Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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My notes refer to someone called "Sorrenson" as a easier read than Orbell or Simmons, but I can't find the full reference.
That'd be M. P. K. Sorrenson, Maori Origins and Migrations (Auckland UP, 1979), which is, indeed, a really good book. Also worth reading, because it shows how much the Waitaha myth and other new age appropriations owe to the hyper-diffusionist ethnologies of the nineteenth century, is K. R. Howe's Quest for Origins (Penguin), a revised version of which came out last year. Howe's good because he addresses Brailsford et al. directly.
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You worship them because they're powerless to chop your head off?
Oh, for God's sakes, Ben, no. I was just pointing out that it's often the shiny people who promise to sweep away the past with AWSUM! new ideas who turn out to be the real menaces. Not the "ghosts" of our ancestors.
Oh, and: those who have most to gain from arguing that ghosts exist and are scary are professional exorcists.
Tom: reactionary, flying straitjackets aside, what are you implying? Because it sounds an awful lot like Deuteronomy 33:17 combined with the first part of Jeremiah 30:11 to me. In other words, not good.
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I'm inclined to agree with Thomas Paine that the right of the dead to dictate the lives of the living is one of the most absurd things humans have ever come up with. It's a form of ghost worship.
Well, yeah, but one of the direct consequences of that line of thinking was Robespierre. I'd prefer to stick to worshipping ghosts, quite frankly, because they're less likely to chop my head off.
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I am going to be deeply un-politically correct here and say I have sympathy for the idea the treaty is the original basis for de jure government. But the realities of New Zealand 170 years on from 1840 makes the current New Zealand state de jure and de facto without need for recourse to the treaty of Waitangi. To my mind, most of the treaty is now relevant only to academics.
OK. But remember that "de facto rights" boil down to rights assumed by force, or the threat of force. And these aren't really sound foundations on which to base any claim to a rule of law that binds us all. If your ancestors were quelled by force alone, surely it behooves you to resist the state by applying a countervailing force of your own?
Remember also that one of the reasons that the Treaty came to be regarded as an unfortunate mistake was because of a change in intellectual climate in Britain in the mid- to late nineteenth century. And the writings in favour of obtaining an empire by force that accompanied that change of opinion were pretty nasty. I've got a copy of the The Nineteenth Century 42 (April 1897) here on the desk beside me, and here's what one of its contributors has to say about the "Ethics of Empire"
What is the moral justification for the conquest of the nations of India by England? The best way of answering that query is to put another. What was it that enabled the English to effect that conquest? Evidently it was their inherent superiority. How, then, did that superiority arise? It arose because through many centuries the ancestors of the Englishmen ... had made a better use of their opportunities than had the ancestors of the various nations in India whom they subdued. That section of mankind which dwelt in Britain had acquired, doubtless through the compulsion of heredity and environment, a far stronger and more energetic temperament than that which obtained on the Indian peninsula. As a result, they were the stronger people .... This is precisely the process which has taken place in the world at large.
That there is the essence of the "de facto" argument. And we see where that led. No good comes of it.
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Where you run into a wall of Pakeha hostility is the idea of bi-culturalism and the relevance of the treaty as a living document. The treaty is between Maori and the British crown and its successor.
The elephant in that room are four million people who now simply call themselves New Zealanders, and who are not addressed in the treaty.So, it's a contention between different ideas of history. I'm going to be simplistic here and boil it down to two viewpoints: the "it was all such a long time ago and has no relevance to us now" school, and the "we're in a partnership; we owe responsibilities to each other as neighbours and partners; and those responsibilities are reborn with each generation" group. It seems to me the second has a lot more going for it. Especially considering that a lot of the grievances currently before the Tribunal didn't take place in some distant, Victorian past. Most of the Maori land alienated through the Land Court was taken in the twentieth century.
A lot of the most cynical seizures of the kind Danielle was referring to -- "we need this land urgently for a school! Sorry, we meant a golf course! LOL" -- happened in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. To claim that these kinds of injustices "have no relevance" to us now is pretty hypocritical, it seems to me.
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This issue requires a political solution. Abdicating that clear political responsibility and letting the courts decide would be irresponsible and risks pushing the Pakeha majority one bridge to far, and that would be a disaster for race relations.
But, Tom, it's a legal issue. And one thing that the depressing fallout of the Brash years shows is that the majority of New Zealanders don't have the slightest grasp of the jurisprudential issues involved. Or even of the basic concept of fairness. Any political solution is going to be affected by this. And the reactionary media infrastructure (talkback; TV news; virtually all daily newspapers) that exists to perpetuate this line of public opinion ain't going anywhere.
I think we're safer leaving it up to the Courts, frankly. There's a much higher proportion of first-class minds on the bench than there is in the New Zealand voting population right now. And if that sounds elitist, well, sorry.
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Yes he can -- but if those views include paranoid Jew-baiting can I point, laugh, and ask whether he'd care to explain how the RSA and the management of the Auckland War Memorial Museum are part of the Jewish Guilt Machine?
It's the blood of the Lost Tribes fizzing righteously in their veins.
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Can I just say that I loved webweavers' little trip(s) down memory lane?
Me too. I've never enjoyed a pointed take-down more.
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(In fact punk was music with all the black elements put back in, going back to real rock music before white American suburbia fucked it all up. Or at least that's the narrative and I really rather think it's much closer to the truth than `punk = white music'.)
Well, yeah, that's one narrative, I guess. But a significant part of the aesthetics of punk, especially in the UK in the late '70s, was amping up and accentuating the whiteness of the performers. Take a look at the self-presentation of the Sex Pistols, for instance. Where are the "black elements" in that? The Sex Pistols were part of a reaction to something -- mainstream '70s rock acts who derived their faux-sexuality and sense of implied menace from an appropriation of black personae, in fashion, hair, vocal stylings, and mannerisms. The punk critique involved a deliberate disavowal of what was seen as the self-serving fakeness of this form of racialised cultural appropriation.
So, while I'm certainly not claiming that punk can be reduced to the music of the "white pride" movement, the self-conscious "Whiteness" of the punk performer, and the punk guitarist's self-conscious abnegation of "black" or funk elements in favour of "white noise," aren't things you can just dismiss. They're kind of central.
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Could Cunliffe first come clean on WTF he does all day?
[Reads to end of press release]
Man, this apostrafing conspiracy goes deeper than I thought! And Cunliffe isn't even an ex-teacher!