Posts by Moz
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: These things we must now change, in reply to Alfie,
one of these things transports us from A to B, whilst the other gives its owner the ability to extinguish life on an industrial scale.
It’s cars that are used to “extinguish life on an industrial scale”. Even this year guns will kill far fewer kiwis than cars do, it’s not even close – the “right to drive” costs 380 lives a year just in direct kills. And “industrial” is the right term, they don’t just chop us up a few at a time, they spread a layer of toxic crud across the whole country while being supported by a network of dodgy companies funding secretive lobbyists.
People arguing for public health based restrictions need to be very selective if they want to keep cars.
That said, I think gun laws in NZ are ridiculously lax, I think the Thorpe report should be implemented and if anything tightened rather than loosened. Guns in Australia are straightforward to get for those that need them, and there’s a problem here with private arsenals as well as city boys going into rural areas and blazing away without thinking that “the bush” has people in it. We should aim for "significantly more restrictive than Australia" not "nicer to gun lovers than...".
-
Hard News: These things we must now change, in reply to andin,
Tamihere said: when the chips are down and death visits, everyone seizes upon faith
I kept the faith and I kept voting
Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand
For theirs is a land with a wall around it
And mine is a faith in my fellow man
Theirs is a land of hope and glory
Mine is the green field and the factory floor
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers
And mine is the peace we know
Between the wars -
Speaker: An attempt at demystifying Sharia, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
the right to be LGBTI+ ? I see this as a fundamental human right but I do not think this is consistent with most Sharia law.
It's not just Islamic extremists, Uganda has the death penalty because it's Christian. Note that most of the countries don't actually execute anyone, they "merely" imprison them if they survive to go to trial.
It's also no more consistent with Christian Law than divorce or dressing immodestly. Ie, it's a big ugly mess and there's a lot of faffing about in various religious groups and theocracies to balance modernising doctrine vs hewing the to the core of the religion. The Christianity of some African countries is pretty scary, they seem to have switched from European fundamentalism to US fundamentalism rather than to anything sane.
I think there's a selection effect running both ways - people pick a religion compatible with their culture, and use the religion to push towards their cultural preferences. You can see that with the defence of slavery in the UK and USA, for example, and also slightly later in their rejection of slavery, then recently especially in the US, their re-embrace of slavery (although they now call it "prison labour" and "free trade areas" etc... oh, and "the rights of the unborn child").
Before we get too carried away, remember that NZ still has the death penalty (for treason).
-
I've just been reading some US-based decrying of any attempt to censor anything in Aotearoa, and my gut reaction was "you can fuck right off".
More reasonably, there's a balance between actively promoting slaughter as the US does, and trying to conceal the existence of nasty things (The Vatican seems to be the easy example here). I would much prefer Aotearoa err away from the US approach. I also don't buy the nihilist approach of "it's going to be available anyway". We have an obligation to do what we can to make the world a better place.
In this case I don't see why the manifesto or video need to be available outside of very specific academic research. We should prosecute people who publish either, down to the level of schoolchildren who share it (with due regard to the limited culpability of children. In many cases being told 'you're just a child' is punishment in itself).
-
Speaker: An attempt at demystifying Sharia, in reply to Moz,
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that Muslims in Aotearoa want to impose Sharia Law or even prefer to live in a country run by Sharia Law... if they wanted that we're a very poor choice, and they do have choices in that regard. Just that the panic over Sharia Law is at least as misplaced as earlier panics over the "Catholic Menace" and let us not delve into antisemitism. Which is also misplaced, and again Jews who want to live in a Jewish theocracy have the option of moving to one.
-
Speaker: An attempt at demystifying Sharia, in reply to Craig Young,
. It is certainly not a fully-fledged alternative legal framework seeking to supplant western constitutional law and legislative frameworks
Sorry to disagree but it absolutely is, there are countries that use it. Well, their local interpretation of it. It's also very clear that secular law is not permitted to contradict Canon Law. I mean Sharia Law. As well as Christian and Jewish religious law. The overwhelming majority of adherents obey secular law anyway. But even in the mainstream we get weird things like the Prime Minister of Australia saying that Catholic Law overrides Australian Law. Oddly the right wingnuts did not go berserk when Tony Abbott said that (he was defending Cardinal Pell at the time. Yes, that Cardinal Pell).
In secular countries people can still choose to live according to religious law, and some do. I live in Lakemba and there's a fair number of professional practices advertised as "we will help you do the paperwork to get your Sharia decision implemented by Australian Law". Family lawyers especially, but also accountants and so on.
There is possibly a higher rate of Muslims who choose to live under Sharia in Australia than Jews living under Halakhah and definitely far higher than Christians trying to live under (say) Greek Orthodox Law. But then Christians have far more diverse opinions about what constitutes the law of their religion than I suspect even Jews manage. Exclusive Brethren spring to mind, but even in mainstream Christianity the Protestant-Catholic split probably looms larger to most these days than the Orthodox-Catholic one (classic QI question "is the pope Catholic", answer: he's not, he's the head of the Orthodox Church* and the Catholic dude has a string of titles that while long does not include "pope").
* you are invited not to ask which Orthodox church. Thank you.
-
Thanks for that summary.
I've also spent a bit of time lately reminding people that the "women must cover their hair" is also from the Pentateuch and is widely practiced by Christians and Jews, albeit not as commonly by young ones. Some may remember such devout practitioners of the habit as Mother Theresa or Mother Angelica.
-
Hard News: These things we must now change, in reply to Craig Young,
The Aussies really need to clean their Augean* media and poltitical stables out.
Oh, people over here have mentioned it all right. Vigorously, and in public. But... yeah. We need to climb down from 90% not willing to change their vote on issues like "is torturing children bad?", "should the secret police be able to detain you indefinitely without trial or lawyer?" and other issues on which naive fools like me might think there was only one answer. Australia thinks, generally vehemently, that there is indeed only one answer and that answer is "fuck off we're full"... perhaps that's where the stable contents you mentioned go?
Mehreen Faruqi (Greens NSW Senator, also Muslim and an engineer) has been quite visible in those media that feel comfortable letting Islamic voices through. Walid Ali has also spoken on his show. But overall there's not a lot, definitely nothing like the Spinoff's coverage or Anjum's article which is far more direct than anything I've seen published here. For that you have to go to the people who spoke at the Bond St vigil in Sydney or similar smaller gatherings and I can't find links. Funny that.
We do get stuff like this though...
-
Also: legal terms change meaning over time too. If you look at the Australian "Section 44 crisis" that is all about the exact meaning of "foreign allegiance". At the time that was written it's very likely that Catholics would have failed because they were ruled by Rome, and it very definitely applied to Africans, Pacific Islanders, Southern Europeans etc (and we don't use the same terms to describe those people today... they weren't racist then, but they are now... weird, huh).
Today the same argument that keeps Kiwis out could equally apply to British people and indeed anyone who swears allegiance to the Queen of New Zealand (and sundry other territories). Luckily the formal Oath used in Australia is to the Queen of Australia (and sundry other territories)... whew! And they require people whose countries don't allow renunciation of citizenship to make a declaration in Australia instead, but they don't impose a similar requirement on people from birthright citizenship countries (like Australia and Aotearoa). Kiwis can just renounce, serve in parliament, then resume their proper (unAustralian) citizenship.
It's a bit of a maze of twisty passages once you start digging.
-
Hard News: These things we must now change, in reply to Dennis Frank,
There's been an evident trend in recent years to disregard the standard definition of the term
That to some extent comes back to prescriptive vs descriptive linguistics, plus the usual rejection of a certain type of argument from authority by young people. Equally, old man yells at cloud is a longstanding tradition.
It's worth noting that race is a social construct without biological meaning, and that racial categorisation changes over time. Are "the Irish" a race? If not when did that change?
two judges in a NSW court recently decided that a prosecution failed because islam is not a race
Would you like to argue that the attacks weren't racist because Islam isn't a race? Passionate racists are quite willing to hate Muslims for not being of the "white race" regardless of the pedantry of online commentators or the arguments of lawyers.
The judges may be correct as a matter of law, but that merely points to the difference between justice and law.
I would also be incredibly reluctant to look to Australia for guidance on matters of bigotry and hatred, especially when it comes to racism and Islamophobia. Australia has a very poor record on this and one simple example is their reluctance to describe first nations people as human. That didn't stop with the referendum and it hasn't stopped now. Look at the controversy over the gargoyles on the war memorial for example.