Does Russel Norman want Israel to disappear?

It's not clear, after all Russel Norman could just have been too quick to use the wrong language here but look at this:

"Palestine"...

...not Gaza (which Israel did withdraw from and Hamas subsequently used as a base to attack Israel - i.e. not occupied territories - the internationally recognised land of the state of Israel).  

.. not "the occupied territories" (which still respects a two state solution)...

but "Palestine", which implies the end of the state of Israel completely.  It is the Hamas solution.   Russel is wanting Israel to withdraw and disband according to that tweet.

but then this is contradictory:

So it looks like he accepts a state of Israel here, but how can we be sure?  His tone is so one-sided as to be virulently anti-Israel.  It's so evasive of the facts.

Israel withdrew from Gaza, completely.  

It dismantled Jewish settlements in their entirety, it told the Palestinians they could govern their own affairs. So they elected Hamas, which vowed to destroy Israel and institute an Islamist theocracy (and has not held an election since).  Hamas started shooting rockets into Israel, supplied by Iran (completely ignored in all of the "America arms Israel" rhetoric).  Israel imposed a blockade to stop the rockets getting into Gaza.

The Greens - nationalising children so you can pay for everyone else's

So the Greens are cleverly pulling at the heart strings, with images of children and landscapes. You're meant to vote for them, yep, someone else's kid, because the Greens think we all belong to everyone else.   It's the antithesis of individuals living their lives responsibly and interacting freely with one another, but rather the heavy hand of the #lovenz state taking your money out of "love" to pay for other people who at best don't care about where it came from, and at worst hold you in contempt (you rich c*** you, probably with Pakeha and male privilege that you inherited from your thieving racist/sexist ancestors, go on feel the guilt). 

People who breed and barely raise kids at all, who then go on to repeat the cycle, maybe bullying your kids in the process, or (the Greens hope) become angry political activists who go on to talk to the hilariously named Child Poverty Action Group (so named because it undertakes the minimal possible action to address child poverty by simply demanding the state do something about it with other people's money).  

If the Press gets this wrong...

No doubt executives in newspapers wonder how they can stop the inexorable decline in business, the drop in circulation and how to stem the competition from online media.

Air NZ official photo of its first Boeing 787 arriving 

I submit Exhibit A as a reason why this continues to happen.  It isn't about a particularly serious news topic at all, more a travel feature, but it demonstrates clearly the slip in standards.  

It is from The Press and the article is meant to be a review of Air NZ's latest plane, the Boeing 787-9 "Dreamliner", because the airline took it on a training trip down to Christchurch last week before it starts commercial service. 

Quite simply it is an article that would fail a high school student, which may be why there is no name put to it.  It may well be a high school student who wrote it.  It's as if the writer didn't even though there was something called the internet, and research isn't difficult to undertake on it.

It's a shocker that is up there with the Gareth Morgan words of wisdom on North Korea in terms of not only saying nothing new, but actually being so inaccurate as to be misleading.

Contrast it to the excellent articles on the website Australian Business Traveller, which frankly has better information about air travel for New Zealanders than any New Zealand source.  Aussie Business Traveller wrote three articles in detail about the plane (one on each cabin, Business, Premium Economy and Economy).  Now I don't expect that level on a newspaper, but I do expect accuracy.  This was a slapdash lazy effort by someone who didn't only know nothing, but didn't even try to find out anything beyond what was seen.

My point with the article title is, that if the Press can get this so wrong, what else does it get wrong that I don't have such knowledge about?  Is it really any wonder that people are abandoning newspapers?

What did the Press get wrong? (I did submit a comment online but it has presumably been too embarrassed to publish it)

One law for all?

Jamie Whyte's "one law for all" speech was disappointing.  Not because of what his end goals are (which are largely ignored by his critics because he gave them so much else to aim at), but because the rhetoric was clumsy and in my view, counter-productive.

One of the most corrosive elements in New Zealand is the widely held consensus amongst most political parties and indeed the bureaucracy and media, that there remains a strong element of racial determinism around the lives people lead, at least for Maori.  This being the idea that the reason Maori on average perform worse in terms of a wide range of social indicators compared to individuals from other ethnic groups, is due to a mix of the legacy of what happened to their ancestors (which seems not to hold back refugees from genocides from living memory) and a system that doesn't "meet their needs". The latter because "the system" is "designed for Pakeha" (not because state provided services aren't necessarily very tailored to individual need).

It is post-modernist structuralist theory which posits that because Maori are (the descendants of) the indigenous people of a land that was colonised (and then gained independence), they are structurally disadvantaged.  With this thinking you can conveniently blank out individual cases that prove how flawed all of this is, like the young Maori woman I once met who got a government scholarship to pursue her law studies, a scholarship open only to Maori - she was proud, because her parents were lawyers.  Not exactly a scholarship that was lifting someone from a below average background.

The view perpetuated by the Greens, Labour, Mana/Internet/Opportunist, Maori Party and much of academia is that she is inherently disadvantaged because she is a Maori woman (doubly disadvantaged).

Forget that her family easily had an income several times that of the average household (so one can argue that her family long ago climbed out of disadvantage), that gets blanked out - the system structurally disadvantages her against a young man from a single parent household with no family history of tertiary education.  Her race was deemed to transmit disadvantage in a system that "creates" it.  The same quackery justifies all sorts of affirmative action programmes, which when government funded (I couldn't care less if private companies run them) are picking winners on the basis of race, out of a sense of "fairness", as if treating individuals differently on the basis of race somehow "redresses collective unfairness".  That is, of course, nonsense.  There is no collective brain or life, just individuals living their lives, and if the state decides that one individual on the basis purely of characteristics she can't choose, deserves privilege over another, then it is simply engaging in the unfairness it is purporting to address.

Unfortunately Jamie Whyte's rhetoric hid the real point, which was I think a major strategic error for those of us who want to move on from racial determinism and neo-Marxist structuralist interpretations of power, capitalism and society.  The mistake many have jumped on is misconstruing a detail around educational quotas (which is not where the debate should lie) and the pre-revolutionary France comparison (which was historically wrong), but I think his two biggest mistakes were:

- To not focus on how the current system privileges a few Maori over everyone else (including other Maori);
- To not sell the optimistic case for individual empowerment and diversity.

Forgotten Posts from the Past: Planning transport

Yes Labour and the Greens always share a grand plan for transport that wont be met of course, because the targets bear little resemblance to what transport users want.  You see you can take two views about what transport users want.  You can take what they do, in response to their own demands and the price to meet those, or you can ask them what they want, and they'll usually want to pay less for a lot more.  It is the latter approach that guides what is the eco-socialist view of transport - which is that the system should be driven by what planners think is good for everyone, not by responding to demand according to what people are prepared to pay for.

Labour's 2008 transport policy had a range of goals which pretty much sums up the banal attitude to this:

- Cut km travelled by single occupancy vehicles in urban centres by 10% by 2015.  In other words, too many people are driving in their own cars in cities, and they should either not do so, or take someone else with them (it doesn't mean empty buses).  A target to reduce congestion would be to meet something people want, but no it is a statement that driving in your own car, on your own, is inherently bad, even if you bought the car, paid for the petrol, insurance etc (including the tax to pay for the road).  Too many people are being bad by driving themselves unnecessarily!

 - Increasing the movement of freight by ship and rail to 30 per cent and 25 per cent respectively. Whatever THAT means, because it could just be an increase in freight tonne km, which could happen anyway with a booming economy. However if it is about mode share, then there is no chance this could happen without taxing others to subsidise freight movements by more expensive modes.  The assumption is that moving freight by sea and rail is better, because of less pollution, but it ignores that the reason it doesn't happen as much as planners want, is cost. It simply costs more.  There is no quantification of the benefits of this mode shift, given it will cost money to achieve it, it is simply part of the quasi-religious belief that sea and rail transport is "better" than road transport, not anything based on evidence.

- Increasing walking, cycling and other active forms of transport to 30 per cent of trips in urban areas. You unfit slobs, walk! I tell you walk! Of course a good way of doing this would be to eliminate public transport subsidies, then more people would walk and cycle, as the main competition for public transport is walking and cycling. Yet Labour wants to double subsidies (euphemistically called "funding") for public transport.   Why 30% of trips?  It's a planning target.  It would improve physical fitness yes, it would also reduce demand for public transport so there could be savings there and delays in expanding road capacity, but how do you "increase" this?  Does pouring taxpayers' money into infrastructure make a difference?  Who knows, as it isn't evidence based.

 The truth is that the government cannot predict transport demand, technologies or geographical changes in demographics and businesses. The government's biggest influence is owning infrastructure it could see free through commercialisation and privatisation, but no, it wants to specify the "right level" of funding when it doesn't know where demand is heading.