Posts by Matthew Hooton
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Hard News: Hate and guns, in reply to Joe Wylie,
downplaying the NRA’s influence is empty hypothesising
Sadly you are almost certainly right. But still, leadership is essential. Obama repeating the same "isn't this terrible" speech hasn't been that. And I doubt Clinton will dare do anything much on any topic. Her comments today were quite carefully worded to not offend the NRA.
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Hard News: Hate and guns, in reply to ,
Chocolate fish for anyone who can guess if New Zealand gun laws can prevent the same thing happening here.
Our guns laws didn't stop Aramoana. They just stopped the dozens of similar incidents that didn't happen in the 27 years since.
And I think John Howard needs to pay a visit to the US again. He showed that a conservative can take guns off conservatives and still get re-elected - three times. Blaming the NRA is ultimately a cop-out. A popular conservative US leader who wants to deal with this issue could. But none has.
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Hard News: Forgetting what we didn't know, in reply to Russell Brown,
But it is just a difference of opinion. The OECD does not think NZ meets its tests fort a tax haven. That Deborah, Nicky and Andrea Vance think it does is interesting but not decisive.
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Hard News: Forgetting what we didn't know, in reply to Russell Brown,
But Deborah Russell also says New Zealand is definitely a tax haven, a thing the Prime Minister continues to strongly deny. That’s a story right there.
That's now a story. That a difference of opinion over a definition. And while Nicky Hager's interpretation sides with Deborah's, the OECD's sides with Key's so you take your pick.
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Hard News: The place where things happen…, in reply to Russell Brown,
“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,”
It's more meaningful when "pursuit of happiness" is properly understood. "Pursuit" is meant in the "exercise" sense rather than "chasing" sense. And "happiness" is more the Aristotelian sense of being excellent and contributing positively to your family and community than the more hedonistic sense we may often think of today. So civil rights issues such as homosexual law reform in the 1980s can certainly be seen to have been partly about making it easier for people to pursue happiness in this sense (as well as the more contemporary sense). I'm not sure that's also true of drug legalisation which seems to be more about the liberty part of the motto.
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I'm struggling to think what possible new regulation a so-called centre-right candidate thinks begging needs beyond the current restraints under the Crimes Act and common law. Sounds like nanny state to me.
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Polity: A wilting rose, in reply to Tom Semmens,
The people who work for an hourly wage (the cleaners, the shop workers, council workmen, you know who I mean) were Labour´s grassroots. The people who will turn out to Jerry Collins funeral, who used to open the halls and provide the tea and biscuits and sweep up afterwards. And when things turned to shit, they discovered Labour´s salaried class professionals preferred clinking champagne flutes with the investment class and kissing the asses of bankers to doing anything to help them.
So they left Labour, leaving it a shrivelled urban rump of screeching identity politics factions, salaried trade unionists and self serving professional politicians
I think this is one of the best summaries, in the fewest words, of Labour's problem. Only thing I think I'd change is that it's not the investment class and bankers whose spell Labour has fallen under but the Wellington upper-middle class liberal elite.
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Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to BenWilson,
I can’t speak for Matthew, but I think this is an overly simplistic representation of his argument.
I'm not really making a big passionate argument. Just that there are some things that can't really be evidence based, such as funding the arts, or Rugby World Cups or much of what we do in foreign policy - us sending soldiers to a dispute or introducing a climate change policy isn't going to be decisive. But we may choose to do these things anyway because we value the cause.
But "evidence based" also raises the question of whose evidence to consider and whose lens to use to interpret it. In a decision over whether to support a foreign request to support a military action, is it the evidence and lens of the realists, the institutionalists, the feminist theorists, or who?
I'm not making any bigger a point than that: that value judgements always need to be made.
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Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to Bart Janssen,
One day we’ll have evidence-based legislation
No we won't, and nor would it even be desirable. We're a democracy not a sciencocracy and the demos are entitled to be slow to reach conclusions - or even irrational - if they want to be.
It would be a good idea to have evidence-based policy advise though. And, in this case, the evidence has been clear for a very long time and government's stated position and the polls suggest the fat, lazy, overpaid, underworked Wellington policy class and the demos are now both catching up, which is a good thing.
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Polity: Eleventy billion dollars!, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
By
‘thought it through’,
I mean even in the sense of thinking how a conversation would progress.