Category: Everything Political

“Why is it… some people buy 20 properties a year and others only buy 1?”
There’s an ad in the ‘entertainment’ section of Wellington freebie the Capital Times this week: “How to profit from property!” It’s advertising an upcoming seminar and, cod-socialist that I am, every word in the advertisement makes my hackles rise.
“NZs Largest Propety Success Program to Property Climbers!”
“Learn the secrets ONLY 6% of investors know that gives them success where many others fail!”
“You will never win the race of wealth riding on a donkey!”
The seminar is from a “Richmastery“, a property investment services company based out of Auckland. Their website promises a long and costly process of induction into their secret techniques, culminating in the slightly spooky inner circle:

STEP 8. Presidential Inner Circle
The Presidential Inner Circle is a unique and exclusive opportunity that is strictly limited to fifty serious members worldwide who will experience a range of privileges, access and discovery that is unattainable outside of this selected private group. This group is about Fun, Discovery, Learning and Access at the Highest levels.

They even have their own website: http://www.presidentialinnercircle.com/. There are some great photos of last weekend’s “Ferrari and Porsche day”.
Anyway. I don’t have any grand purpose here other than saying “Look at that!” and pointing. If it reminds you of Amway or Landmark or even Scientology, that’s no mistake, this is just another iteration of the same tried and tested techniques for sucking people in. And I surely don’t have to remind anyone in NZ of the havoc wreaked socially by the rise in investment property.
“Imagine how much faster your personal wealth accumulation could be with this information!”
Bah, humbug. I’m going to catch the bus to work now.

I’m going to the UK in August. 24 hours in a flying tin can for me (each way). And yet. I worry about climate change. I esteem George Monbiot, who says not flying is the single most significant thing one can do to help avert climate change. My moral heuristic is Kant’s categorical imperative: do as you would have everyone do. I even co-ordinate a teaching programme about the gap between attitudes and behaviour in the environmental context.
All this, and I fly to the UK.
I’m going over for the wedding of one of my oldest and closest friends. If there is ever a reason to travel the world, surely this would be it? But on the other hand, I know my friend would understand if I didn’t go. If our friendship means anything, it is respect for one anothers’ principles. Besides, I have a lot of very close friends all around the world. There will always be events of significance out there.
But there are flights going all the time. What’s one seat on one flight going to do? It’s not like they’d cancel the flight if I wasn’t on it, right? But any decision anyone makes has social consequences. If I didn’t go, then that would contribute to social perception of air travel. Me not going might nudge a few other people closer to thinking, yeah, if I’m serious about climate change I’m not going to make that sort of trip. And if they made similar decisions, so it would spread further. Me going has the opposite effect – someone whose conscience is nagging them, like mine did me, can think “well morgue always talks about climate change but he flew around the world just the same”. And maybe that will hold them back.
The big problem in climate change is corporate and government activity, individual carbon output is just a sideshow and worrying about it is useless. But corporate and government activity happens in the social matrix. All the stuff about social influence above applies here as well. The big powers will only change when there’s a mass of public sentiment demanding it, and if I believe that then isn’t it incumbent on me to be part of the demanding public?
Well, just buy come carbon offset and consider yourself in balance. Maybe. I’m suspicious of carbon offset schemes because of the time lag – they promise to pay back your carbon output in the future, but the problem is worsening now and timescales for change are short.
So am I a hypocrite? Yeah, I think I am. And there’s not much I can do about that except acknowledge it. So bear it in mind whenever I talk about this stuff – I’m just an ordinary hypocrite like everyone else. And I’m sure looking forward to the UK.

Glenn Greenwald (18 March) on Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” address:

The entire premise of Barack Obama’s candidacy is… that Americans are not only able, but eager, to participate in a more elevated and reasoned political discourse… But in Obama’s faith in the average American voter lies one of the greatest weaknesses of his campaign. His faith in the ability and willingness of Americans to rise above manipulative political tactics seems drastically to understate both the efficacy of such tactics and the deafening amplification they receive from our establishment press.

The Times of London (21 March):

Polls show Barack Obama damaged by link to Reverend Jeremiah Wright
Barack Obama has been significantly damaged by the controversy over his pastor’s inflammatory remarks and the issue has become a serious threat to his presidential ambitions, polls suggest.
The surveys released yesterday point to an erosion of Mr Obama’s support among independents, a bloc that has previously backed him in overwhelming numbers, and particular alienation among white, working-class voters who will be critical to the general election in November.
They appear disturbed by the Illinois senator’s refusal to disown the Rev Jeremiah Wright in a keynote speech he delivered on Tuesday…

Kiwi equestrian gold-medal winner Mark Todd’s comments that if he went to Beijing he’d make some kind of protest against China’s abhorrent actions in Tibet are a sign of an undercurrent of concern that athletes around the world must be feeling.
It would be wrong to take Todd’s comments as too much of a sign – he’s an atypical case, an older athlete making an unexpected comeback at the twilight of his career and already with some gold in his closet – surely he has less to lose from official censure than the vast majority of young competitors. Additionally, it’s plain from the article that his comments were dug out by an enterprising reporter, rather than something Todd had intended to say. Still, Todd knows about the media and knew what he was doing. And the questions he answered will keep coming, everywhere around the world.
The current violence in Tibet, where an absence of free information flow is apparently concealing brutal state repression and perhaps the murder of citizens, is already casting a shadow over the games. For us in the West, Tibet is China’s greatest PR disaster, and the Olympics its greatest PR coup. The appeal to draw these two storylines together will prove irresistible to the world media.
China has already put pressure on governments to ask their athletes to sign a pledge not to speak about politics at the game. A number of athletes have spoken out saying they don’t intend to engage with politics at all. But that’s only to be expected; it would be an athlete with poor survival instincts, or a special case like Todd, who announces now their intent to cause a stir in Beijing.
There is a moral dimension to the Olympics, and I expect it to come to the fore in Beijing. It won’t be the first time there’s been a memorable protest under the five rings.

Padraig O’Bama
Hillary calls herself “the mutant candidate.” As in, the X-Men.
From The Morgue: Being Informed, So You Don’t Want To Be.

Two Palestinian gunmen have opened fire in a Jewish religious school in Jerusalem, killing at least eight people and wounding 20.
A school? I have no words.

Back in November 2k6, I wrote my “Now we have won” post saying that the public landscape of ideas has changed, and that the Iraq war is now seen as an endless failure, and anthropogenic climate change is accepted as happening. (There were some stoushy comments that led to a followup “No, seriously!” post.)
That post was when i thought we’d hit tipping point. Some might say I was too early or too late, but it seems impossible to deny that we’ve tipped somewhere along the line.
The example that got me today was featured in the DomPost, sourced from the Washington Post – an article about climate change sceptics that gives them all the credibility of the Keystone Kops:

While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists.

or even:

Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, said he was not surprised that roughly 500 participants had gathered at the meeting. “I’m sure that the flat Earth society had a few final meetings before they broke up.”

This article simply wouldn’t have been printable a couple years ago. Thank heavens we’re over that nonsense.
(The DomPost version takes note of the fact that some of NZ’s own Clown Skeptics, Vincent Gray among them, made the pilgrimage.)

This one’s been sitting in my bookmarks for a while, waiting for me to get around to blogging it. It’s worth waiting for. It isn’t often I read something that really shakes me, and this more than fit the bill.
Back on 19 feb, George Monbiot wrote about how costs are balanced in environmental accounting. His starting point was the crucial Stern Report, a document that joined with the IPCC findings to finally tip the balance on whether action is needed to stem climate change:

Sir Nicholas Stern… showed that stopping runaway climate change would cost less than failing to prevent it. But… few people bothered to find out how he had achieved this result. It took me a while, but by the time I reached the end [of his report] I was horrified.

Monbiot identifies problems with the way Stern measures the costs of climate change. All kinds of destruction, disruption, displacement and death are turned into a money figure: they are considered as “a reduction in consumption” equivalent to $30 per tonne of carbon.
Suddenly, as Monbiot observes, you are able to weigh up the cost of environmental destruction and human life as entries on a balance sheet. Sure enough, the UK govt’s argument to expand Heathrow airport follows this precedent. As Monbiot summarises:

The government claims that building a third runway will reduce delays, on average, by three minutes. This saving is costed at €38-49 per passenger per hour. The price is a function of the average net wages of travellers: the more you earn, the more the delays are deemed to cost you, even if you are on holiday.

This is the sort of logic that sits behind much public decisionmaking. On the one hand, Stern conscientiously evaluates human misery and death as a component of ‘reduction in consumption’; on the other hand, a City Executive whose plane is delayed is deemed to have its own social cost.
I should say, I don’t have a problem with the methodology in principle. Unlike Monbiot, weighing up human life in dollar terms doesn’t shock me; health funders and automobile manufacturers have to do the same thing all the time. What shocks me is the way in which these prices are set. The most cautious figures are used to call the devastation of our planetary ecosystem a ‘reduction in consumption’ – but somehow the most generous assessments are given to the cost to society of an exec stuck waiting for his plane another hour. And perhaps that’s enough to sink this methodology. The translation of non-monetary values into financial ones will always be so tentative and subjective and responsive to the biases of those performing the translation that the most hideous results are inevitable. And on this basis, the decisions are made that determine whether our planet is trapped into a horrible future. (Or for a Dubtown parallel – the decision to press ahead on the Wellington Bypass surely owed a lot to exactly this kind of accounting.)
Go read the article. Monbiot is always incredible, and this is a superb example of his writing at its pithy, excellent best. I was lucky enough to see him talking at the G8 in July ’05, and he’s going to be videocasting a talk to Wellington this Saturday morning for Writers and Readers Week. Perhaps my favourite Monbiot article of all time is Fallen Fruit, about why apples in the UK aren’t as nice as they used to be. (That one was even better with the photos.)

I haven’t been blogging much on the middle east lately, but I’ve been following the news threads as solidly as ever. The latest violence in Gaza is worrying. Only a week ago it was a peaceful protest against an economic blockade; now there’s been escalation and invasion, and civilians are dying. This is all the more concerning because it is out of step with what ordinary Israelis want, according to this Haaretz account that says most Israelis support ceasefire talks with Hamas.
If this concerns you as well, here’s something you can do right now: sign the Avaaz petition.
Out of all the organisations I’ve seen trying to turn online presence into real-world influence, Avaaz is easily the strongest and most successful. They essential work through online word-of-mouth, like this, to push very targetted issue-specific petitions. Their first big one was to the 2007 G8 about global warming, and since then they’ve kept an eye on numerous human rights and climate change issues. They do good work and are the best channel I’m aware of for turning your concern at your computer screen into something that key decisionmakers will actually see.
At the petition page you can see how many have signed, as the bar creeps toward their target. The petition will be delivered to the Israeli government and to Hamas to call for an immediate ceasefire. It’s something.

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