Who are the real victims?

It's grimly fascinating to see people who would protest loudly if anyone dared victim-blame an assaulted woman for dressing the wrong way, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, effectively doing the same to the mainly older women who organised and attended the Auckland "Let Women Speak" rally. 

It’s almost as riveting as someone feverishly likening those chaotic scenes to the ANZACs "keeping Nazism from our shores”. Or equating the righteousness of those advancing the ideology of gender identity to that of the anti-apartheid movement in New Zealand in the 1980s when protesters faced down both police and angry rugby fans in brutal battles which divided the country. (1) 

The politicking of some of the loose groupings that make up the broad left in the Neo-liberal era, owes too much to virtual and real life cosplaying and on-line attitudinising. When such people declare that "Nazis must be opposed", which of course they must, what seems to escape some of them is that the sentiment is widely accepted, even among most of the moderate right. 

It's so self evident and uncontroversial that most people are surprised when it is voiced so fervently and indiscriminately. Many people are even more surprised when they're told that a group of women from a wide range of socio-economic, personal, and political backgrounds who want to talk publicly about sex-based rights, are Nazis. 

Some people's surprise tips into incredulity when they're told that the empirical proof of all these women being Nazis rests on their "leader" having been photographed with, and having accepted various forms of comparatively small scale tactical or financial support from people on the secular or religious far right. 

Most recently, the image of twenty black clad crypto-fascists in Melbourne giving Nazi salutes at the Let Women Speak rally, has been cited as further proof that the organisers and attendees at the LWS rally are Nazis.

Like a swarm of wasps, the Melbourne crypto-fascists were attracted to the LWS rally possibly because the opponents of Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker, had declared her to be a Nazi. Equally likely, given the crypto-fascists seem to hate her almost as much as the "paedo freaks" they claim to be opposing, is the possibility that the wasps were coat-tailing the rally to stage a recruitment photo opp, and the media and Victoria police duly obliged them.

We now all know that Posie Parker expresses very strong opinions in opposition to transgenderism, a political ideology that currently preoccupies the left of neo-liberalism almost to the exclusion (and to the detriment) of all the other massive issues confronting us here in New Zealand, and globally.

What people may not know or choose to ignore is that the moment she formed a group to oppose what she sees as a threat to women's sex-based rights, the label of TERF was slapped on her. 

People may also not know or choose to ignore the fact that TERF was already equated with Nazi, and the angry toddler corollary had already been written that as it’s okay, even a moral obligation, to punch Nazis, it’s okay to punch TERFs like her and her supporters, even if they're older women or left wingers or lesbians.

After Melbourne, some people amused themselves by putting up Twitter polls asking, "is it OK to punch a Nazi?" 

People who've probably never physically encountered a real Nazi, let alone punched one or faced down large numbers of them, all cried, "Yes". 

Punching is all well and good when it's actual Nazis, but the optics change when the chief "Nazi" is a diminutive, middle aged mum of four, and her supporters are mainly middle aged and older women, and include lesbians and Māori and Pasifika women. 

Even if she is a calculated far right winger (as opposed to an angry woman who had made some  unwise political and tactical decisions) does that mean everyone drawn to her as a figurehead, is a literal Nazi? 

How many credibility gaps does that sort of claim result in – gaps in which the real Nazis can hide?

Like the term feminazi, coined in the 1990s, the labelling of TERFs as Nazis serves to demonise the wide range of arguments and claims which counter those of transgenderism's primary platform of gender self-identification.

What trans advocates and allies fail to acknowledge is that this indiscriminate labelling has the side effect of diluting both the historical and the contemporary reality of Nazi ideology and its outcomes. 

There is a huge risk in the rise of the far right globally, and here in NZ; we have seen the tragic outcomes of that in Christchurch, but is this sort of indiscriminate labelling of women as Nazis really the best way to counter that rise?

Labels not only serve to corral and to brand a person or a group, they often obscure hugely complex realities, reducing them to the political and intellectual equivalent of sound-bites. 

In the politics of appearance, this reduction of complex issues to slogans and mantras is almost always accompanied by hyperbolic rhetoric, and catastrophising. 

Trans rights activists and allies claim that Posie Parker is a Nazi who wants literally to exterminate all trans people who are the most marginalised, disadvantaged, vulnerable, at risk minority of all.  

In reaction, the Parkerites now shout back about the "mass mutilation of children", the imminent erasure of all women's sex-based rights, and the risks to women and children of persons with a penis being allowed into women-only spaces.

The clamour of the arguments and the inflamed rhetoric now being generated from behind dense barriers of moral certitude, means there is insufficient space or quiet in the middle ground for the sort of nuanced debates this issue needs. Nor can it be put into the context of the mass of other pressing issues facing us. 

A basic political principle for me is, in order to see the bottom line of who benefits from a given action or issue, we always have to look up. That is never more essential than in this issue. 

The truth is that far from all trans people being a hugely marginalised and disadvantaged group, some, maybe even a lot of trans people are well buffered by advantages accruing from their birth sex, ethnicity, socio-economic status etc. Here in NZ, trans people have full legal equality and considerable social acceptance. There are very few acts of reported violence against trans people for being trans, and so safe is NZ, trans people apply for asylum here. 

Furthermore, trans rights and the positioning of them on the zenith of the political-moral high ground, are supported by the entirety of the corporate world and most of mainstream media, and by all the main political parties. Pretty much all the country’s governmental and non governmental organisations and institutions are fully supportive, and transgender activists have made incredible headway since the 1990s, in quietly creating a pro-trans legal and social environment. (2) 

In this context, and the absence of a body of empirical proof, the argument that the anti LWS protest was in support of the most marginalised, at risk of violence, hated, discriminated against minority of all time illustrates the sad fact that hyperbolic rhetoric, sloganeering, and catastrophising now dominate the discourse around this and related issues.I do not deny the fact that trans people could easily become the first target of a far right and social conservative backlash. 

The trick for trans allies is supporting in ways that don't provide fuel for such a backlash. A start point would be to stop behaving like sanctimonious jerks.

* * * *

This was the backcloth to a large number of people, high on a heady mix of adrenaline and moral certitude, heading out protest the Let Women Speak rally – to figuratively "punch some Nazis". 

Among the crowds were some who were prepared to take that literally, and one man, hyped up on that heady mix of moral certitude, adrenaline and testosterone, punched a 72-year-old woman in the face three times because she was wearing a tee shirt that identified her as an attendee at the rally.

She’s the same age as me. Those punches could have killed her or caused brain damage, or cervical spinal injury – and that is not hyperbolic or catastrophising, it is medical, anatomical fact.

That cowardly attack and other footage of women being driven out of a public space in a violent manner, by people claiming to be defending trans people from violence, is now firmly embedded in far right agit prop, i.e. it's given ammunition to the actual or wanna-be fascists.

Even though it's been sanitised post hoc by the same media outlets which actively raised the political temperature and helped to foment the rage, I suspect considerable damage in the electoral middle ground has also been done.  (3) 

In contrast to the LWS protest, a rally and march down Queen Street, of forces which pose arguably a greater threat to the rainbow community, resulted in just a brief scuffle. There was no  throwing liquids over Bishop Tamaki and his wife; no rushing into the massed ranks of big, tough men to throw punches. 

No, that behaviour was reserved for the soft targets in Albert Park. 

Maybe the protesters’ amygdalas had switched off and the adrenaline rush had subsided by the time they confronted the Destiny Church rally but what are the odds the brave social justice warrior who punched a pensioner in the head wouldn’t have dared to as much as say boo to the Bishop?

What many people outside the social media bubbles of self-reinforcing beliefs, will take away from this, is that "antifa" and the "woke left" pick on soft targets, eg. older women. What will your average, middle of the road Kiwi take from the weirdo who thought it was a good idea to express support for trans people by tweeting that she “gets off on seeing fear in the eyes” of a small, middle aged woman being mobbed by angry, mainly male protesters?

Those who let your political knees jerk so violently that your remaining sense is being knocked out of your heads, and who decry the likes of me as nazi adjacent, may I suggest you climb down off your moral high horse and turn it out to pasture – the poor beast needs a rest.

Talk to women outside your political bubbles, face to face. Look into the eyes of the ordinary concerned women, lesbians and socialist feminists, and if you still want to reject everything we say and call us fascists, then clearly the traditional left in NZ has died of pernicious political anaemia, and with it, all hope of mass resistance to the real enemy.

Footnotes:

1) The conflation of WW1 and 2 and the historical fact that NZ’s shores were more at risk from Japanese RW nationalist militarism than European Nazism is silly but hauling it into a debate about sex-based rights is surreal. A person who argued that the LWS protesters were on the same side of history as the protesters against the Springbok tour who were abused and spat on is seemingly oblivious to the fact that not only were the protesters in Albert Park facing small numbers of older women as opposed to cops and burly rugby fans, it was they who were doing the spitting and abusing.

2) This process of largely unnoticed changes at the level of policy and regulation ended when the right to sex self-identification by statutory declaration was included in an omnibus bill which led to opposition from groups concerned about its wider implications.

3) Marama Davidson's glib comment that white straight men are the main perpetrators of violence was the most spectacular of the left's many own goals.

Schisms to the left of us, advantages to the right ....

What follows is a bit of ramble around the edges of a rather messy ideological battleground. I've covered a lot of the ground in earlier posts but some points are so important, they bear repeating.

The forces that advance and protect global corporate capitalism set about routing its main enemy, the old red left, by destroying its collectives, corrupting its political parties, and denying the existence of universalist, class-based theories. 

They also replenished their armoury of divert and divide tactics.

Neo-liberalism's promotion of hyper-individualism and aspirational culture – we can / must be the best possible versions of our unique selves – was so successful because it was grafted onto older ideologies that posit the existence of an immutable and unique individual soul or spirit housed within a mutable (mortal) body. 

In its most alienated and harmful expressions, the physical body is reduced to a "meat sack" or "flesh suit" inhabited and "piloted" by the "authentic self".

The left of neo-liberalism (the system-adjusters) – already enthralled by identity and emergent queer politics – seized on gender identity as its cause du jour, as did parts of the wider left which, in other respects, are anti-capitalist. 

The odd alliances and enmities that have flowed from all this are a neo-liberal spin doctor's dream, and have become arguably one of the most effective diverters and dividers we've yet seen.

* * * *

The new wave of feminism that was energised by opposition to gender identity ideology and praxis  is now in the throes of a major sectarian schism between a loose coalition of socialist feminists – from social democrats to communists – and a loose coalition of liberal and radical feminists aided by an growing horde of opportunist right-wing blokes, which has just one target in its sights – transwomen or, in the gender critical nomenclature, trans-identifying males.

Sometimes a strategic response to a single issue serves to galvanise and to unite a broader movement, pulling people into political activism on a wider front. However, that might not be progressive activism – and it can sometimes be the antithesis of it. 

In the absence of the strong organisational and theoretical frameworks that are needed to hold progressive movements together, instead of a focus on a single issue serving to pull people into wider progressive activism, it can as easily lead to them being pulled into wider reactionary activism.

The dangers of a narrow focus on a single issue and the sorts of political opportunism that can accompany it, was illustrated when some gender critical women in NZ promoted right-wing libertarian, David Seymour's scaremongering and tub-thumping about the Labour Government’s repeal of the infamous and discredited "Three Strikes" legislation. 

His cynical and opportunist appeal to the law and order brigade was used to inflate the bogey man of a specific threat to women via a claimed mass release of sex offenders. 

The women responsible for promoting this were either right-wingers cynically aiming to use the new wave of women's rights activism as a platform, or they were so focussed on a narrow goal, they failed to see the wider political picture.

There are gender critical feminists who’ve never taken any notice of, for example, the class and ethnic skewing of the female prison population, but who became incensed over the housing of male-bodied trans prisoners in female prisons. 

Their sex-based prisoner rights' activism goes only as far as stopping that one sort of potential harm to female prisoners, and does not address or want to change the socio-economic underpinnings of wider prison policy with its disproportionate adverse effects on the poor and on people of colour, both female and male.

Women who said nothing about the adverse effects of neo-liberal economic policy on health care provision, now rail about the presence of transwomen both as patients and health care workers. Many had and have little to say and are prepared to do less about the impacts of low quality or non-existent health care on all members of impoverished communities, especially women and kids.

The same with sport; people who never said a word about the sexism and the pay and status differentials in the world of commercialised sport, are up in arms about the inclusion of male bodied trans people in female categories.

Arguably the most emotive of these linked issues is paediatric transition. Many of the people who rage about the adverse effects on children of gender ideology and its associated medicalised care paradigm – have little or nothing to say about the thousands of children under the age of five who die every single day, most from easily preventable causes. 

Few voices were or are raised to express horror about that death toll, let alone demand and fight for the structural changes needed to end it, while the relatively small number of kids affected by gender identity medical protocols in the affluent world is held up as the pre-eminent child protection issue of the era.

Paediatric transition is of course hugely important but the medical “advances” that have both enabled and profited from the transgender wave were made in the context of the prior immense growth of medicine for profit. 

The underlying ethos and the influence of medicine for profit serves to corrupt medical ethics, and it has a grossly disproportionate impact on the poor, caused both by the inability to pay for access to medical care and by the diversion of medical services into the provision of various forms of appearance enhancement, for example.

This development in commercialised medicine preceded the rise of gender identity ideology, including gender affirming paediatric medical protocols, and arguably was a necessary precondition for it. 

                                                                       * * * *

I've said before that I see this more as a battle between social conservatism and social transgressivism than a simple left/right division.

Tendencies towards social conservatism, in the sense of an attachment to, and respect for traditional social and moral norms, and social trangressivism, in the sense of disrupting or changing those norms – cut across all social and economic boundaries. There are politically left wing social conservatives and politically right wing social transgressives. Also, people may be socially conservative on some issues and socially transgressive on others. 

Very simplistically, the conservative pole helps maintain a necessary degree of social stability and cohesion – especially with regard to the unwritten social contract; the other is necessary for change and innovation. 

A healthy society keeps a balance because if the two poles are not held in tension, they will start to pull towards extremes. Social conservatism acting as a brake on change can energise a counter-reaction which pulls societal norms towards the social transgressive pole. Push too far in that direction and social conservatism will start to pull back. 

Neo-liberalism, with its profit at any cost monetarist ideology, weakened left wing progressive movements by undermining both their organisational bases, and the theoretical-intellectual frameworks which give the movements political coherence and resilience. It also continued an older tradition of fomenting sectarianism, which is the kiss of death for progressive movements, especially when sects centre around a cult of personality – in the digital era, cults of celebrity.

Neo-liberalism has put cults of celebrity on steroids and "democratised" them via social media such that a huge range of people can become "famous" and some sort of "influencer" – having their ego boosted, promoting or undermining a cause, making money ...or all of the above. 

The single biggest question mark over gender identity politics for me was always the speed with, and extent to which global corporates and corporate-friendly governments, institutions, and NGOs etc embraced it.

The reasons for that are complex – partly market-driven, partly ideological.

Gender identity with its precursor, the denial of sex dimorphism, once it was pulled to the extremes of “I feel I am, therefore I literally am” was always going to galvanise opposition among social conservatives. Not all of these people are political conservatives but when confronted with an issue that goes beyond their personal or political pale, they may be pulled into alliances with the political right, and even the far-right.

The fact that so many on the white left stood alongside the corporate establishment as it embraced gender identity, and then went far beyond it by attacking anyone, women especially, who refused to toe the gender identity line, is a measure of how thoroughly gutted the left in the west is. 

These attacks on anti-gender identity feminists preceded the rise of sections of the gender critical movement which are prepared to ally with the far right on this one issue, and arguably helped propel a lot of those women into the right's waiting arms.

One could be forgiven for thinking that amongst the ranks of the white left were some people who deliberately fomented that division, tapping into a vein of unreconstructed sexism and latent or internalised misogyny amongst enough on the broad left to create an activist groundswell. 

A motley mix of flip floppers, political cowards, and opportunists followed the activists onto what was declared to be the zenith of the moral and political high ground. Some of them are now straggling down under the cover of darkness leaving the hard core defenders, still convinced they’re firmly on the right side of history. 

Meanwhile the forces that would actually "annihilate" women or queer people (as opposed to the angry rhetoric of a woman who shoots from the lip) are gathering force and momentum.

The big question is, at what point will the corporate world decide that gender identity has ceased to be a political and economic opportunity, and become a threat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Strategic Blunder?

The image above is a screenshot from a video of a trans rights protester and security men at the Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne. The mike had been grabbed from a woman speaker, and two men wrestled with the protester to retrieve it. 

The way the two men are behaving, and especially the hand around the protester's throat, and how they frame part of the sign behind them, caught my eye. it also caught the eye of influential trans activist, Katie Montgomery. Let Women Speak organiser, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker, claims that the protester was trans, but a masked woman calling herself Joanne, and claiming to be the protester, appeared on Montgomery's You Tube channel.  

Given her face is clearly visible on two of the videos I've seen of the incident, quite why Joanne needed to wear a mask while being interviewed by Montgomery, is anyone's guess. 

Joanne also said, along with some standard issue Antifa agitprop, that no complaint would be laid with the police as they are "all bastards".

It's a bit immaterial in any event given the image has already provided grist for the trans rights mill, and it's completely inappropriate for a bloke to grab anyone by the throat in that way.

The security overreach aside, I don't much like the image of big men acting as "protectors" of little women, nor the name of the event which to me sounds a bit too much like a request than a demand. 

More importantly, there is the question of how the person who has made herself the iconic centre of the movement, ought to have reacted to actual Nazis gatecrashing her event. If she was sensible, and if she wants to win the middle ground on this issue – and that is where it will be decided – Keen-Minshull should have immediately issued a press statement condemning that sort of far right, ultra-nationalist, white supremacist movement without reservation, and distancing her organisation, and gender critical feminism more widely, from it. 

She, or the Aussie organisers, should also have immediately asked formal questions of the Victoria police as to why Nazis were allowed to parade in that way at that point, and why they ushered the twenty Black Shorts out through the cordon they'd established between the LWS rally and the trans rights protesters.

It seems that Keen-Minshull decided not to comment until pressured during an interview which made it all too little, too late. Had she never been prepared to share platforms with far right organisations and individuals, her claim that people should realise Let Women Speak is nothing to do with the far right might hold more water than it does.  

Her supporters, instead of urging her to distance herself, are arguing she should not have to issue a statement because the trans activists won't believe her, and they will demand more and more retractions and qualifying statements until she is forced to resile from gender critical claims and demands completely. But, without such a statement, and in light of her prior connections, the trans activists were always going to dominate the media discourse, and her refusal to speak out was always going to be widely interpreted as further proof that she is either on the far right or is indebted to far right organisations in some way. Every far right, religious extremist organisation or individual coat-tailing these issues which are not rejected by GC feminists, will be taken as proof, either of political naiveté or of cynical collaboration, or worse, as evidence that the entire movement is what the gender identity extremists claim – far right and transphobic.

Keen-Minshull is gutsy and self-opinionated; she is clearly stubborn and she likes to win. These qualities, combined with a lack of political campaigning experience mean she makes tactical blunders. The rambling video she made that was directed at the NZ prime minister over the questions raised about her right of entry to the country, is a case in point. 

Her stubborn insistence that, for example, gender identity is so important an issue for all women, losing abortion rights would be a price worth paying to stop it, is either acting as a calculating spokeswoman for the forces that want to remove the right to abortion, or she is so focussed on a single goal, so intent on winning, and so buoyed up by her own celebrity, she fails to consider the wider implications of what she says. 

NZ transactivists and allies are indulging in the most inflamed rhetoric imaginable, for example, seeing "white power gestures" in her hand movements, which only serves to polarise the debate even further. 

She should have taken every opportunity to defuse that sort of foolishness by making it absolutely and immediately clear she will have no truck with far right extremists. Instead, she tacitly encouraged her supporters to counter-attack with salvos of their own hyperbolic claims and feverish rhetoric. 

I don't know enough about her to be able to say with absolute certainty whether she is a right winger who is calculatedly using this facet of a re-energised women's rights movement, or if she is a well-intentioned woman whose anger has been fanned by the hyperbolic rejection of her concerns by trans activists and allies in white left. 

Their smug certitude often makes me spit tacks so I can understand why some women are now anti-left, or at least, the so-called "woke" left. Whether that makes them committed to the right or to the far right is moot, as is whether any of them can be won back to the left. 

That political ball is in very much in play. 

Keen-Minshull is now being presented both in the legacy media and on social media in NZ in the most ludicrously hyperbolic terms. An article on what should be NZ's voice of balance, rationality, and moderation, Radio NZ, failed to do even the most basic checks on the story. Had they done so, they'd have seen that the Black Shorts were not there to support LWS but to hijack both the rally and the counter-protest for their own political ends ... the promotion of their brand of fundamentalist, white supremacist, ultra-nationalist, hyper-patriarchal Christianity. 

These "anti-paedo" groups are currently focussed on the same sort of claims that drove a man to rush into a pizza restaurant in Washington with an automatic weapon, to "rescue" the kidnapped children he believed had been chained in the basement by Democratic Party child abusers. It's also behind the links now being drawn between drag queens and paedophilia.

These are the sort of people who form real-life vigilante squads, and some of whom are so full of rage they have lost all connection to reality. The story about vigilantes who attacked a UK paediatrician's home in 2000 because they got confused about her job title is amusing... until these people turn their on-line conspiracy theorising into more serious forms of action and people get hurt or killed. (1)

Notes:

(1) These conspiracists don't realise there are two sorts of child sex abusers (leaving aside the far great number of adults who physically abuse kids) – those driven by a parafilia, and those who are just selfish, callous sexual opportunists. Malignant paedophiles don't do their grooming by dressing in drag and reading to kids in a public library; they groom by stealth, and they mostly wear business suits or forms of religious garb. For an abused kid it doesn't much matter which they are in truth, but hysteria or blinding rage from the adults around them is likely to add to the long-term harm.

Filthy Forestry

In 2016 I wrote this. People have been warning about the disastrous effects of poor land management for decades. My dad grew up in rural Whanganui, and as a young man he farmed on Banks Peninsula, and he always said that to stop the erosion, NZ’s steeply folded major catchments would need to be reforested in native bush.

The destruction of Aotearoa-NZ's dense, multi-story, water retaining native forest in order to plant pasture, led to a massive loss of top soil as rains eroded the bare tops of steep land. (1) This sort of erosion resulted in the silt laden flooding that has occurred before in exceptional rains  in places like the Esk Valley. 

What we now know, or should, is that these once exceptional rains are now happening frequently.

Pinus radiata grows faster in NZ than anywhere else on the globe. Historically, mass planting of it and other exotics was done by the state to stabilise areas of land exposed to erosion by earlier native forest clearance, and on so-called marginal land as job creation schemes during the Great Depression.

The planting to stabilise eroding catchment areas staved off the erosion problem for a time until, as happens with all mass commercial planting, the trees reach harvesting stage, and are clear felled. 

 

What was not known then, and is seldom commented upon even now, is the fact that pine trees give off large amounts of gases containing alkaloids which have the useful by-product of making the area around the trees hostile to other plant species. 

 

When these gases react with the sort of airborne artificial chemicals produced by human activity, they create toxic biogenic particles which "are chemically transformed by free radicals after they are first formed in the atmosphere." 

 

The greater the numbers of pine trees there are combining with airborne artificial chemicals from human activity, the worse this aerosol pollution will be, and it can travel for hundreds of kilometres on the wind, and is not just harmful to human beings. (2)

 

To allow access for the giant trucks and other huge machines on which commercial forestry depends, roads are carved out which, on steep land, become water courses and add to erosion. 

 

Clear felling is carried out even though not all trees will be ready or suitable for harvest. Clear felling is purely for industry convenience. The only logs that are wanted are those of a certain range of diameter, straightness, and length. All others and the tops of the trees, roots, side branches, bark etc are left as waste.

 

Screenshot of part of the Esk River catchment from Google Maps 

 

Areas are cleared in the forest for the processing and stacking of logs, and the slash is rowed up, or pushed into heaps. When water rushes down off the bare hillsides in heavy rains, it takes with it vast amounts of this debris – combining with loose rock and top soil into a literal lahar. 

The destructive force of a heavily silt laden river is bad enough, add rock and wood and it becomes the sort of monster we have recently seen devastate parts of Hawkes Bay.

The forest floor in a commercial pine plantation is a desert because dense pine forest is inimical to most other plants species, and to native birds.  One plant that can co-exist with pine if there is enough light, is gorse – one of the most invasive noxious weeds in NZ. Gorse also grows here faster than anywhere else and it can seed up to three times a year. When the pines are felled, before any new planting can be done, plants like gorse take off.

Far more of the alkaloids pine releases when it burns are produced in cooler, smouldering fires such as you might see in a controlled burn or in the burning of slash, which brings me to the question of how the industry ought to dispose of its monumental amounts of waste. 

 

I’ve read some stupid, politically motivated posts on social media from people claiming that the burning of slash was stopped in the 1980s because of pressure from environmentalists. Given these people cannot envisage the possibility of forestry corporations being expected to invest in other ways of disposing of their waste, they conclude that the destruction we saw last week was caused by "greenies and lefties". (3)

 

The issue of carbon emissions from huge fires aside, those who think burning forestry slash is a problem-free solution should address themselves to the other potential adverse effects of the practice.

 

You either leave the slash to dry out, which creates a flood and fire risk while it’s drying, or you burn it green, which means it smoulders possibly for weeks, and as stated above, green pine burning at lower temperatures produces larger amounts of toxic alkaloids. So, if it's burned when still green, there will be an increase air pollution.

 

If it's left to dry, even if rains like the ones we saw last week don't occur, there's an increased fire risk given these huge piles of slash can smoulder for weeks and possibly months, and be reignited in dry and/or windy conditions. (4)

 

The fire risk is exacerbated by the fact that even if it’s quickly replanted, other plants which tolerate the wasteland created by densely planted pines will have started growing. The most prolific of these is gorse, which is both highly invasive, difficult to eradicate, and highly flammable even when young and green.

 

Recently, as part of the emissions trading scheme, the planting of massive pine forests has become doubly attractive to corporations, both as a longer term cash crop and to create carbon credits. Moves by the NZ Labour government to remove such forests from the ETS were blocked by the forestry lobby. Māori especially objected, claiming it could cost the Māori economy billions of dollars given Māori are major forest owners (they will own 40% once Treaty settlements are completed), and make up around 40% of the forestry workforce.

 

Environmental activists who are calling for an end to dirty dairying must also face the realities of filthy forestry, especially when mass planting of pines under the ETS moves from forestry on marginal land to planting on productive farmland, and if bad forestry management practices result in more disasters such as the one we have just seen in Hawkes Bay.  

Notes:

 
1.   NZ always has and continues to lose top soil at one of the highest rates in the world. For an economy that depends on agriculture and viticulture, that’s several stops past Stupid and Unsustainable.

2.   Aerosol pollution is unquestionably deadly; in the United States alone it kills more than 50,000 people each year.

  
3.   This is on a par with right wing radio hosts using the cyclone as a political weapon with which to beat the government, and appealing to those people who are already convinced the country’s “going down the woke toilet”, we have lost resilience, etc etc. Arguably the least “resilient” people in the country riding their political high horse was a sight some of us will never forget or forgive. 

4.   A man who had a huge macrocarpa tree on the boundary with a property with extensive native plantings, created a stockaded area under the tree from old dry wood from conifers in his shelter belt. Unbeknown to his neighbours, he build a campfire under the tree, with a tripod for his billy and he’d go down there and make himself a cup of tea. The region had a few days of gale force nor’westers, which, unusually and fortunately for the neighbours, had dumped a lot of rain. In a break in the gales, even though more were predicted, the man decided to light his campfire and boil his billy. Having doused the fire, he went back indoors. The wind picked up again and his neighbours looked out a while later to see smoke on their boundary, then saw the flames race up through the huge tree. The fire the man thought he had totally doused had enough life in it for a damp nor’wester to reignite it, and blow burning embers into the dry wood of his stockade which burst into flames and set fire to the tree. The fire burned fiercely enough to kill the huge old tree, melt fence wires and burn deep into fence posts. Fortunately, the volunteer fire brigade put it out before it could travel downwind into neighbouring properties. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hypocrisy Rules

It's appalling that the tragic death of a man in Auckland who was stabbed after chasing a robber, is being used as a political football. 

The equally tragic death by stabbing of a Christchurch man who was out walking his dog is not attracting quite the same attention from the law and order mob.

The same people who mocked and derided Jacinda Ardern for "playing to the gallery" after the Christchurch mosque murders, are now praising her political opponents for doing the same over Janak Patel's tragic death, and they are lambasting the PM for not cancelling a trip to the Chathams to show due respect.

Say what you will about Ardern's politics, but I'll stand by my opinion that she's completely genuine in her empathy with, and sympathy for, all victims of violence.

I can't say the same about many of the political poseurs and opportunists who are helping stoke the fires of the current moral panic over rising street crime.

There's nothing more useful to the political right in the run up to an election than a moral panic – except several, mutually reinforcing moral panics.

It's a well established fact that socially conservative people tend to drift towards, and to be more accepting of authoritarian governance (or people who promise it) especially at times of heightened social uncertainty and personal anxiety. 

Media-inflated moral panics are a great way of ensuring high levels of both, and none more so than those centred around such things as violent crime, parental rights, and child abuse. 

If you can place an ethnic, or other minority at the heart of the moral panic, so much the better.

Janak Patel's death is an outcome of a set of social issues and problems that are far wider and more entrenched than the law and order tub thumpers have either the wit or the heart to comprehend, let alone respond to sensibly. 

This was an instance of horizontal violence, ie poor people robbing slightly more affluent people.

Very affluent people with legitimate avenues of making money don't tend to rob little corner shops, or carry a knife and stab a worker who chases after them.

These small businesses, in terms of location, opening hours, staffing levels etc are vulnerable, easier to target and to rob than larger businesses. Their profit margins mean the owners can't afford sophisticated security measures, or to employ several members of staff which could be a deterrent. 

A lot of those who are crying crocodile tears about the small businesses that are falling victim to horizontal crime don't give a damn about them in truth. If they did, they'd stand up for them against the giant corporates whose economies of scale force the likes of dairies into the sorts of opening hours and staffing levels which make them all the more vulnerable to being robbed by low level criminals.

For those who are minded to use this sad death to score political points, let me remind you of another time when a senseless, tragic death occurred as a result of a similar example of horizontal crime, and which was also used by a cynical law and order lobby. 

A pizza delivery man, was lured to an address where a group of kids waited to rob him. The kids were all brown-skinned and they ranged in age from twelve to seventeen. One of them hit the man with a baseball bat and they robbed him. He staggered back towards his vehicle, tried to get assistance from people in the locality but no one helped him and he died from a brain bleed. 

Utterly tragic.

Much of the NZ media gorged on the spectacle, whipping up rage among a population already in a state of heightened alert as a result of the efforts of right wing law and order lobbyists.

All the kids were charged with murder and the youngest became the focal point of a salivating media in what has to be one of NZ journalism's least edifying moments. 

Sensible and scientifically supported arguments in the kids' defence – e.g they were not neurologically mature enough to fully understand the consequences of their actions; they'd been raised on a diet of television and video games in which people get whacked on the head with a baseball bat and are up and about immediately with little more than a few cuts and bruises – were waved aside. 

None of it resonated with the police, the prosecution, the courts, the media or with way too many of the NZ public, especially the racists.

The kids were cast as callous little monsters. People who, in every other respect, wouldn't have given the likes of Michael Choy as much as a passing thought, elevated him to the highest level of victimhood – not because they cared about him or others like him – but because by elevating him as a victim, they could all the more effectively diminish and dehumanise the kids whose reckless criminal action had cost him his life. 

This is obviously not a direct parallel as Janak Patel's alleged killer is a grown man but expect a lot of similar media overkill and cynical and politically opportunist tub thumping if he fits the law and order mob's template for a legitimate target. 

On Compassion

Some Sunday post-Twitter musings. 

Why do some women see compassion as a quality that has been imposed on them to ensure their compliance within the patriarchy or various forms of phallocracy? 

If women are indeed socialised into being more compassionate, surely that's a good thing and should be encouraged. 

If we shrug off female compassion as a mere outcome of patriarchal / phallocratic social relations – what are we saying about the quality of being human? 

Being compassionate and having empathy are human qualities; in a healthy society we'd all be socialised into them, and people who lacked them would be a cause for concern or would be ostracised. 

Could it be that it these essentially cooperative qualities have to be socialised out of people?

To me, the very essence of being human is the capacity for compassion and empathy – especially extending beyond your own ‘kind’ ie kin / ethnic group / religion / country etc.

It's an essential ingredient in the glue that holds people together in groups, and it's only in groups that we become fully human. 

How those groups function internally powerfully influences how they function externally. The dominance of aggressive competition within a group or society increases the likelihood of that group or society being in aggressive competition with others.

There's too much glorifying of the stereotypically masculine and denigrating of the stereotypically feminine in our world; it's what liberal feminism has capitulated to – the eulogising and reifying of some ultra-feminine stereotypes, especially related to appearance, combined with the uncritical adoption of some masculine stereotypes, especially related to aggressive competitiveness.

I can get as infuriated with the self absorbed, heedless machinations of social media influencers,  identiactivists and smug beardy-bros as anyone, and on a gut level I might want to punch them; on a more intellectual level I see them as products of a dysfunctional society. 

There has NEVER been a more dangerous time than this moment in history; never has humanity faced challenges on a scale of those we face here at this precise point in our existence as a discrete species. And such is the impact we have had on the planet, what adversely affects us also affects all other living creatures.

To hear a person I once admired hugely for his style of gentle, targetless humour (so rare in our world) talk about the 21st century as if it was a thing of which to be proud because he, now she, can be in permanent "girl mode", is a tad annoying. 

As is knowing that someone has become famous and hugely influential by donning the most crippling of gender straitjackets ...the ones that depict women as airheads and bimbos. 

Only narcissists and psychopaths fail to accept the fact that life involves a series of compromises. Properly socialised people accept there are a number of triaging processes going on, and sometimes someone else gets priority. 

All those who are lining up to fight for sex-based or for identity based rights need to ask, am I in this because I really care about vulnerable people?

Outside of pointing out and opposing the additional risk posed to those vulnerable people by malignant or vexatious actors, what have I done, what am I prepared to do to make their lives less vulnerable?

What would I be prepared to do and to give up to ensure poor, marginalised, abused people are better placed to protect themselves, to make their own choices rather than continue to be the objects of state aid or private charity? 

The tragic answer is, quite a few not only do sod all, they're not prepared to give up anything.

The rapidly widening schism in what had the capacity to be a re-energised women's liberation movement, has given rise to those who are on the political right and those who need justification for allying with it, referring to themselves not as feminists but as "femalists".

This is a forelock tug to the simple, if ingenious, marketing strategy of Posie Parker – placing the standard dictionary definition of woman onto a range of "merch". 

(I don't know about you but I find that word to be intensely irritating. Merch, schmerch.)

Honestly, can it get any more surreal? 

If you have no commitment to structural change, or if you are anti-trans in the sense of finding trans people to be unnatural and unacceptable, then I have to repeat, I'm not your ally.  

But, if you are so mired in your desire to be woke, or so fearful of being branded a TERF you refuse to look past the immediate issue to what's really at stake, I'm not your ally either. 

Someone recently accused me of sitting on a burning fence; I prefer to see myself as having climbed a small prominence nearby in order to be able to keep a better eye on the antics of both extremes. Of course, being stuck up there also makes me an easy target for both. 

Ho hum.

Yet more matters ideological

Still on the identity politics theme, which is getting increasingly hard to avoid on both social and mainstream media, and breaking news for those who claim there’s no such thing as a transgenderist ideology, there is in fact a set of beliefs about the state of being transgender, which are characteristic of a group – ergo an ideology. 

These beliefs are usually presented on social media in the form of memes and mantras, and in mainstream media, in opinion pieces and articles that are often poorly-researched and one-sided.

These beliefs include: 

• Biological sex is not binary, it is on a spectrum, and the existence of the range of disorders or differences of sex differentiation is appropriated to support that claim.
• Gender identity is innate, or develops so early in development, it might as well be.
• Gender identity can also be fluid.
• People who are born male, even those who make no medical or appearance changes are, if they so declare, to be regarded as adult human females, legally and socially, and vice versa. 
• Any negative impact on current sex-based rights which exist to protect women and girls, or to counter-balance historical or current sex-based disadvantages, is deemed to be either non-existent or insignificant in comparison to the advantages accruing to transwomen of being fully included in the category of women or adult human female.
• To be inclusive of the tiny minority of transmen who still menstruate, or who want and are able to conceive and go through pregnancy, and so as to not emphasise the inability of transwomen to menstruate or to gestate new life, the terms associated with all aspects of being reproductively female, must be made gender-neutral. Hence terms like pregnant people, menstruators, people with a cervix, gestational or non-gestational parent, human milk, chest feeding, etc should be used. 
• Terms like biologically or genetically female or male must not be used.
• It is literally possible to be born in the wrong body, i.e. there is such a thing as a female brain in an otherwise male body, or vv.  
• At a more metaphysical level, there can be a female or male essence/ soul / spirit  inhabiting a male or a female body.
• Misgendering (ie use of incorrect third person pronouns) or dead naming (using a former name) should be designated as hate crimes. 
• It is possible for a three-year-old to know they are transgender, and appropriate for such a chid to be socially transitioned.
• If trans kids are not allowed to delay puberty chemically, they will kill themselves in alarming numbers. (1)
• Puberty blockers are harmless, or any harm they do is analogous to chemotherapy for childhood cancers.

And so on – a number of beliefs that constitute an ideology in the current sense of the word, and many of which are also ideological in the archaic sense of the word – i.e. visionary speculation of an unrealistic or idealistic nature.

In the 1980s – as neo-liberalism was poised to send the social and natural worlds into a tail spin from which both may never recover – a social contagion swept the anglophone world. 

Large numbers of people – many in  positions of authority – believed absolutely in the existence of a giant, global conspiracy of satanic child abusers. This drew together some very unlikely bedfellows such as the police, religious fundamentalists, and some radical feminists – and spread its tentacles into the corridors of governance. 

The evil-doers who were the focus of that moral panic were both male and female, and deemed to be literal immolators of children. Most of the victims of the moral panic were ordinary people, many of them parents, caught up in the hysteria. 

Most of the witch hunters and the vigilante mobs unleashed by them were not remotely interested in changing society foundationally in order that all children might be protected from all forms of abuse. They were in the grip of a weird form of bloodlust that demanded – and got – sacrifice. There are some who are still in its grip.

In this current era – which is a tipping point for neo-liberal capitalism and may well herald a rapid descent into some form of overt authoritarianism – there is a current social contagion, a wave of a fervent, almost blind-to-reason belief in the immutability of gender identity. It is ostensibly in defence of transgender people, and widely seen as progressive, ergo a phenomenon of the left. 

The witch hunters of this movement are both male and female, but it's the former who tend to be the most aggressive and domineering in pretty much all facets – who’d have guessed?

The designated evil-doers are TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) who are deemed to be the worst enemies (the hyperbole even extends into them being literal killers) of trans people, by being the primary instigators and transmitters of transphobia.

Trans people are depicted as uniformly weak and vulnerable and in need of protection – even those who gained (and retain) all the physical, social, and economic benefits of being born male, middle or upper class, and white.

Although there are men involved, in the mind's eye of the social media mobs, TERFs are female – and not just female – white, middle-class, feminist females. (2)

If these mobs, and the mass of institutional fellow travellers, were all in pursuit of a permanent change in the social and economic base of the world that was aimed at benefitting all people, if they were removing and disposing of the behavioural straitjacket of sex-role stereotypes – their fervour could be applauded – but mostly, they’re not. 

Mostly they're in the grip of a social contagion, or they are displacing their own disquiet, transferring their intense emotions from one sticking point to another. Or they are – not to put too fine a point on it – moral and political cowards. 

The TERF has become gender identity obsessed progressives’ social media scapegoat – rid the world of the TERF, and all will be well. 

Of course, most of them know that it won't. They know there'll still be racism, poverty, war, femicide, rape, economic and sexual exploitation, the annual holocaust of needless deaths of small black and brown persons, and all against the backcloth of a looming, multi-faceted global ecological disaster, but they can shelve all that while they're doing the work of the virtuous in silencing the Terrible TERFs.

It would be funny if it were not so destructive and divisive.

Notes:

(1)  An almost inevitable consequence of delayed puberty is multiple, major surgeries to change the body, and a life time of cross-sex HRT with attendant medical surveillance and testing regimes because of increased risk of cancer and of metabolic organ damage. There is also the hugely vexed question of whether, without such medical intervention,  some – possibly most – of these kids would become lesbian or gay. 

(2) This should also be considered in relation to another rising phenomenon - blaming white, middle class women for - well,  just about everything.