Posts by Moz
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people being "worth the price of admission" ... that varies from person to person
That's what makes it hard. In the end you're making choices about which people to welcome, and it's never possible to welcome everyone (like the joke says "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?").
The question is really about how the decision is made and who makes it. Often it's a contest between loud minorities, and all too often it's between two privileged minorities. Should nice middle-class white women welcome nice middle-class white men, or should they permit non-white women? You can bet the nice middle-class white men will have opinions (don't we always), but the non-white women... hmm.
You can end up in a "turtles all the way down" situation of trying to work out how to hear voices that aren't currently present to get their ideas on how to better accommodate voice that would let you welcome ... but then are you just asking under-privileged people to do even more work to assuage your privileged guilt? Even telling them that they're invited is implicitly pressuring them to attend...
Meanwhile I'm about to go off and enjoy the company of some other middle-aged property owners as we work to beautify our local area. Our suburb is so lovely :)
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Hard News: NZ On Air and the bill that…, in reply to peter payne,
are the Taxpayers Union
it's a bunch of people who hate unions, hate taxes, and believe that government should be primarily accountable to right wing trolls. Oh, and they have no sense of humour which makes their name all the funnier. These days they're been rendered irrelevant by Trump, who satirises far right iggorence better than they could ever hope to.
Politically they seem to be the less successful version of TOP, possibly because their funder isn't willing to stand up and defend their ideas in person.
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
CATATONIC
STATEIf you graduate from Darwin University is that a pass or a fail?
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
it's really an attempt to shut down the free speech of the left by
... saying anything at all, but in an aggressively hostile way with the aim of intimidating the speaker. The message is "people like me only kill a few people a year, and mostly in the USA. But... would you bet your life on that?"
We need to keep working to reform the legal system to better dispense justice, so that we can have a civil society. That project is increasingly urgent, as the "I have the right to campaign for genocide" debate shows. As the MSP said back in 1998 "if you tolerate this then your children will be next". I don't like much 'boys with guitars' but political songs speak to me.. give me Chumbawamba over MSP any day.
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Didn't realise PC was a term of praise - where do join up?
It's easy - just support people you think are doing the right thing, disagree with those doing the wrong thing, and pretty soon you'll be called a social justice warrior and accused of virtue signalling.
Yes, exactly: I'm publicly standing up against injustice because I want that to be a common, acceptable thing for everyone to do. Why would anyone *not* want that, other than "lack of injustice to stand against"?
So many of the terms of abuse that the trolls use are like that that it's often funny. Sadly, much of what they actually do is horribly destructive and the humor is overridden. It's the people who can't spell nazi but still manage to kill someone... "ha ha your sign is wrong" is an inappropriate response.
The opposite of SJW "I'm an antisocial non-violent campaigner for injustice" is an outdated cliche. We're not dealing with basement-dwelling neckbeards any more, but a well-funded international cadre of anti-liberal, anti-democracy activists.
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Joe, I don't understand your point. You ask for examples of leaving it to someone else not working, the provide an example of direct action working. Or do you mean that the great majority of people left it to someone else and got a good outcome anyway?
The obvious example I was thinking of was "peace in our time", but you can also see it in Yemen, Palestine and Turkey right now. Or Australia, the US and France if you want to look at concentration camps rather than genocides. Sitting here saying "well, in general we don't approve of genocide, but there would be little benefit to mentioning that and significant cost so we're just going to ignore it". Hence the arrival of kiwis deported from Australia after a certain amount of inhospitality... That Nice Mr Key barely raised a whimper.
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Simon Honiss,
100% agree why should Maori have to do the heavy lifting
Leaving it to someone else has historically not worked out well with this particular politics. Maori can of course sit back and say "not our problem", but I think there's an argument to be made that in fact nazis want to make themselves a problem for Maori.
It might be better to work together to minimise the damage.
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BTW, in Australia it should be a very different debate. As I said in response to one "oh noes, the racists are coming" blog post:
We have people on the ABC and almost every media outlet defending concentration camps, we have secret courts using secret evidence to imprison Australians without letting them defend themselves*, we have widespread public agreement that sending the Australian military in to take aboriginal children away from their parents is a good idea, we send refugees back to their country of origin where they “disappear”… and you’re worried about foreign fascists?
I think you need to very clearly explain how their views differ from those of our Prime Minister and why only foreigners should be no-platformed.
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Yeah, per linger "it would have been great if" is not even slightly the same things as "we should have forced", especially when done after the event. I don't recall any effort to persuade a marae to host, put it that way.
To me it's more of a moderately amusing thought experiment after the fact. And it's not my place to suggest that stuff especially since my only experience of being a "minority" is living in a suburb that's mostly muslim, but doing that in a country that is overtly anti-muslim means that it's the sort of technical minority status I also get from being male.
In a somewhat rare turn of events, a local TV station interviewed one of them in Lakemba (that bit is unsurprising) ... but when she said something blatantly untrue and stupid, the interviewer pulled her up on it. The clip is circulating right now because it does very effectively make the point that the nazi is also a very stable genius. "there's no pub in Lakemba" ... "the Lakemba Hotel is just over there" {mic drop}.
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Tim Watkin has a good point at The Pundit: it would have been great if a marae had offered to host them.
https://www.pundit.co.nz/content/good-is-a-conversation-what-nzs-weekend-of-division-should-teach-us