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I was interested to see reports in the media that the Swiss election had resulted in a substantial gain for a very right-wing party running on an anti-immigration platform. The New York Times had run a piece on the Swiss People’s Party, and I’d been shown the ad that offended so many people – a piece of very clever design carrying a clear stealth meaning.
So there was only one thing to do – contact Kiwi In Zurich to throw down some wisdom in a guest post. KiZ, take it away…
A foreigner living in Switzerland doesn’t get the right to vote. Foreigners (except for the extremely wealthy ones) do however get the right to pay tax at a higher rate than the Swiss. Both of these points miff me a bit, but when you are a guest in someone else’s country you put up with much more than you’d be prepared to put up with in your own country.
The weekend before last witnessed the Swiss parliamentary general elections, and despite not being able to vote, I was nevertheless drawn into the elections. This year was always going to be an interesting election as the SVP party (the right wing Swiss People’s Party) managed to polarise the electorate through its anti-foreigner (http://www.ausschaffungsinitiative.ch/), cult personality advertising campaign and its stated intention to become the dominant party in the Swiss parliament.
The results on the weekend unfortunately (to my mind at least) partially bore out SVP’s success in playing the always populist anti-foreigner card with SVP attaining an historic high. The ‘historic high’ has to be taken in context however. Although the SVP received 28.8% of the vote, which hasn’t been equalled by any single party in the Parliament since 1919, what I find more interesting than SVP’s success, however, is that the single biggest winners were the two Green parties (the ‘standard’ Greens and the Green Liberal Party). The Green parties attained at the cost of SP (the left socialist party) a staggering 9.5% of the vote and are now trying to wrangle a seat on the Executive (in Switzerland the Executive, unusually, is made up of all the largest parties in parliament).
Predictably, the media characterised the results in the most sensational way possible, describing the elections as a move towards right wing extremism in Switzerland. This is hardly the case. It is true the Socialist Party (SP), the major left party did lose a significant share of their vote, but it is not the case, nor would one expect it to be the case, that those left voters simply decided to vote right rather than left. Rather, what actually happened is that a significant number of voters moved further to the left and voted Green. Where the media is concerned, I guess it just isn’t terribly sexy to talk about a dramatic move to the left by the otherwise conservative Swiss.
I draw three things from the results:
• The environment and green politics are a significant concern to the Swiss electorate (hardly surprising with the glaciers melting)
• The SP party have not successfully picked up the environmental agenda and have failed to inspire the electorate generally, thus fragmenting the left
• The SVP managed to play the politics of personality, fear and populism in order to successfully increase their share, thus polarising the electorate
Just to complete the picture, the SVP historic high was attained at the cost of the various independents who lost a total 1.4% of their votes. Given that independents are not members of any major party, it seems a bit rich to me to describe this as a move to the right.
The German newspapers describe the election as been the end of kuschel-politik (politics of consensus) in Switzerland and this is perhaps the most interesting development this election may represent. By ‘kuschel politics’, the Germans are referring to the Swiss tendency towards moderation and consensus, rather than the confrontation that characterises almost all other political systems. The polarisation seems partly to be caused by SVP being the only truly right party of any size and its in many ways utterly xenophobic and unrealistic policies which the well educated and moderate Swiss electorate and politicians have up until now been able to respond to and moderate. If the dramatic strengthening of the Greens who are in their own (but much nicer) way as intolerant as the SVPs is not only a result of the raised environmental awareness, but also as response to the extreme politics of the SVP then perhaps this will herald the end of the Swiss cushion politics. My guess is that it won’t. The Swiss tend to be a remarkably moderate group of people and I don’t see the politics and culture of consensus being eroded anytime soon as it is this very consensus that makes the country as stable and successful as it is.

Percy Patrick Geddes, my grandfather, died five years ago, almost precisely as I write this. I think of him often. I carry his surname as my middle name, and claim membership in Clan Gordon rather than Clan Davidson to honour his lineage on my mother’s side. I see his influence in the best parts of who I am today.
Five years ago, I was newly on the road, starting my travels. I wrote about this then:

In the first minutes of All Saints Day my grandfather, Percy Patrick Geddes,
passed away.
He´s one of the reasons I´m travelling. Growing up, it seemed to me that he´d been everywhere there was to go. He and my grandmother Felice drove all over New Zealand, all over Europe, to so many places. I was always finding out about more places he had seen and I´m sure there are plenty more that I still don´t know about. He loved to travel.
He was a great grandfather and a great friend and a great role model. I guess I idolised him without even realising it. He did living the way it was meant to be done.

Two websites to waste your time when you should be working:
Passive Aggressive Notes.com – communications from your disgruntled flatmate/cowo/neighbour who doesn’t want to outright confront you.
My Right-Wing Dad – what the crazy right-wingers in your life are emailing to each other, and sometimes to you.
—
Just watched some Alien 3 documentaries from the Aliens Quadrilogy DVD set. Wicked. Wish I still had my Cinefantastique June 1992 issue on the making of Alien 3 – now that was some quality movie journalism. (Hmmm… maybe I can.)

Another of my roleplaying game books has been released from Adamant Entertainment.
This one is called Unearthly: Cosmic Heroes. It’s the first of the replacement books stepping in after the Amazing Triple Action line fell over. It’s for the superhero RPG Mutants & Masterminds, and is a sourcebook for cosmic-level adventures. No formal reviews yet, but the few comments that have turned up on discussion forums or in emails to me have been positive.
The .pdf is currently on sale for US$6.95 (down from US$12.95). You can also get a print copy via Lulu On top of that, for the entire month of November, Adamant has a special offer to celebrate their birthday: anyone who purchases more than $10 worth of Adamant Entertainment product will be entered into a drawing for a new iPod Nano, the proceeds from which are given to the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa.
So if you have been meaning to buy my supers RPG books, now is the moment to strike! The three issues of Amazing Triple Action are all available here for $5.95 each – buy one and the cheap Unearthly, and you go in the iPod draw.
This ends the advertisement.

[Edit: link to Meurant piece reinstated. Thanks for the headsup Scott.]
Stephen pointed at this piece by Ross Meurant, describing his journey through police culture (“the forest”) as a true believer, and eventually out of it to the point where he can look back with perspective. Some of it is extraordinary:

Your mission is to protect society from this evil. Very soon you learn to decide what is evil and what is not. You are no longer just a collector of human rubbish at the base of the cliff but you have an obligation; yes, even a duty to guide the country to a decent society. That direction is best decided by you and others in your sub culture of police, for what better epitomises the values of a decent society than those cherished by the men and women in blue?

He urges action in response to the ‘terror raids’:

I urge every New Zealander not to allow the state apparatus to take from you by default, legal rights people long before us fought for, died for. I urge every New Zealand to contact their Member of Parliament and express concern that the anti-terror legislation currently before parliament, be placed on “hold” until the true nature of the present police raids under the auspicious of terror legislation, is tested before the courts.

This is a timely call, from an unexpected quarter. NZ’s politicians are, by and large, reluctant to throw their weight behind the raids in case they turn out to be shonky; they are likewise reluctant to speak out against them in case they turn out to be sound. Exceptions are the Maori party, who have been outspoken in framing this as a racist action, and the NZ First comedy bandwagon, who have been outspoken in framing the Maori party’s criticism as a racist action.
As the days have turned into weeks and the cloak of secrecy over the whole affair remains in place, my expectation that this is a legitimate action has dwindled to virtually nothing. New Zealand is a small society, and the informal networks are hard at work. People I trust in turn know and trust many of the arrestees, or those who have been harassed by the police in this operation. My faith in the strength of these networks is much greater than my faith in the official line of the police operation.
The public interest in this case is significant. While I don’t think the operation was intended to suppress protest as an end in itself, that is its effect, and that obligates a democratic state to act with care and transparency. The claims behind the raids are wide-ranging and unprecedented. The suggestion is that New Zealand is not the nation we think it is; that its heart is not what we understand it to be. This is enormously powerful stuff that has the potential to shift our national identity. Determining the worth of the raids is vital for us if we are to know the society of which we are part.
The public have not been entrusted with any real evidence. A few incendiary text messages, and claims of gun-running and illegal gun ownership, do not amount to much of anything. Given what is here at stake, the public has a right to know as soon as possible what basis exists for the operation. Continued secrecy will weaken our society. The public need for some hard facts is pressing, and keeping the specific accusations against the accused a secret – let alone the evidence – is rapidly becoming indefensible.
And, of course, there are many good reasons to doubt the worth of the raids – the Louise Nicholas affair has generally undermined our faith in the police, and the Ahmed Zaoui debacle demonstrated that secrecy can be used to keep the many weaknesses of a case out of the public eye.
It seems increasingly impossible that this is anything more than an elaborate fantasy, where the police (and SIS?) sought out only confirmatory evidence for their hypothesis that there was a threat. Of course, they found it.
Meurant urges that we demand to place the anti-terror legislation on hold until the truth about these raids comes out; I think we have every right to demand that the truth be revealed sooner rather than later. The state apparatus has not earned our good faith, and it is now time they fronted up.

So. I posted how I took one look at his ruling to decide a British Judge got it wrong, and no lawyer cleared his or her throat and set me right. I posted yesterday about tax rates and no-one who actually understands them said anything. So I can only conclude that it’s true: blogging makes you know everything.
You only encourage me.
Wellingtonians, take note: highly recommended art show on at the Adam Art Gallery up at Victoria University – Giovanni Battista Piranesi‘s Imaginary Prisons series of etchings from the mid-1700s. I saw them in Melbourne and they were amazing. Go see.
Friday linky: Moebius does Cthulhu in the pages of Heavy Metal; a fascinating computer game about the Israel/Palestine problem in which you play a journalist gathering quotes and comments from those on both sides and building them into stories (thanks Svend); we now know that Dumbledore was gay, but I like Neil Gaiman’s take on JKR continuing to talking about the Potterverse much more than Salon.com’s; and an essay about understanding American class divisions through the Facebook/MySpace divide. Facebook continues to grow at an incredible rate; I now have more Facebook friends than I have contacts on all my other social networking systems put together.
Next week I shall explain thermodynamics and, I don’t know, Scandinavian fashion trends perhaps. Whatever I want. For I am a blogger, and blogging makes you know everything.

The front pages Weds all featured stories based on this press release from the Deputy Leader and finance spokesman of the National Party.
Joanna Average, who has earned the average wage since 2000, is only $500 a year better off now once tax bracket creep and inflation are taken into account… Mr English says the average wage has risen by 30% since 2000, but someone on the average wage in 2000, is now paying 42% more tax. “Wages up 30%, tax up 40%. There’s something very wrong with that.”
Is there, though? Let’s run some quick numbers off the case study the Nats provide:
2000 average wage: $33,968, taxed $6,623, which is a rate of 19.5%.
2007 average wage: $44,123, taxed $9,430, which is a rate of 21.5%.
But! Reconsider that 2007 wage without “tax bracket creep” – then tax would be $8,604. Or, to flip that around, it’s the difference between a net income of $34,700 and one of $35,500. (Both of them are well up on the 2000 net income of $27,300)
That’s what Nat’s claims amount to: less than a thousand dollars differential. Definitely, you’re better off with that extra grand, but it’s hardly the big loss to match the big numbers the press release throws around. The whole point of the press release is to win support for tax cuts, but the numbers just don’t back it up as a major issue.
The real issue is inflation. The Nats’ own calculations show that the effective loss of earnings due to inflation is $6842. In other words, inflation is the behind 90% of “loss of earnings”; tax bracket creep is responsible for only 10% of that.
(Did I get it right? Economics heads are invited to point out where I am hideously wrong, but obviously I don’t think I am. In any case, that’s enough math. I’m going to sleep.)

On Saturday I saw The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a film about the 2002 coup in Venezuala that unseated President Hugo Chavez for a couple of days before his government was restored. The film was made by some Irish documentarians, who happened to be following Chavez around at the time of the coup.
It’s an incredible experience, taking you right inside the halls of power during an extraordinary set of events. Essentially, the plan for the coup was to send an anti-Chavez march right into a pro-Chavez demonstration, and then have police snipers kill some demonstrators. The coup leaders would seize the government-run television station and add its voice to the five they already own, and broadcast that the deaths were caused by a brutal overreaction by Chavez’s forces. This would give them the moral authority to seize control.
I was reminded of the CIA-managed coup in Iran, in 1953, which also relied on massive public demonstrations resulting in stage-managed deaths. (I wrote about that here.)
It reminded me again that here in New Zealand we were party to this coup. I remember vividly the story as it appeared in our local newspapers, that Chavez security forces fired into an unruly anti-Chavez demonstration, killing dozens. The truth (as I realised at the time thanks to some internet research) was almost precisely opposite to this: anti-Chavez plotters had ordered police to assassinate Chavez supporters. The spin and disinformation had issued from the table of the coup leaders, and found its way straight into my morning newspaper. It was something of a wake-up call to me at the time.
I went to Venezuala partly because of these events, and generally to lay eyes on the place. I wrote about it here. It added extra resonance to the documentary, because I recognised many of the locations. It felt familiar.
(There have, of course, been claims that the film is Chavez propaganda. Don’t believe it. Wikipedia has a summary; check the Discussion page for more.)
So am I a fully-signed up member of the Huge Chavez personality cult, as Russell Brown unhelpfully puts it? Nope. There are problems with Chavez, not least his desire to stay in power forevermore. But the more I read about the situation there, the more it seems like these caveats are small in the face of the incredible transitions over which he has presided. The Venezualan political project is a fascinating and exciting one, and I am certainly a fully-signed-up member of those who wish it well.

This is a comic strip I wrote for the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club‘s prestigious zine, TSV in 1997.
(I put this on LJ last week; here’s a lot more about it for the readership here.)



I was approached to write a strip in 1996 I think, presumably thanks to my heavily comic-styled short story Tempest that had appeared in TSV’s 1995 fiction offering Timestreams 5. Eager to take the chance to write a comic that would actually be drawn, I set about developing some ideas.
This was the era of the Doctor Who New Adventures. Starting in 1991 and continuing until 1997, Virgin Publishing released a series of novels carrying on the Doctor Who series after the first TV run came to an end in 1989. They are highly regarded, and with very good reason, as they took many risks and generally pushed the Who concept into unexpected new realms. They were often bleak and willing to address very dark subject matter. Notably, several key personnel on the new Doctor Who series also wrote for the New Adventures series, including the revival’s showrunner Russell T Davies.
The arrival of the New Adventures in 1991 coincided with my own teenage fictional exploration of the Doctor Who universe. I was writing a series of short stories in the post-apocalyptic setting of 1964 serial Dalek Invasion Of Earth. I saw that serial in 1988, when it screened as part of the 25th anniversary celebrations here in NZ. It had a big effect on me, and I’d spend the better part of the following decade-plus picking over that serial and its themes and ideas. These stories were about a teenage boy named Raan learning to assert himself and survive in the wrecked and dangerous society. His mentor was a man called ‘the Judge’, who had fought against the Dalek invasion ten years before.
The sting in these stories – and it was clearly and deliberately present in the very first pages I wrote at age 14 – was that the Judge’s efforts to train Raan were actually messing with the boy’s head. He was being taught to use violence as a quick solution, to trust no-one, to keep everyone at a distance. Ultimately, Raan could be turned into a fighting machine, but at the cost of his humanity.
(This angle was a direct response to a fetishisation of human-as-combat-machine that was abundant in popular culture at the time. Comics of the era were full of young people who had trained to be deadly weapons. I wanted to examine the psychological cost such training might have if it was treated a bit more realistically.)
Eventually, these stories grew into a novella, in which this theme expanded. Raan’s combat training was actually working against society’s recovery. Sure, Raan could kick dangerous gang toughs in the head, but that wouldn’t help society find its soul – in fact, it would make social recovery even harder by perpetuating violence. Raan was part of the problem, not part of the solution. The journey Raan made through the story was from being proud of how hardcore he was and how well the Judge had prepared him for survival, through to recognising that he had been trained to dehumanise himself and that his instincts were counter to the greater good. Raan – and the reader – come to see the Judge’s training as an abuse, born of the Judge’s stubborn pride. Ultimately, Raan rejects the Judge – but his redemption comes too late for him to achieve the escape he dearly wanted.
Looking back now, I’m quite impressed by what 15-year-old me was doing with those themes.
Back in the early 90s, I was in talks with Paul and other key NZDWFC folks to get this novella published as a special fiction release, like their other standalone Glory of the Daleks by Chris Owen. Alas, it never quite came together. This comic strip seemed like a good way for me to revisit the setting and the themes, and actually get them into print.
The gloomy mood I was interested in dovetailed perfectly with the New Adventures era, so I decided to tie the story explicitly to the New Adventures continuity. The Sylvester McCoy Doctor appears in his NA aspect accompanied by Bernice Summerfield, who was introduced in the novels by Paul Cornell (who would later write several much-loved episodes of the new series).
The link was tightest with Cornell’s 1994 NA No Future, in which an ongoing story in the NAs was resolved – essentially, the Doctor’s companion Ace had become disillusioned with his manipulative and sometimes amoral behaviour, and had left him to become a hard, emotionless soldier. In this book, Ace comes to terms with what has happened and forgives both him and herself. The parallels with Raan’s story were not lost on me.
So with all these elements in place – Raan, the Judge, No Future – I was able to build up a new story. Set during the invasion, it again features young people being stripped of their humanity by adult men who have forgotten what they are fighting for. It also features the Judge, making this mistake just as he would ten years in the future in the Raan novella. I don’t think you need any prior knowledge to understand the main story – it should stand alone just fine. (The “we’re friends of a relative of yours” comment is just an excuse to get the Doctor and Bernice involved. The implication is that Sarah is a descendant of Ace, but to be honest I don’t care in the slightest about that. All that matters is that they turned up, not why or how.)
The last page deserves a bit of extra comment. This is actually based on a scene at the conclusion of Cornell’s No Future. (I remember being a bit nervous about that, because Cornell was a subscriber to TSV at the time. At least, I think he was.) I added in the flower badge because Ace was always fond of badges and it gave me a nice token to tie the events together. It was meant to be implied that Ace had bought the flower in Glastonbury as part of her emergence from the soldier-life and her re-connection with her past; and that she had inadvertantly left it behind when she left the company of Bernice and the Doctor some time later.
Paul Potiki did the art, and I was very impressed with his work. With my script I’d sent down some layout thumbnails to indicate what I was trying to do, but I’m pretty sure I told him to ignore them whenever he desired and do what he thought was best. The final version more than exceeded my hopes. It really is a beautiful bunch of pictures, and I still get a thrill knowing those are my words turned into illustration there.
So, there you go. More information on a Doctor Who comic strip than you could possibly want. Now go read it.
(See also comments from editor Paul Scoones and Alden Bates.)

Dear Professor Internets,
Please excuse Morgan Davie from blogging on Monday, because it was gloriously sunny and he basically had much better things to do.
I trust this will not affect his final grade for this course.
Yours faithfully,
my mother.
.