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Finally! After so many battles you have reached the final chamber. Here, your quest will end. Wiping off the last of the Bloodbeast’s ichor from your tunic, you climb the stairs and open the door.
Inside there are two foul monsters. They are both grossly obese, and stand glaring at each other. Between them is a comfortable settee, and they clearly both wish to sit down in it, but they are too large to share.
“Ah!” cry the monsters in unison. “You are here, puny human. Now, you must choose. Which of us will you join on the settee?”
The first monster, stinking and covered with scuttling vermin, grins to show unbrushed teeth. “If you choose me, I’ll roll all over you until you’re good and filthy, and then I’ll gnaw on you a bit, and then I’ll crush you underneath me until you almost drown in my juices.”
“But I’ll also order that a new settee be made, and once it is ready, you’ll have your own place to sit ever after.”
The second monster, with lifeless shark’s eyes and rows of thin teeth, spread its arms. “If you choose me, I’ll shuffle over to give you as much room on the settee as possible. Not only that, I’ll let you use the remote control at least once a day.”
“Of course, next week I’ll bite your head off and swallow it whole.”
Your entire adventure comes down to this fateful choice! What will you do?
If you attack the stinking monster, turn to 275
If you attack the shark’s eyes monster, turn to 360
Minister for Social Development, Paula Bennett, is confused about which Peter Saunders she appointed as an advisor to the Welfare Working Group (WWG), the Green Party revealed today.
“The tale of Paula, Peter and Peter is a perplexing predicament for the Minister. There are two Peter Saunders who work on welfare issues and it seems Ms Bennett is unsure of which one she appointed” said Catherine Delahunty Green Party Work and Income Spokesperson.
Ms Bennett told the house last Thursday that the WWG advisor wrote a book called Welfare to Work in Practice.
However, this book was not written by the Peter Saunders Ms Bennett appointed…
– Greens media release
The original Professor Peter Saunders is director of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales where he has been for more than 20 years.
The new Peter Saunders is also a professor, fomerly of the University of Sussex, who last year was appointed director of social policy research programs at the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), a Sydney-based think tank.
My friend bekitty recently went to join her partner in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he is working until September. She didn’t make it. She tells her story in full, and it’s worth a read to see what happens when the eye of immigration falls upon you.
In particular, I draw your attention to her framing of the experience, as a reminder of how privileged she is. Here’s a hint:
In Tank 6 with me were 16 other women… I was the only woman who didn’t speak Spanish.
Just another in a long line of bad experiences with immigration controls. Although I can understand the need for limits, the ruthlessness with which borders are patrolled troubles me. The things that concern me in particular, in this story and others I’ve heard, are the huge scope for discretion by immigration staff, the lack of recourse for people who find themselves on the wrong track, and the high-stakes decisions being made under pressure without access to advice or support.
Although this story has the distinctive fingerprints of the U.S.A. all over it, I doubt somehow that this story would be massively different in any other country. I’ve heard bad stories about every first world nation. It would be nice to achieve a culture shift. Can’t see it happening any time soon though.
(Movie poster above is The Visitor, which covers some of this same ground. Nice film.)
ACTA isn’t well-known to those who aren’t web people, true internet natives. And it should be. From ACTA .net.nz, a description:
While in name it is about protecting consumers from counterfeit merchandise, the agreement is much wider in scope and addresses the regulation of Internet use by private citizens in an attempt to prevent unauthorised sharing of copyrighted works.
ACTA is being negotiated between a large group of countries in a series of secret meetings. This is a big deal. As internet use becomes more and more central to civic participation, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to fight against attempts to attach commerce-driven barriers and traps. (It’s the secret meetings that really set me off – the lack of transparency is appalling.)
The next (secret) meeting between the countries is here in Wellington, and on Saturday a group of local web-people produced and issued the Wellington Declaration, which calls for:
acknowledging fair use in copyright
no protection for technology that limits users interaction with their own files
preservation of normal consumer protections and due process
maintaining right to privacy
avoiding punishment of ISPs, hosts and search engines
preserving access to the internet for all
in a copyright violation, ensuring that Courts (or equivalent) determine damages, proportionate to intent and harm
setting a high bar for criminal liability
This is all very important stuff. I urge you to sign the petition. It will be given to the NZ govt and they will circulate it to all countries in the negotiations. This is not an NZ issue, this is a global issue, and I hope you’ll all take a minute to add your name.
Just over a week ago, a post I made about Wikileaks (lifted directly from Dylan Horrocks’ twitter feed) went ballistic and garnered nearly 100,000 sets of eyeballs in a day. The events in question mentioned an upcoming video release about murder in Iraq and a Pentagon cover-up.
The video has now been released. It’s circulating all over the place, and Scoop has a good overview, with the short-form (17-minute) video embedded.
Basic story: a U.S. military helicopter identifies a group of men in a street as targets, and shoots them down. When others arrive to evacuate the wounded, they too are shot down. I don’t recommend watching the video lightly – it’s intense and emotional, and the video-game chatter of the U.S. soldiers is hard to listen to. But I do think it’s important, and if you intend to form an opinion on this, you should try to get through it. Warning: children are injured in the attack.
There’s lots of discussion happening all over the ‘net about what the video shows, and whether the U.S. military personnel involved were right or wrong to designate the men as targets and shoot them, and whether they were right or wrong to do the same thing when more people arrived to help the wounded. A lot of this discussion concerns the rules of engagement in play at the time, and whether the men in question were reasonably seen as carrying weapons.
The weapons are, to me, of greatest interest. You can hear in the spotter’s (gunner’s?) commentary as he sees the men and sees guns that he believes this is a legitimate military target. Look again at how exactly this happens:
At 3 mins into the video, the leaked footage begins as the spotters identify a group of people standing together.
At 3 mins 20 seconds, Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen is in the centre of the frame, hoisting his camera. The spotter says “That’s a weapon.” (With those words, Namir and companions were condemned to death.)
At 3’37, the spotter reports: “Have individuals with weapons.” Note the plural – one weapon has become several, without obvious cause.
At 3’40, two other men come into frame, and they both are carrying weapons, AK-47s apparently. (These are, again, legal to carry here.) Spotter, on seeing the first of this pair: “He’s got a weapon too.” Then, after seeing the other: “Have five to six individuals with AK-47s.” Three identified weapons (one erroneously) have become five to six. They’ve seen enough. At 3’50, permission to fire is sought, and soon after is received.
At 4’10, a long camera piece is identified as an RPG. Note, permission to fire has already been received at this point.
There’s a well-known perceptual/cognitive phenomenon called confirmation bias. This says that we interpret what we are seeing in terms of what we expect to see. This video captures confirmation bias in action. A camera became a gun, then two others with guns became proof of an attack squad, then the camera again became an immediate threat. The pattern is clear: there is no way for the spotters in the helicopter to step out of this chain of perceptions.
This is not a trivial matter. I’m not trying to diminish these events by pointing at a cognitive bias as an excuse or rationale. No, to me this is exactly where the scandal is. Fire orders are being made on interpretations that do not correct for this extremely common and well-understood bias. Lives are being taken and the system that authorizes this fails to account for decades-old research (and anecdotal understanding that goes back hundreds of years.) Instead, the whole apparatus operates in precisely the opposite direction; once the action is taken, it must be justified. The evidence is massaged and re-interpreted to support the initial confirmation bias. A perceptual error becomes truth.
Now, the target identification issue isn’t the only troubling thing here, and it isn’t the focus of Wikileaks’ interest. The assault on unarmed men (and children!) attempting to evacuate the wounded is horrific. The Pentagon’s stonewalling of Reuters trying to get this tape is appalling. The disengaged chatter of the U.S. military is disturbing, if completely understandable.
Regardless of those issues, the confirmation bias explanation for what happens is all I can think about right now. I probably won’t come back to the rest. I don’t think I want to watch that video ever again.
There were a lot of people there. The house monkey spotted me and my Cal in this crowd photo from Scoop’s coverage (and I found him in this one). Ran into china_shop, who pointed out how weird it was that the speakers kept citing The Economist (thanks to this article that rips into this nation’s environmental credentials).
I was talking to Dale yesterday about this and we shared our confusion at this whole situation. As Dale said, how can they not see this as a big vote-loser? Where are the gains to balance that out? Claire expresses similar feelings down in the comments, with the post title above being one of her explanations for the behaviour on display. I am no wiser. I’ve heard some conspiracy theories that it’s about controlling the media while other changes get pushed through, or about putting this or that MP over, and the govt will pull back and say “sorry folks we listen love us!” but I don’t have any faith in the present govt’s ability to run that kind of disciplined strategy, and Brownlee has totally nailed his credibility to this endeavour so I don’t think an elegant backdown is possible any more.
I can’t even bring myself to write anything coherent on this subject. The calculated gains are so petty and the symbolic cost so huge (let alone the real costs) it just infuriates me.
If you’re a Kiwi, write to the PM about it. I just did. He’s at j.key@ministers.govt.nz and you can write to him this very moment. Stephen Judd has a great exemplar.
(If you’re not a Kiwi, feel free to write as well – living up to the international branding of NZ as clean and green is important to our tourism industry.)
I’d also like to add my voice to all those expressing bewildered delight that the Waihopai Three were acquitted. They were three nonviolent peace activists who broke into a secure base and deflated the canopy over one of the Echelon system‘s monitoring dishes.
I have no idea how the jury found them not guilty; the defence were running a pretty unlikely line. I can only conclude that the jury respected their actions and fudged the decision to avoid punishing them.
There might yet be an appeal. I feel the Crown might decide not to, though, as they probably know they’d be on a hiding to nothing pursuing the case – better to let it sink into history. One can only imagine what will be going on in the diplomatic backchannels about this, though.
Speaking of the political rhetoric and its disconnect from understanding…
Author Nicky Hager accuses the prime minister of being “cranky” and of coming up with “wacky” conspiracy theories. Hmm. – Liam Hehir, Palmerston North
Backstory: investigating journo Nicky Hager came into possession of a lot of internal emails from the National Party, and used them as the basis of a book called The Hollow Men that essentially rolled Nats leader Don Brash out of politics.
Nats attack dog Matthew Hooton went ferociously after control of the story with the lede-friendly counterattack line that those emails were stolen not leaked, probably by high-tech computer hackers, and that made Hager a criminal, and never mind the substance of the book because he’s a criminal and they were hacked! HACKED I SAY!
Cue endless discussion over whether or not the emails were hacked (the media reports all use this frame even though none of them really seem to know what “hacked” means). Meanwhile, things that came up in those emails remain ignored by every media commentator and most politicos. John Key, current Prime Minister, was an important liaison between the Exclusive Brethren and the Nats machine; he denies this vehemently even though the Hollow Men movie has a clip showing him entering a meeting with the EBs. Does anyone challenge him on this? Apparently not. The only story is whether or not the emails were HACKED, i.e. whether Hager is an outright criminal or just a very naughty man.
So, there are two police investigations into the allegations of hacking. Hager maintains “no, they were leaked to me”. Police say, twice: no evidence at all of anything like hacking, whatever that means.
John Key’s response: “Bollocks.” Nice one, P.M., stay on message there. So in the face of two police investigations you’re just going to stick to your story? Of course you are, because your story is a strategic position adopted upon advice from media advisors, and is not in any way connected to anything real. Nats insider/advisor Richard Long, who might be the very one who helped John Key come up with the response line to this story, enthusiastically supports the bollocks line in his completely independent political commentary column in the DomPost.
And so we get the letter to the editor by Liam Hehir, who helpfully demonstrates how effective this media management has been. In Hehir’s world, it’s Hager who’s the wacky conspiracy theorist and John Key who’s the reasonable and sensible one. Sorry Liam Hehir, but you’ve been sold.
I can only point at the media on this. John Key has basically said the police investigations were flawed, and discounted their conclusions. On the basis of nothing much at all he’s pushing a line that says Hager’s entirely reasonable claim of “leakers at work” is a lie, and Hager is a thief. No-one pushes back on this. And certainly no-one pays much attention to the dirt that the emails in question throw in Key’s direction. Media as stenographers to the powerful, as Glenn Greenwald likes to put it. The result is Liam Hehir’s letter. Come on, DomPost and others, do your jobs will you?
