"Any demonstration against the government or coalition forces will be fired upon"
Another example of the "freedom" America is bringing to Iraq?
Thursday, December 18, 2003
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Foreshore and seabed
I'm busy going through the FAQ and slew of press releases about this on Scoop. On first glance, it looks like Maori come off as the losers. The beaches get transferred to the public domain (in other words, they belong to everyone - a neat short-circuiting of National's campaign), and while there is a process to protect customary usage rights, they are constrained by a prohibition on granting actual or effective ownership. The dreams of certain activists of owning parts of the foreshore and seabed have been crushed.
Of course, they were just that - dreams - but it is of concern. Yes, the court decision which sparked all this talked about the improbability of actually gaining such title, but the possibility was there, and now its not. If there is an iwi or hapu out there with a strong case for actual title, then they've been robbed. I would be happier if there was some mechanism for recognising such strong cases and settling them, rather than a blanket prohibition on any grant of title. (The cynic in me says that its been deliberately left out so the government can concede it to Maori in the next few months)
Other than that, I'm happy with the general thrust. We all get to go to the beach, customary rights can be legally recognised, and the activists who acted as if that possibility granted a certainty get told to fuck off. Everyone but the latter - and the rednecks who think that customary rights don't exist and shouldn't be recognised - ought to be happy.
Update: Yes, I know - according to the news last night, and the Herald this morning "financial redress would be available if the Maori Land Court found customary rights were such that, except for the proposal, would have led to the granting of a private title". So it's not so bad after all.
Good things take time
Blogging was light yesterday because I was making this:
Look on my works, ye greedy, and despair.
Update: OK, so it's not the best of photos. That white stuff on the top is not cheese, but white chocolate ribbons, which I've discovered are rediculously easy to make. And the brown circle thing they're on top of is a pecan chocolate fudge cake, which required about two and a half cakes of chocolate to make. And yes, it tasted every bit as good as it looks...
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
State of the WMD hunt
Investigators say Saddam flushed WMD stash down toilet seconds before capture
(And while we're looking at Scoop, Dave Crampton has an article about the government's upcoming Civil Unions legislation).
Bless my beard
When I saw this photo of a captured Saddam with beard this morning, my first thought was how much he looked like someone else:
Bad press
The Guardian has a story - Not-so-nice New Zealand - about our treatment of Ahmed Zaoui and the rise of Winston Peters.
Less than impressed
Knife is less than impressed with political blogs. It's certainly a good rant...
As for my thoughts: The sameness is mostly because there are only so many political memes in the noosphere... and because the pro-American Randroid Libertarian (as opposed to Nozickian or left- or un-American Libertarian) cluster is vastly overrepresented on the Net. Most political blogs are primarily reactive - they follow the real media - which means that the same issues crop up again and again and again. Taxes. Drugs. Crime. Human rights. Whether a new century starts in 00 or 01. State-funding of this or that. If you're lucky, you get some decent commentary which looks at something from a new angle, or differs slightly from what you see in the newspapers. But normally, you get the same old unoriginal and uninspired crap (and I'm as guilty of this as everyone else). But this is no different from the "letters to the editor" columns in newspapers, or from usenet. There's nothing new under the sun in them, and there's nothing new on the blogs either.
As for people thinking its "up to the blogosphere", most blogs are run by amateurs and have tiny readerships compared to their wider societies. I'm under no illusions that what I do is even close to journalism, or that the few people who read my ravings are enough to have any effect on the public consciousness.
This doesn't mean I'm going to stop, though.
Monday, December 15, 2003
Free education
Darkness has a post on this, in which he attacks NZUSA for wanting a return to state-funded tertary educationa nd universal student allowances. Unfortunately, his argument is centered around a specious claim that a return to state-funding means a return to the days when "university was where rich, white boys went to smoke pot and chant socialist slogans". This isn't necessarily so.
He also attributes the dramatic expansion in tertiary study since the 90's (and the resulting expansion of opportunity) to the loan scheme, which seems to be getting things arse-backwards. What really happened is that the government decided that it wanted far more people to go to university; it (or rather, the business interests directing government policy at the time) also decided that it did not want to pay for the extra places through taxation. The solution was to cut funding per student, and make up the shortfall through fees. The student loan scheme was simply the vehicle by which this shortfall could be temporarily covered, not a causal factor.
What NZUSA is advocating is a return to full state funding, without any decrease in the number of places funded. I'm not sure that this is achievable (my back of the envelope estimate is that it could cost up to half a billion dollars - but then, we're stashing three times that much away for future superannuation costs, so it is really just a matter of political will), but its no worse than advocating for world peace, human rights, or an end to taxation and welfare.
As for student allowances, I am in favour of a universal allowance mainly because I do not think that anyone in this country should have to borrow to eat (which is the situation for many students now). If the cost of doing so is subsidising a few people who could otherwise get the money off their parents, then so be it. But the current system cannot be allowed to continue.
The price of freedom
What did Saddam's capture cost? Four dead and sixty wounded, in Kirkuk alone. Not from anything invloved in the actual capture, but from all those people firing guns in the air in celebration...
Time to bring in the UN
I've been expecting to wake up one morning to learn that a major city has been blanketed in radioactive dust; instead, I woke up this morning to find that Saddam Hussein had been captured.
This is genuinely good news - he's a monster, and he deserves to face justice. But it's also time to bring in the UN, to ensure that the justice he faces is fair, open and transperant. Even Saddam has human rights, and if we are to punish people for human rights violations, we must ensure that we do not violate their rights in the process. Otherwise, we'd be sending a message of hypocrisy, and undermining the very thing we're claiming to protect.
Update: No, this does not mean trying Saddam in the Hague. It means using international expertise in the matter to both ensure that the process is fair, and lend credability to it. If the Americans organise a show trial for Saddam, they will be forever open to the claim that they were merely enacting "victor's justice". The Iraqi people deserve better than that.
Sunday, December 14, 2003
Greens claim New Zealand deceived over army role in Iraq
But the documents they've unearthed don't show anything of the sort. It's been no secret that NZ troops may need to defend themselves, and it's no leap from that to their having detailed rules on when and how they may do so.
Show me something that says that NZ troops are patroling the streets intimidating the local populace into submission or kicking in doors, and I'll be righteously pissed off. But so far I haven't seen anything to indicate that they're acting beyond the role we set for them.
That said, I'd be interested in learning how many times they have had to fire their weapons, and under what circumstances. Though the government will probably try and hide behind "operational security" if the result is at all embarassing.
Britain's shame
The Guardian has details on Britain's own 'Camp Delta'. They should be familiar to anyone familiar with the case of Ahmed Zaoui - men incarcerated without trial, forbidden to see the evidence against them, and denied fair legal proceedings.
The same principles apply here as to the Zaoui case. if the government has evidence, then it should charge these men in a court of law; if it does not, it should release them. But it cannot continue to imprison people without trial and maintain any shred of moral credability or decency.
Saturday, December 13, 2003
Tea from an empty cup
Salon has an article about the Sims Online - and the trials and tribulations of the editor of its online newspaper, The Alphaville Herald. I don't play Sims, but there was some interesting stuff mentioned in the article... most notably on the question of whether crimes can be committed in the game. There are players who specialise in scamming newbies out of their simoleans (virtual cash), and the gut instinct would be that it's all part of the game etc. But the virtual money can be exchanged for real via ebay - does this mean that a crime has been committed and that the scammer should be charged with fraud or theft? Or is it a fake "crime" by a fake person...?
More troubling is the existence of online "prostitution" (netsex for simoleans) performed by players who are minors. The law is pretty much a gray area here...
What fascinates me is the use of online environments like Sims Online to explore the evolution of government from the State of Nature. Sims has rules against physical violence - you literally cannot assault another Sim - but there's plenty of scope for people's behaviour to impinge on others, and for people to club together in an effort to regulate it. Probably the absence of violence makes such clubbing together much weaker than it would be if people were being killed or maimed (rather than simply having their stuff stolen); but its still a fascinating online laboratory nonetheless.
(And believe it or not, there is a link between the title of this post and the content. Really.)
Consequences
NZPundit on the US denying Iraq reconstruction contracts to the French etc:
While one can chuckle at menstrual teenage girls or boorish teenage boys conducting themselves as though actions had no consequences, to see heads of state in the same state of high delusion is truly baffling.
Indeed. And the consequences for Bush aren't exactly pleasant. The day after he released his blacklist, he had to get on the phone to the French, the Germans and Russians and beg them to write off Iraq's outstanding debt. Strangely, that went down like a lead balloon - as will the next request for these countries to send their soldiers to die in the place of Americans in Iraq.
Bush's move is spectacularly stupid. Yes, it's American money. Yes, they can take revenge if they want to. But the cost is that no country outside the US and its current clique of toadies has any stake in US success - and every reason to want them to fail. And that doesn't just go for Iraq, but for any future project the US is planning (such as, say, North Korea), until they decide to play nice.
But then, Bush is the proverbial "boorish teenage boy", so it's hardly surprising...
Temper tantrums
David Blunkett, the British Home Secretary, has threatened to resign from Amnesty International after they criticised the British government's treatment of terrorism suspects.
(I was tempted to blog about that yesterday, but what could I say? The British system has no place in any civilised country. No democracy should be imprisoning people without trial, denying them the presumption of innocence, or using evidence obtained by torture. The UK, like the US, has fallen a long, long way since september 11th...)
As for David Blunkett: Amnesty is an organisation dedicated to promoting international human rights. They do not exist solely to criticise enemies of the British government while ignoring human rights violations at home - that would be inconsistent, both with the criticism, and with the underlying view that human rights are universal and posessed in equal measure by everyone, everywhere. If Blunkett believes that Amnesty should simply be a tool of British foreign policy, used to beat its enemies, or that the UK's treatment of terrorist suspects is somehow not a human rights violation, then he should quit. But I hope he's a better man that that.
John Roughan has a good counter to Winston Peters' racist anti-immigrant xenophobia in the Herald today.
Many conservatives and supporters of the Iraq War --the mass of Americans who shrug off civilian deaths when they are not American civilian deaths--obviously have a pronounced problem with visualizing numbers and applying moral standards. Or they just don't care.In other words, they are stupid and evil.
Therefore, the need for a visual aid for the numerically and morally challenged.
