Category: Everything Political

So the election season has rolled on, with the first big electoral policy initiative out of the incumbent Labour govt being war on taggers.
Obviously this is an image-correction maneuver by Clark. The electorate are sick of tagging, so it is valuable to be seen to be doing something. But a lot of people have missed that the new law is really intended for adult offenders; youth who tag are going to be dealt with exactly the same way (see the FAQ at the bottom of the press release for more).
The big impact on the kids is going to be restrictions on the sale of spray cans to teens. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of such a restriction, it just doesn’t sound very effective in the face of an army of disenfranchised 13-year-olds with marker pens, older cousins and nothing to do with their time. Still, the FAQ has an answer to that:

It has been suggested that spray paint taggers will all start scratching glass or using marker pens. However, tagging has its own internal boundaries and ‘culture’. As spray paint is the chosen tool of this ‘culture’ it is expected that the movement to other types of graffiti implement will be small and we would expect to see an overall reduction in graffiti.

Heck, it could work. Tagging doesn’t have deep roots in this country anyway.
Overall it doesn’t seem to me like much change is possible from this legislation. It’s certainly not an important social problem. (Don’t get me started on that Broken Windows nonsense. And no, tagging is not a gateway crime. The taggers of today don’t become the home invaders of tomorrow.) No doubt some policy wonk has worked hard on it, but ultimately it just amounts to a flag in the ground saying Labour is not surrendering middle NZ without a fight.
Anyway. I’ve had a few interesting conversations about this recently. Tagging as an activity has always sat uneasily with me. Full-fledged graf art, I have a lot of love for that. Witty and weird little slogans scrawled in public places are a bonus in our urban landscape. Tagging, the runty little sideshow of graffiti, has never won me over. It isn’t the act itself that bugs me, but the thoughtless aesthetic placement of so much tagging. I mean, tagging some suburban garage? Tagging the side of a white suburban house? This doltish placement has always annoyed me. But the aesthetics of graffiti and tagging are subjective. Does graffiti add value or subtract value to an environment? Well, that depends on the graffiti, the environment, and the person. It’s an impossible equation.
It gets even curlier when you start talking about rights. Do suburban house owners have the right to a crisp, clean garage? Really? What are such property rights built on? Aren’t all such rights dependent on having a fair society which values all its members? Where does value even come from in our society? Do we have the right to clean walls?
I’m very wary of romanticising wall-scrawling. There’s some incredible stuff that happens through words and art on our streets – does anyone know what the “Gayskins” tag that turned up all over town late last year means? – but also there’s a bunch of selfish people who lack any empathy for those who have to cope with their actions.
End result, I guess: Labour’s big public stand is pandering to the talkback masses and that doesn’t make me happy. (Let’s not forget that this comes on the heels of a boy being murdered for tagging and the disgraceful way in which many elected leaders responded.) But if teens end up having trouble buying spray cans by themselves, well, that’s not going to cause me to lose any sleep over damaged civil rights.
Keith Ng has a good piece on the War on Taggers over at Public Address

Chris Sims has swapped out face-kicking for high-kicking because it’s Bring It On Week over at the ISB! If you, like me, have some sneaking (or not-so-sneaking) affection for the best race-relations cheerleader movie ever*, then get on over there for the stick-figure action and way more cheer-puns than you ever want to see.
But this is a blog with pretensions to social relevance, and that means my contribution to Bring It On week is obliged to harsh your high. Check it: one of these things is not like the other:




* No, Revenge of the Cheerleaders doesn’t count, no matter how many full-frontal Hoff shots it contains.

Well, how about that.
He’s been sitting in the top job almost 50 years. Smart money was on him staying there until he died, I would have thought. Guess not.
Random association: watched the Fog of War doco the other day, about Robert McNamara. The Cuban Missile Crisis was discussed, and McNamara told an anecdote about sitting down with Castro and hearing that there were already nuclear missiles in Cuba, and that Castro had asked Khruschev to launch them at the US, knowing full well that Cuba would be destroyed as a result. McNamara’s eyes boggled as he told this story. He said Castro explained himself only by saying, “If it had been you in my position, you would have done exactly the same.”
Anyone reading this been to Cuba? Impressions?

I’m one of the many, many people who’ve pretty much abandoned TV to get my fix straight off the Digital Video Disc. Side effect: when I am in front of the box, the advertisements are even harder to ignore than normal.
This might be why it’s taken me until now to notice that in Cadbury’s chocolate world, all the happy brown-skinned people are actually white people. See for yourself. All that platinum white-boy hair.
And now that I’ve noticed, it bugs me. They don’t make ’em like they used to, that’s for sure…
( Also bugging me is this Aussie advertising disguised as a teaching resource.)

There have been a bunch of wicked pix up from the various protests (gasmask hello kitty girl is apparently already a meme) but my favourite is this, from Manchester – actual creepy-alien looking Scientologist guy filming the protest.

Also, Edinburgers can see what they missed on South Bridge here.

One of the more fascinating things going on webwards right now is the Anonymous vs. Scientology war. In a nutshell: anonymous hacker network wages PR and tech war on Church of Scientology. Their infoclearinghouse is at Xenu.net, you’re one-stop shop for creepy truths about scientology.
The opening salvo was a massive denial-of-service attack on Scientology servers (where you overload them with fake traffic so they can’t handle legit traffic), and the next big moment was today, Feb 10, a global day of in-person action outside Scientology offices.
Project Chanology has the scoop. Very small demos happened at Christchurch and Auckland, according to this page; other parts of the world are still waiting for the designated time to arrive as I write.
This is fascinating on lots of levels. One of them that appeals to me is how the Anonymous collective is perhaps the only organisation really capable of attacking Scientology. The Church of Scientology has some scary-smart people running its operations, and they are very skilled at making end-runs around legal systems and outmaneuvering attacks that come through normal channels. Some countries have had successes but it’s just plain hard to go for the throat – the Church of Scientology people have a long track record of very intimidating responses to unfriendly coverage by journalists, in particular.
Anonymous, however, isn’t reachable by any of the means the CoS can usually deploy. It isn’t a real organisation; it really is just a really big network of anonymous geek dudes. And that’s anonymous to each other as well – there are no real identities in play here. It is a group with no hierarchy, no structure, no social links, no membership. It is almost an anti-group.
The flipside of this, of course, is that Anonymous is so loose and amorphous that it’s hard for it to turn itself to real action. The Feb 10 demos are a case in point. In less than 24 hours it’ll be apparent whether Anon is a real force or just a worthy attempt; either way, there are big signs of the future to be read in what happens.
I hope Anon pulls it off, though I doubt they’ll manage much. Scientology is very, very screwed up and anything that starts hammering away at that is fine by me. (Also, Tom Cruise is gay, and his attempts to change his orientation led him to Scientology where he has convinced himself he is in fact straight. Doesn’t that explain pretty much everything about that guy?)
EDIT: pics are up from Sydney
EDIT 2: Account of London demo. Five hundred people? Whitechapel’s discussion thread is all worth a look actually.

More election WTF from the land of the free:
“Frankly, in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”
– Mitt Romney, bowing out of the race for the Republican nomination because mumble mumble Terrorists! mumble mumble.
Also, courtesy other moose: Fairness and balance in US media is secured as Karl Rove joins Fox News. Hallelujah.

It was a quiet Waitangi Day this year, compared to the last few. Opposition leader John Key continued his successful programme of getting about the place being likable. Fearless Leader Auntie Helen steered clear without earning the nation’s ridicule, presumable because we all remember the nasty reception she’s had in the past.
No-one climbed any trees or threw any mud or anything. How restrained.
There was, of course, this:

For the furriners, that’s National’s Prime Ministerial hopeful John Key on the right, and he’s greeting his alleged would-be assassin Tame Iti, on the left. That terror raids story just gets stranger and stranger as the months go on.

Well, that didn’t really clear anything up, did it?
Which is fine. I think it’s extremely healthy for the US Democratic nomination to be a long-running down-to-the-wire battle between two candidates who represent similar policy sets but very different visions, and (crucially) neither of whom are white guys. Not least because it provides extra impetus for sorting out their ridiculous electoral system, which is still a complete third-world shambles in every way you’d care to think about.
And on the other side of the fence, white guy with extra pro-war. However it shakes out it’ll be a fascinating election, and probably the nastiest election in decades as the Repub strategists go to town on triggering the latent sexism/racism (delete one) of the independent electorate.
(Props to Sonal for liveblogging the day. Hardcore.)

We just aren’t very good at it, are we? Humans, I mean. As Karen put it in comments to the previous post, we “like simple solutions. and simple solutions don’t exist in complex systems.”
Stuff’s “Have your say” on John key’s boot camp proposal is instructive. It is full of just what you’d expect, but nestled among the nonsense is this revealing comment by a “Dave Smith”: “This hippie flower-power Nanny State the Labour and Greens have produced just does not work – We have given it a try for long enough.”
And this from “Amanda”: “the next few years we will start to see the effects of the disrespectful, mouthy, selfish little savages bleating about “rights” that the Labour government has created!”
Labour came into (coalition) government at the end of 1999. That’s eight years of labour governance so far. Is eight years really enough for society to be changed so utterly? Especially following the neo-liberal economic changes pursued in an unbroken chain from 1984 through to the end of 1999? We are still, as a nation, discovering the effect of those changes (which are in some ways perpetuated by the current government).
I have a notion that politics – left and right, conservative and liberal, however you choose to frame it – are not really about different kinds of governance. I think they are about different perceptions of people, and different perceptions of how systems work.
Many rightish ideologies (and particularly the libertarian strain) at their core view people as fully capable of being masters of their own destinies, and somehow immune to context and systemic influence or pressure.
Many leftish ideologies at their core view people as structured by the systems in which they inhabit. Behaviour can be explained, and some would say excused, by systemic pressures. Also, cleverly designed systems can encourage socially beneficial behaviours.
So, the kinds of political views that make sense to you emerge from your understanding of human behaviour.
These are of course very rough sketches. (They’re not even necessarily contradictory views, if you’re willing to interpret them both just so.) In a sense, these are folk-politics that exist in the community in relationship with politics-as-she-is-done in the big house of government. (Lakoff enthusiasts can compare his family-metaphors to the above – I think Lakoff’s right, but I think that his level of explanation is wrong – his metaphors emerge from these ideas.)
Here’s the kick, though: I think they’re unequal. Rightish ideologies are just simpler at their core than leftish ones. More than that: rightish ideologies, at their core, are just wrong. They’re wrong about us and about society and they’re wrong about themselves. They don’t understand what it is to be human. (Libertarianism, I’m pointing at you for the most explicit incidence of this.)
Systems are complex. Change takes time. The picture is always bigger than you think. Leftish ideologies, for all their many flaws and weaknesses, tend to have a much better grasp on that than rightish ones; and that in itself makes them vulnerable.
—
It is left as an exercise for the reader* how my notion above is not undermined by the fact that capitalism, a system founded on profoundly rightish notions of how humans and systems act, works so much more effectively than any form of socialism I’ve heard of.
* i.e. I’m not sure myself