The Bennett of the Doubt

The Faceborg has informed me that it is 2000AD's birthday. To blithely say that the sci-fi comic was an influential aspect on my world perspective is as understated as it is moronic (Take that, Chris Finlayson's style guide). So, happy new revolution around the sun, Tharg. Glad you haven't barfed yet.

Back in 2000AD's golden years, from around 1981 to 86, grand idealists abounded. Among Alan Moore's Twisted Times and Dredd's Wagner/Ezquerra ultimately black comic fascism, it was Nemesis the Warlock (via Script Robot Pat Mills) who pointed out the plain facts out of the fiction, with great truths such as "What's the point of having dark arts if you don't meddle with them?"

With this is mind, might I try to tie various disparate popular themes together into one elegant political equation?

The tl;dr is this - a tolerable level of chaos.

We used to have the principle of the "reasonable person" embedded in Law, courtesy of the British system of justice. Beyond reasonable doubt and all that. The Crown used to bestow the benefit of the doubt where facts were disputed. In recent years, this foundational principle has been eroded by the lower threshold endorsed by the civil courts; the balance of probabilities.

You can see this point of reference in all points of popular culture these days; from the hectoring mobs of cyber-bullies virtually lynching people for just the wrong level of tolerance, to the Cam Slater's outbursts such as NZ politics is a hateful zero-sum business.

There is more to heav'n and earth than is dreamt of than all those philosophies. As a nation, our comparative advantage lies in being small and nimble. In a post-agrarian, post-industrial world where intellectual property comes into its own, we are not being as innovative as we should. I believe that this is mainly because of the recent baby boomer prohibition on people fucking around. They reckon there's too much fucking around. I say we're not doing nearly enough.

As Nassim Taleb points out in Antifragile, most technologies didn't appear from formal methods such as Big Pharma. They come from interested people fucking around with shit. From Goodyear to Dirac, from Marie Curie to Pasteur, Fleming, Watson and Crick, or even Feynman observing spinning dinner plates, all the big jumps come from smart people meddling with shit.

For example, back in the day when Mother Meri Aubert ran the Homes of Compassion in Island Bay (where Matt McCarten would later be raised in captivity), explosions would regularly be heard from the back shed as Mother Mary fucked with shit.

As a wise girl once told me, "It's not what you've got, it what's you do with it."

Digging in the Dirt

The past is a different country. They do things differently there. It can be an illuminating place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. There be dragons.

It's ANZAC Day, and fresh from one blogger dodging one set of lawyer monkeys, it seems another is set up against some gorilla class action.

Russell Brown sought to revisit a controversial current affairs program from 1990 in this week's Media 3 program. A visibly frustrated Russell Brown explained during the show that several pieces were cut on legal advice, and Roger Douglas had thrown legal action at them to try and torpedo the entire program at the last moment. The blog post For the Public Good Revisited has been pulled, although nothing online is ever offline.

Which is a shame, because I was rather looking forward to a look at the events of that era. My dead old man was in the thick of it, and all I've got so far is his side of the story:

Without that guidance, Lange made a complete mess of the 1987 campaign. He offended some women dramatically on a television interview while he was on tour in the South Island. I think it was at Rangiora (It was in fact Geraldine - goNZo). In my own electorate, I had gone to considerable pains to prepare the way for Lange at the Palmerston North Teachers Training College in the morning, only to have him in the afternoon verbally abuse some student again on television over his shirt or some other trivial matter. These were two major television blues that forced the Labour Party to spend around half a million dollars on TV adverts in addition to what we expected to spend, in order to cover his misdemeanours in this regard.

What I did discover is why so many Lefties have bad blood towards my old man, and probably against me personally. The evidence is lacking but they want so hard to rage against the de Cleene.

How about we frame it thusly, in order to defuse the tensions? Just as the Tuhoe Terror defendants don't have to justify a goddamn thing to the police or the public, neither do the Dark Artists have to justify historic campaign financing now.

How much have things changed? Here's what being a minister outside of cabinet was like before reform (Book of Trev, same chapter as above):

I would rather in retrospect have been under-secretary of finance to Roger Douglas than I would have been Minister of Pies & Ice-cream in the cabinet. There were several reasons for this. The first was financial. Under the Higher Salaries Commission, Ministers and under-secretaries were paid one hundred odd dollars tax-free a day for the time they were not in Wellington. The idea was that they were doing their job elsewhere. I thought this was ridiculous but it rendered my under-secretaries' pay up with a cabinet minister. I didn't have to go down to Wellington on Monday and was paid this $100 for fishing and shooting. That later, on our own instigation, was altered and is not the position now. That was the ridiculous nature however of much of the way of fixing salaries for ministers and under-secretaries in those days.

How much has stayed the same? Well, the statute of limitations has expired on whatever corruption lies behind John Banks and his campaign financing. If you can keep the corpse buried for six months, you can never be guilty.

How about we work on current affairs like that instead of picking over really old bones? Unless someone has a bone to pick, that is.

Thought of the Day - Stoned by Monkeys Edition

If there's one thing dumber than picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel and paper by the drum, it is picking an argument with an infinite number of monkeys on keyboards.

In other news, Colin Craig has withdrawn his defamation suit against national treasure The Civilian.

Parasites Lost

Always treat a journalist as if they were loaded. That's the hard lesson that Gareth Hughes has hopefully learned after this attempt at post-modern interviewing:



What started as a bit of impish sledging from Tag Team Farrar and Whale, has got even Idiot/Savant biting at the bait. Possibly because Hughes seemed so flippant about such contentious issues. Welcome to the war.

As any Politics 101 student can tell you, journalists and politicians are symbiotic parasites. One cannot live without their tentacles in the other sucker's guts. Little wonder then the natives got restless when John Armstrong went pestilential on bloggers late last year:

Shamelessly nicked from The Paepae, because Facebook's Timeline has a memory hole.

Sure, bloggers exist to make journalists look good, as well as provide uncredited material for MSM hacks short of a lede. We don't mind being the media's bottom bitch, but a bit of recognition now and again wouldn't hurt either.

What the Politics 101 student probably couldn't tell you, is how important and fateful one TV interview was, mainly because it happened long before they were born.



Simon Walker's evisceration of Muldoon made politicians' sphincters around the country contract so fast, the resulting sound was mistaken for thunder. TV had not only killed the radio star, it had murdered the supremacy of the prime minister's word. The leader no longer controlled everything. What would the littler Napoleans do?

They wised up and got media advisors, press secretaries, Public Relations spinners, hairdressers, make-up, washed-up actors and creative directors to adapt their shill to the new theatre in town. My old man was very proud of the fact that he refused all these prophylactic professionals and preferred to keep it simple by knowing what he was talking about. He understood the issues to a granular level.

Not much chance of general knowledge, let alone genuine insight, in the House these days. Just a choice of Blue Bull, Red Bull, Green Bull, Black Bull, Brown Bull, Shitting Bull or Purple Haze.

Getting what you want

Morgan Godfery over at Maui Street has some wise words for activists of all stripes, not just the silly buggers up at Waitangi:

What do these protestors, and I use the term protestors in its loosest sense, expect to achieve? Actions like the above serve only to reinforce negative opinions and galvanise the public against your cause. Of course, these village idiots wouldn’t know the first thing about making gains for Maori. They know how to make a lot of mindless noise, but they don’t know what progress looks like, let alone how to achieve it. 

Politics is the art of getting what you want. You do not win an argument by pissing people off without a bloody good explanation. It's part of why the Occupy cause in NZ failed to gain more public support. It's a lesson that a few cannabis activists have yet to learn.


The great PR guru Thomas Chin of the Distillers Union once said something along the lines that you generally get better results if you befriend your target, not bedevil them. Result?

Statistics New Zealand's household expenditure survey shows Kiwis spent 7.2 per cent more on alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs in 2009-2010, compared with 2006- 2007, while our spending on transport, recreation and culture fell...

That did not stop New Zealanders from buying hard liquor, with spending on spirits up by 25 per cent. 

Another nugget of meaty goodness is Gareth Morgan talking to Chris Laidlaw, explaining why he never took up a career in politics. Pretty often, you can do a lot more public good outside the Beehive than in it, with much less collateral damage.