The results of the first attempt to host a debate between a right-focused blogger and left-focused blogger here at KP have been decidedly mixed. The idea was to show that reasonable people with opposing ideologies can have a civilised debate about matters of contemporary import in a common forum rather than slag each other across the blogosphere. Since I have good regard for Sagenz writing on strategic issues at New Minister in spite of the company he keeps over there (PM excepted and Gooner occasionally forgiven) and the fact that we disagree on 95% of everything political, I invited him to debate me here on the proposition that the Iraq invasion was a success. Kindly enough, he agreed, even while acknowledging that he was entering opposition turf in doing so.

I assumed that readers would focus on the merits of our arguments, using the ends-means/costs-benefits rationales that are the essence of strategic thought. I thought that the debate would centre on my short to medium negative appraisal versus Sage’s long term mixed success scenario, in which short term failures could lead to longer-term success from a US/Western standpoint. I assumed that people had read enough to look beyond the pretext for the invasion (WMDs), and that they were conversant in the ample literature directed to the topic.  I assume that people would leave their (anti-American and anti-Israeli, in particular) biases at home and concentrate on the merits of the argument as given. My assumptions were wrong.

Although there were a few good comments, what we mostly got was the usual partisan diatribes, several of which were clearly uninformed by a thorough read of what was written. Some were completely off-thread. Then there was the nitpicking troll from Japan who had little substantive to offer, another rant directed at me that actually was about something Sagenz wrote, capped off by the king of pompous armchair revolutionaries harping about me being vaingloriously mean to the troll. The bulk of the comments did not debate the merits of the arguments or even address the subject as specified. That was disappointing.

Even so, after expressing my unhappiness with Lew and Sagenz and hearing back from them, I would like to try the debate experiment again and invite people to submit topics and possible authors. I think that  because KP tries to keep things civilised, we can offer a good hosting platform for some worthwhile, stimulating and reasoned left versus right arguments. But ground rules for comments will be established so that if comments deviate from the subject matter as framed by the debate question, they will be deleted.

Surely this is a worthwhile venture and not to much to ask for people to stay within the margins of the debate as framed. If nothing else, doing so helps improve intellectual discipline because it forces both authors and readers to check their biases and assumptions at the door in the attempt to be concise and to the point.

Thus spake John Ansell, who’s back with another cracking demonstration that he’s the nation’s pre-eminent racial fearmonger. He really is peerless in this regard.

And there’s plenty more where that came from.

Incidentally, you can read Scott Hamilton’s (and others’) thorough and systematic destruction of Ansell’s rather slippery and Victorian views on race, ethnicity, culture and religion (yes, Virginia, ‘Māori’ is a religion) in the comments thread of this post at the excellent Reading The Maps.

L

From the star-touched genius of Lyndon Hood, with reference to the government position on the trans-Tasman wage gap: The Calculator of Cthulhu.

L

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, and so it is that Chris Trotter finds common cause with Peter Cresswell in selectively revising the story of Ngāi Tūhoe to frame them up as our very own Khmer Rouge, and the Tino Rangatiratanga movement as the mortal enemy of civil society as we know it. I do not seek to defend Te Kooti and his followers: it’s not necessary to do so to abhor the brutality of the Crown response. But even that isn’t the point of this post: I’ve covered that ground before. The point is that their reading is anitithetical to the ongoing development of a peaceful and modern Aotearoa.

Both frame up the Crown position as a matter of swordright — Tūhoe ‘picked the wrong side’ in their war and were justly punished for it. Should have been punished more. Both Chris and Peter seem to be of the view that the Crown would have been entirely justified in leaving not one stone upon another, not one man, woman or child alive. And more than a century later, based on their own (conveniently one-eyed) assessment of incidents surrounding Te Kooti’s succour in Te Urewera, they argue that Tūhoe still deserve whatever they get: nothing if they’re bloody lucky. Frankly, I expect this sort of thing from permanent-state-of-jihad Objectivists; not so much from an actual historian claiming the mantle of a peace-loving social democrat.

Because the end justifies the means, you see. The brutal and systematic dispossession and wholesale slaughter of Māori throughout Aotearoa was perhaps unfortunate, but necessary in ‘civilising’ the uncivilised hordes of savages found here by the noble white man of 1840. I asked Chris a while ago whether he thought that NZ would have been better off if Europeans had just landed with boatloads of armed soldiers and done to the natives what they did in the rest of the world. He responded by saying I was “not mentally wired for this sort of historical argument.” But I guess I have a fuller answer now.

These are people who claim to want to ‘move on’ from our colonial history, for Aotearoa to become ‘one nation’. But doing so on the basis of swordright cannot result in a nation of two people joining together as ‘iwi tahi tatou’, but of one people who set the rules and another who live by them; the former wielding the righteous sword of civilisation, the latter’s efforts to work with the former rather than under them cut down by it, and even their efforts to work within the rules viewed with eternal suspicion and distrust. This is beyond misery — it is ignorant, paranoiac hatred and fear of ghosts long passed which has brought these two bedfellows together. Just don’t think about the offspring they might bear.

Update: Fresh approval from PC.

L

I agree with DPF, that for the sake of historical correctness, Wellington’s Majoribanks Street should probably be changed to Marjoribanks, and Nairn Street should probably be changed to Nairne, since that’s how the names are properly spelt. This is precisely the argument I made with regard to Whanganui, and as DPF says it’s no different. But as is so often the case, the idiots of the KBR are reflexively shrieking “racism” because Wellington City Council aren’t recommending a change to the NZ Geographic Board.

The lack of a change is not racism: it’s that nobody seems to care. Whanganui Māori got their name change after decades of concerted and organised lobbying, public demonstration, private petition, backroom negotiation, research and campaigning on the topic. What would be racist is to expect that these changes in Wellington — trivial though they are — should go through as of right just because one historian thinks they should. The decision to change an entrenched name is and must remain a matter of civil society deliberation: those who favour the change lobby for it; those who oppose it lobby against it, both bring whatever evidence and principled arguments they can to the discourse, and those authorities empowered to decide the matter do so in accordance with appropriate legislation and customs. So, to those who want the names of Stewart Marjoribanks and Alexander Nairne properly recognised, I say: start lobbying!

L

With the arrival of my second child, my time just got more valuable. When better to engage in a medium which brutally enforces parsimony?

(You can now follow me on twitter. No guarantees as to coherence. Yes, the message above did take me ages to cut to 140 characters.)

L

Via PC, a nifty tool: feed it some text and it tells you who you write like.

From a more-or-less random sample of my writing on this site, more than 50% comes back telling me I write like David Foster Wallace. I’d never heard about him until now, but wikipedia lists his form as “postmodern literature” and “hysterical realism”. I can see how that cap would fit. But Wallace hanged himself in 2008. That’s not so good.

Outliers include the post from the other day about tits and teeth news presenter selection, which is like Stephen King, possibly confirming Pablo’s dim view of it. The dam breaks, my only real attempt at satire, apparently reads like James Joyce. My epic and furious response to Chris Trotter from a while back is in the style of H P Lovecraft, which I think is rather fitting.

L

Rather than further sidetrack the discussion about police and firearms at The Dim Post, quick answers here to inquiries there by “The Big Dog” as to my views on two topics:

Lew, I’d be interested to know what you think of Tame Iti?

Tame Iti is a convenient symbol of all that whitey wants to fear. Since the events of October 2007 he’s been dressed up as our very own Colonel Kurtz.

Likewise Hone Harawira to an extent; Danyl’s brilliant commentary on this is here. The reality is — to put it very mildly — somewhat different. This isn’t to say that either are utterly blameless, or that this depiction is entirely unwanted; only that their notoriety is rather greater than is really deserved.

Lew, What did you think of Bomber Bradbury’s take?

(Assuming Bomber’s take on police and firearms here.) Bomber distrusts and fears the police, and he has his reasons for doing so. In that context the response is not unreasonable or unusual. While I agree with a lot of what he says in principle, I essentially see police as part of a healthy civil society, not as its enemy, so I ascribe those concerns somewhat less weight. So where Bomber insists on hard restrictions on police powers, I am more content with soft restrictions and strong civilian oversight. It’s an open question as to whether our present oversight is sufficient, though.

Edit: TBD was actually asking for my views on Bomber’s response to the October 2007 Urewera Terra raids. I’ve answered in the comments below.

L

I generally agree with r0b’s reasoning on the police need — or lack — for firearms. This is a mostly-empty moral panic.

But how things have changed for Greg O’Connor of the Police Association. This from 1 June 2009:

Mr O’Connor, who is currently studying policing in Scandinavia, did not support all police carrying guns but said the matter had to be looked at. [...] “We said the debate should take place outside the emotion of Len Snee’s death and it’s disappointing to see that now there’s not going to be any debate there needs to be.”

A year ago Greg O’Connor was careful to frame the Police Association response in this way. He repeatedly said he didn’t want to arm all officers, he just wanted “a debate”, and one which would take place in the cold light of reason rather than as a knee-jerk in the aftermath of a police shooting. That’s a mature and responsible position. But even though the debate has not really occurred in the intervening year, his position has congealed — or perhaps he now just feels more at liberty to express it — into “all guns, all the time”.

What’s changed in the past year? The agenda has changed, that’s all: how firearms are framed in the public discourse about policing. Any time a firearm is used — regardless of the outcome — it’s a big media deal. Recent events such as the Urewera Terra raids of October 2007, the retrial of David Bain, the story of a large number of dogs being “massacred” using a firearm, and of course a number of police shootings have imprinted the prominence of firearms as public menace on the public consciousness. This has progressed alongside a police and crime-reporting discourse which has as its basic theme the notion that our plucky boys and girls in blue are under constant attack from all sides. Contrary to O’Connor’s noble aim, there has been no meaningful debate about arming police. This fact suits his arm-the-cops purposes, and it’s now clear that those cries for a debate, and the appearance of a debate within the Police, were made with the primary purpose of simply keeping the issue primed and on the public agenda. It’s lurked there, undebated, for a while, and with these most recent events it’s moving rather rapidly closer to actually happening. That’s a dangerous way to set policy.

Although I accept this is a contentious position, I generally believe that we need to trust the operational discretion and instincts of frontline police staff, as long as we have tough and independent disciplinary oversight as to their policy, and conduct in implementing that policy. On this basis, I’m not categorically opposed to the notion of police vehicles containing a lock-box with firearms in it, which police can use in accordance with firm and well-documented policy in light of the tactical circumstances in which they find themselves. But I would say that this isn’t very different to the current status quo, and the use of firearms must not be left to the sole discretion of an individual officer. The deployment policy and tactical decisions to deploy must be matters for which police command can be held accountable, for which the police as an organisation are responsible.

But what I’m more interested in is a public debate on this, and other policing matters. We really need one.

L

As I’ve said before, Peter Shirtcliffe’s campaign to scupper MMP (again) is probably a blessing in disguise for the electoral status quo in New Zealand. If any further evidence were required, the following should suffice for now:

The speech bubbles are blank because Peter is running a caption competition to find a punchline. Demonstrating piercing insight into his relevance to NZ politics, he has chosen the Kiwiblog Right for these words of inspiration. Personally, I think that leaving them blank perfectly captures the character of this campaign: inchoate, futile, tone-deaf irrelevance.

Hopefully he won’t be too disheartened by the far-from-enthusiastic response of Farrar’s captive authoritarians.

L