Blogging on liberty, capitalism, reason, international affairs and foreign policy, from a distinctly libertarian and objectivist perspective
26 September 2007
Mugabe should be no surprise
Bravery in Rangoon
25 September 2007
Ahmadinejad the homophobic, anti-semitic liar
24 September 2007
Socialism's striving for medals
21 September 2007
Global warming's agenda of fear
20 September 2007
Christian politics NZ - the triumph of commonsense
Brian Tamaki promised great things for his flock - the flock that sadly or stupidly, depending on your point of view, present tithes to keep him and his comrades in a style very few of his flock would be accustomed to. It certainly shouldn't be banned, but there is something immoral about spreading judgment among the ignorant, and convincing them to pay him to live a lavish lifestyle, while condemning those who don't to hell. Tamaki's promises that the Destiny NZ party would enter Parliament in 2005 and be in government in 2008 were either a marketing exercise or the voice of the truly deluded. No one looking relatively objectively at NZ politics can see fundamentalist Christian politics having much of a market.
The best a Christian party has done in NZ was when Peter Dunne's centrist (middle muddle ground as Bob Jones once called it) United Party, which had been languishing at 0.9% merged with the happy clappy Christian Democrats (once led by a charismatic young preacher, of whom it has been said fell from grace following allegations of conduct that is all too often laid at the feet of high profile Christian politicians, although nothing like Graham Capill). Dunne becoming the media darling in 2002 saw his party hold the balance of power then, and now - and we have the Families Commission. However, with United Future halving its vote in 2005, and Dunne distancing himself from the Christian dimension, AND Gordon Copeland slipping away, it would look like United Future will be a party of Dunne only in 2008 - which of course, is a triumph of commonsense. Dunne after all is a man with more intelligence than he has shown, with a political career of highlights such as creating the useless Families Commission, appealing to homophobes by not debating civil unions, but saying they are a proxy for gay marriage (without saying whether he thought that was bad or not, but implying that it was), and campaigning for a cargo cult highway with a billion dollar cost that the funding system he supported in Cabinet has constantly rejected.
The relaunch of Destiny as PC has pointed out, has to make you laugh.
What the new party will do is continue to attract a small number of voters who, in all probability, would either have voted National or stayed home. However, Brian Tamaki's time will come.
I believe fundamentalist pre-enlightenment Christian politics are a potential disaster for humanity, fortunately in New Zealand (as in the UK), the appetite for going back to witch hunts, jailing heretics and abolishing free speech on Christian grounds, is not high. What good that some churches offer their members in setting some rational moral rules around treating others, and instilling some discipline and respect is not seen in Christian politicians - the likes of Tamaki have no respect for those of other religions or no religion - they are the wannabe Taliban of New Zealand.
Over 95% of New Zealand voters reject this, now if only the US could follow...
10 September 2007
National socialist Party again - John Keycescu
^
"The proposal calls for a database to track the development of New Zealand children, which Mr Key would not oppose. "You have to balance the intrusion of privacy over the need to try to get a resolution to an issue that is of quite great concern. In this case the issue warrants that." "
^
Kim John Key, John Keycescu, Mao Key John.
^
What a fucking waste a vote for National is then - want a reason to join Libertarianz? Don't want your family tracked by the state and Cindy Kiro's social worker mates? Well go on go here.
^
Yes I know Family First is against it, but they'll track your internet use and burn books.
08 September 2007
Media useless in protecting our freedoms - Big Sister Kiro
06 September 2007
Death
I don’t think there is anything beautiful or wonderful about death, the only comfort I ever think there can be is when it is the alternative to excruciating agony. Those who consciously choose euthanasia for themselves are to be respected in that light. Beyond that though, death of those you love is a loss, a waste. It isn’t a “fact of life” or anything beyond what must be accepted, it is a cruel devastating removal of someone that is valued and loved.
The loss is noticed because you can’t talk to the person anymore, can’t hear their thoughts, share laughter, stories and experiences. That is irreplaceable because people are individuals, and the pain is only real because you have loved and lost.
You can avoid grief rather easily, be a hermit. You’ll never get close to anyone, never enjoy who they are, their mind and their sense of life, and you’ll never attend a funeral. However I don’t want that, and I value what time I’ve had with those who I have lost recently. That time is precious, and so easily wasted and frittered away on nonsense.
One point is to value memories, and to have memories to value you have to create them, live them and as you get older you can share them, smile and look back upon all those years.
Eventually technology will allow more transplants, the growth of replacement components for the body, and may even allow consciousness to remain forever intact. The desirability of this will be the subject of much debate, who wants to be conscious without a body, and who wants to be forever patched up in old age. This sets aside the typical debates about the sustainability of perpetual life and breeding. However, as lives extend it will continue to become more interesting, until, of course, I am dead.
I don’t have religion for comfort, as easy as it would be and in some moments I did wonder if those I lost could hear and see me. However, I don’t feel they are in a better place, there are no place, they are no more, as romantic as alternatives may seem (and frankly as pleasant as that seems at first). The most recent loss has also hit me about my own mortality, dying at 56 of a blood clot to the brain from a varicose vein, with cancer also spreading. She was a fit, slim, non-smoker.
I’ll do what I can to delay it all, but it is only when a parent dies young that the truth of ones own mortality is clear. Realism strikes hard, and I have to live, frittering away time is over. It is not a time to be reckless, but a time to embrace life and those who you love – for some of them will die before you, and then your time will come, and if in the moments beforehand you can reflect, then reflect upon what you had – and remember every day from now until then is all you have.
Carpe Diem has never felt so true.
12 August 2007
It's not the fault of the child torturer because
06 August 2007
2007 will forever be in my memory
01 August 2007
New Zealand to be friendly to murderers
31 July 2007
Politically correct sledgehammer
Nat MPs boycott junket
It is time to play the blame game
28 July 2007
David Benson Pope - good riddance
27 July 2007
The National Puritan Party
- The teacher in question posted nude pictures of himself on an online dating website. This website only allows registration of users 18 years and over. Katherine Rich calls them "hard core pornographic" involving himself and two women. Some were probably of him having a stiffie, the sort of image half the population gets to see in person most days, and a good part of the rest of the population gets to see a little less often. Other would involve him committing legal acts with the women. Nothing illegal about it, and hardly immoral given that the vast majority of the population "commits" them regularly (and the remainder usually want to). Online dating websites are NOT porn sites, though some get perilously close;
- The only people that would get to see these photos are other adults registered on the dating website who searched for someone with the teacher's profile;
- He sought other women to commit legal acts with, presumably consensually, although Katherine Rich has focused upon the phrase "the younger the better" to imply that he is a pedophile, or seeking underage sex. While he COULD have said 18 plus, the implication is that given it is a legal dating site, given that the dating site has strict rules about these things, that it is borderline.
The teacher appears to have committed no offences, or even attempted to do so. He has not solicited anyone underage, there is no evidence of handling illegal pornography and no evidence of any untoward activity towards students.
The Teachers Council Disciplinary Tribunal ruled that he should continue teaching, presumably because there IS insufficient evidence to support that this teacher is any more a risk than say, a quiet demure understated man who doesn't show his cock online. Indeed, an adult swinger may well be LESS of a risk than the quiet lonely male who never seems to have much of a profile. Two out of five on the tribunal dissented, but then again that is not enough to end someone's career,
The fact that the teacher's ad could be accessed by past present and future students is truly irrelevant. Are teachers meant to live an ascetic life, or maybe the National Party stereotype of heterosexual married couples breeding happily, without threesomes entering into their lives, or large age gaps?
When can people have private lives when they have committed no crime, have not even done anything sufficient to be charged of the attempt of a crime without politicians taking cheap shots?
Would I be comfortable with this teacher teaching my children (if I had any)? Well frankly, I either wouldn't know or I wouldn't care that he advertises for other women, including young legal age ones if there are NO outstanding allegations about actual behaviour towards students or sex crimes more generally. It is no different to the scaremongering over gay teachers not too long ago that implied that a gay man in front of a class of boys was probably wanting to fondle them. Does "the younger the better" mean illegal? Well, the question you have to ask is, do you want to give someone, for whom you have no other evidence, the benefit of the doubt or do you want to engage in a witch hunt?
If he had been caught asking for schoolgirls, or flirting with them, or been caught with any, then fine - this is all justified. However, there are hundreds and hundreds of teachers who, secretly, will fantasise occasionally about their students, and I mean particularly younger teachers with the oldest students. You will never know who they are, because 99% of the time you never get to know who fantasises about whom. As long as it remains so, it is nobody else's business. As long as teachers pursue sex lives that do not break the law or do not involve students, then it should not be anyone else's business.
Winston in a time warp
- The coalition agreement terminated in force when the coalition with National broke up in 1998;
- The remains of that government was voted out in 1999 and remains so;
- The confidence and supply agreement with Labour does not cross reference the 1996 coalition agreement as a basis for policy;
- The coalition agreement is not the word of some sage, it's a political document of convenience.
means nothing?
Sorry Winston, reread the calendar it is 2007, not 1997.
Yes, if you had a gun and a bullet and could get away with it
25 July 2007
Peter Dunne does occasionally have common sense
They're taking the piss... aren't they?
Chavez turns the screws, once more
24 July 2007
A game
“By achieving a relatively self-sufficient economy, it is possible to greatly cut back the amount of energy and resources that are needed to provide the goods and services that people need. By using local economies and small local factories, we largely eliminate the need for transport and heavy packaging. It also becomes much easier to recycle all waste products into fresh goods, given that manufacture takes place locally and recycled materials do not need to travel far. Local economies will also provide a much fairer distribution of wealth. Enormous factories and economic outlets have a tendency to concentrate wealth into the hands of just a few people.”
^
“Ultimately it is quality of life that matters most. A truly localised economy, which blends the benefits of modern technology with the more friendly, quiet and socially integrated communities of yesteryear, could offer people the best of both worlds. The advantages that such a society would bring, in terms of quality of life, care for the elderly, greener and quieter surroundings, freedom from crime and traffic, better health, safety for our children”
^
“Empirical data show that a good supply of domestic capital is still more likely to lead to investment, as capital doesn't flow perfectly across borders (nor should it).
Dependency on foreign capital means we have to run our economy like a tart on the streets of global capitalism, always primping to be attractive for other people's money, and setting everything from interest rates to worker-protection laws to please them.
This means turning ownership, and thus control, of much of our economy to foreigners. When their economic interests coincide with ours, this is tolerable, but they often won't, and on fundamentals, they never will"
Grey grizzling anti-wog brigade and the xenophobic economic infants
^
On Auckland airport, have you ever read such sheer nonsense?
^
The Bigoted wog haters (when has NZ First ever been positive about immigration?) talk of it being the selling of “another New Zealand plum” to a foreign owned company. What rot. The Bigoted Wog Haters could always buy it out if they wanted. “New Zealand” doesn’t own it, so stop using deceptive language that some collective entity called New Zealand has any rights to it. Anyway, what do they think Dubai Aerospace are going to do? Put rockets on it and send it to the Middle East, or destroy it? Have another sherry or five and go watch TV1 and fall asleep. This is the economic illiteracy that nearly bankrupted NZ under Muldoon.
^
The xenophobic economic infants are funnier still. Apparently there will be monopoly issues because of the change of ownership!! Air New Zealand will wonder what it has been going on about for years then, and I guess the Commerce Commission investigations had too many big words for the economic infants to read. Changing ownership makes NO difference. Such xenophobes rant and foam at the mouth saying “Coming on top of the attempt to buy up Tourism Holdings Limited, tourists to New Zealand could be landing at a foreign owned airport, travelling in foreign owned campervans, and visiting foreign owned iconic tourist sites and spending money which will simply go back to the overseas owners.” We'll all be branded with 666s and those foreigners will be so mean and cruel to us. I'm so scared of the foreigners, they eat babies and drink the blood of virgins! The foreigners will only hire their own kind after all, who wont spend a cent in New Zealand, but repatriate it all, they wont eat our food or rent our buildings or spend money in our shops - and then they'll stop us using the airport because monopolies like to stop people using their facilities, and then they'll buy our homes, our clothes, our children, then it will be hell, and the little elephants in the sky will land on our houses and eat gingerbread trees and...
The answer to the bigoted wog haters and the xenophobic economic infants is:
^
BUY THE F**KING AIRPORT YOURSELF!
^
However they wont, it’s SOOO strategically important they want to stop others using their money to buy it and others to realise their investments by selling it, but like most good old socialist whingers they wont cough up a cent to risk by investment. Of course they'll blether on about "we used to own it". Oh really? Did you get dividends, vote on the directors, could you sell what you owned if you thought the management performed poorly? Of course not, you owned nothing - the state owned it and took risks with your money, and spent the dividends on what IT wanted.
21 July 2007
Etiquette lessons of the month
- Older people, mostly men. Put your cellphone in your pocket (or on your desk if you're the prat sitting 5 metres away) put it on vibrate and turn it onto silent or meeting. Many of us can tell by the fact you keep the default ringtone on, and on a loud setting, that you barely have a clue how to use this device, and more importantly you don't know how fucking annoying it is to here that ringtone time and time again. I don't want to know that your phone has rung, frankly it isn't important.
- Talk quietly on the phone or go away somewhere to talk on it. I have as much interest in your phone conversation as I have in the contents of your stomach. Doing this in queues is the worst thing of all, it doesn't show you're important, it shows that you are too lazy or stupid to check voicemail and can't stand not having phone calls.
- There is something on trains in several countries called "quiet" carriages. In those you should turn your phone on vibrate and answer it only in the vestibule. If that's too hard, don't sit in the quiet carriage. I will sarcastically tell you off if you don't obey, which is nothing compared to my desire to take your phone and break it.
- Women. Don't put your cellphone in your handbag on a loud ring and spend the next 5 seconds rummaging around for the infernal thing so that in the last second it is so loud we all notice. Put it somewhere else and put it on vibrate, it will make us both happier.
- Beep Beep Beep Beep. Similar to 1. if you're too much of a retard to change the notification for text messages to a single silent vibrate, then you don't deserve the phone. One beep will do, but beep beep.... beep beep is unnecessary and rude.
- Airlines. Whatever airlines choose to allow people to receive phone calls or text messages should be boycotted. The Daily Telegraph has a campaign on this. If you are on a short flight, then you can cope spending an hour or two without the world being able to reach you or vice versa. On a long flight, people are likely to sleep, work or relax, and again what the hell are you going to do differently when you're on a flight? Ryanair and Air France are keen, well I wouldn't fly Ryanair anyway as it is the airline that has done more to lower service standards than any other, and Air France is disappointing, but then it accentuates the stereotype of French rudeness.
- Airline passengers. For fuck's sake wait till you're through the terminal before you use it. Who the fuck cares that "I've landed" while you're standing up waiting for the front door to open? If someone is picking you up, let them use their fucking eyes and look at the arrivals screen to determine if your plane is in or not. You have to be quite an absolute cock to suddenly turn your phone on when the seatbelt sign goes off, as if you have lost oxygen and you desperately need it. If you feel like that, get help.
In short, cellphones have one main use. The ability to call someone in an emergency or for business purposes (people working remotely). The secondary use is to text messages silently. Calls received should go to voicemail and people can pick them up later. It is possible to live productively without them going off infernally in public all the time.
and don't tell me your whinge and moan story about how much business you do with your phone. Fine, great, fantastic, just don't have the conversation in my ear and turn off your fucking ring tone. Got it? If you're that clever you can put it on vibrate.
20 July 2007
Life's hard for Winston
19 July 2007
Greens cuddle up to Galloway
Besides talking nonsense like "Locke said he understood Mr Galloway represented a constituency that had a sizeable Muslim population and they were very supportive of him during elections". As George has stood for ONE election in his constituency, and he won the seat with a majority of 823, with 35.9% of the vote. Hmmm.
He has been quoted by Stuff as saying "We are very much impressed with him in his stand on Iraq."
Which stand is that then? Is it...
saying to Saddam Hussein "Sir: I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability" which he repeatedly claims is a misquote.
^
or maybe his meeting with Uday Hussein reported by the Sun with photos of the video reviewing this. Given the numerous allegations around Uday murdering, torturing and raping, you have to wonder at Galloway being friendly to this late thug, and Keith Locke wanting to be associated with that (but hey, anyone who's anti American may be his friend).
^
Or if not Iraq, how about his support for the Syrian invasion and occupation of Lebanon reported in the Lebanon Daily Star? "Syrian troops in Lebanon maintain stability and protect the country from Israel."
^
or does Keith sympathise with his statement to the Guardian that "If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life"
Nice friends he has.
17 July 2007
Debating global warming
Greens continue to ignore Camp 22
Boris for Mayor of London?
16 July 2007
Residents Action Movement invites friend of dictators
Style wins over inertia
Meanwhile according to the Mail on Sunday (hey the new Prince album was free with it ok?) Gordon Brown has told his Cabinet colleagues not to mention the words "Muslim" and "terrorist" in the same sentence in public. This follows the European Commission issuing guidelines for spokespeople to not use words like "jihad", "Islamic" or "fundamentalist" in association with terrorist attacks.
Orwell is alive and well. Islam is voluntary you know.