what I was getting at in the section you quoted above, my issue with these blogs is not so much that there weren’t more dimensions. It’s that in terms of this blog series, and the Labour party’s direction, my doubt is whether this discipline is the best fit for what is essentially an ideological service that the Labour party is anticipating providing to actual humans.
What I’m getting at is that this single dimension is such that the strategists in the Labour Party feel they may flit back and forth along it at will, without IMHO fully accounting for the fact that voters (who would be less likely to change the brand of cola they drink) do the same, rendering the entire exercise akin to a game of musical chairs. The difference here being that a voter can change colours with little ado while a political party in the public eye risks being labelled a ‘sell out’ or one of many such expressions that are nigh on impossible to quantify. I’d even go so far as to argue that it is just this; Labour ideological chop and change routine over the the last three decades compared to National’s consistency that is a chief reason why they are no longer solo contenders at this juncture.
As a consequence of these blogs I’m less confident in Labour’s bottom line because one of their number is front footing with this continuum as the benchmark of who we are and what we want rather than presenting any identifiable ideological position. Rather than asking us what we need. “jobs, jobs, jobs” is all well and good, who’s going to argue with that? It is a start.
At this point, subsequent to the “ham-fisted” (as Andrew Little categorised it on The Nation) Chinese name maneuver, I’d wager that Labour have become even less distinguishable from NZF than they were when the survey was carried out.
But still at this point, beyond our placement on a graph we are nuanced organisms. We are nuanced organisms who will react unfavourably when antagonised by party affiliates on a web forum. There’s no two ways about that, antagonising your would-be supporters is poor politics. sure I understand that Andrew Little’s got a real connection with people who don’t hang about in political forums on the interwabs, but it’s no longer 1998, 82% of the population of New Zealand are internet users, having strategists turning people off your brand for argument’s sake in a freely accessible domain that enshrines that exchange for perpetuity is a lose-lose situation.
A lot is made of National’s aspirational politics, and just as much is made of the left’s negative attitude and while I remain suspect about any of the aspirations Joyce or Key would have me hold, I am inclined to agree to an extent that the left still offer very little to compete with:
“I think we’re on the cusp of something very special for our country, I’d like to be our Prime Minister and lead us to that.”
Bullshit or not, the political impact that this sentiment has had remains as tangible as anything else going at the moment, while also being immeasurable.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to BenWilson,
However, I also slowly realized another obvious thing, in hindsight, that the questions themselves were also dominated by that division
Yeah that’s the limitation there, that political compass that was doing the rounds a few years back had far more to offer if only our surveys had been less one dimensional. Definitely send it along Ben!
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There is no possibility of an end to mainstream media, name any banana republic, dictatorship, corrupt or worn torn country of significant size that you can think of and one of the certainties is that there will be a mainstream media catering to its inhabitants, by definition and necessity. What we are seeing is a serious threat to the position independent media has occupied in the mainstream.
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Just to be absolutely clear I’ve got this straight. The culmination of a Masters and a Doctorate in Political Science is a perpetuation of this traditional visualisation of the political spectrum as a dualistic linear continuum.
Though we could just as easily substitute ‘left’ for the word ‘compassionate’ and ‘right’ for the word ‘selfish’ in terms of the simplicity in which these issues are presented, I’ll stick with the terminology provided.
So the basic plan is to move a traditionally left wing party further to the right in order to gain power and then either
a) reneg on the more rightward pledges, having mislead the voters and by virtue of having won Governance, tug the population back in the lefterly direction for which they didn’t vote while retaining power and getting reelected?
b) stick with it and govern in a more right leaning capacity, offering even less of a distinction between Labour and National and dragging the country further right in the process.
Moving forward, someone inextricably linked to the Labour party decided it would be a good idea to publish this shift further afield as a series of Dear John letters to the readership of this left leaning blog rather than publishing these same pieces proposing a shift right at somewhere like Kiwiblog where they might actually win some votes?
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we know that some of the people who are on that watch list of 40 people potentially could undertake a domestic terror action now."
Sounds familiar right? Of course it does, from last November:
Government agencies have a watch list of between 30 and 40 people of concern in the foreign fighter context.
This 30-40 people may or may not be the same 40 people who could potentially undertake domestic terror action now. Possibly it’s the same watch-list of 30 to 40 that Rebecca Kitteridge announced last year were being closely monitored.
These are nice round numbers 30-40, not forgetting the broader 80 from Key’s 2014 speech to the National Institution of International Relations. All excellent numbers, divisible by 5, and 10 and at their upper reaches all multiples of four - entirely by the by.
And so how much headway has been made by the SIS in the previous 12 months? A watch list of 40 remains a watch list of 40. Supposing targets have been discarded from the watch list, as many new new targets have emerged.
So what does this mean for us as a people? Obviously knowing that there are 40 people among us who could undertake a domestic terror action right now, is a cause of anxiety, though we’ll try not to feel actual terror, the repeated broadcasts of that figure take me closer to a feeling of terror than anything anyone on the watch list has yet to accomplish. On the other hand the more skeptical might disregard it as part of a PR beat up to help justify our sending troops.
For any would be New Zealand terrorists who might have recruited more members in the interim, it’s great news, especially if they are connected enough to know that their numbers are well above 40. In fact if they’ve been paying attention to Snowden, Greenwald, Kitteridge and Key, they’ll be well aware that in supporting ISIS in whatever shape or form that they’ve opened themselves up to having their digital communications surveilled indiscriminately and would most certainly have taken steps to minimise the effectiveness of this surveillance. A spot of counter-counter-terrorism. Furthermore, having followed Kitteridge’s numerous interviews they’d be well aware that to fly under the radar in committing a lone wolf attack, things will be considerably easier if they simply avoid ISIS related data. Don’t watch the videos, don’t read the literature, simply prep in isolation, fueled by their evident disdain for this way of life – like a *lone* wolf.
If a successful attack is carried out, people will obviously want to know what happened. If the attacker was one of the forty why weren’t they stopped in advance? If the attacker wasn’t one of the forty then why were the SIS wasting valuable resources focusing on those 40? You’d have to be totally confident you’ve got this in hand before throwing numbers around.
At the end of the day, one has to ask for whose benefit they keep repeating this number 40 on the TV? It certainly doesn’t help with putting the wee ones to bed. So Kitteridge and Key and Finalyson and whoever else liked to reminds us of the number of threats on a regular basis has made this country just a little more of a shit place to grow up in than it was a generation ago.
Well done team and Merry Christmas – may your children not have nightmares.
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Hard News: The Police Ten 7 State, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
When clearing one problem creates another one, something is well wrong with the system, the funding, or both…
Seriously Ian, when we have reached a point where we have preteens hanging themselves in our primary schools, a media gagged from factually reporting the issue, a Government unable to publically debate the underlying impetus and a society – from whom these developments are hidden, with no possibility to correct itself – no one’s fussed because so few know – then we are so far past any “when” threshold for speculating that something *might* be wrong with our system that the more pressing question is will we ever be able to make things right.
As our leader wags on that his terrorism watch list numbers the same as last year and the leader of the opposition indulges in a spot of skydiving, a community rocked by this news have to explain to their pupils and own children that her name doesn’t make the news because they’re afraid the rest of the children might copy and then answer questions querying why the Government would think that they would want to copy their school mate. Well heck, why not? We've build lie upon lie upon lie.
Just be sure not to miss your local Santa parade.
