Posts by Dennis Frank
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Typo: punish, not publish!
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Western political theory has been based on democracy for three centuries, whereas western political practice has been based on organised lying for much longer. Machiavelli 1.01 ... so relevance of the media kerfuffle lies in the fact that voters only ever publish disorganised lying.
Both parties scoring own goals have combined with incessant rain to force me into our political blogs first time in half a year & thanks to all contributors for this high-quality commentary thread. I particularly liked this from Rich: "A centre-left government led by Andrew Little and James Shaw is likely to be a repeat of Helen Clark's policies of saying the right thing and being a good manager of capitalism. That doesn't address the fundamental issues of declining living standards and increasingly precarious career prospects. Which in turn is liable to lead (as happened with Obama and Blair) to a disgruntled section of society looking for populist solutions - and enabling a hard-right idiot to spring up".
Yeah, the leftist pretence is no credible option. The leftists gamble, as usual, on public disgust with the right producing a change of government. I agree with whoever reminded us that it is more likely to be produced by a positive alternative - which the left have spent several decades persuading voters that they cannot produce (via their poor performance).
An interesting question now is whether poor police performance will again result in non-prosecution of Barclay for his recording of the conversation of the Nat electorate official, or will non-prosecution result from legal advice obtained by the police - or will prosecution occur? Sufficient evidence available, or destroyed? Admission of guilt on the official record suffices as a basis upon which to proceed? Then will the PM be required to testify in court? Can government arm-twisting deter the process of justice in our democracy? Watch this space.
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Legal Beagle: Three Strikes five years…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I'm with the general public in this respect: same standard as for restorative justice. We just need to see a significant percentage improvement from both policies to make them seem credible. When it isn't forthcoming, we get the impression that policy-makers are operating on blind faith - or using smoke & mirror tactics.
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Legal Beagle: Three Strikes five years…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Some, but so little that it is effectively negligible. Politics being a numbers game, the advocates of deterrence ideology would have to be able to cite significant numbers to win the public debate by presenting the policy as validated by testing. As a proportion, the improvement seems likely to be measured as such a tiny percentage of the whole that the adherent who employed a statistician to measure it would take such fright at the result as to lose confidence in the feasibility of announcing it to the public.
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Okay, so no evidence of deterrence. The onus is now on advocates of the policy to justify it. If reasonable people can see no evidence that the policy is necessary, support for it will ebb.
Equally, we don't seem to be getting evidence that restorative justice works, either. Intuitively, one suspects it ought to, and I've long been a supporter of the notion. Perhaps there's a problem with implementation?
Since justice must be seen to be done for the public to be confident that the justice system is performing a public service, how do we get people satisfied with the performance of the system? Seems to me the next step is formal incorporation of victims' rights, and an operational charter for the system that requires it to include victim participation in the design of outcomes...
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Hard News: The Greens' pretty good new…, in reply to andin,
There is indeed. The reason I didn't mention it is because it represents a different archetype, that the word fool also was applied to. The tarot fool represents everyman, starting out out the road of life. Young men are so naive they often make fools of themselves by accident, eh? Then there's also many who deliberately play the fool.
I recall the tarot picture of that fool as a young guy with his swag tied to a stick over his shoulder. I never used the system myself, but my second wife did a reading for a prominent Auckland criminal lawyer friend in the '70s, predicting something ominous about to happen to him. Next day, his baby child died of heat exhaustion while locked in a car with windows up (they were living in Queensland). Spooked my wife so much she never did another tarot reading again!
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I've noticed inequality featuring constantly in the media this year - and not just in this country. As in lots of people complaining about it (and nobody trying to eliminate it).
But if the criteria are replications of a meme & catchiness, then I'd bet on Brexit or Trump, with truthiness & post-truth deserving merit awards.
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Hard News: The Greens' pretty good new…, in reply to andin,
It was a broad generalisation: most of those are mostly true. The thing about playing the fool is that the play is most socially effective along the fine line that divides truly foolish behaviour from that which makes people think and invokes insights into what's going on at a deeper level.
So that was the ancient archetype. Rulers employed fools to entertain their courts, but the courtiers (and sometimes the rulers) were often taken aback by the cutting edge evident in the social commentary uttered by the fool. The archetype danced the fool on the edge between life & death: the fool died when he cut too hard with his words. That's why comedians got too scared to do political satire after the '70s: media owners don't like criticism of themselves or their political reps.
The prankster story made Tom Wolfe famous because it was avante garde in content, and people always want that leading-edge excitement. If Kesey had been clueless, word-of-mouth would not have snowballed sales. As for Leary, one wouldn't expect an academic to have a sense of humour - but he was right about the crucial effect of the setting of a trip. Dunno that acronym but I always take Titralac pills to eliminate indigestion fast (from any chemist)...
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Emery's experience replicates my own. When I got a job making television commercials in Sydney in '76 I bought a white Rover V8 3.5l with scarlet leather upholstery and a turbocharger button on the floor that got me across an intersection when the lights went green before any other car started moving. Drove high much of the time, never caused an accident.
It tuned me into the traffic flow, so I always ended up in the right place by instinct. I put it down to some kind of leftbrain/rightbrain coordination that bypassed conscious thought. You know how you fell off a bike as a kid whenever you tried to pedal consciously? Logic proves a total screw-up in many practical situations.
However we must not forget the immense cultural divide between those who sharpened up after getting high, and those who got stoned (as in acting like their brain had gelled into concrete). Mostly it seemed generational - those born in the forties who created the avante garde, and those born in the fifties who just followed the trend without comprehension of what it was. Mere hedonists, them, whereas the first lot were into making transformations happen.
And of course the younger crowd were into the cocktail effect. They thought it was cool to get out of it on a combination of drugs, more fool them. Wouldn't trust such turkeys driving - anything could happen. Probably did, all over the place.
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Not just that. It was created to serve as the political representative of the green movement - no doubt the current parliamentary reps feel they're doing that but I'd only partially agree. Some founders thought they were transforming the residue of the Values Party into something more viable, but since several political groups amalgamated that too is merely partially true. Best way to grasp the raison d'etre is to examine & ponder the four principles of the green charter (see GP website).
They were imported from the German Greens and lack the requisite spiritual principle - an omission which the activists here proved too thick to rectify. I'd also incorporate a principle of equity, and another that articulates the commons (public ownership as counter-balance to private). Seven is the magic number, as tradition tells us. Too bad mainstream complacency will prevent them getting that clever...