Posts by mark taslov
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nor a funding issue
sorry I may have fuxt the maths there:
Thailand are around $16,000 and costs in a DHB could be around $20,000.
so accounting for:
three male to female surgeries and one female to male surgery every two years,
at current rates – which if we’re honest are highly prejudicial – total costs to Ardern’s Government may be hiked by something in the region of $10k per annum.
Government books reveal a $5.5 billion cash surplus
as I was saying:
“this Government fucking hates gender minorities and intersex people”
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to WH,
I’m sure no one wants that – as I said, I’m wondering what the intended meaning of the video is given you previously directed it at me – specifically – without comment when you came at me in that thread – and then reposted it today.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to WH,
for anyone who missed 2018 I assume.
To be honest I’ve been wondering about the message you’re trying to convey with that John Malkovich clip since you sent it to me here some weeks back as part of that series of gaslighty "There’s a subtext to Mark’s comments that you may not be aware of." insinuations that I was promoting terrorism or something as part of your rigorous defence of the human rights of ex-leaders of the National Party.
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Hard News: That escalated quickly ..., in reply to Craig Young,
One does not expect an incoming centre-left administration to resolve everything, so staffing and funding of reassignment surgery will have to wait.
Hi Craig, given that this is neither a staffing nor a funding issue in that a qualified gender reassignment surgeon, Dr Rita Yang, has been in the employ of the Counties Manukau DHB since January; and given that Labour has reneged on its 2017 promise to enact the recommendations of the Human Rights Commission’s 2008 To Be Who I Am report; "Justice Minister Andrew “Fiscal Gender Reassignment” Little’s office confirmed no action has been taken or planned to enact the recommendations" (possibly unsurprising given the Justice Minister’s previous form in this area); in addition to the Government’s unpreparedness to collect LGBTI data in the census; and in light of the Government’s failure to implement the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s 2016 recommendations, despite the PM standing up before the UN just a week or so ago and claiming before the world "That all people are equal. That everyone is entitled to have their dignity and human rights respected. That we must strive to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom. And we must consistently hold ourselves to account on each"; mightn’t it be safer to assume that at this juncture, mental health week 2018, roughly a year out from their election win, messaging still in the thrall of anachronistic cisgender binary absolutism, the ongoing erasure of sexual and domestic violence against and within the rainbow community still largely swept under the rug, that rather than being stymied by either staffing or funding, that the chief issue might simply be that this Government fucking hates gender minorities and intersex people?
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Speaker: Gender quotas (and helping…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
While the ethnic makeup of the people in the article’s photo provides some indication as to the shortcomings of this type of non-intersectional “gender diversity” – this tweet couplet brings the conversation right up to date.
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Up Front: R.O.A.R., in reply to Emma Hart,
idk, it’s difficult to ignore the central role SOEs are playing in validating this stuff. Perhaps someone could ask the Minister of Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media about reintroducing the broadcast charter:
"to set and maintain the highest standards of programme quality and editorial integrity."
whether promoting and normalising transmisia, racism, xenophobia etc by validating outlying falsifiable sources is really in keeping with the spirit of:
• Providing for minority interests and increased choice
• Enforcement of standards of content which conform with and support perceived community values.
• Promotion of national culture and identity.
• Promotion of participatory democracy, including encouragement of a diversity of sources of information.
likelihood of a cultural switch within the sector back towards fact-based narratives?:
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Up Front: R.O.A.R., in reply to Emma Hart,
for no reason I can fathom without drowning in bile and cynicism, both Stuff and The Herald chose to lend their platforms to a small group of very vocal transphobes.
And again. I can’t speak for the Herald but in the case of the Dom Post, reporter Matt Stewart has made no secret of his inclination to foster debate around trans lives.
Tellingly, in constructing his original piece, Stewart was informed of Renee Gerlich’s conspiracy theorist blogging; comparing modern trans surgery to Nazi experimentation on trans people – a detail repeatedly omitted in his commentaries.
Upon publication of that piece, Patrick Crewdson was approached, leading to Dom Post Editor Eric Janssen offering to discuss it over coffee. Unable to meet, instead connecting him to the trans woman (two words) whose testimony wrt Gerlich’s NAZI fixation Stewart had previously disregarded, Janssen’s response appeared lacklustre – and AFAIK no further attempt was made at contact.
All of this despite Gerlich’s status as a NAZI conspiracy theorist being a matter of public record for some months, verifiable via rudimentary Google search.
contains an article written nine months ago by Gerlich, comparing modern trans surgery to Nazi experimentation on trans people, entitled “Fundamentalism, Pseudoscience, Romanticism, and Scapegoats: some parallels of gender identity doctrine with Nazi eugenics”.
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And finally (apologies for the multi-posts), as more well-platformed journalists and the like step up to nail their colours to the mast in spite of the above and other material conditions, Moana Jackson has done a wonderful job of weaving these many threads of the kaitaka huaki together, expressing so much in this beautiful piece Rethinking free speech:
Any freedom should enhance the mana of the individual and the collective rather than diminish it
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Incidentally it's Day of Silence.
“Discrimination towards rainbow communities is still hugely prevalent in Aotearoa and more needs to be done to address it. The Day of Silence campaign is about raising awareness and asking New Zealanders to consider what part they play in ending homophobia, biphobia and transphobia in our country.”
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CATATONIC
STATE
UPerhaps we could throw it in the hat
I see Dr Bryce Edwards has penned a piece for Newsroom which largely pulls the same neo-colonial stops already covered in this thread i.e. misrepresentation of terms like “banned”, “free speech” etc.
There’s some interesting elements to this, none less so than the fact that an article ostensibly written about issues related to S&M and Dr Brash only makes reference to Māori – once, in an individual capacity, and without the macron – this likewise occurred in the earlier ’pro’ publication.
This colourblind erasure of Māori concerns is an overriding theme for the piece as he speaks of clampdowns on political freedoms:
Of course, historically, it’s been the political left and marginalised groups that have suffered the most from clampdowns on political freedoms. Socialists, unionists, and other groups fighting for liberation and equality have had their speech suppressed by the state or the media.
With no acknowledgement whatsoever of the greatest suppression of free speech Aotearoa (across the political spectrum) has had to overcome:
The Māori language was suppressed in schools, either formally or informally, to ensure that Māori youngsters assimilated with the wider community. Some older Māori still recall being punished for speaking their language. In the mid-1980s Sir James Henare recalled being sent into the bush to cut a piece of pirita (supplejack vine) with which he was struck for speaking te reo in the school grounds. One teacher told him that ‘if you want to earn your bread and butter you must speak English.’
In light of the cancellation of Hone Harawira, there is rather a sense of putting the cart before the horse in the way he formulates his points:
Those calling for restrictions seem to forget that they won’t always be in power, and the climate of suppression they create encourages an opponent to use the same tactics against you.
What struck me most about the piece is how tone-deaf it feels when analysed in contemporary context. As Dr Edwards throws around his strawman, vaguely along the lines of: "the left who supported Thomas’s decision to cancel a talk by Dr Brash in a heated political climate are vying for free speech to be widely suppressed" he seems unwilling or unable to contend with the advent of the internet and digital communication.
As he types:
Whether it’s the civil rights movement in the US, gay rights movements everywhere, or the anti-Springbok Tour movement in 1981, they’ve all been helped by the ability to organise freely and speak freely.
He comes across as awkwardly misrepresentive of the way political organisation has evolved since the 50s
This was most obvious during the 1951 watersiders lockout, when it was illegal to distribute pro-union pamphlets.
Disregarding key issues such as the fact that the state lacks teeth to suppress speech in the 21st century – yes violations can be prosecuted but that in itself is insufficient to keep the cat in the bag, this has been common knowledge for years (I was able to access this musician’s name within about 5 minutes from an offshore site) – obfuscates the way the state has evolved to thwart free organisation of political activism; i.e. not by suppressing speech but by eaves-dropping on communications etc.
The temptation for the left to support the state, or even businesses, in suppressing the activities of right wing or reactionary activists or speakers, on the basis of their awful politics should be avoided, if for no other reason than it is likely to produce a climate or rules in which the left and marginalised groups are further marginalised.
In writing this paragraph my sense was that there is a failure to fully account for the way in which marginalised groups are already "further marginalised", which brings into question what “free speech” means in this catatonic context.
Dr Edwards first came to my attention on Twitter when I noticed he’d faved a transphobic joke by Damian Grant about “__bruce__ Jenner” winning woman of the year (subsequently deleted). I’ve observed him platforming anti-trans activists with an uncomfortable regularity – (he originally RTd this innocuous tweet – later tweeting under his own name), the point being that he’s not precious about not boosting the profile of anti-trans voices to his 11.6k audience – to the extent that he’s comfortable endorsing the kinds of "I identify as an attack helicopter" type tweets which marginalise and harm trans people – particularly youth.
Sure folks like this always have a pro-trans tweet on the ledger – in case pressed – the “some of my best friends are…” for the digital age. Folks like this are everywhere and minority concerns around marginalisation are largely erm marginalised – so it’s of no great concern to most people let alone well-regarded, well-funded, well-platformed servants of the hegemony. As they attempt to minimise Dr Brash’s campaign against the public use of Te Reo to being part of a dispute on "property rights", as they lighten the tone with jokey asides about gender and sexual minorities "burning up the letters of the alphabet"
Which I’ll just assume is hilarious when you’re not in the firing line.Dr Edwards knows he can broadcast as many transphobic jokes as he likes with absolute impunity. I presume that my understanding of what free speech should be is far removed from someone who uses their platforms to amplify the mocking and marginalisation of minorities. That this power imbalance is not accounted for in his analysis highlights the limitations he faces in attempting to present issues of this nature beyond the scope of his own bias and erasive framing. Yes minorities may point out the erasure in his reporting but without the visibility and platform, information is suppressed.
So on the one hand, while he makes compelling arguments for his audience – he largely falls into the type of trap outlined by Cornel West in his recent bFM interview of not being accountable for his free speech, assuming – as far as I can ascertain – that everyone else enjoys the same well-platformed privileges and/or is equally comfortable antagonising minorities.
accountability takes a lot of different forms, there’s legal accountability, there’s political accountability, there’s intellectual accountability and that’s what democracy is about, it’s the accountability, especially the powerful using arbitrary power to dominate, express and exploit and degrade everyday people, working people, poor people; women, black folk, brown folk, indigenous people, gay and lesbians, trans and so forth
7:20
Circling back to what’s already been discussed in this thread one point which remains evident to me at least is that regardless of how much civics, ethics etc one is exposed to, without an awareness and preparedness to address our history, then it remains largely academic.Dr Brash doesn’t thrive on our lack of ethic and civic responsibility as much as he thrives on our lack of understanding of our own history. Māori history is largely ignored say our top historians, New Zealand Land Wars should be taught in high school, says Waikato history teacher, it’s *that* bad that I learned considerably more about Te Tiriti o Waitangi from this Fairfax(who now uses macrons) series than i learnt right the way through the NZ education system to tertiary level.
Furthermore on the note of education, beyond left-right framing, the distance ably highlighted in this thread between various academics is huge – while one lecturer might be enviably competent in providing a nuanced and wider historical context another might brush cultural and political context aside entirely, as Dr Edwards is doing.
