Category: This blog

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About that silly Mr. Bridges.

In the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attacks, Simon Bridges wants to expand the powers available to the NZ security community when it comes to search and surveillance. He apparently believes that resurrecting “Project Speargun,” a 5 Eyes/GCSB 2013 effort to place a meta-data mining probe into the Southern Cross fiber optical cable connecting NZ to the world (via LA), would have prevented the attacks. He seems to not realize that Project Speargun was not fully abandoned but superseded by newer technologies, and that it would not have prevented the domestic terrorism attack in any event because it was foreign focused and used algorithms to reflect the concerns of NZ’s 5 Eyes partners (which were not focused on violent white supremacism).

He seems to think that the cyber-security program Cortex (designed to protect NZ firms and government agencies from hacking attacks) was somehow linked to Project Speargun (as some sort of inner-outer perimeter system). Yet the two are completely separate projects. As Leader of the Opposition Mr. Bridges sits on the Intelligence and Security Committee and gets regular briefs from the SIS and GCSB Directors, so the confusion and attempt to resurrect Project Speargun reflects a fundamental disconnect.

It also seems odd that a leader of a center-right party founded in part on classic liberal principles in defense of the right to privacy and the primacy of civil liberties would decide that there is political mileage to be gained by calling for more intrusive State powers at the expense of individual rights. Cynical opportunism, perhaps?

I was interviewed by RNZ about his comments. My observations are here.

After doing the interview and listening to Mr. Bridges remarks once again, it seems to me that he is a special piece of work. So I decided that the best thing I could do was honor him with a tweet from the consulting firm (which among other things does political leadership analysis). Here it is:

“When it comes to Simon Bridges calling for enhanced powers for NZ spy agencies, he is like a guy who says that he needs a telescope because his binoculars don’t work well enough, only to find out that the lens caps are still on the binoculars.”

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KP ten years on.

In January 2009 KP started publication. I was living in Singapore and was part of the original team that included Anita and Pete. Shortly thereafter Lew joined us. Over the years Pete, then Anita and later Lew dropped out (much to my regret) and others came and went. We have had a couple of guest contributors (Kate and Selwyn Manning) but these days it is just me rattling around the shed. I am not sure about Anita but Lew is a prolific presence on twitter, although I believe that however brilliant a 140 character snark may be, it is no substitute for the type of essays he used to write here. Pete moved into work roles that prevented him from continuing after the first few months and a couple of years later Anita made clear that work conflicts precluded her further participation, which is fair enough.

During the last decade I returned to NZ and welcomed a son into the family. I stay connected to academia through my partner but justify my existence with some consulting and commentary work. Most of the time, when not researching and writing for applied or personal reasons I dedicate my time to watching that boy grow up in the splendorous settings of the Waitakere seaside bush. He is lucky to have been born in such a place. He is not quite the hunter-gatherer yet but he is most certainly an outdoor kid who knows his way around livestock, dogs, poultry and wild birds and who knows which varmints are good and which are bad (in our household, the latter referred to as “evildoers” or, in the case of stoats, “Trumps”).

So, what have the ten years brought? We have published 1,072 posts, 542 of which are mine. There have been 901, 090 page views and 14, 825 approved comments (that does not included deleted troll comments and spam, which runs into the thousands). The greatest single day for pages views saw 4000 readers, but the average now is just 60-150 per day. Domestic topics get the most hits, which is slightly unfortunate given that my major focus is on international relations, comparative foreign policy, US politics, intelligence and military-security issues. As one can see from the Archives column on the right hand side of the front page, we started off with a bang but then gradually diminished the amount of posts published per month. Things dropped off markedly after Lew departed and now average around 1-3 per month depending on my mood, work commitments and what is happening the in the world. I continue to hope that Lew will return or that I can find another regular contributor but so far those hopes have not worked out.

The blog gets traffic from other NZ political blogs but most of what gets directed over is via search engines and mass consumption social media (Twitter, FB, Reddit). Although it is asked to accept advertising or paid content from time to time, it was the intention of the KP originators that we never go down that path, something that I continue to honour.

There is a dedicated cadre of regular commentators, some who have been around since the inception. Since I am unwilling to indulge ill-informed people, trolls or political onanists, it does not have much in the way of regular contrarians amongst the commentators, although people like Tom Hunter, Phil Sage, Redbaiter and, to a lesser extent, Paul Scott drop in to keep me on my toes. Otherwise the commentators display clear Left leanings, often considerably to the Left of me.

At this juncture KP survives as a tiny niche blog with a majority NZ audience but predominantly international focus. That is OK with me and justifies paying the server fees (it is a WordPress platform hosted by Dreamhost). For me it fits somewhere in between editorial commentary in corporate media, personal opinion and professional writing–a bit more ideological and subjective in many cases but most often somewhat above a rant.

It is hard to discern what the future holds for the blog but in the interim it will plod along in its current form in its designated space in the blogosphere. Thanks to those who continue to come along for the ride.

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House of Pain.

I am on the mend, sort of.

Or better said, I am out of surgery and convalescing after having my left hip replaced. It was an interesting experience. They decided to give me a spinal with a light sedative, so I got to hear the sounds and feel the tugs. After the first tugs (slicing and dicing as they opened me up), I heard a circular saw. That is used to cut off the top of the femur and old hip ball. Then I heard a grinder. That is used to “sand” down the pits and sharp projections caused by degenerative arthritis on the hip socket. I then heard hammering on metal. That is the sound of the fitted metal plate being hammered into the hip socket (think of the spikes that are used to hold down railroad ties. Here the spikes are hammered into the hip socket through holes in the fitted metal plate). The hammering was also the new titanium hip ball being hammered into the new top of the femur (also attached by a spike). Then more tugging as they sewed me up. They cut and separate the abductor muscle to get to the hip. Took about 1.5 hours.

The first night was agonising once the spinal wore off (took about 4 hours). They prefer not to give painkillers until all lower body sensation is restored, so one has to suffer until the painkillers kick in after normal sensation resumes (which works downwards from the point of injection to the toes). For me, that included suffering through a pain fever (where one is hot to touch to the point of discolouration and blistering amid profuse sweating). I would say the pain was 8.5-9 on a scale of 10, all through my pelvic girdle. The next day they got me up and we started “exercising, ” (i.e. walking with a walker and crutches) and the worst pain was (and is) in the femur that was operated on (pain at about 7.5-8 level). I now have incision pain (a hot tearing sensation) as a constant more than anything else, on a scale of 5 or so out of 10.

I assume the various pains will begin to wear off soon but boy, I could use some opiates at this point (they try to avoid using them and I have a reaction to morphine anyway). Instead, I rely on the mobile pharmacy of non-opiates that was provided to me upon my release.

I was released after 3 nights in hospital and transferred to my in-laws as a halfway point while the family support crew worked. Lets just say that the 100 meter walk on crutches to the car and entering/exiting said vehicle was excruciating. It managed to combine deep bone, pelvic girdle and incision pain into one big ball of wretchedness. Beyond that, I am incredibly fragile and vulnerable to falls, which is a problem because along with infections dislocating the new hip is considered to be a terminal game changer for the worse.

I will go home tomorrow and continue to use the crutches and cane until I can walk by myself. I cannot bend forward, twist my hips, cross my legs or have my knees higher than my hips for six weeks. I need special chairs for the shower and loo. I cannot drive for that time (a problem in a one driver household located a half hour from the nearest main town). But I am told that it is all worth it once the pain goes away and will be able to exercise and perhaps even jog again.

That is my motivation because I have promised the little guy that I will soon be able to kick the ball and chase him around the paddock. Let’s hope so.

PS: Other than a couple of glitches, my experience with the public health system (so far) was 9 out of 10. In terms of institutional processes and staff care I received excellent treatment. I did go private for a couple of tests but everything else was done publicly and the total time from when I was put on the waiting list (as an acute case) to surgery was 3 months. Happy to see my tax dollars put to good use.

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Spare a thought for grumpy old men.

At an early age, I knew that I was going to be athletic-minded. I used to say to my father “I am immortal until proven otherwise!” and, much to his consternation and that of my mother, set out to prove the point by engaging in a number of risk taking (read: stupid) activities. More constructively, from the age of seven I played sports, lots of them. I played team sports and I played individual sports. I ran, I swam, I rode bikes and I raced around fields throwing, catching and kicking balls. Those balls were big and small, oval and round, and I waved an assortment of sticks at them when duty required.  Heck, I even tried ice hockey even though I could not skate: the team made me a maskless goalie on sneakers while I learned to skate until I realised that was a losing proposition.

I  boxed and I tried judo. I was a gym rat that lifted weights and even tried body-building for a decade or so. I loved to run trails, desert washes and beaches, preferably barefoot on the latter. I enjoyed the camaraderie of team sports and the solitude of the long distance runner. I got hurt a fair bit and I lost more than I won, but it was the act of competing, of testing my limits, that I most enjoyed. As I say to my kids, there is honour in losing so long as you make the other guys work hard for their win. After I had to give up team sports I endurance raced in order to justify my (compulsive) training, was a referee/umpire and coach in a couple of sports for a while and even surf lifeguarded to hone my open water skills and contribute to the community in which I now live. I also was able to engage in physical activities connected to government service before I moved to NZ, something that complemented my sports-minded approach to life.

Although my physical decline began with injuries dating back to the 1970s, things really began to unravel about ten years ago when I had a near-death experience that ended my competitive endurance racing life. Five knee surgeries had already given me a noticeable limp, and osteoarthritis in my feet, knees and shoulders made doctors comment that my X-rays looked like that of an 80 year old rather than a 40/50/60 year old. I ate aspirin like cereal and served as a involuntary guinea pig for the testing of assorted balms, lotions and other muscle and skeletal ache remedies.

With weight bearing activities no longer possible, I switched to indoor machines and eventually set up a home gym with stationary bikes, a rower and an elliptical machine. I spun, I glided and I rowed to the tune of thousands of songs, something I would never do when training outdoors. I was determined to make the most of what I had left in me, and enjoyed being able to use music as an external displacement/disassociation  training method rather than the internalisation/association techniques that are the stock of endurance athletes (where you go inside yourself to monitor your body’s performance rather than diverting attention into things like music).

While rowing two years ago I felt a twinge in my hip. I rested for a week, then resumed, only for the twinge to come back, this time a bit more sharply. Over the course of the next months that twinge turned into a constant sharp pain in my left side. It eventually started to affect my gait, as it became difficult to walk uphill or downhill (particularly the latter). I eventually stopped gong to the pool, not because I could not swim but because the walk from the parking lot was too painful and I was too unsteady on my feet on the damp surfaces of the pool decks and changing rooms.

Based on what I described, my GP prescribed industrial strength ibuprofen and paracetamol, but that only dulled the pain. Eventually, I had to stop trying to exercise as inevitably something would tweak and I would be immobilized for days. The more I was unable to exercise the more I put on weight while my legs atrophied. It was a vicious circle.

A few weeks before leaving to the US last July and at the insistence of my wife I told the GP that I was in fact barely mobile because of the hip pain. She ran some basic tests and said something to the effect of “your hip is munted.” The trouble was that my family and I were leaving on a five month sabbatical to the US and so there was nothing that could be done until we got back to NZ other than to eat painkillers. And so I did.

What I did not anticipate was that I would continue to deteriorate exponentially. I was walking with difficulty when we arrived at our place in Florida. A month later, when we moved to Boston, I could barely walk two blocks without having to stop and rest. A month into the Boston stay I couldn’t walk more than 100 meters, and a month after that I could not go even 20 meters without having to stop and do pain management. My wife bought me a walking cane and I began to use it. It was not enough.

All the meticulous planning for the division of labour while we were in Boston, where I was the designated support person, evaporated once we got there. I could not use pubic transport to shoulder my responsibilities as the primary caregiver, since even with the cane I could not get to the nearest bus stop in order to take the kid to the twice weekly pre-school we enrolled him in. Nor could I shop at the local grocery without assistance from strangers. By the time we left Boston I could not push a mop without having to take multiple breaks. That left everything in terms of domestic chores to the person who was there to do research and write, and that was not me. My physical condition became, and is, a family problem.

As part of the sabbatical we had a number of pre-booked domestic flights to take (we wound up taking 10 flights and spending 51 hours in the air during that trip).  By mid-October I could no longer walk through airport terminals even with the cane and started having to be wheeled from the check-in counters to the gates. Not only did I find that humiliating and a tremendous burden on my wife and four year old, but I discovered that many people simply do not see or dislike disabled folk and consider them nuisances or obstacles in their way. Making inter-terminal and rental car transfers were a nightmare, and contrary to popular belief, not all of my wheelchair bound passage was expedited by the TSA security people. Sometimes I got waved through, sometimes I was made to stand and go through the regular screening process, sometimes it was a little bit of both.

It was heartbreaking to see my old US friend’s faces when they set eyes upon me. The had images of me in my “prime,” and instead they got a hobbled shell of the guy that used to be. Although mellowed by experience, I still have the same persona, the same ideas, the same outlook on life as twenty or even thirty years ago, but the shell is not the same. It pained me to see how distressed my old friends were at the sight of me bent over on a cane at their doorsteps.

In December I presented myself to NZ Immigration in a airline-supplied wheelchair with a grumpy kid and a heavily backpack laden, sleep deprived Mom in tow. The arrangement with Air NZ, as far as I can tell,  is that they wheel people to the arrivals terminal greeting space. After that things are by private arrangement, including disposition of the the service chair in parking lots.

By the time we came back to NZ the hip pain had spread to the other side and lower back (it turns out that is typical of “end state” hip osteoarthritis). The day after we got back I saw my GP, who referred me for X-rays the next week. They showed that my left hip has no cartilage left and is bone-on-bone with spurs growing in the joint. The right hip is half as bad. Armed with that information, I was referred to a hip replacement specialist. I am now scheduled to have hip replacement surgery sometime in the next month or so.

When I saw the orthopaedic surgeon in early February the pain was constant and continues through the night. I was prescribed Tramadol, which again dulls but does not eliminate the pain even when taken in combination with other non-opioid pain relief. The hip is now structurally failing at inopportune times such as stepping from the porch to the footpath leading to the garage, to which can be added regular knee buckling when I overcompensate by putting most of my (over) weight on my right side.

There is no getting around the pain and structural failures. Consequently, we have curtailed our social activities away from home because I have great difficulty in accessing venues, and even disabled parking places are often too far from the destination for me to walk without stopping or assistance (I have a temporary disabled placard for the car, something that has introduced me to the special type of lowlife known as the able-bodied disabled parking space squatter). I try to avoid too many trips to the kitchen or bathroom because it hurts to get up and do the short walk to them. In effect, I am trapped in my body and pretty much homebound, using the car as wheelchair, the cane as a prop and relying on family and friends to help with simple chores. That sucks.

The real issue and the point of this post is pain. Pain robs one of the joy of life and even, after a while, of the will to live. Pain makes one timid, fearful that the next step will bring more injury and worse pain. Pain makes one irritable and short-tempered for no apparent reason. My ever patient and long suffering wife says that my smile is more often a wince these days. Pain makes one cynical, gloomy and pessimistic. Pain is an energy-sapping, tupor-inducing drain on life. It robs personality spark and it cripples spirit. If it cannot be stopped by medical intervention, it invites remedy by other means. Ever-present, pain is an all-encompassing, quality of life-ruining curse.

It ruins lives in many ways. I find myself getting short with my four year old when he is just being a kid and snap at my wife over silly or minor things. I increasingly dislike noise. I am mean-spirited more often than not. I feel envious of the able-bodied and am frustrated that I cannot chase my boy around the paddock or no longer do some funky chicken dance with him to the tune of the old roundtable or Mom’s CDs. The sum effect is to sink into a funk, although I am lucky in that I, for reasons known only to the goddess, have more of an optimistic than depressive personality.  But that does not mean that I am fun to live with in my current state. Because I, my friends, am a grumpy old man.

Hopefully all of that will end once I have the hip emplacement surgery. I am relatively young and am told that the pain goes away immediately, and that after the physical rehabilitation work I should be back to near-normal (that is, no more Ironman but I will be able to throw and kick balls with the kid and yes, trot after him when doing so). I sure hope so, and hope is my friend at this point.

But for others not as fortunate as me, hope may not be enough or no longer be possible. So please spare a thought for grumpy old men and women. Be it as a result of sports injuries, hard physical labour, chronic illness or accidents, many senior people are not irritable by choice. They too, are products of their pasts and they too are trapped in bodies that bear the physical consequences of lives spent in something other than splendorous leisure. Showing them empathy and compassion may not take away their pain, but it will at least show them that you share the understanding of what it does to them.

That is the best palliative of all.

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Media Irritants.

Terrorism Porn.

Coverage of the Manchester bombing has turned into an exercise in morbid titillation. The media voyeuristically interviews hysterical parents about whether they or their children saw carnage and how do they feel about that. They blather on about the identity of the perpetrator and his ties to Daesh.  In doing so they explain nothing more than what is already obvious and feed into the extremist narrative. It is all about shock! horror! the humanity! OMG, what depravity does this?!  Meanwhile kids are wiped out on industrial scale in non Anglo Saxon places and the Western media barely murmurs. Perhaps the people at the BBC, CNN, Fox News, Newshub  or TVNZ  believe that white children matter more than brown or black ones, but I for one do not. Unless coverage is given equally to Palestinian, Syrian or Yemeni children buried under the debris of their houses bombed from above, or to those destroyed in sectarian violence in the Sudan, Somalia, India and Pakistan, then the Western media needs to spare us their crocodile tears about “innocence lost.”

Let me put it this way: Last night on a 7PM show a NZ television outlet offered a panel with a comedian, a politician and some gender balanced eye candy ready to discuss the issues of the day. After a somber cross over to the UK to discuss the bombing with a follow up by a local academic, the hosts turned and said something to the effect of “now changing the subject,” whereupon they all went into yuck yuck mode over some stupid story about something inconsequential. Again, this included a politician of some apparent import in this land. That was shameful, debased and as clear a sign of the vacuousness of NZ media (and some politicians) as one can ever get.

If the media and UK government had a shred of decency and counter-terrorism sense they would have never mentioned the killer’s name, or his motivations, or streamed imagery of panicked teens running for cover and crying parents searching for their offspring. Instead, the authorities should have just reported that a mass murder occurred in which explosives were used and that the police were investigating and offering support to the victims and family. The corporate media should have follow suit and imposed restrictions on coverage even in the face (and especially because) of social media coverage of the event. That would help take the oxygen out of the extremist story, removes fuel for copycats and nut jobs, give no credence to motivation or ideology and treats the event as what it is: a violent criminal act, no more, no less.

Instead, we get discussions of the type of explosives used (and where to find the ingredients for them) and the emotional and psychological impact of the event. Sadists, jihadists and any number of terrorism “experts” are wanking themselves with delight at the way the story has been covered but the rest of us are no wiser for it.

Iran is not the greatest sponsor of terrorism.

The US government and the Western media continue to run and parrot the line that Iran is the greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world and thus the major threat to peace in the Middle East. Holding a straight face, President Drumpf recently repeated this meme at a conference of Sunni Arab oligarchies hosted by Saudi Arabia–Saudi Arabia! Those paragons of governmental virtue and human rights advocacy applauded his words and the Western press, including that of NZ, reported approvingly of the statesmanship demonstrated by his remarks.

I call bullish*t on that.

Sure, Iran suports Hezbollah, Hamas, the Alawite regime in Syria, the al-Sadr and other Shiia militias in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen. It is complicit in the bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s (and I, as a US Defense Department official charged with Latin American affairs at the time have some knowledge of the financial and forensic investigations that trace back to Tehran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards). It clearly has nuclear ambitions and talks trash about Israel, but compared to North Korea with regard to the former and any Friday sermon in the Sunni world with regard to the latter, how is it appreciably worse? Seriously, does anyone with a fair and objective mind think that (Shiite) Iran is a worse sponsor of terrorism than, say, (Sunni) Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan (whose intelligence services were implicated in the Mumbai terrorist attacks and who continue to fund and arm extremists in India and Afghanistan, if not further afield), any of the other UAE countries or, putting aside sectarian weirdness for a moment, organised crime and –dare I say it–the US (which backed with money and weapons rightwing death squads responsible for the deaths of thousands in Latin America and elsewhere from the 1950s to the 1980s and with who covert connections are reported to continue to this day)?

Why does the media accept the US word about Iran and its links to terrorism? Why do they not question the criteria upon which this “assessment” is based. Because nothing I have read, heard or personally seen in three decades of working the interstices of unconventional warfare has led me to believe that Iran is the foremost sponsor/supporter of terrorism in the world yesterday or today. Instead, it is a revolutionary regime that has successfully stood up to the US and its Sunni allies using conventional and unconventional means, covert and overt, indirect and direct, diplomatic, military and economic. I am not a fan of the Iranian regime or its ideology, but what is so different about the way it operates when compared to other regional actors other than that it has an adversarial relationship with the US and others in the West? Iran may not be the best “behaved” country in the world either domestically or internationally, but again, compared to who and by what measure?

The NZDF are lying and covering up what happened during Operation Burnham.

The NZDF wants us to believe that contrary to all Western professional militaries, its special operators do not occasional make mistakes that result in the deaths of innocents and, moreover, do not carry cameras into battle zones, do not collect forensic evidence on those killed and need permission from the US to release video from the air cover provided during NZDF operations abroad (assuming of course, that the NZDF requests such video in the first place). Other than an intrepid few, the NZ media has just taken the NZDF word for it although it has now been caught out lying about photographic evidence taken by NZDF soldiers at the scene (“and oversight” it claims), and has generally stonewalled OIA requests for information about really happened.

I am not entirely convinced that the explanation of the Burnham mission offered by Jon Stephenson (whose reporting constitutes ninety percent of the book Hit and Run) and Nicky Hager (who took majority credit for it) is absolutely correct in all details, but I sure as hell know one thing: when it comes to the honesty, integrity and credibility of Mr. Stephenson versus that of the NZDF brass, I will take Mr. Stephenson every time. This is not about the soldiers on the ground that night. This is about who gave the orders to undertake the raid and who decided to hide what really happened in its aftermath. Were it that TV talking heads and comfortable columnists and opinionators be cognisant of that fact.

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Introducing E.A. Blair.

Due to the press of externalities, the KP collective has shifted over the years since its inception in 2009. Lately it has been mostly me who has been doing the posting but that is about to change. Lew and I are delighted to welcome E.A. Blair on board.

E.A.’s background is in government/education/military/security with a decade spent living/working in Asia and an overall interest in Asia and the Middle East.  E.A. spent five years dealing with high risk for a major government department which included areas such as Asia/Africa and Counter Proliferation, and currently works in another government department with a similar work function but an internal focus.

E.A. will starting posting in the very near future, so please extend a reader’s welcome!

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Year End Summary.

Kiwipolitico continues to chug along in its niche space in the NZ political blogosphere. We published 41 posts this past year, all but three of which I wrote. Kate guest posted in May (on universal human rights) and Lew wrote posts in July and August (on Labour’s inept pronouncements on race and the Auckland housing market, and tasers). We averaged around 4 posts per month, with April being the high mark (5 posts) and February and November being low points (2 posts).  Our readership continues its gradual decline, slipping to around 3500 views per month. In a sign that readership is indeed content driven, the biggest month for views was February (4900) even though it was a month when only two posts were published. That included the most viewed post (on NZ’s role in the anti-Daesh coalition), which was followed in views by the recently published post on the Police search for Rawshark as part of the sequels to the Dirty Politics saga. The third most viewed post was Lew’s July post on Labour’s clumsy attempt to layer race into the debate about Auckland’s housing market.

Most of what I wrote focused on comparative politics, foreign policy, international relations, intelligence matters and security. I did a couple of “lighter” posts (on Donald Trump and cricket sledging) and  a few on NZ politics (including the post about the NZDF’s defamatory treatment of Jon Stephenson), but in the main it was my usual repertoire of subjects.

Most of our traffic comes directly from search engines and other NZ Left-leaning blogs. Twitter and Facebook also provide significant traffic and were instrumental in sending viewers to the most read posts. Mention of a post by larger blogs such as The Standard or Kiwiblog also sends more viewers than usual our way.

We have a dedicated core of readers and commentators who help inform discussion of selected topics. One area of success has been the significant reduction in the number of trolls even though we have not had to ban anyone this year. The pests from the past have not returned and the new ones–especially the NZ government employee writing from his work computer and feebly trying to cover his IP tracks with common misdirection techniques that are easily overcome with reverse tracking technologies–have come to realise that there is no point in trolling because all they do is get slapped silly. I must admit I do miss “peter quixote”/”lolita’s brother”/Paul Scott, who voluntarily stopped posting his reactionary diatribes for reasons unknown to me.

An ongoing source of concern is the lack of diversity in our contributors and the one man show aspects of the blog. Lew is busy with life balance issues, Kate was and perhaps will be a very occasional visitor, and the last remaining member of the original cadre, Anita, has all but disappeared. I write on KP as an outlet for more ideological toned and personal missives, since my business writing has to be non-partisan, neutral and ideology-free. My hope is that the other members will return to writing more regularly and/or that we pick up another member willing to contribute regularly. That is important because we need to expand the range of subjects we write about and I cannot do that on my own given the limitations of my “expertise” and interests.  Having said that, I will endeavour to do my bit to keep KP rolling as an alternative source of analysis and interpretation of social dynamics, both foreign and domestic.

In any event I would like to wish our readers the best for a productive and happy 2016.  Cheers!

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Wishing you the best for the upcoming year.

Another year has come and gone and KP idles along in its small corner of the blogosphere.  For a year in which social media was touted as emerging as a significant competitor to the corporate press as framers of political discourse and debate in NZ, we had little impact outside of a dedicated core of readers.

KP published 55 posts in 2014. All but ten were written by me. Anita did not contribute this year and Lew wrote the ten that I did not (including all of June’s posts). His posts covered important domestic issues and were, as is always the case, the most read and had the most impact in terms of generating larger debate. I spent a bit more time on domestic related issues than I usually do and started adding links to other commentary that I have done, mostly in the fields of intelligence, security and NZ foreign policy. As has been the trend from the beginning, these received less attention than “purely” domestic or party politics related posts, and my posts on global affairs and international relations received the least amount of hits (and in some cases no comments). Having said that, my posts on the dire state of the NZ Left in January, May and September did generate some interesting responses in the comments and a couple of ripostes from Chris Trotter, and proved to be sadly prophetic in the wake of the election. They also elicited some gleeful coverage among Right leaning blogs, which was unfortunate.

We received around 3500 reads per month, with the high being 12000+ in September. The number of comments varied considerably but consistently averaged between 10-15 per post. No one was banned although one individual was warned off (see below). Other than the latter’s, most commentary was intelligent and civilised.

Most of our referrals came from other social media, especially twitter, although any mention in the Herald or NBR brought a relative flood of readers.  We also received traffic from other NZ political blogs, mostly on the Left. The cross-pollination is regular and welcome.

Traffic came predominantly from NZ, although there is a dedicated group of readers from overseas. I had a problem with trolling on a couple of my posts (primarily about Eastern Europe), including some ad hominum attacks from a NZ based clown who works for a NZ government agency and who used deliberately misdirected email servers to cover his tracks. To say the least he is not welcome here and if he persists I will be forced to out him by name. Let’s just say that we know each other from a past life.

Otherwise it was business as usual. KP is not out to make a splash or turn its authors into notorieties. We do not toe a party line, try not to be hysterical and although very critical of those in power most definitely reject the very concept of “attack” blogging. We leave that for others with darker inclinations. I cannot speak for Anita and Lew, but for me blogging on KP fills a space that is somewhere between academic writing, editorial writing, business analysis and personal reflection. In that measure it serves its purpose.

We shall see how this year goes. Without countervailing input from my other colleagues and with the press of my business commitments growing while I share parenting duties of a toddler (at an age normally associated with grandparenting), I foresee less time to write for KP and consequently a diminished number of posts. But one never knows what the future may bring, so I shall use the theme of embracing uncertainty as my motto for the next 12 months.

All the best to our readers for a healthy and happy 2015.

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Why Does Class Matter? Contemplating Left praxis in a po-mo age.

My posts on the demise of the political Left in NZ have elicited a fair bit of debate, which is good. However, there are two main areas of misunderstanding in the debate that need to be corrected. The first is that that by repeating my oft-stated claim here and elsewhere that socio-economic class, and particularly the working classes, need to be the central focus of Left praxis, I am ignoring the productive and cultural changes of the post-industrial, post-modern era. The second is that I dismiss the entire Left as ineffectual losers.

Let me address the latter first. When I write about the “political” Left I am speaking strictly about those parts of the Left that directly involve themselves in politics, either institutionalized or not. In this category I do not include the cultural or activist Left that engage in direct action in non-political realms such as poverty alleviation, human rights protection, diversity promotion, etc. These type of Left indirectly address political questions and therefore have political import but are not immediately involved with or primarily focused on political matters (say, by acting as parties or running campaigns, among many other things). Some of their members may be, but the Left agencies involved are, first and foremost, non-political in nature.

In a way, these non-political Left entities act much like non-Left charities: they provide direct assistance to the disadvantaged or vulnerable, have clear political content in what they do, but are not political agencies per se.

Thus I recognize the good works of the non-political Left and even see them as providing potential foundation stones for effective Left political activism. But as things currently stand the interface between the non-political and political Left is largely skewed towards diluting the socialist content and neutering the working class orientation inherent in many forms of grassroots Left activism. And where the interface is direct (say, Socialist Aotearoa), the message is too vulgar and the agents too shrill to make their points effectively.

This may sound harsh but that is the reality. The larger point is that I am not dismissing the entire Left as “dead” or moribund. I am confining my diagnosis to the contemporary political Left, narrowly defined, and it is not defeatist to point out what I would have thought was glaringly obvious.

With regard to the second accusation, this has been the subject of much debate here at KP. Lew and Anita have both eloquently written on identity as a primary focus. I accept their arguments but also think that class matters when it comes to a Left praxis. To that end, let me reprise a statement I made in response to a comment made by reader Chris Waugh on the previous post.

Some people mistakenly believe that because I believe that a Left praxis has to be rooted in class consciousness I “dismiss” or neglect superstructural issues like gender, ethnic identity, environmental concerns and sexual preference.

I do not. However, I do not give these superstructural factors primacy in my thought because all of those forms of identification or orientation are non-universal, whereas insertion in a capitalist class system rooted in the exploitation of wage labor is a universal constant. Hence I see modern Left praxis as rooted in a working class consciousness, broadly defined to include all forms of non-managerial wage labor and all ethnicities, genders and preferences.

Put it this way: consider a situation where there is a female hourly worker and a female CEO of a major firm. What identification comes first when they meet each other in the social division of labor? Will identifying as female be so strong that it will bridge the class gap between them? Or will their class determine their relationship in the first instance?

Perhaps gender solidarity will prevail, as could be the case with being gay, Indian, bisexual etc. But I am simply unsure that these identifications universally supersede the class element and therefore should replace it as a focus of Left praxis.

So there you have it. Not all of the Left is ineffectual but the political Left certainly is. A working class orientation is necessary and central to any Left praxis but not sufficient to encompass the myriad of non-class progressive causes that make up the post-industrial Left. Resolving these issues and reconciling the dilemmas inherent in them are what must be done for the Left to regain a significant place in the NZ political arena.

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Yearly Summary.

As 2013 draws to a close I thought I’d summarize how it went on KP.

It was a quiet year, with only 53 posts. The blog has increasingly become a one trick pony show, as Lew and Anita have greatly diminished their presence on it. Lew wrote nine posts during the year, most before June, and Anita contributed one. Work and family commitments clearly play a part in that, and I could well follow the diminished presence trend should the consultancy and my infant son demand more time than I can currently afford. Lew maintains an active presence on Twitter (LewSOS), so his impact on the NZ commentariat continues albeit in pithy form.

We are very much a niche blog, averaging 100-200 views per day (less on weekends), or around 500-600 per week. Most are returning readers. Since I do not post about things that I do not know about, the bulk of the posts have been about international relations, espionage and intelligence, military-strategic affairs and NZ foreign policy, interspersed with some personal observations about more immediate things. That leaves big gaps in the areas in which Anita and Lew have expertise (which is broad and much more NZ focused), hence the lesser number of views compared to previous years when they were more active.

The search terms leading to KP are varied, although “Auckland haka incident” and “Wendy Petrie breasts” are among the most frequent.

There is a stable core of readers and commentators. Most of our links come from other NZ blogs, search engines, Twitter and Facebook. One person, Paul Scott (aka “peterquixote” or “lolitasbrother”) was briefly banned for abusive comments but later reinstated. Another, Hugh, chose to stop commenting because of my irritated responses to remarks of his that I found to be off the subject or obviously uninformed, thread-jacks or useless nitpicking. His decision followed a private email exchange in which we could not resolve our differences.

I was called out on my more pointed remarks to Hugh by others, and have taken on board the need to return to civility even when dealing with trolls (which I accept Hugh is not). Having said that, most of the regular commentators are thoughtful, insightful and knowledgable about what they are writing about, so the task of being civil is easy most of the time.

On a more positive note, KP has avoided involvement in the internecine quarreling and back-biting amongst the NZ Left blogging community, and is treated with a modicum of respect by all but the most rabid blogging Right.

In general, KP is percolating along at a subdued but steady rate.

Not much else to report. I enjoy the fact that I can use the blog to write shorter, more informal and/or ideological essays in a non-academic style yet on subjects that are within or related to my professional and personal interests. It allows me to ruminate on those non-professional concerns as well as link to various media appearances and some of the analyses offered at the consultancy. It is a bit indulgent, to be sure, but I guess that the very nature of blogging is conducive to that.

In any event I would like to wish all readers the best of New Year’s and my hopes that it turns out to be happy and productive for all. I look forward to continuing my second fatherhood (I have two adult children in the US) and to watching my Kiwi son develop during his first year. I very much hope that we will see more of Anita and Lew in 2014 (and perhaps even the reclusive jafapete!), and that whatever happens we manage to continue to satisfactorily fill that small niche that we occupy in the blogging world.

Prospero Ano Nuevo a todos!