Posts by Dennis Frank
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to ,
Metiria Turei said it, but your assumption that she speaks for the Greens is only valid for those who believe in the 19th century concept of political representation. Our representatives are more likely to spout personal opinions nowadays. Some do try to articulate whatever the relatively objective commonly-held view in the party they pretend to represent currently is , but such old-fashioned attempts to be authentic are increasingly rare.
The Greens representation of the green movement has always been flawed, and at times like this a fair-minded person is likely to view such fatuous sectarianism as an insult to the intelligence of the folks in the broader green movement - however to be charitable to our co-leader I'll suggest that she was taking a moral stand against a highly unsuitable role-model. I doubt she was implying that as leader of the Green govt of Aotearoa she would decline an invitation to visit President Trump at the White House. Too bad, eh? Could have been a fun way to grab the headlines...
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Legal Beagle: On Gell-Mann Amnesia; or…, in reply to Kevin McCready,
Thanks Kevin, I'll look out for it. I wrote the initial section on rehabilitation in the Green Party justice policy when I was convenor of the working group in the early '90s and still agree with the principle.
However it appears that in practice some offenders resist application. Due either to too much damage done to them when younger or innate inability to reform. In regard to those cases I'm more inclined to the SST stance.
Could be that SST has a jaundiced view of rehabilitation because they see it as a failure? I've noticed the media tends not to front with comparative success/failure stats. That could be because neither they nor the state want to discover or tell the truth. Has any university has done the requisite research on this?
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I've been trending towards the view expressed by Kevin (that jail doesn't actually work as a deterrent to crime). However, a basic principle of justice is that it must be seen to be done. I wonder why the judiciary always demonstrate their collective inability to grasp this concept.
Breeding disrespect for the justice system in the public mind is not in our common interest. Alternatives to jail time do actually need generate a widespread perception of credibility.
Graeme asks: "Why, in the biggest criminal justice story in New Zealand for several days, did not a single news article (well, not a single news article accessible on google news at any rate) mention what the person at the centre of it was actually convicted of?" My explanation: for younger generations (the media market) perception now equates with reality. Often a story about popular perceptions will seem better than one that merely reports facts.
The media must reflect cultural fashions, so postmodern reporting goes with that flow. Delusional tendencies abound. The mental discipline required to get a grip on reality just seems too hard for many players. Trumpism.
"Police did not agree to reduce a more serious charge to a charge of assault or assault on a Police officer, they agreed to reduce a more serious charge to a charge of aggravated assault. The maximum penalty for assault on a police officer is six months in prison. The maximum penalty for aggravated assault is three years in prison." So the judge chose zero prison time due to the damage done to the policewoman being so negligible?
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Incidentally, Russell, I also recall being introduced to Dave Neumegan by my friend Bob Hillier. They said there was an entire cabal of law students like them in Pipe Soc. I was briefly honoured at their invitation to join them (despite being a physics student) but smoking pipes in groups seemed kinda weird to me (but then I turned out to be allergic to tobacco).
Bill Spring, who you mentioned, got elected by the silent majority of students. Us nonconformists were outnumbered about ten to one even at AU. Nationwide (general public) it was around a hundred to one. Ultraconservatism was once the pervasive norm in Aotearoa. Your references to our traditional culture in that era highlight the reactionary paranoia to the upwelling alternative. I've got a clipping from the Herald in my archive reporting the call from Holyoake's Minister of Police for the RSA to send a bunch of thugs to beat up the PYM next time they dared march in the street! The Stones had a #1 hit in England that wasn't broadcast here (I suspect not even Hauraki dared): Let's Spend the Night Together. The establishment had to prevent such moral perversion...
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Hard News: Radio B and the secret pirates, in reply to Joe Wylie,
..like a turd on a string... : ) yeah, you're recycling what was happening in my mind at the time!
Complex memes can be so infectious that they globalise - likely we picked it up from the cultural ambience. Probably originated in Scotland by youngsters paraphrasing the traditional 18th century line (about Bonnie Prince Charlie escaping his English pursuers).
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I was on the periphery - got friendly with Selwyn Jones in '71 who told me how he was deeply involved in building the Radio Bosom enterprise. The Ak freak scene arose from guys with shoulder-length hair getting high & doing trips, but he & I just had the hair in common at that point. Phil Goff likewise. He was in the PYM at the time. Shadbolt was the avatar.
The culture was known as the Underground in the late sixties, but that changed to the counter-culture in the early seventies. Solidarity with Bosom was due to the fact that those who created it were genuine rebels like us, but it soon trended away from the avante garde towards the mainstream.
Late in '66 I found Hauraki on my old valve radio & stayed with it a few years till it went mainstream. I was in the 6th form in Wanganui, and had been listening to the Sydney & Melbourne pop stations because they weren't as staid as ours - reception across the Tasman was surprisingly good after I ran a long section of clothes-line wire from the house to our big willow tree. Beat groups were jazzing up old classics & the Palmerston North band Pete Nelson & the Castaways had a hit with a sped-up version of the Skye Boat Song that year (also a hit in Oz & later appeared on a compilation CD of one-hit wonders in the '90s).
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Hard News: LATE: From #Slacktivism to Activism, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Of course not. It was just an oblique reference to the effect of postmodernism on younger generations. In particular, to how that culture makes it hard to discern what's real. I'm aware there are pros & cons to postmodern culture, so I'm just citing the relevant downside.
In respect of the topic originating this thread of comments, it seems to me very relevant to the relation of info to activism. The TPPA was mentioned, and I found myself so ambivalent several years after my initial total hostility to secret corporate lawyer tribunals (went on the first TPPA march about 5 years ago but none since) that I ended up disgusted with the simple-mindedness of many opponents. Dumb buggers couldn't grasp that enforcement of tribunal decisions is the crux of the issue: the Herald editorial pointing out that the Ecuador case proved the point of unenforceability wasn't a fact that they wanted to know.
We live in the era of information, but what informs people is just as likely to be rumour & innuendo as fact. So I was sceptical that Brian Cox was doing anything other than going with the flow of postmodernism. To put the best gloss on it, I presume he was simply reporting the consensual view handed down by a century of physicists. I'm sceptical that any of them bothered to check that replication had actually occurred. But I could be wrong...
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Hard News: LATE: From #Slacktivism to Activism, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Okay, Bart, would I believe someone born a couple of months after I enrolled at AU to get my physics degree? He's a Fellow of the Royal Society, just like Sir Isaac Newton (the famous alchemist) so I'm tempted, but my point was that physicists conceived the principle of replication to transcend reliance on just such hearsay.
To get from the subjective nature of individual opinion to the objective nature of consensus reality some other scientist must do the same experiment and get the same result. Cases of scientists misinterpreting data are legion. Here's a nifty explanation of the relativistic nature of Mercury's orbit: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26408/what-did-general-relativity-clarify-about-mercury
Not too technical, but also not all that satisfying. Doesn't say who - if anyone - independently verified Sir Arthur Eddington's 1919 validation of Einstein's prediction. So how can we tell if it even happened? Just trying to make a nuanced point about the unacknowledged role blind faith plays in providing us with a social reality based on the supposedly sound basis of science.
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Consider the origin of information: from the Latin verb informare, which means to give form, or to form an idea of. So it's the object of thought.
Merely opinion, then? Can a rumour inform us? Makes the scientific equation of information with data seem too reductionist, huh?
Activists are motivated more by concerns than information. It's the emotion that generates their activism. People are likely to be (mis)informed by rhetoric, opinions of others, a shared belief that masquerades as reality. Information showing that GE produces frankenstein food motivates activists into public protest mode. Information showing that GE saves lives in medicine (tonight's headline news) will motivate scientific activists into lobbying for the right to perform that public service.
There's a line of ancient wisdom relevant here: hermetic philosophy runs through 23 centuries up to our time. Starting from Mercury (Hermes) as messenger of the gods: mediating between the realms of heaven & earth. Thus oracles. Thus Prometheus (thief who stole fire technology from the gods).
Via the cross-fertilisation between cultures, this medial conduit of information flow took technology from place to place, thus Mercury/Hermes was credited as originator of trade. Quite a deep well, this one. Way too deep for most academics!
Mercury is the only planet with a relativistic orbit (measured deviation from the orbit predicted by Newtonian physics verified Einstein's theory of relativity more than a century ago. But was this information fact? Or was it merely the opinion of the physicist doing the measuring? The transcendence from subjectivity to objectivity is performed in physics via the principle of replication: another conduit of information flow, connecting the individual psyche to the group mind. A scientific discovery doesn't become a fact until other scientists verify it. Fair to say that journalists try to conform to this discipline too, but it's in the nature of reality that doing so is often impossible - and media owners want a good story...
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Russell, I suggest you consider the issue from a minority-rights perspective too. Women, Maoris, homosexuals are all large minorities that achieved liberation from legal and cultural oppression in the 20th century. Folks choosing to use cannabis remain the only large minority still oppressed.
It will probably help them to clarify why this is so. Unfortunately the field of political psychology remains undeveloped, but the relation of motives and tacit beliefs to cultural conventions & paradigms, ideology and group psychodynamics would benefit from extensive elucidation. Why have users not formed an effective political lobby as the other minorities did?
It often seems to me that the coercive effect of prohibition is a key dimension of the situation. The right of free speech is not usable by a user when exercising it is liable to result in loss of career & liberty. When I entered my television career in '75 I was surprised to discover that the mainstreamers I worked with had embraced a lifestyle of getting high just like those of us who did the commune/crash-pad scene. The advertising, music & media industries were full of users by the end of that decade.
Plenty of people who went on to become wealthy, successful professionals in all walks of life, some famous, are living exemplars of the capacity of folks to use cannabis for self-empowerment. Not a single one has ever been able to provide public testimony of this. The social sanction against telling the truth in Aotearoa is too powerful. Bullshit prevails.
Now the public have formed a majority in favour of ending prohibition. Only the Nat/Lab dinosaurs remain to hold back the tide of progress. We need some force able to break through this left/right collusion: the Greens aren't strong enough to do it alone.