I Judge You, and That’s Okay

“When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.” (Wayne Dyer)

Some people run around saying things like “don’t you judge me!” But I think they’re wrong to say such things. By that I mean I think we do have the right or privilege to judge others. I’m going to explain why you’re in the clear to judge those around you.

On a daily basis we deal with a wide assortment of people. The various people we encounter act certain ways; how they act is up to them. They sometimes do stupid, distasteful, wrong, bad, or unacceptable things. When such things happen to us, or even if we witness their occurrence, we have a judgmental reaction – which isn’t a bad thing. This natural reaction is simply an evaluation of the situation based on our own standards; we compare what happened to what we think should have happened. If you catch Jimmy making out with Suzy, when you know that Kathy believes her and Jimmy are in a monogamous relationship, you have a reaction which consists of an evaluation of how the situation measures up to your standards; you asses whether or not his behaviour meets your threshold of acceptable behaviour. Your reaction also consist of a reassessment of Jimmy and how you view the relationship you have with him.

So when you encounter these situations and generate your reactions, what are you to do? Express your reaction?? Or bite your tongue?? While it’s fine for you choose to bite your tongue, you needn’t feel obligated to do so. That is, you have the right or privilege to express your assessment of the situation. So when you say something like “Jimmy, you jerk, you shouldn’t be making out with Suzy!” all you’re doing is saying “According to my understanding of the situation, the course of action Jimmy elected to take is at odds with my personal standards of acceptable behaviour for that situation. As such I now regard my relationship with Jimmy differently.” Notice that when you judge someone you aren’t so much saying something about him, but, rather, something about yourself (and how you view your relationship with him). When you boil it down, you're really just making a claim about yourself: a claim about what you consider to be acceptable behaviour. When you judge Jimmy you’re expressing: (a) the fact that your personal stanadards dictate that someone in a position like his should have acted differently that the behaviour deemed acceptable by Jimmy and, (b) you consider your relationship with Jimmy to be altered in some way as a result of (a). To say that you shouldn’t express such things about yourself is to say that you shouldn’t describe your own views about what you consider to be acceptable behaviour. And to say people should be allowed to express such things about themselves is just silly.

What you and Jimmy (or whoever) do next is up to both of you. He needn’t give any weight to what you expressed if he doesn’t want to (since he has his own standards of acceptable behaviour). Nor does he need to be concerned with how you view your relationship with him. (But, if he values your relationship, he probably should be concerned with your judgment.) So, ultimately, it’s not a bad thing when you “judge” someone since, when you do so, you’re simply making a descriptive claim about yourself and your relationship to those in it.

Lastly, there will be some situations where you might be best off biting your tongue and not sharing your views. But such situations are rare and the reasons for biting your tongue will be prudential ones. But, even then, you’re still allowed to make descriptive espressions about your views. (Again, that’s all you’re really doing when you judge people.) I could say more, but I think that’s enough for now. This is just my spur-of-the-moment thoughts on the subject. I could be wrong. After all, what do I know.

Wrong Laws.

For those of you who are fans of my usual glib approach to life, the universe and everything - I apologise, because this isn't really one of those posts. Every now and then an article appears in a newspaper that not only infuriates me, but makes me physically ill that someone was paid to make racist, debased and dangerous remarks in a format that will be read and considered by hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders. Michael Laws, former National MP, current mayor of Whanganui and all-round muppet, wrote an article in last weeks Sunday Star-Times that not only fits that previous description, but may have set a new low for gutter 'columnism' in any newspaper, ever.

The article was entitled 'The Liberal Shame' and if you want to read it, follow this link. But I'd strongly discourage you from reading it, because in reading it you would be giving his views a modicum of legitimacy that they not deserve. Laws's rants about the general inferiority of 'the brown underclass', declares that there were certain types of people who shouldn't breed (and if we cut through Laws's subtext, these people are generally brown and poor) and states, with all the hubris of a man who has spent three years in parliament AND got to be on Celebrity Treasure Island TWICE, that the 'liberal' approach to crime and raising families and building a society has failed. That he holds this opinion and deems fit to air it in the marketplace of ideas is bad enough, but in making his remarks through the prism of Nia Glassie's torture and murder, Laws shows a remarkably twisted propensity for cynical opportunism.

But I realise in making this criticism, particulary with the degree of vehemence, I will be amongst a very small minority of New Zealanders. The sad tale of 3-year old Nia Glassie, beaten, tortured, swung from the clothesline, put in the dryer has haunted and revulsed New Zealanders in a way that I have seen very few high-profile murder cases do. Many New Zealanders feel hatred and contempt for Nia's killers, and Laws in this respect was providing a summary of these views, albeit in a way that is spiteful, racist and socially poisonous.

I share this contempt for Nia's killers, I do not know how I could not. But I fail to see, as many of my fellow countrymen see, and as Michael Laws saw fit to publish, that the Nia Glassie case is proof that our society (or at least the poor, brown bits of it) has become more violent, and this 'extra violence' is the result of namby-pamby 'liberal' (say the word liberal with an extra helping of contempt for good measure) policy-makers, who have 'mollycoddled' violent youths and Maori society to the point where they share Nia's blood on their hands. Firstly, I maintain, but with an increasingly less secure conviction, that the recent spate of child abuse cases in the media are not inexorable proof of a society that is getting more violent. Of course there are more cases of such abuse appearing in the media in 2008 than in 1968, that's the inevitable result of a total increase in population. But a sudden spate of child abuse cases does not suggest to me that the underclass woke up one morning and decided to get more violent. It suggests that there have been a series of hideous coincidences throughout 2008. Or to be more cynical, it shows that media outlets -realising that stories about child abuse sell more papers - are getting more efficient at rooting these stories out.

But even if I am wrong with my previous point, and I'm not even certain myself as to whether I am correct, I'd argue that if society has 'broken down' in New Zealand's poorest, urban areas this definitely should not be seen as a failure of a system of 'liberal' policies. What seems more likely is that society is getting more violent not because the policies have been too liberal, because they have not been liberal enough. When you have a society that says that it is ok that people who are poor and the children of people who are poor can be denied opportunity because if they are poor, it is possibly a proxy for them being inferior (or worse, lazy) then of course you have widely disproportionate inequalities. And when you have a poorly educated 'underclass', with limited resources and no safety net provided by government to give them a competive go in life, and when you slash funding to groups that dispense advice and monitor first time parents then it follows that people who grew up in a culture of violence as a way of discipline will subject their children to the same abuse they suffered. When lobby groups call for the unfettered ability of parents to raise their children in whatever way they see fit, then it follows that more parents will see that what is unconcsionable abuse in our eyes as just showing loving and necessary discipline to their own children.

If a tendency towards 'more child abuse' in New Zealand society exists, and is not just the result of a few horrific coincidences then the people that have blood on their hands are not those who believe in 'education' and 'being politically correct'. The people who have blood on their hands are people like Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley, who slashed social welfare in New Zealand in the early 1990's, or people like Laws himself, who fail to see that screaming 'STERILISE THE POOR, AND DEATH PENALTY TO CHILD KILLERS' misses all sorts of points, most notably that you cannot solve a problem unless you are prepared to adress the underlying causes, rather than just create a media panic when the symptons of wider social failure appear in the cold, hard form of Nia Glassie's dead body.

It would be laughable, if it were not so reprehensible, that Laws attempts to play anthropologist, limiting the problem to that of a brown underclass, and littering his turgid dross of a column with overtones of racism - declaring that we have to stop getting all culturally sensitive and letting Maori think they can solve their own problems. It is true that almost all of the defendants in these cases have surnames like Kahui and Pailegutu, not Smith or Jones. And is true that in some Pacific Island cultures and maybe even in the Maori culture, a greater level of physical discipline is considered more culturally acceptable, which flies in the face of the rights of all children to be protected from harm. But what is not true is the brown parents are worse than white parents. It speaks volumes for the Anglosupremacist attitudes that pervades Laws peice that he begins by describing the underclass as a brown underclass and ends by describing it as feckless and stupid. It seems for Laws, and more sadly for numerous other New Zealand that 'brown' and 'stupid' and 'brown' and 'violent' are interchangeable adjectives. 'Poor' and 'uneducated' is perhaps more fitting, as this is a problem that needs to be solved with changing cultural norms in Pacific Island communities that child violence is not ok, and being willing to pump public resources into ensuring that at-risk families recieve government help.

Laws thinks the answer is forced sterilisation and the death penalty. For a man who spent much of 2008 declaring that the law that says you cannot smack your children for the purposes of correction, or that to save water resources showers were limited to 15 minutes was an overly invasive intrusion into private life by a nanny state , this is a quite remarkable turnaround. But it is a turnaround conducted with a nod to the inherent superiority of white people, and with a nod to the white and wealthy constitutents that elected him mayor of Whanganui. And it is a turnaround that while attempting to adress a very real and very worrying problem in New Zealand, arrives at almost the complete opposite to what is needed. He talks of the liberal shame, but he advocates a cynical, muddle-headed, disgraceful and illiberal sham. Shame on him.

Alex

The Prostitute and the Porno Star

“I am disappointed that my parents didn't give birth to a porn star” (Rufus Wainwright )

What’s the difference between a hooker and an adult entertainment actor? No, this isn’t the setup of a bad joke but a genuine question. Some might think this question is moot in a country where both are legal or both illegal, but I think there’s more to it than that (e.g. a moral difference). Let’s see if we can figure it out.

So, what do we mean when we talk about prostitution? Well, to keep things simple, let’s say prostitution consists of: a sexual act, participated in by at least 2 individuals, where at least 1 participant is financially compensated for his participation. And what about pornography? Well, that’s always been real tricky to define. US Justice Potter Stewart more or less gave up on trying to define it and just went with the now infamous “I know it when I see it” line. But let’s shoot for a little more. Let’s run with the following: pornography is a recorded sexual act, participated in by at least 2 individuals, where at least 1 participant is financially compensated for his participation; and where the recorded product is distributed to others. Note the similarity between these definitions, in addition to the crucial difference: that the services of the prostitute do not create a tangible product while the services of the porn star do. (Also note that this is a narrow conception of porn. It leaves out, for instance, the kind of porn depicted in such things as Playboy. But this is okay given the intent of what we’re talking about here.)

This definition of porn excludes the prostitute who fulfills his client’s fantasy of being filmed. This is excluded because, even though the act is recorded in this case, it doesn't count as pornography so long as the product never distributed. But were the client or the prostitute, whoever retains possession of the recording, to distribute it for consumption by others, then they are in fact participants in pornography. It’s also important to bear in mind that someone doesn’t need to consent to be a participant in pornography – a sex act can be recorded and distributed without the knowledge or consent of the participants; or someone can consent to having his participation in a sex act recorded but not consent to the distribution of that recording (a la Paris Hilton). Either way, porn is what they did. But, either way, let's set these cases aside. (Lastly, I also want to exclude those secret lil sex tape people make and genuinely keep private. I’m unsure what to call such things; but it doesn’t seem accurate to put them under the rubric of pornography… it seems as if they should count as something else…)

Anyway, so what IS the difference between the porn star and the prostitute? Well, when you boil it down, it might seem that the only things pornography has that prostitution lacks is: (1) the presence of active recording instruments; and (2) the distribution of the product of that recording equipment. If that’s the only difference between porn and prostitution, it’s not a difference that amounts to much. It’s certainly not enough to make a moral distinction between the two. And maybe this is why a lot of folks treat them both as having the same moral standing. But here’s a reason to think that we ought to regard them differently:

Prostitutes remain the proprietor of their commodity; porn stars do not. We can describe the actions of the prostitute as offering a service that doesn’t result in a tangible product; the same cannot be said of the porn star. We can describe the actions of the porn star as a service, but one that’s instrumental in the creation of a tangible product (something that’s distributed to others for consumption). That product, once distributed, is then out in the world and beyond the control of the porn star. Porn can’t be undone. The Internet exacerbates this since, once something is out there, it’s virtually impossible to regain control of it (say, to destroy it) and it probably won’t ever go away. So we can say that porn stars necessarily lose control of that which they produce through their work. The same can’t be said about prostitutes. Sure, a pimp might be “in control” of a streetwalker; or a hooker might lose control of a situation with his client. But such occurrences don’t always happen. Autonomous persons can consent to being a prostitute and always be in control. Such a prostitute, we can say, is always in control of his commodity; it isn’t necessary that the prostitute loses control of his service, but it is a necessary part of being a porn start that he loses control of the tangible end product that his services contribute to.

So the porn star seems worse off. The prostitute can walk away and it’s prima facie less likely that her time as a prostitute will “come back to haunt her”. 15 years down the road the kid of a porn star could stumble upon her mom’s video series online. A similar occurrence seems far less likely for the prostitute (the kid meeting a former client of her mom seems more like a plotline from some Latin Soap Opera). So is this enough to ground a moral distinction?

If anything, it seems as if this “worse off” status of porn stars gives more force to the notion that porn stars suffer “participant harms” (i.e. harms that are brought on by their participation in porno). So here one could say that the lose of control over the end product to which the porn star contributes is harmful to him, despite the fact that he consented to participating in porn and agreed to give up any control over the end product. This might seem like a stretch. But consider this: there are other things we can't do (morally or legally) irregardless of whether or not those involved consented. Assisted suicide is an excellent example. Euthanasia, like pornography, consent isn't the issue. So some of our hangups about assisted suicide might carry over and give us reason to consider pornography morally impermissible. If this holds up, in the end, it appears that we might have grounds for believing that prostitution is less morally problematic than pornography -- the business of Larry Flint is as morally dubious as that of Dr. Kevorkian. I could say more, but I think that’s enough for now. This is just my spur-of-the-moment thoughts on the subject. I could be wrong. After all, what do I know.

As demanded - a word on Kittens.

Recently, Paul D ran a survey. This survey asked what would the ever-tolerant, long-suffering reader(s) of A Word on Failure like to see me blog about next. With an enthusiastic response of 12 participants, an overwhelming majority suggested that they would like to see me blog about Kittens. So despite the fact that the Congo has decided to collapse on itself, Barack Obama is thinking of making Hillary Clinton the person-in-charge-of-making-the-rest-of-the-world-like-America and New Zealand's rugby league team are world champions today's post shall be about my own personal opinions on the offspring of cats.

It's a good thing I like Kittens. They are cute, they play with wool (or yarn), they are soft to touch and nice to pet. Recently a kitten was born in Western Australia that had TWO heads, and I didn't think 'AARGH mutant' - I thought 'Awwww, it can miaow out of both its mouths'. (See for yourselves).

On the other hand I also like meat (I realise this is an unconvincing segue, but bear with me). Ham sandwiches, bacon, kebabs - it's all good really. I realise that on the whole, humans eating meat is bad for the planet (it takes a whole lot more land to grow cows than grain, which means that land is being used inefficiently PLUS having cows burping, farting and polluting is worse for the environment than a whole lot of grain grown in a field. Grain doesn't burp, or fart or cause global warming. It just exists.) And, in a victory for the forces of obviousness, eating meat is also bad for the animals. I don't want to know the number of cows that get thrown out every day at a single Burger King because they make far more burgers than they need. We will kill and eat the mothers of a litter/nest/whetever of baby animals just to gain some short term fufillment and fleeting sense of yum. But despite knowing that eating meat is bad, its also tasty. So while I will freely conceed that I am a worse person than someone committed to a vegetarian diet as of yet I have been unable to ween myself off the idea of spearing chunks of hot,dead animals into my mouth.

Where am I going with this? Well, although I love the taste of meat, there are limited number of animals I would eat. I would eat a sheep. I would eat a cow. I would eat a pig. (But I would not eat green eggs and ham, I do not like it Sam-I-am). But I would not eat a horse. Horses are for riding, not for snacking. And nor would I eat a kitten. Kittens are cute, and are for petting, not for baking into a pie.

But even if I wanted to eat a kitten, I'm not sure if I could in New Zealand. My friends would shun me, and would no longer come around to my house for dinner parties. A local newspaper may even take a picture of me, and tell people that I am unstable. After all, eating a kitten is just objectively wrong, isn't it?

And yet, I think my most vivid encounter with feelings of cultural superiority as a child was being told by my Year 3 teacher (I think it is the equivalent of 2nd Grade) that 'they eat dogs and cats in Asia, you know'. I was horrified and appalled. Eating pets seemed disgusting, unclean and savage. And when I was also told that 'Muslim people don't eat pork', I couldn't work this out either. Everyone ate pork. Pork was yummy, especially with apple. And pigs were things that were just begging to be eaten, from one gross little thing that basically existed to consume the family compost, we were able to extract delicious ham and pork and bacon.

The animals that different societies have chosen to eat seem to have developed along culturally specific lines. One man's household companion is another man's shishkebab. There doesn't seem to be any way to determine which animals should be eaten, and which should not - our own Western society eats animals big and small, feathered and furred, wild and domesticated. Even if we extend this idea away from the eating of animals to the usage of animals in general - a popular Chinese aphrodiasiac is ground-up rhino horn, a practice that again is wholly alien to how Westerners concieve of the rhino, as a beautiful, wild beast to be protected. So with no innate objective rationale to determine what animals are ok to eat, and what animals are not, the best (and still unsatisfactory) conclusion we can reach is that 'all animals are equal - but, in a culturally subjective sense, some are more equal than others'. (apologies to George Orwell)

So I guess my post on kittens isn't really about kittens at all. If we distil it, this post is about whales. My country, New Zealand, is one of the world leaders in the fight against the hunting of whales for food. And on the surface, this seems a decent fight to have. Whales are awesome, they sing, they splash and are the focus for some of the coolest myths and legends of many cultures. But just because my culture finds whales kinda awesome shouldn't be a reason to impose our culture's values upon the Nordic and Japanese cultures. Provided that whales are being hunted in a way that is sustainable and will not lead to the extermination of the species New Zealand's argument basically amounts to a kid petulantly stamping it's foot and screaming 'BUT I DON'T WANT YOU TO DO THAT' without any sufficiently well-grounded moral or economic philosophy to support an arbitrary distinction between why eating beef is good, and eating Pods (see what I did there) is wrong.

If someone can give me a reason why the animal rights claims of whales are superior to the animal rights claims of a sheep, I'd love to hear it - because like I said, whales are awesome. But until then does anyone know a cafe where there do a real good blubber and eggs?

Alex

Bitchdom

“Well, I'd love to stay and chat, but you're a total bitch.” (Stewie, 'Family Guy')

In my last post I used the following example: a girlfriend who tells her significant other that she loves him, but goes around kissing other people. I said such a person is a bitch. I thought this was a good example for the point I was trying to make because, I thought, it was an obvious and uncontroversial truth (her status as bitch). But I was, apparently, wrong. In one of the comments I received on that post someone suggested that she might not be a bitch. I thought this was an unusual claim, so I thought it might be worthwhile to talk about what it means to be a bitch. This discussion, like my previous post about “bullshit”, kind of serves as means for presenting the problems generated by how non-traditional terms get into our everyday vocabulary and affect how we’re able to communicate. And even though the online urban dictionary is helpful when you get called a manicorn at the bar, ambiguity in what we mean when we say something is often the root of social problems.

First of all, I should point out that I conceptualized this girl (and her boyfriend) in a specific way: your typical pair of people in a monogamous relationship. They aren't swingers or anything. They (or at least the boyfriend) has a reasonable expectation of faithfulness. Having said that, like many of our words, bitch has many meanings. For instance 'bitch' does means "a female dog". But, clearly, that's not what I mean when I talk about the girlfriend who makes out with people other than her boyfriend. You might also use the term affectionately: "yea, she's my bitch." But, again, that's not what I mean here. I don't want to confuse you, so I want to be clear that I'm talking abut a specific sense of the word bitch. I think the way I used bitch in describing the girlfriend is the typical or primary usage of the term. I'll say a bit more about alternate usages later, but I want to first explain how I understand its primary meaning.

A bitch describes a girl whose behavior is harsh or mean to at least one other person, or a girl who has (on at least one occasion) a disposition that reflects a harsh or mean attitude towards someone; a girl has to be bitchy towards someone in order to be a bitch. She can also be a bitch generally, but that's just being a bitch to all most everyone. So being a bitch (in at least this sense) is a bad thing. The target of her bitchiness doesn't always need to be aware that (s)he is being treated poorly. Nor does the bitch, or anyone else, need to be aware of the fact that she’s acting like a bitch. So being a bitch isn't really a subjective thing; can be a bitch without anyone ever recognizing that fact about her. So why is the girlfriend in the example a bitch (in at least this sense)? Well, it seems to me that she's a bitch because she’s being deceitful and acting in such a way that would likely hurt her significant other (and, typically, we shouldn’t do things that would be harmful to those we say we love). Whether or not her boyfriend finds out that she goes around making out with other people is irrelevant, she's still a bitch in virtue of her disregard for the wellbeing of her boyfriend. She, it seems to me, is someone who has a neglectful disregard for the wellbeing of her significant other – such a disposition, I would say, counts as one that harsh or mean. Hence, she’s a bitch.

What about when you call a guy a bitch? That seems to necessarily imply something different; or at the least something more. Here’s what I mean: when you call a guy a bitch, even if you say it to express the same thing as when you'd say it to a girl, you seem to being saying something else as well. Here bitch seems to carry the implicit implication that he doesn't measure up as a man. Similar sorts of gender specific terms do the same sort of thing. For example (and I’ll admit that this might not be a good example) were you to call a girl a dickhead you’re implicitly suggesting that she doesn't measure up as a woman. The male version of bitch might be "asshole", although that may be a gender neutral term. I find it interesting that there are gender specific terms; but I’m not sure what that says about our language, society, or inter-gender relations. But maybe I’m on my own thinking there something interesting about our colloquial usage of slang and derogatory terminology. At the very least the ambiguity that comes with new words detracts from our ability to communicate effectively. I could say more, but I think that’s enough for now. This is just my spur-of-the-moment thoughts on the subject. I could be wrong. After all, what do I know.

Left out.

Well, I'm back. Being a law student in exam mode meant I had no scheduled time to clutter up the internets with my peculiar brand of bitter invective, substandard grammar and prediliction for terrible puns. I've missed writing, because since my self-imposed exile some quite seismic events have happened - Barack Obama's kids are getting a puppy, New Zealander's are getting a conservative government AND Wendy's have this really sweet new burger with THREE types of meat. While I realise that the people have spoken in Paul's ill-advised poll, and with a phenomenal turn-out of 12, have spoken overwhelmingly in favour of me blogging about kittens. I will, therefore blog about kittens..but not just yet. Today, I want to blog about something every more meek, helpless and in more desperate need of some warm milk and a cuddle than a Kitten.

In the whole excitement of Obama v McCain v Ms. WasillaWackjob, I sorta forgot that my own country, New Zealand, had an election too. In my defence, it was quite a forgettable campaign - while the Republicans were accusing Barack Obama of hanging out with terrorists and letting an unlicensed plumber improvise their policy on Israel, here in Noo Zillund, the most exciting thing about our campaign was ACT leader Rodney Hide's yellow jacket.

But it was still quite a shock to wake up on November the 9th and remember that Helen Clark is no longer the Prime Minister (or even the leader of the opposition), that Winston Peters had been banished to whatever swamp him and his racist party crawled out of...and that after 9 years of being under a broadly left-leaning Labour government, New Zealanders had opted overwhelmingly for the conservative styles of John Key's National Party (supported by a one man 'United' Future party, and a further right ACT party - which included a 70-year old Roger Douglas and a crazy man who spent $250 000 of his own money fighting restrictions on campaign spending). To judge by the comments left by pro-National supporters on the stuff.co.nz website, the next few years will be defined by a railing against 'dole-bludgers, single mothers, hippies, and peoples who ain't Kiwi'. Urgh. Oh yeah, and they want to privatize prisons.

The left were administered a good-old fashioned spanking on Saturday night. In no way this was a surprise, polls were predicting a major defeat for the Labour party for well over a year now. But whats more troubling than the election of a National-led government, and the ascendancy of conservatism in New Zealand has been the response of Labour supporters to their defeat. Taking heed from an article in the Melbourne Herald sun that damned New Zealand's election choice as been as 'reasoned as a dead slug', the default position of many Labour supporters has been to decry an election won because the voters were bored, wanted a 'change' without caring what form that change took, and simply were too ignorant to realise what they hell they were getting themselves into. To hear some disgruntled Labourites speak is to imagine that the public were determined to vote National and John Key could have been on TV the day before the election eating a baby and it would not have made any difference. Not only is this viewpoint offensive to half the country and who did not vote for Labour, but it is symptomatic of a wider failure on behalf of the New Zealand left to make a convincing case to the NZ public, and reflects an intellectual arrogance in the inherent superiority of leftwingism, to the extent that it alienates and undermines the average voter.

And it's especially troubling because New Zealander's didn't go to the polls last Saturday and issue a vote of protest against a goverment they felt agreed with their conception of beliefs and values but weren't governing well enough. I would argue that a majority of New Zealander's went into the polling booth and ticked National, because they believed the conservatism espoused by the National party was a better fit for the way they would like their country to be.

The majority of New Zealanders believe that the principle of 'equality of opportunity' is a principle that means anyone can achieve anything they want to, if they work hard enough. John Key, the man who went from a state House, to Merrill Lynch and now to the top floor of the Beehive is the living embodiment of this. People like myself, and others who put far far more effort into making the case for 'liberal progressive' values than I do, argue that the tag of equality of opportunity must be complemented by the idea that the lottery of birth forms a major barrier to acheiving opportunity - that the son of a doctor has more chance of being a doctor (or a lawyer) than the son of the hospital janitor. John Key's ability to rise out of poverty should be lauded, but not used as a positive argument in the case against welfare and government support, and the more compelling argument does not focus on the fact John Key succeeded but on the fact that there were thousands of others who were not John Key, and unable to overcome the barriers, of lack of finances, of lack of job opportunity networks, of geographical proximity to role models, that were placed in their way through no fault of their own.

They are other major issues, swirling around in the election campaign, that put me, and other liberals, at odds with the zeitgest of the nation. The battle over the survival of the Maori seats was not couched in attempts to provide the right of self-determination to our indigenous people, but in the poisonous rhetoric of 'special rights' for one group over another. Crime remains seen as the outcome of moral badness, not the inevitable result of gross and increasing social and economic inequalities, and something that needs to be adressed at the underlying economic causes. Smacking your children is seen as an inherent right of parenthood, and attempts to make the smacking of children illegal was seen as an attempt to make criminals out of good parents, and not an attempt to drag the ability to define the difference between a 'corrective smack' and 'abuse' away from the arcane, precedential and slow-to-react judiciary to a police force with a better ability to gauge what is acceptable in the present day. The banning of lightbulbs that provide an inefficient environmental clusterfuck, was not seen as a valid way to combat climate change, but another example of government as an overbearing nanny that did not trust in the rationality of its subjects.

That's why when I hear a Labour or Green or a supporter of anyone left decrying their fellow National-voting New Zealanders as idiots, I cringe. Because calling people idiots is not a good way to win their support. More broadly it shows that the left has fallen into a belief in the inherent superiority of their ideas to the extent that the onus should not fall on them to justify their position - after all, social welfare is JUST GOOD. Social Welfare may be a good thing, as may the banning of smacking, the retention of the Maori seats etc. But anytime a government policy requires the removal of a right or a freedom from people, or even alters the status quo, the onus must be on those who believe in the change to prove to others why that change is a good thing.

Labour failed to do that in 2008. But that doesn't mean that Labour needs to lurch to the right, and try and capture National's supporters (in the way that National lurched to the left, adopting a whole lot of Labour's policies that seemed politically sexy). But it means that the New Zealand left shouldn't flee to the idealogical trenches, abandon large swathes of the New Zealand electorate as retards, and play poker amongst themselves while dreaming of moving to Amsterdam. National was elected overwhelmingly because its overarching ideals were more appealing. We've got to spend the next three years finding out why that electorate rejected the ideals of progressive liberalism, and how we can make the case more convincing. The next three years in opposition, offers Labour a chance for renewal to look at some stuff that Norman Kirk wrote and return to their core beliefs. And it offers media outlets a chance to make puns like 'Key's rusty', or 'Dunne Deal'.

Hey, and Winston won't be spewing bile about Asians. It's not all bad.

A Puzzle For Your Thoughts

"To almost everyone, it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly." (Robert Nozick)

Consider the following situation:

You walk into a room and are presented with 2 boxes; one made of glass and the other of cardboard. While you can’t tell what’s inside the cardboard box, you can clearly see $100 in the glass box. You’re told by the room’s attendant that you’ve got a choice to make. You can either: take what’s in the cardboard box only, or take what’s in both boxes. But, before making your choice, the attendant also says that “the predictor” has already predicted your decision. He tells you that the predictor has a virtually perfect track record – for however long “the predictor” and the attendant have been running this game, and it’s been going on for a while, the prediction has almost always been right. The attendant also tells you that IF “the predictor” predicted that you would pick just the cardboard box, he put $1,000,000 in it. But, IF “the predictor” predicted that you’d pick both boxes, he’d put a turnip in the cardboard box. So what do ya do? Just go with the cardboard box (call that choice ‘one-boxing’)? Or grab both boxes (call that ‘two-boxing’)?

Here’s why you might think you should one-boxing: “the predictor” has a nearly perfect track record for predicting what people in this situation will do. So, if you just go with the cardboard box, it’s pretty likely that he’d have predicted that and placed $1,000,000 in it. So if you were to one-box you’d likely end up with $1,000,000. Whereas if you were to two-box, he, surely, would have predicted that and placed a turnip in the cardboard box instead. So if you two-box you’re likely to end up with $100 plus a turnip (yuck). Since you prefer $1,000,000 over $100-and-a-turnip, you should one-box.

But, on the other hand, here’s why you might two-box: Look, “the predictor” made his prediction before you’ll make your decision (in fact he made his prediction before you even entered the room). So, regardless of what he thinks you’ll do, it’s already a fact that there’s either $1,000,000 in the cardboard box or a turnip. Nothing you do at this point will change that. So you should just two-box because your choices boil down to this: the turnip in the cardboard (if he predicted you’d two-box) plus $100 (from the glass box) or $1,000,000 (if he predicted you’d one-box) plus $100. In other words, your possible outcomes are: $100-and-a-turnip or $1,000,100. Either way, you’re $100 better off if you two-box. Therefore, you should two-box.

So what would YOU do? Are you a one-boxer? Or a two-boxer? Post your answer (and rationale, if you want) in a comment!

This scenario is known as Newcomb’s Problem; some have argued that it’s essentially the same thing as the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, while others maintain that they’re totally different. Regardless, thought, this is a classic paradox. By that I mean it’s a philosophical paradox. A philosophical paradox is a little different than what we mean when we talk about paradoxes colloquially. After all, it might seem “paradoxical” when your girlfriend says she loves you but goes around making out with other people. But that’s not genuinely paradoxical (really, she’s just a bitch). Something is philosophically paradoxical if there are two persuasive arguments that have contradictory conclusions (like above), or an argument which contradicts and baffles our intuitions (like the Traveler’s Dilemma). When thinking about paradoxes, you end up running circles around in your reasoning process. I think they’re interesting, fun, and often shake the foundations of our beliefs. But maybe I’m on my own thinking there something worth talking about here. I could say more, but I think that’s enough for now. This is just my spur-of-the-moment thoughts on the subject. I could be wrong. After all, what do I know.