Posts by mark taslov
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Sacha,
A decade of my life I won’t get back.
You certainly woke me up. To reiterate what Katharine said:
I love this place because I learn so much.
whakawhetai koe mo tou mahi!
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The Damaging depiction of disability
History has been witness to how societies killed their differently abled population as they were seen as useless and a burden on society. The Nazi regime eliminated many differently abled people in concentration camps. In ancient Rome, people and even babies born with disabilities were killed, by stoning them to death. Today, many families leave their newborn babies in orphanages if they are born differently abled. There are many who feel ashamed and embarrassed about the existence of differently abled people in their families.
Vocabulary matters in making or reducing a discourse. There’s a long way to go in how societies treat people with disabilities, and language is one of these important steps.
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Sacha,
Patrick Crewdson’s klan facilitating dissemination of the ideology.
I’d be embarrassed to be most news editors and producers right now.
I’m embarrassed to be Pākehā right now – more than ever. As I read somewhere:
"𝕳𝖊’𝖘 𝖆 𝖙𝖞𝖕𝖎𝖈𝖆𝖑 𝖕𝖗𝖔𝖉𝖚𝖈𝖊 𝖔𝖋 𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖈𝖚𝖑𝖙𝖚𝖗𝖆𝖑 𝖓𝖎𝖈𝖍𝖊, 𝖓𝖔𝖙 𝖆 𝖗𝖆𝖈𝖎𝖘𝖙."
2:44
White men don’t get to decide what racism is, white people don’t get to decide what racism is, they were so bad at judging it every time it happened, they were bad at judging it during slavery, they were bad at judging it during Jim Crow, white people don’t get to play this game, you don’t get to decide what the rules are here.
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to mark taslov,
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Sacha,
Publishable elsewhere?
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Thank you for sharing that Katharine – and for your mahi, some keen insights conveyed, with so much care.
ehara koe i a ia!
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to mark taslov,
He’s not under threat of being woken up and hauled away at dawn, he’s not in danger of losing his livelihood, heck he’s not even in danger of being effectively silenced
In fact he’s just been nominated New Zealander of the Year.
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
but seriously, that was a painful watch – the makeup team at TVNZ appear to have used a foundation tone on Bridges which almost looks a shade or two too light – understandable on a show and channel where they don’t have much use for non-white flesh tones, perhaps they’ve run out or perhaps it was the lighting but either way I found it an unwelcome distraction and would have gone for something warmer.
What has floored me this week is the number of journalists and professional pundits putting paid to their reputations – in revealing they simply lack the range for this type of discourse in the 21st century . Corin Dann makes no bones about revealing his own bias calling Jan Thomas’s decision “idiotic” in the preamble, and reveals his inadequacies fully as he throws around terms like “free speech” and “banned” with wild abandon.
Firstly, Don Brash has not been "banned" from Massey as far as I know – his talk was cancelled. That Steve Eller’s piece I linked to on page 4 highlights that neither is this the first time a speaker has been cancelled but that it’s also not the first time Massey has cancelled events and evacuated buildings when threats have been made.
In throwing around a term like freeze peach, as Dann does, with the enthusiasm of a turophile hankering for his brunch at Dairy Queen, he reveals an inability or unwillingness to either grasp or present these basic concepts to a wider multicultural audience.
This had been touched upon in advance by POC academics:
You don’t give a fuck about free speech, that’s all Western epistemological nonsense designed to be deployed as a defence mechanism when marginalized groups raise the point about how someone’s speech is hateful and dehumanising against them.
It’s no coincidence that voices like these, voices of POC who possess the range, background and experience are not centred in these discussions because they’d show up Dann, Wells et al’s takes as being so pale as if to almost be transparent.
The stupid thing is I saw this happening all over America when I was there, and NZers are doing the same thing now, letting the media stir this shit pot up coz they need to make money from these stories. This is one way capitalism is linked to our dehumanization too.
As a Pākehā academic mentioned:
One of the things I spend a lot of time writing about atm is the research showing that the more racists get to talk, the more it embeds ideas that individuals being oppressed are to blames for their experiences & the less likely public are to support equity policies. Just saying
Dennis’s contributions to this thread, especially the above, highlight this to a t. Without meaningful resistance it is being normalised and as such Dennis feels emboldened to begin dredging up the same kinds of white supremacist talking points that have resulted in other users being actually erm..banned (from here at least).
watching that 58’ interview the TVNZ Sunday crew recorded (of which they showed viewers about 1%), made me aware that they aren’t trolls. They are advocates of a level playing field for free speech
As some of you know, I lived in the PRC for about a 1/3 of my life and there where I observed various issues related to free speech – be that a website manager who was incarcerated for a month for failing to adequately moderate a web forum, a student who was bundled into a van for writing anti-Govt rhetoric online and even in the last month a private chat group of septuagenarians shut down because one was complaining about being unable to meet the cost of living – instances where attempts at free speech have resulted in genuine consequences. Most tellingly in all these cases is that the citizens were effectively muzzled – by the authorities.
As such, the hypocricy of what’s going on remains self evident:
Michel Foucault said that discourse is productive, and we should interrogate & lay bare power dynamics behind it, and all the White intellectuals said: that’s brilliant! So I’m confused then, why all these White peeps don’t understand why we’re against giving Brash a platform.
This to me is the gist of the underlying issue – because Don Brash’s right to free speech has not been impacted in the least, by any stretch of the whitest imagination. He’s not under threat of being woken up and hauled away at dawn, he’s not in danger of losing his livelihood, heck he’s not even in danger of being effectively silenced – he simply had a talk cancelled – he experienced an instance of being deplatformed.
What is most telling in that is that people (especially minorities) get deplatformed all the time, only we’re less likely to hear about it from a media founded on white supremacy.
I’ve had one experience of being deplatformed, people obviously don’t go out of their way to platform someone like me but someone asked me to write a piece about being trans, which I did, reluctantly, it was an incredible amount of shit to dredge up, I put my heart and soul into it over the period of a few months, it was potentially the biggest opportunity in my life to express some of the difficulties I and folk like me face, as such I researched it meticulously. When almost completed I was faced with and incensed by a tolerable bigot scenario – and in responding in an aggressive manner (why are minorities so angry?) I was firstly had up about not having completed the work sooner (despite no deadline), I was then informed that it was too long (no word count had been provided) and then told I would only be platformed if I complied with a condition of not speaking out in that manner again. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the platformer entirely disregarded everything I researched and wrote, based on a tweet a few months later where they exhibited no comprehension or willingness to even begin to address the issues I’d outlined – standard issue hegemonic erasure. Three months wasted but what are you gonna do?
The hegemony has shown time and time again absolutely no concern for deplatforming, suppressing and marginalising the voices of minorities since year dot – it comes with the territory. With no Brash chorus to defend you – no one would even know and as such very few members of whatever hegemony (this site being an exception) seem equipped to analyse let alone account for our own positionality – see Dennis above.
The answers to the types of questions wypipo et al are currently losing their shit over are being answered – away from the glare and bright lights of MSM attention, because they don’t fit the fast food sound bite culture. Regardless they are here, they are strong and coherent and most importantly they’re not going away.
such a view is grounded within the western colonial legal definition and context from which the original statement derived. It is as Moana Jackson noted highly problematic to advocate from a position that enables those in power to continue to dominate over others[15]. Such advocacy of free speech does not serve the interests of those that live in a context of colonial oppression.
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I hear Sonny Jill Williams.
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Thanks for the response Dennis, that was very informative, I’m now extricating myself from this conversation.
