Marxist thuggery takes over London protest

The UK government faces a chronic budget deficit and so one of its policies has been to significantly increase university tuition fees so students pay a far higher proportion of tertiary education costs.  Given the benefits of university education are carried almost exclusively by the people getting the education, it is hardly unfair.   The state student loan scheme even allows students to borrow their fees and not have to pay back the loans until they earn over £27,050 a year.   So it hardly forms a barrier to anyone, unless they fear their education isn't worth it once they start earning the average annual income. 

Of course to the socialist National Union of Students (voluntary membership in the UK by the way, but universities fund it directly), it's unfair.  They moan that current generations of politicians got a free university education - back in the days when a far smaller fraction of people went into tertiary education and the welfare state wasn't draining taxpayers of so much money.  

This attitude that the world owes them an education, that the budget deficit isn't their problem (presumably they don't think they should pay more tax to cover the debt Gordon Brown threw their way) and that other people should pay for their choices means they are obviously disrespectful of property rights.   It shows too.

A bunch of them marched to Conservative Party headquarters, smashed it up, invaded it and one even threw a fire extinguisher off the roof at police officers below.

In other words, if you don't give us what we want, we'll take it and do violence.

and the Labour Leader of the Opposition is silent...

The state and children

One of the perennial issues that fires up politicians, the media and many of the public in the UK, as with many places, is when a case of horrendous abuse and neglect of children is discovered.  More often than not one or more parents are implicated in it, and accusations are thrown around about why it wasn't detected earlier.  

The role of the state in this is enforcer of criminal law, but it is in the difficult area of crimes against children by their parents and guardians.   Children inherently do not have the rights and powers of adults, because their rights are held in trust by their parents/guardians.   The opportunities for children to reach beyond these people to seek help for violent or sexual abuse are varied, but may be severely impaired by abusive adults who threaten or apply violence and detention upon them if they say anything.   The situation of the scared small helpless child being beaten or raped, and fearful to tell others is one of the most appalling and repulsive images for most sane adults.  

Until comparatively recently, many children in those situations had to rely upon other relatives to rescue them or for trauma to be severe enough to be obvious to a doctor, if medical attention was made available.   Even in such cases, sadistic parents/guardians might lie, "she fell down the stairs" excuses abound.  Sexual crimes in particular being difficult to prove, or even link to an individual in an age before DNA evidence.   The word of abused children alone was often not believed.  

Yet most children were and are raised by parents/guardians who love them, who don't beat and abuse them, and while never perfect (who is?), they genuinely acted in the child's best interests.  Such children would be fed, clothed, kept warm, given medical attention, taken to school and given the attention, love and dedication of normal loving parents.   In other words, the family unit works, most of the time.  

Yet the cases when it failed came to increasing attention in the 1970s and 1980s.   It started with physical abuse, as more women in particular came to no longer tolerate men beating them up (and their children).   It then came with sexual abuse, and the truly disturbing issue of incestual child rape (when children wouldn't be believed because their father was a "pillar of society") which gained attention.

The road to hell was then paved with the good intentions of those who wanted to protect children.  I recall in the 1980s a NZ Telethon which claimed that 1 in 3 girls in NZ were sexually abused by their fathers.   A bogus statistic sourced not from prosecutions or even charges, but by writers in feminist social policy.  Some of the definitions of "abuse" included "seeing dad naked" - which is highly likely to occur at some point, given families can share bathrooms, or children can walk into bedrooms uninvited etc.  

Of course there was a wider agenda going on.  The focus was on men committing abuse (which was no doubt backed up by statistics) and the focus on taking children away from fathers.  A similar philosophy was taking over in the UK, Australia and the US, including the now largely discredited theory that children who say "no" are scared of saying "yes" when asked about abuse.

The approach was rather simple.  A child was placed in an interview with a psychologist, who would progressively ask leading questions as to whether "certain things happened" that would constitute abuse.  If the child kept saying "no" this wouldn't be believed, until finally the child, having figured out that she was giving the wrong answer (and being uncomfortable with being constantly questioned) said "yes".  At that point there was glee from the psychologist, and the apparatus of state would come into play and split up a family, putting it through criminal investigation and trial.

The snake-oil merchants and pseuds who perpetrated this nonsense caused enormous harm and damage to parents and children.   "False memory syndrome" was a similar theory, which implied that people who were abused "blanked out the memory" (true in the case of very severe ongoing trauma), so when they couldn't remember any abuse, they would be probed more until they finally "remembered" something that could have been interpreted as abuse (e.g. "I was on dad's lap and I can't remember if he might have had an erection or not, I don't know, he could've, but I don't remember noticing it, though I might not have known what it was to remember it").    

So whilst some were looking for abuse at every corner, every time a real case would appear (maybe once a year or so), there would be horrors that "not enough had been done".  

Well in the UK today plenty is done, although Ofsted (the bureaucracy responsible for "children's services" in the UK) claims 119 children suffered serious injury or death due to a failure  to intervene.  Meanwhile, the untold story is that of cases of intervention that are traumatic and dead wrong.

You see under pressure to ensure every child is safe, authorities in the UK respond hysterically to suspicions and allegations, and put parents through processes where it is assumed that they are guilty, until proven innocent.   Christopher Booker has been highlighting these issues in two articles in the Daily Telegraph:

in the latest year for which we have figures (2008), of 7,340 applications for care orders made by social workers, only 20 were refused.  Meanwhile, the children themselves are handed over to foster homes, which receive £400 a week or £20,000 a year for each child, and where many are intensely unhappy and not infrequently abused. Foster carers and social workers routinely conspire to tell bewildered children that their parents neither love them nor want them back. Children and parents meet at rigorously supervised "contact sessions", where any expression of affection or attempt to discuss why the children have been taken from home may be punished by termination of the session or denial of further contact.

"one Court of Appeal judge recently compared the conduct of a council's social workers to what went on in "Stalin's Russia or Mao's China". But in general this cruel, dishonest and venal system continues on its way, hidden from view, accountable to nobody but itself."

Data privacy laws prevent anyone getting any decent information about specific cases, and parents also know that if they talk about their experiences, they are under further suspicion.  "Kafka-esque" is one description of it  

Parents are forbidden to talk to the media or even to their MPs about the injustice they are suffering. Several times in recent months, councils have sought injunctions to prohibit me reporting anything at all about a case, even though no person or even the council itself would be identified. More than once, parents have been threatened with contempt of court and prison if they talk to me or anyone else about how they are being treated.

He writes about a case of a family that fled to northern Cyprus after social workers took their child off them because a neighbour complained about the parents having a noisy argument.  Grandparents on one side of the family had decided to work with social workers and got custody of the child, and the whole mess unravelled.  After the interim care order had taken away their child they wondered:

Last June, puzzled at why the interim care order had not been renewed as the law requires, Carol called the court. She was told that the order had lapsed three months earlier. When her husband confirmed this by a second call to the court, Carol drove to her in-laws’ home to explain that there was no longer any legal reason why her daughter could not be returned to her. Her mother-in-law protested, but the child was so overjoyed to go home that she ran to get into her mother’s car. The mother-in-law stood in front of the car but Carol reversed and drove off.   When her daughter said she was hungry, they stopped at a motorway service station. The grandmother had alerted the police, the car number was picked up by a camera and before long Carol (who was pregnant again) was arrested, handcuffed and pushed into a police van. At the police station, she collapsed and was taken to hospital.

What is clear is that many thousands of people are involved in a state industry of child protection that assumes intervention is preferable to investigation and assessment.   The common law right to assume someone is innocent until proven guilty is under attack, and children are assumed to be in imminent danger when there is no objective evidence as to that danger.  More importantly, the risk and harm involved in forcibly separating children from their parents in these circumstances is almost completely underplayed.

What is needed is to consider objectively what the role of the state should be in protecting children.   It certainly should intervene when there is sufficient likelihood that failure to do so will put the child in danger of violent or sexual assault - (and I don't mean a smack, i mean a beating).

That isn't a threshold of balance of probabilities, it isn't a threshold of beyond reasonable doubt (that's for the courts), but it does mean accepting that sometimes children wont be saved.   Yet it is better that this be the case than for the state to recklessly damage families and harm children by intervening when it shouldn't.   Police forces may have washed their hands of assessing families in favour of child protection workers, but how well placed are they to make judgments about intervening below criminal standards of proof.

The culture and philosophy behind child protection needs a serious investigation.  The priority given to protecting children should also include an assumption that it is best children stay with their parents/guardians unless there is enough prima facie evidence that they are criminally abusing the child.  That doesn't mean shouting, it doesn't mean being drunk, it doesn't mean seeing mum and dad naked, it doesn't mean accepting hearsay as enough reason to intervene.

Moreover, some serious thought needs to be given about whether it remains appropriate for the state to subsidise the raising of children.   The clearest message to adults should be that if you breed, it is a cost upon you to raise children - they will cost part of your income - YOUR income.  You wont get extra money for extra kids, or a bigger house.  You will have to cope.   If you don't like it, then don't breed.  If you breed accidentally then put up with it, or give up the child for adoption.  

If it seems harsh to abolish it, it only needs 10 months worth of warning that no new applications for benefit for children will be accepted, and people will be on their own if they have more kids.   The existing benefits can be frozen nominally.   The quid pro quo is that taxes can be cut.  

The welfare state pays people to breed, it rewards fecundity, yet the same state seeks to punish if it gets a hint that children are not being treated "as they should be".   The very same state relies on taxes from the vast bulk of families who never create a single problem.  

At one time the state let families be autonomous and people daren't intervene in their neighbours affairs - the Fritzl case in Austria being an extreme example of what happens when people become completely atomised from each other.   However things have moved too far towards a culture of assuming that when allegations are raised, they are true.   It will never be perfect, there will always be children who aren't saved, there will always be families who are unfairly and brutally split because of false allegations and assumptions, but a free society should always presume innocence first.

Humans first, not animals or the supernatural

I don't say it enough.

I detest cancer, I detest the fear of cancer.

I thoroughly embrace and endorse all those who develop pharmaceuticals, ontological procedures, stem cell treatment and other research to eradicate this heartless scourge.

I detest those who interfere with such development because they care more about the brief lives of animals than the lives of humans who would be saved suffering and death from it.

I detest those human hating environmentalist  Zeus's who treat those who engage in the bio-chemistry of genetic engineering like Prometheus, and do all they can to spread their lies of fear and blind hatred of science, through their Dark Ages worship of the "natural".   Cells growing out of control and taking over a human being is fucking natural you fools.

I detest those religious believers who treat embryonic stem cells as if they are equivalent to human beings, and who seek to interfere with that research.

Most of all I am fed up with having to face the fear of cancer in loved ones again and again.

This time it better not be.

McCarten a ranting fool

For some time Matt McCarten has had a profile in New Zealand politics, because he has been able to express himself rather well.   For he has not been much of a success story, having been President of the New Labour Party then the now virtually defunct Alliance Party.   Bear in mind the Alliance peaked in vote in 1993, when first past the post made it a safe protest vote at 18%, 1996 saw it drop to just over 10% and when it was almost certain to get into power in 1999 it dropped to just under 8%.   After losing its personality cult leader of Jim Anderton, McCarten's Alliance fell out of Parliament in 2002.  Quite why he still has a column in the NZ Herald remains a mystery, and the Herald should think very carefully about whether he still deserves it after his latest rant.  For rant is all it can be described as, being as devoid of fact and pithy analysis as many talkback callers.

We start with a headline that tells us that McCarten basically doesn't believe in liberal democracy.  Quite something for a man who has had such high level involvement in a party that sought power and was part of a coalition government for one term.  The "idiots rule" at poll booths.  Unlike Matt, who knows better.   Not that many of us who comment in politics don't sometimes wonder why people vote as they do, but for him to suggest that voters are stupid implies he is better than they are, and should make their decisions for them.   I guess given his political heritage that may not be all that surprising.

Of course he doesn't mean New Zealand voters (yet) but rather Americans.  Nothing like bashing a whole nationality of people, particularly Americans.  I mean had he said Indians, or Chinese, or Kenyans or Samoans or... but he wouldn't would he?  It's ok to bash people according to their nationality because in Matt's world white Americans have power, and can be insulted and denigrated.   Not that he would tolerate anyone saying people of his nationality are stupid with "naivete and proud ignorance" (sic).

Then he has his own vision of the Bush years "Two years ago the Republicans, led by that boofhead, George Bush the younger, idiotically ran their own form of Rogernomics: giving the rich huge tax refunds; slashing public services".  Matt did you actually follow US public policy over that period or just fit it into your binary left-right framework that fits New Zealand rather well, but doesn't fit the US?  Where do punitive tariffs on steel imports fit into Rogernomics, where does bailing out banks, where does expanding state education ("No Child Left Behind" was a bipartisan initiative with that known "Republican" Ted Kennedy), where does increasing state spending and deficits fit into Rogernomics Matt?  Yes there was a tax cut, which applied from middle to upper incomes, but slashing public services?  No. Any privatisations? No, even though USPS, Amtrak and the FAA are all easy targets.  

No, you see Matt is dumbing down US politics so you can understand it, except it's so dumb he's wrong.  It is why the Tea Party opposed so many Republican nominations for the mid term elections and why the Tea Party has specifically rejected the past politics of both main parties.   Such details confuse Matt, he obviously forgot Rob Muldoon was one of New Zealand's most socialist Prime Ministers, because he opposed him at the time.

Matt ignores that "going to war against two countries" was in part retaliation for 9/11.   Of course he would rather the US sit back, take 9/11, feel guilty and let the Taliban be emboldened and maintain their totalitarian rule in Afghanistan without interruption.   He would deny it, but that is precisely the implication of his statement.

He continues to be wilfully blind on Obama "."He used his majority in both houses of Congress to get an economic stimulus to save greedy capitalists from themselves and then introduced a health system to cover just about everyone who got sick".  Actually Matt, the Bush Administration was playing big spend ups and bailouts first, but you were ignoring things at the time.  The "health system" is compulsory health insurance, which you opposed when it was actually Roger Douglas's policy for New Zealand in a slightly different form.   Too complex I know, just blank it all out Matt.

"Obama also saved millions of skilled jobs by nationalising the car industry" Steady on Matt, keep a tissue handy.  Your economic illiteracy only gets you excited by seeing money taken off of millions of people somehow "saving jobs" by going to a few thousand.

"The liberals and progressives have been sidelined to a large degree. In New Zealand, the power of corporations and wealthy individuals in United States politics seems extraordinary" Yes you noticed how rich all those Tea Party supporters and American voters are.  Oh that's right, they didn't decide things really did they?  The US media was completely against Obama from the start, not that you'd notice this on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, NPR, PBS, New York Times or the LA Times etc, but Matt doesn't bother consuming much foreign news, obviously.

"Can you imagine a corporation in this country being able to spend as much money as they liked to get a policy they want adopted, or unlimited funds to get a favourite candidate elected?"  You mean like the campaign for electoral reform?  Oh you mean spending their own money as much as they liked - their own money.   However, you think it isn't their money do you?  You think anyone with money must have taken it from someone somehow.   Bit of envy is it, or just disbelief as to how free people actually function on a grand scale?

"the calibre of the "teabag party" Republican candidates are just plain scary. Many of their serious contenders oppose abortion openly, even in cases of child rape or incest on the basis that it is "God's plan". One of them opposed masturbation. Others argued that if they didn't get elected their supporters would take up arms to overthrow the country ."

Many? Really Matt?  Or is that just your own spin again? Yes that's right.  One opposed masturbation once yes, but it wasn't her policy platform, and your party had Alamein Kopu - one of Parliament's greatest non-entities, and screaming Pam Corkery, an enormous intellect there.   Maybe had you quoted the Tea Party website which had only three policies you might have had some substance there: fiscal responsibility, smaller government and lower taxes.   Hard to paint that as hysterical madness isn't it?

"Attendees at their rallies carried assault weapons" How many Matt? Do a handful at hundreds of rallies count at significant?  Does this not happen with Democrats? 

"The leader of the Congress Republicans campaigned actively for a candidate who dressed in Nazi regalia,"  Yes as a joke Matt, and your Sandra Lee once compared what happened to Maori as a Holocaust.  Given Obama's past links to far-left radicals and a pastor who blamed the US for 9/11 and made numerous anti-semitic remarks, you might want to look in your own ideological backyard.  

Then, finally, Matt sees this as advice for Phil Goff!  "Working people need a party with specific visionary policies. Merely being a more pastel version of the other party won't get you elected next year, Phil."

Why not? It worked for John Key, he was Labour lite par excellence.  Your party had a vision, and it didn't get close to the 5% threshold once it lost its "great leader" Jim Anderton.  

The message Matt didn't get from this is that many Americans became scared at vast overspending by government of THEIR money (Matt doesn't understand that taxpayers think their money is theirs!) and borrowing ever more that will have to be paid off.  He didn't get that maybe a lot of Americans WANT more of their money back, and don't like ever growing government doing more for them.

You see Matt, while you and your ideological compadres were thinking the USSR was simply an alternative way of looking at things, and it was best to be neutral in the Cold War, Americans by and large did not.

It would help if you took down the hammer and sickle in your brain and opened your eyes.  You're more prejudiced than most Republicans, you're more stupid than many of them too because you can't even engage in basic research or read sufficiently widely to figure out what was going on in the US.

US voters rejected Obama because he was elected on a vapid bubble of hype, empty slogans of "change" and "can we fix it, yes we can".   There was nothing behind this but the hype of believing one man could make people's lives better.   That bubble has been burst, and Americans fear being pushed into second place by an Administration that keeps spending far more money than it gets in taxes.

Sadly, because you can't think beyond your ranting leftwing cage, you spout out empty nonsense which has at best a few grains of truth in it.

ACC - Another reason to hate Nick Smith's politics

The NZ Herald reports:

"he poured cold water on speculation that workplace accident insurance might be opened up to full competition from private insurers after an ACC "stocktake" completed in June by a group led by former Labour Party Finance Minister David Caygill. Its report has not been made public.

Dr Smith said opening the business to competition would be "a very major decision and, consistent with the John Key pragmatism and cautiousness, we are not in any hurry".

Could you be more of a spineless hypocrite if you tried?

You VOTED FOR opening the workplace accident insurance market up to competition when National was last in government.  You VOTED AGAINST returning it to a statutory monopoly, and now you are in charge of it you have the testicular fortitude of a mouse.

What has changed Nick? The rest of the developed world has open markets for accident insurance, for both workplace and motor vehicles.  New Zealand once led the world in reform, deregulation and opening state monopolies up to competition.   

You've shown you're little better than the Jim Andertons, Jeanette Fitzsimons and the Winston Peters, scared that without nanny state running everything, people will make the wrong decisions.

Just join Labour and be done with it, you'd be happier there.