Posts by mark taslov
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to mark taslov,
Zhang Yikun with Andrew Little, Phil Twyford, Raymond Huo and Phil Goff.
Again returning to Anne-Marie Brady’s point:
“We need to upskill our local politicians and our national politicians in our public sector. In the ‘abc’ of the Chinese party state, we’ve got to be able to engage with China and understand it, but also recognise the risks.”
and additionally:
"One of the things we need to do in New Zealand is to start to see China the way it really is.
One might expand that to also include local media vis a vis this paragraph from Tracey Watkin’s Friday article for Stuff.co.nz Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s on again, off again trip to China off again:
The Chinese Government will see the change of government here as being less friendly to its interests than the previous National government, in particular the Labour-NZ First coalition’s moves on foreign house buyers, which it will see as directly targeting Chinese investors.
Which does again highlight an absolute lack of understanding of the economic conditions and motivations of New Zealand’s largest trading partner as I mentioned a few pages back:
the heightened specificity of the messaging could be construed as conforming to CCP policy, in tandem with the PRC Government’s insubstantive domestic attempts to crack down on the exodus of capital:
This background – that the CCP is against rather than for the exodus of capital by individuals – is widely accessible:
"The improvement in China’s foreign exchange reserves in July reflects the ramping up of efforts by Chinese authorities to curb capital outflows,” said IHS Markit Asia Pacific economist Rajiv Biswas. The government has been “clamping down on corporate outbound merger and acquisition deals, as well as tougher regulations on private individual remittances for foreign property purchases."
There’s little one can suggest other than to read about it:
What Is the Problem?
The outflows have put significant pressure on the Chinese renminbi, eroding financial confidence and forcing the government to dip into its reserves to shore up the currency. The reserves increased modestly in March, suggesting a small improvement in the situation.
Obviously the general population is more likely to pay credence to – checks notes – Stuff.co.nz’s Political Editor than a layperson – which is incidentally why I assume my considerably more generous comment was erm moderated from the Stuff website – moderation of factually based political analysis online likewise being something the CCP might be seen as gravitating towards rather than against.
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to Neil,
For those following at home, as citation for what’s being discussed MAOA: 5 common myths debunked (content warning – trans exclusionary):
To sum everything up the interaction between genetics and behaviour is very, very complex to put it mildly. Whilst it is very easy to make bold statements such as “low MAO-A activity leads to increased aggressiveness”, a modern day of equivalent “of a pill for every ill”the reality is much less clear.
Whilst there is definitely an association with the 2R, 3R and 5R forms of MAOA and increased aggression, the actual contribution of MAOA is unknown, but most likely low
A few points at this juncture,
1. this thread sure is living up to its headline.
2. the shifting definitions in conflating ‘vengeful’ or ‘obsessive’ behaviour and then switching that to mean ‘aggressive’ behaviour is again what I’d describe as a form gaslighting.
3. when sacha stated "I do not need anything further from you on the topic" and you continued @ing him – that’s a consent/boundary issue worth consideration.As Emma first responded to you:
Social conditioning.
Which ties in with both this from the link:
The associations only appeared when a large enough population was studied, and this suggests that there are lots of other factors which are also influencing how aggressive we are, not just MAOA. Some studies have failed to find a link between MAOA and aggression
and this:
But! all these reports come with a very large caveat. Whilst they do show that the MAOA-L forms are associated with increased aggression, having an MAOA-L form does not mean that someone will be aggressive, there are numerous other factors associated, with the most important thought to be early life abuse
For me what confirms the validity of Emma’s response is simply that the USA is an outlier in issues of this nature – there are evidently a number of contributing conditions to what is – at this point – a very American problem.
Between 1983 to 2013, 119 mass shootings took place around the world. Sixty-six percent were in the U.S.
I’ll also point out that a trend has emerged Neil where you seem comfortable outright ignoring the women on this thread – there’s nothing remotely novel about this tendency but worth pointing it out all the same.
Coming back to your original point re: ‘vengeful’ or ‘obsessive’ behaviour- and bringing in findings from rainbow communities – which despite smaller cohorts function as controls for heteronormative assumptions, this is more relavant to what we may describe as ’vengeful’ or ‘obsessive’ behaviour’:
it was hypothesized that homicide brutality will vary with the offender’s sexual orientation and gender, such that the percentage of killings coded as brutal will be higher for (a) gay and lesbian relative to heterosexual relations, (b) men relative to women, (c) gay relative to heterosexual men, and (d) lesbian relative to heterosexual women. The rates of intimate partner homicide were also hypothesized to vary with the gender of the partners, such that (a) homicide rates will be higher in gay relative to heterosexual and lesbian couples and (b) homicide rates will be lowest in lesbian couples. The results support all but one prediction derived from the two hypotheses. We predicted that men would kill their partners more brutally than would women, but the results indicate that the opposite is true.
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to linger,
muscle bulk, which of course is gender-associated
Not to dispute your wider point but just to keep things loosely inclusive, and not going full Labour Party on the issue, if I may correct:
learned gendered behaviour will also be influenced by different cost/benefit results of aggressive behaviour for individuals with larger muscle bulk, which of course is sex-associated
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Thanks for your response Dennis. The speciousness reminds me of a younger me on these boards – a bad habit fomented by an inability to publicly address certain aspects of my lived reality in local cyberspace due to fear motivated by trauma punctuated conditioning. A tendency I feel – with the patience and goodwill of the community here – I’ve largely managed to move beyond.
As I said earlier – and I’m not straying from this – I see your discrediting of people calling Brash a racist as gaslighting – which – as I also said earlier – I have considerable experience of from all sorts of people – caregivers, teachers, journalists, you name it, cis folk stepping up to gaslight me is the story of my life.
People feel entitled to set me straight on all manner of things related to who they think I am, or what I experience, to school me, humiliate me on what cissexism or transphobia is because they ’wrote a book about it’, to chastise me for using this pseudonym because they read it as male and they’re trans-misogynists whose feminism involves trying to correct trans folk with regards to who they think we are and should be. These are your heroes, community leaders, political movers and shakers, the establishment, the elite.
I’m not talking about Dennis Frank on various New Zealand left wing websites – I’m talking about high profile celebrities who’ve gone out of their way to gaslight me about my experiences of sexual assault, or sexual violence; an Auckland Local Board member who retweeted cissexist material sexualising pubescent boys on Twitter, and who when informed about this, appended a disclaimer (about the cissexism) while continuing to disseminate the cissexist material sexualising pubescent boys; folk with a feminist ideology similar to Neil’s – prepared to go to similar lengths to protect it from being challenged by those with experiences it erases. Folk who third gender us when the prospect of us talking about non-heterosexual IPV we experience conflicts with heteronormative narratives and agendas.
I’m talking about primary school teachers who tell our parents ’your kid’ll grow out of’ being trans, I’m talking about a rapist who implied they assaulted me because they thought i’m a NAZI. I’m talking about you and your false equivalence of with regard to reincarnation, neglecting that such a scenario would likely entail every single person – on good odds – having been reincarnated a female at one or multiple points rendering the entire strawperson moot to the equation. I’m talking about being chased around the house by my wife with a carving knife and having experienced IPV in this relationship for 7 years with nowhere to turn or escape to because the Government never came through with either its welfare reforms nor its rainbow policies nor the requisite progressiveness to even acknowledge these issues exist.
When you’ve passed Gaslighting 301 and you’re onto the Post-Grad and you’re clear beyond a skerrick of uncertainty that the cavalry are not coming to the rescue.
We all do it to some extent – every single one of us – at some time or another – we second guess others’ perceptions – generally relatively innocuously and other times with disastrous effect – and so when you get on the gaslight like this;
I’m aware that younger generations in recent decades have tended to view and call anything they don’t like racist, so as to devalue it as a technical term. A symptom of collective brain death?
Well you can call that what you want – justify it as you feel you need to – but I’m done with it – you don’t wanna show me nothing, but you’re telling me everything. I’m acutely aware even discussing this stuff how painful it is listening to “allies” waffle on – how white this site is – and how ultimately I’m just giving you oxygen when I should be – as the HRC suggests – giving nothing to racism.
Don't @ me.
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Thanks so much for that and thank you for you!
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Hard News: On joining the international…, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Thanks for your reply Rob. This struck a chord with me:
how private companies (notably facebook) have taken over the ‘public square’
In that for me it brings into focus that recourse by commentators to repeat the old cliché – as issued here by Simon Bridges in this anonymous editorial for Radio New Zealand:
“Universities for centuries have been the bastions of free speech,”
When in actuality universities are by and large not in the least “bastions of free speech” – Toddy across the road’s back veranda is more of a bastion of free speech, universities – by contrast – have for centuries been bastions of western colonial-imperialist-patriarchal epistemology and latterly capitalism. Which is why they won’t teach you how to make LSD or what the Colonel’s 13 herbs and spices are, which is why, when I matriculated – the interest the State was charging on the loan facilitating my study was 7.2% – almost double the current mortgage rate of 3.95%.
Tellingly in the discourse little connection was made between tertiary and secondary or even primary education – would the public response have been different had Jan Thomas been a secondary principal vetoing a visit by the ex-Governor? I somehow doubt such a decision would be subjected to the same scrutiny – there’s considerably less mythologisation around the place of secondary education as a “bastion of freedom of speech” though the conditions are vaguely identical – pre-tertiary education remains considerably more accessible.
most of us never get close to having such a platform.
which is the rub for me – having been expelled from Massey when our team haxxed and cleaned out a Coca~Cola® vending machine predatorily situated outside our halls of residence, all too aware of how private companies have taken over the ‘public square’. Bastions of Commerce; sure, Bastions of extortionate lending; absolutely, Bastions of maintaining the status quo; 100%. The most newsworthy feature of Brash’s ban simply being the disdain shown for a member of the elite.
which is something of a digression from what you’re talking about but I thought it worth revisiting – having taken a mosey along that slippery slope, noting that issue at least appears to have passed as the contextually merited one-off it always appeared to be – without – as so many eminent palefaces predicted – the sky falling on our heads.
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Again what astonishes me is how you buy into all that, yet when a Māori person calls Don Brash racist you discredit it as ‘brain death’.
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oops – some corrections needed in this paragraph:
Likewise it wasn’t unusual that leading up to the birth the couple continued to entertain by indulging the media a number of times as to whether or not they’d revealed the baby’s sex – going to some substantive lengths to play up the importance of the sex – instead of making an attempt – in keeping with Labour policy of empowering and ensuring that ’Rainbow New Zealanders can live in safety and dignity’ – to dismiss this salaciousness by acknowledging that genitals are an inadequate gauge for ascertaining gender, and that the sexing of infants – the expectations and imposition which accompany this active engagement in fomenting cissexist ideology and assiduously maintaining cisnormative narratives – causes harm for gender minorities, GNC and intersex people in the community.
In the video, prior to the first punch, a girl calls out: “Are you a boy or a girl?” the victim responds: “Does it really matter?” “Yeah it does”, a girl says before the victim replies: “No, it doesn’t” then she is punched.
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Mark, I gather that you have taken what I wrote quite personally.
On the other hand, what Neil has been writing I take very personally, because I’m acutely aware of how the type of absolutist gender binary agenda he’s pushing destroys lives. Our threshold for ‘evidence’ has sunk to extraordinarily low levels it seems.
I can recognise the bias and follies all too well – a couple of week’s back he’d have had us believe Narcissistic Personality Disorder was the exclusive domain of Jami-Lee Ross or white males or that JLR was the only abuser or bed hopper in Parliament. Marama Davidson set things straight on the latter points and most research indicates that NPD affects something like 6% of the population i.e. about 200,000 New Zealanders.
With regard to gender/sex, the barrow he’s pushing is very much the cisnormative soup du jour, a symptom of top down messaging which has long since and continues to dominate gender discourse in 2018 Aotearoa e.g. when the Prime Minister was asked on 19 January:
Are you going to find out the baby’s gender?
Without hesitation, nor attempt to correct the journalist she erased the lived reality of every trans person in the country (12:05) by promptly responding
Ah we already know
Because cis people by and large maintain that they do know the gender of babies and furthermore that sex and gender are to be conflated. So it wasn’t unusual that the PM chose to only "acknowledge those women" (11:45) who’d given birth before her rather than inclusively acknowledging everyone; the men and other gender minorities who’ve gone through similar.
Similarly it wasn’t unusual that leading up to the birth the couple continued to entertain by indulging the media a number of times as to whether or not they’d revealed the baby’s sex – going to some substantive lengths to play up the importance of the sex – instead of making an attempt – in keeping with Labour policy of empowering and ensuring that ’Rainbow New Zealanders can live in safety and dignity’. of dismissing this salaciousness by acknowledging that genitals are an inadequate gauge for ascertaining gender, that the sexing of infants, the expectations and imposition which accompany this active engagement in fomenting cissexist ideology and assiduously maintaining cisnormative narratives causes harm for gender minorities, GNC and intersex people in the community.
In the video, prior to the first punch, a girl calls out: “Are you a boy or a girl?” the victim responds: “Does it really matter?” “Yeah it does”, a girl says before the victim replies: “No, it doesn’t” then she is punched.
So yeah Dennis, that’s the kind of stuff I take personally. Incidentally yesterday was intersex day of remembrance and solidarity as yet the Government of kindness or whatever continues to ignore the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s recommendations calling for an end to the colonial practice of Intersex Genital mutilation in New Zealand.
• implement a child rights-based health care protocol for intersex children that guarantees the rights to bodily integrity and self-determination
• investigate incidents of surgical and other medical treatment of intersex children without informed consent, and provide redress
• educate professionals on biological and physical sexual diversity and consequences of unnecessary interventions on children
• provide free access to surgical intervention and treatment related to their intersex condition for 16 to 18 year old intersex children
It doesn't matter how many teachers or teachers assistants we've got if they're not teaching the truth.
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Mark, I gather that you have taken what I wrote quite personally.
Dennis, thanks for your response, I genuinely didn’t. I’ll readily admit – based on feedback I’ve received throughout the years – that despite my ambitions, I’m not particularly able when it comes to conveying my tone accurately in written form, I generally just tend to turn the volume up to eleven and hope something lands.
For clarity; I see views like yours on this topic regularly, and simply put, as far as I’m concerned this is a form of gaslighting:
I’m aware that younger generations in recent decades have tended to view and call anything they don’t like racist, so as to devalue it as a technical term. A symptom of collective brain death?
