Posts by Joe Wylie
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Access: Right to die?, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
please read what Martin wrote
Martin Sullivan writes:
I couldn’t help thinking “This is precisely the problem. It is people like this, with all their ‘expertise’ who will end up speaking for those disabled people who lack the communication skills or cannot speak once euthanasia is legalised.”
Then he goes on to presume to speak for the entire disability spectrum:
It seems that ‘euthanasia’ comes with just too much baggage; baggage such as the Nazi euthanasia program which became our silent holocaust in which over 200,000 of us perished.
Not everyone blessed with a metaphorical wooden leg chooses to wave it about, or to have it done on their behalf by a self-appointed advocate. For example, two people close to me have intellectual disabilities. Provided they remember to close their mouths around strangers, and they’re not required to sustain a conversation for longer than five minutes, they can for the most part lead ‘normal’ lives.
To expect them to sacrifice something of their privacy in the interests of out & proud disability activism would be severely damaging to the precious ‘normality’ they sometimes struggle to sustain. Nevertheless, by WINZ standards they’re disabled. While they don’t live in denial, they’re only too aware of the corrosive effects of being condescended to, even by people with the best of intentions.
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Access: Right to die?, in reply to Sacha,
The checks and balances in any euthansia legislation must be able to counter that sort of stuff.
Exactly. In a forum such as this I’d once have assumed that the discussion would be about how that could be achieved. Instead Martin Sullivan, with the headiness born of single-issue activism, Godwins his own argument by invoking the holocaust. In this mini-climate of wooden-leg-waving scaremongering, it’s the issue of unbearable physical suffering that’s treated as “a bogey to be avoided at all costs”.
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Envirologue: 1080, "eco-terrorism" and agendas, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
In Chchch we call that passive acceptance: Martin van Beynenism
As a commenter on that old curtain-twitcher Van Beynen's column noted a while back, if the Dirty Politics revelations had landed in his lap instead of Hager's they'd have been swiftly passed on to the potentially embarassed, with the public happily kept in the dark.
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OnPoint: Leviathan, in reply to Stephen Judd,
But when I said don’t be a crank, I was thinking in the context of one on one interactions.
Best summed up in this classic post from Simon Garlick
Garlick's examples of grassroots crackpottery aren't too different from those described in a mid-90s Sydney Morning Herald piece on a Lower North Shore Liberal Party meeting. As the kind of Party apologist who gives MP Tony Zappia "a lot of credit" for simply attempting to do his job, Garlick appears to have let his foray outside the confines of whatever bubble he usually inhabits go to his head when he makes the claim that online activism "Isn’t. Worth. Jack."
If "actually raising the issues with someone who matters" isn't happening online it's because elected politicians and candidates from the two major parties are simply too media-timid to genuinely engage on the record. When I "friended" a local politician who'd been publicly outspoken on post-Chch quake issues, I was disappointed to discover that their Facebook presence was confined to the joys of dog ownership.
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OnPoint: Leviathan, in reply to Idiot Savant,
The problem, of course, is that those in power like to paint anyone who doesn’t like the way things are as a crank.
Being a house crank like Jamie Whyte is fine. If the example of Brash is any indication, a spent crank won't get a knighthood for services rendered.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Christchurch,…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I did find on the odd occasion that just asserting authority worked reasonably well with boot boys who were spoiling a party. They could be surprisingly biddable.
That biddability was demonstrated when Mainstreet enforced a policy of boots being required to check in their Docs as a condition of entry. An eyewitness account from back then had massed boots rushing from a Spelling Mistakes set to the foyer, where they fell over one another retrieving and scrambling into their hardware. Once they got out onto Queen Street the reported King Cobras who'd sparked their frenzy were nowhere to be seen.
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Nanogirl. Hope she fares better than Microworld of Inner Space, which I guess no-one much remembers. It was down in Halsey Street near the Ak. waterfront, and featured interactive zoomable exhibits of stuff like ant nests, bacteria, and forensic microscope slides.
Very cool for the time. Set up by a couple of science teachers and a digital whizz, it apparently did OK with school parties until a financial wide boy asset stripped it. All those sweet little macro-lensed video cameras and interactive rigs got auctioned off for a song.
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Hard News: To defame and deflect, in reply to BenWilson,
On Stuff, Michael Field does a useful job of explaining why we might want to eavesdrop on our Pacific neighbours
Not really. He lists a bunch of might-have-helpeds, all of which involve extremely pervasive outright spying on people in other sovereign nations, right up to their senior politicians – for their good. They do not ask for such help, and probably would not want it, and if it was provided, people would just plot trouble in ways that such surveillance is not helpful for.
Field's piece reads like a 21st century version of the musings of the kind of old colonial hand who kept the natives in line with a sack of beads and a dozen Lee-Enfields.
A large chunk of Fiji's population live in New Zealand and more may come if things ever go bad again.
We need to be watching.
Is it just Field, or was that kind of implied rascism and condescension all the go back on his watch?
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“Mr Little said it isn’t a surprise that the GCSB would be monitoring the Pacific nations, he said he couldn’t understand the intelligence interest in “hoovering up” all communications.”
While I appreciate that Little’s a busy man, surely someone in his circle should have taken the trouble to grab a copy of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide.
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Hard News: When the fast track seems a…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Dang and here I am reading Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue
“Do What You’ve Got to Do and Stay Fly.”