Hard News: Smack to the Future
358 Responses
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Why bother...have a survey. Personally I don't think CIRs are crap democracy at all. I think representative democracy is crap. CIRs are far, far more credible than surveys.
Which really shows you don't know much about surveys. A robust survey will show nuance and explore attitudes and beliefs through successive questions. That's why they're used for research.
I think the problem with CIRs as we presently have them can be demonstrated thus:
Would the result have been different if the question had been:
"Should children have the same legal protections from assault as adults do?"
Same question, in essence, as the one that went out on the ballots. Just an entirely different emotional loading. And, I would hazard a guess, likely to procure a quite different result. It would certainly have been a much harder one for the "No" team to campaign on.
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Would the result have been different if the question had been:
"Should children have the same legal protections from assault as adults do?"
To me, that was the question that was asked. Yes, I know that the wording was different, but the true intention was clear enough.
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Yeah, Um. Your link serves to show that the anti-reform people struggled to even get the signatures for their petition. It does not show that "the public" was against legalized homosexuality, just that some members of the public were.
Actually Ben, even given the many dubious practices that went into the collection of signatures for the anti-homosexual law reform petition, its authors almost certainly got substantially more genuine signatures than the pro-smackers did, particularly on a per-capita basis. Even if half of all the signatures were chucked out, it would still be 100,000 more than Baldock got.
Perhaps instead of accusing other people of "Epic fail" you should read up a bit more yourself.
There is some evidence that a referendum on homosexual law reform might have gone for law reform, but an equal chance that an emotive campaign could have sent it the other way.
Are you suggesting that the more core of the issue would have changed either way depending on the vote?
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Anyways, I'm tapped out. I only had one point, which was that the question didn't really seem that hard, and I think the result bears that out. I don't think smacking is generally a good idea, nor do I always think it is criminal. I speculate that most of the "no" voters suffered as little trouble as I and everyone else I spoke with outside of PAS did, in interpreting a straightforward question. The rest just want the question to be hard, and again I speculate, it's because they don't like the answer that got 7.3 times as much support as it's rival.
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Ben, "when did you stop beating your wife?" is a straightforward question. Just not particularly useful.
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But do you take my point that a differently-loaded question asking essentially the same thing would have procured a different result?
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Well OK, if Russ wants a go I'll do one more round.
Perhaps instead of accusing other people of "Epic fail" you should read up a bit more yourself.
Perhaps you shouldn't quote me out of context. I did not accuse anyone in particular of an epic fail. That might involve reading on your part too.
Actually Ben, even given the many dubious practices that went into the collection of signatures for the anti-homosexual law reform petition, its authors almost certainly got substantially more genuine signatures than the pro-smackers did, particularly on a per-capita basis. Even if half of all the signatures were chucked out, it would still be 100,000 more than Baldock got.
None of which proves that homosexual law reform was unpopular.
There is some evidence that a referendum on homosexual law reform might have gone for law reform, but an equal chance that an emotive campaign could have sent it the other way.
Might have. We'll never know.
Are you suggesting that the more core of the issue would have changed either way depending on the vote?
I don't understand the question. Is there a typo?
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But at the end of the day, I'd say anal sex is as harmful as the person who is engaging in it thinks it is.
I'm not a doctor, but I think that anal sex, or indeed any other activity which could cause harm, could be a lot more harmful than the person engaging in it thinks it us.
If I was to self-mutilate myself for pleasure, I suspect the actual harm would come down to what I'd done, not whether or not I was enjoying myself while doing it and thought it wasn't harmful.
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Ben, "when did you stop beating your wife?" is a straightforward question. Just not particularly useful.
It's also easy to answer. "Never", is a true answer to that question, in my case. I never started, so I have never stopped. Yes it is a poor question, because a "never" answer is not specific about whether I beat my wife.
But do you take my point that a differently-loaded question asking essentially the same thing would have procured a different result?
Perhaps. Give me the question.
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(My last post shouldn't be read as equating anal sex with mutilation. I was just looking for a more contrasting example)
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Kyle, if you define the subjective pleasure out of the harm equation then science alone weighs in, sure. But you also miss a lot.
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Perhaps. Give me the question.
I did, but here it is again:
Should children have the same legal protections from assault as adults do?
We could then proceed to the implications of the "no" answer to the question that was asked:
Larry Baldock, one of the sponsors(?) of the petition thinks it means the law should be amended to allow parents to hit their children with sticks.
Family Integrity would toss in belts as well as sticks.
Family First doesn't want belts or sticks, but has held up as victims of the law a man who punched his child in the face, a man who "smacked" a child so hard that a relative took pictures of bruising which were used as evidence in a prosecution, and a man who repeatedly threw his son to the ground. So god knows where their boundaries are.
Meanwhile, John Boscawen is bringing a bill that would allow parents to hit a child of any age in the head, so long as it is "trifling and transitory". He completely failed to define "trifling and transitory" in a bFM interview yesterday, yet he's asking us to believe that every parent will understand the words.
Still think this is a great way to make laws?
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I personally doubt so many would be keen to answer "no" to that wording.
But for a fraction of the cost and kerfuffle of a referendum, some polling company could have found out for us.
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OK, but harm is clearly not defined only how you feel about something at the time. There's a scientific element to harm which isn't hard to see.
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Still think this is a great way to make laws?
The simplest answer to any change to the law would have been that originally proposed by Sue Bradford (before Labour and National got together and amended it), which was just to remove section 59 from the law.
Children then could have gotten the same protection from members of their family as any other person - a basic right not to be assaulted, sensibly applied by police and courts.
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I did, but here it is again:
Aha...I missed that post.
Yeah, probably it would get a different result. But it is also a different question. As in, it does not have the same parse at all. It does not amount to the same question. It's a lot vaguer.
Still think this is a great way to make laws?
I detect the horrendous begging of a question here. The answer to that is "No". I never thought it was a great way to make laws so I don't continue to. But I think it's a pretty important part of democracy. The right of citizenry to target an actual issue and demand that the position of citizens be formally counted is one of those safety valves for when the leadership is simply not doing what a large majority of people think they should be doing. Of course the citizens could be completely wrong about that, and find that popular opinion isn't actually in their favor.
But for a fraction of the cost and kerfuffle of a referendum, some polling company could have found out for us.
The kerfuffle is all part of it.
OK, but harm is clearly not defined only how you feel about something at the time. There's a scientific element to harm which isn't hard to see.
I don't deny it. I just don't think it's the whole story. Where morals are concerned it's actually very little of the story. That's why there isn't a science of morality.
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You're trying pretty hard to get this begging the question thing, but I didn't give you an "argument". I gave you a likely answer. The answer to “should a smack as part of good husbandly correction be a criminal offence?” would be uncontroversially "Yes".
The point of the hypothetical alternate question isn’t for you to posit the likely result. It is to highlight one aspect of the actual question that was problematic.
The reason is because people think smacking other adults is a crime. … They won't make an exception for "good husbandly correction".
The reason is (at least should be) that a smack cannot be part of “good husbandly correction”, and the notion is itself faulty. People would not be saying “Yes, it should be a crime, even if part of good husbandly correction”. They would be saying that the idea that a smack could be something that is “good husbandly correction” is absurd.
I don't mean they think that is the law. I mean they think it's bad and should be a crime.
You said in your answer to do it would be a crime. That’s either a pointless statement, or you’re appealing to the criminality of the matter as a support of your position on the criminality of the matter in question. If you don’t see how that’s begging the question, I don‘t know what else to say.
I’ll add here that I’m not against referenda per se. They’re especially useful for making the final decision about significant proposed changes to the mechanisms of our representative democracy
Why bother...have a survey.
Because surveys don’t make decisions. They inform whoever is doing the survey. In a representative democracy the reps themselves shouldn’t make the final decision on changes to the mechanisms that are used to run the democratic system. My objection to CIRs is on the 'C 'and 'I' parts, not so much the 'R'.
Harm is not as amenable to science as you seem to think.
Nor you, apparently:
Me: “The question of whether there is some detrimental effect from being smacked as a child is not a moral question. It is a scientific question…”
Ben: “Right”
Anyways,
Harm is a highly subjective notion. Is anal sex harmful? Ask science and you'll get an answer that will probably highlight the risks of physical damage. There could be any amount of 'scientific' analysis of the psychological impacts of it. But at the end of the day, I'd say anal sex is as harmful as the person who is engaging in it thinks it is.
Agreed, but two things: 1) you realise your focus on the idea of science as where you get your morals from is a straw man, don‘t you? Neither myself nor James W said that. (2) To paraphrase you: I'd say there a sense that anal sex is as harmful as the people who engage in it think it is. That doesn’t apply to the smacking issue, as the children aren’t asked if they consent to getting smacked, are they?
That always was illegal man. Because it would not be considered "reasonable" by either a judge or a jury.
I specifically choose the “bullwhip” example because it refers to a notorious case whereby the jury did consider it was reasonable. Thus, it wasn’t illegal.
Yes, why don't we go back to that incredibly poor example
Why is it so poor? No analogy is perfect, but they’re useful for making points, esp. in informal arguments. Confer your own use of an analogy when discussing a scientific assessment of harm. (I don’t think that analogy holds up, but note that I bothered to say why.)
In your hypothetical world, where husbandly correction is widely popular,
It wouldn’t have to be widely popular, just something that people considered to be a private matter, not something the Law or the Government should be poking its nose into. Much like the general attitude many people had to domestic violence. It’s not about changing attitudes about how most people actually treat their wives (or children), it’s about changing their attitude to what they see as ‘public’ and ‘private’ behavior. Today, no one would seriously say that a man forcing his wife to have sex was a private matter that the “nosey” state should stay out of. Once, that was society’s view (not sure if that was the case in NZ, but certainly in other countries.)
You'd start with women, it would be a fucking easy sell.
So by analogy you’re saying in the smacking debate we would start with children. Easy sell. Do they get a say in referenda?
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But for a fraction of the cost and kerfuffle of a referendum, some polling company could have found out for us.
And we'd probably have gotten a rather less ambiguous question, since polling companies stake their reputations (and commercial survival) on the quality and credibility of the work that appears under their names.
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Quite. I reckon the Clerk could even hire a polling expert to review and test referendum questions before they are expensively delivered.
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I'm still struggling to see how "Should children have the same legal protections from assault as adults do?" is a lot vaguer.
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That question above is one I understand perfectly.
I do have a proposal though. If we are going to allow parents to hit their children when other options have failed I suggest this...
when somebody is caught speeding they are issued a ticket. And then if that doesn't work and they are caught speeding again the police officer calls home, and gets their elderly parents down pronto with a bloody great wooden spoon and serves up a sound thrashing on the road side. Other options have failed you see and if it works for kids it should surely work for adults as well.
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Does anyone have the phone number for Baldock's parents?
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I actually think changing general attitudes to smacking would be a much more positive step than criminalizing it. "There is another way" as a campaign would probably work. I'm inclined to think Supernanny has done much more to stop smacking in NZ than Labour did. A "help quit smacking" team would also be of great benefit, if people didn't think there was a good chance of ending up getting prosecuted instead of helped.
This does make me wonder why there was no public education campaign to go along with the law change. Is it because it was a private member's bill drawn out of the lottery?
I note the report from the Justice and Electoral Committee (from July 2005 I believe) said this:
Public education
We recommend that if the bill is enacted the appropriate agencies should conduct public awareness and education campaigns about the effect of the recommended changes to section 59 and alternatives to physical discipline. We received positive feedback about the Strategies with Kids---Information for Parents (SKIP) programme. This programme has been adopted by thousands of parents, community groups, and educational groups throughout the country. We consider that the extension of the SKIP programme and similar parental educational programmes would be most beneficial in conjunction with the recommended changes to section 59.
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This does make me wonder why there was no public education campaign to go along with the law change. Is it because it was a private member's bill drawn out of the lottery?
I believe it was part of Sue Bradford's proposal that a public education programme would go along with the law change.
Once it became the government bill of death and got passed, the government I think didn't want to know anything more about it because it would keep reminding the public about it with an election coming up, so that it just was a law with no accompanying programme.
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