One of the greatest costs of the Covid19 pandemic has been the absolute shutdown of opportunity for international travel, for New Zealanders. You can be grateful that the pandemic has resulted in so few New Zealanders getting seriously ill and killed by Covid 19, but also acknowledge the cost of this, and it's a cost that isn't directly fiscal, or is even noted by the emotional toll of separated loved ones. It's the cost of the narrowing of opportunity and experience from being stuck in a small country far far away from the people, the places, the discourse and the culture of the rest of the world. Yes, communications technology has enabled much more to be learned and seen through a screen, but when the dominant discourses are still led by local media outlets including the de-facto state news and opinion website, the Spinoff (don't forget the media you're forced to pay for), then there is so much of the world that people are unaware of. For TV reporter Patrick Gower to claim journalism in NZ is at an all time high is almost laughable, because if it were true it is a bit like claiming El Salvador is having a great year in lowering violent crime. There are capable journalists in NZ, but it's so often not remotely world class, compared to others.
One of those is Bari Weiss, 37 year old former Wall Street Journal and New York Times (NYT) journalist, who resigned in 2020 because of abuse from colleagues and concern over the narrow frame of reference the NYT was presenting. That link is her resignation letter, she got tired being called a Nazi or a racist by colleagues because of what she wrote. Bear in mind she is a Jew.
Politics in the US as it is, she was hounded and condemned by the left, and praised by the right, but she is hardly a Trumpian conservative, or even a conservative at all. She claims to be a left-leaning centrist liberal, and she is a committed Zionist. What she is, is an intelligent voice of criticism of current cultural and politics trends, in a way that for me, as a radical classically liberal/libertarian atheist, is a breath of fresh air, when the main discourse is between post-modernist left identitarian politics and a clumsy centre-right/populist occasionally identitarian reactionism. It's intelligent and thoughtful, and indeed the sort of discourse I wish Republicans and moderate Democrats would use.
So when she published her list of favourite essays of 2021, they are worth looking at, so here are a few pertinent to NZ:
Wilfred Reilly "The Good News They Won’t Tell You About Race in America". Reilly is an African-American political scientist who has taken on the "alt-right" and is also critical of how race, gender and class issues can't be easily discussed in the USA today because of the positions taken by people on the hard-left and right. His essay dissects statistics about race and socio-economic outcomes, including how the highest income racial group in the US are Indian-Americans, who earn 92% more than whites on average, West Indians (Caribbean) on average earn around the same as white. He doesn't deny that there is racism in the US, but he denies that it is on the scale and as important as a determinant of social outcomes as many activists (and the media) claim. Imagine a NZ journalist or academic having the audacity to do research that might risk taking on the narrative that Māori suffer from widespread institutional or systemic racism across state and private institutions, and that this is determinative of socio-economic outcomes. So much reporting on this is reductive to correlation being causation.
Following on from this is Wesley Yang "Welcome to Year Zero" which is the logical consequence of the post-modernist far-left "racism is determinative" philosophy criticised by Reilly. The US embarking down a path of explicitly race based preferences, regardless of need, for business subsidies, board appointments, etc. Racial colourblindness is seen as "white supremacy" and unlike Reilly's article, evidence is ignored in favour of the view that "disparities were henceforth to be understood as the product of a foundational, pervasive, trans-historical, and unyielding racism that can only be dislodged through the overt distribution of opportunity and reward by race in pursuit of "equity"". Sounds familiar? This pyramid of white supremacy says it all. Bear in mind that all of this is exactly what the Green Party and Te Pāti Māori embrace philosophically, along with more than a few in Labour.
Andrew Sullivan "When all of the media narratives collapse" is an incisive look at a whole host of mistakes made by the US mainstream media (which many NZ outlets parrot without question), and why it has happened, and how news producers in the US have decided to react to manufactured news by manufacturing their own narratives.
Keira Bell "My Story". She's a 24 year old UK woman who has transitioned to being a man, and back. I'm pretty much live and let live about trans-genderism. I don't really care if people want to live as a different sex to that they were born as, or claim one of the multiple gender identities that are asserted. However, I'm sceptical about the current enthusiasm to medically intervene with healthy people before they are fully-grown adults, in ways that terminate their fertility and cause irreversible changes, when some narratives indicate that mental health problems may arise from sexuality or non-conformity with societal gender indicators. Keira took legal action against the NHS and won. She's no conservative, but she wants transition to not be seen as the only or the core option for those suffering gender dysphoria. Given the Maoist approach of so much of the trans-activist lobby to debate, I'd also be grateful if a journalist or researcher in NZ actually took this issue on in a way that doesn't pander to a binary view.
