Category: This blog

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Who are the non-geriatric NZ Right thinkers?

OK, you knew this was coming. In the interest of ideological balance, or better yet, just because I am curious, I would like to ask readers who the under-60 Right thinkers are. Given that the Left thinker thread spun off into tangents about age limits, outlets and who and what constitutes the “proper “Left (thereby confirming the view that Lefties would rather argue about ideological purity and how many Marxists can balance on the head of the pin than simply answer a straight-forward question), here the label “Right” includes anything that is not skinhead neo-Nazi holocaust denier (which means Ann Rand enthusiasts and those of religious inclinations are eligible). In order to avoid nomination of the fossilised architects of the neo-liberal destruction of NZ’s welfare state, I have placed an age limit of 60 so that we can see if there is new blood in the Right waters.

Please be nice. I was gratified to see that only one commentator on the Left Thinker thread engaged in trolling, and just once at that. Thus I ask that Lefties not engage in bad behaviour and either refrain from making nasty or derisive comments or be sincere in their choices. Of course the same applies for any Right-oriented readers. That means, among other things, that due to reason of probity Rick “I think that my argument is so powerful that it’s not necessary to talk about it” Giles is ineligible for nomination. Beyond that and within the guidelines mentioned above, the field is open.

Although the Left Thinker post elicited a spike in page reads and much commentary (still going), it only elicited a couple of consensus names and a few others, thereby falling short of the short list I had asked for (perhaps that was my mistake, as I figured that a short list would be somewhere between 5-10). Thus I wonder what the Right list will look like (should there be one) even if I have added 20 years to the upper age limit and made no negative editorial remarks about various Right factions in the post (except about skinheads, neo-Nazis and their ilk).

I yield the floor to you.

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Beginning the end in the Little Red Dot.

This weekend I return to SG for one more semester of teaching and research. It marks the beginning of the end of my stay in this interesting–some might say remarkable–SE Asian country, as I will return permanently to NZ in five months. While engaging in my academic responsibilities I will continue to build the nascent political risk consultancy I have established in NZ, chasing down some potential leads and developing the web site concept in order to reach a larger audience and client base. Come June I will be doing that full time.

It has been wonderful to have spent the last two months in NZ, and out on the Auckland west coast in particular. I made in down to the South Island for the holidays, but mostly enjoyed a remarkable run of weather as I reclaimed my home and restored my roots in the community in which it is located. In spite of its problems, I often feel that Kiwis do not fully appreciate how lucky they are and how (relatively) minor the majority of its social and political problems tend to be (some notable and unfortunate exceptions notwithstanding).  In the larger scheme of things it may not be exactly Godzone but it sure is a darn good place to live–and I say this having personally experienced the downside of NZ in the form of my direct exposure to unethical academic management and duplicitous politicians who say one thing then do another without regard to the costs imposed on innocents and the country’s international reputation. But even then, a few ethically bankrupt elites do not detract from the broader, more positive picture.

In any event I plan to compile a short “to-do” list of places in SE Asia to visit while back in SG (one mayor attraction of the country is that it is a transportation hub with many options when it comes to regional travel). Since I enjoy open water swimming and snorkeling, the top of my list is the Bornean East Coast, which I understand is unspoiled and non-touristy (which is why I have no interest in Bali or the tacky Thai resort destinations). I have been to Pulau Tiomen and Bintan, so want to go further afield in the search of reefs, surf and fish. If anyone has suggestions along those lines, I am all ears.

I will continue to post and attempt to contribute to NZ policy discussions while finishing up in SG, and look forward to what promises to be another interesting chapter in a life yet to be fully played out on either a personal or professional level.

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Felizes Fiestas y Prospero Ano Nuevo a nuestros lectores.

I am spending Xmas in Otago with my partner’s family and just wanted to wish our readers the best for the festive season and a very happy, healthy, prosperous and productive New Year. KP has built a faithful cadre of intelligent readers and commentators, and we continue to chug along nicely in our niche of the blogosphere. Much thanks for contributing to our modest success. And thanks to Lew and Anita for being such good collaborators even in the face of obstacles and other pressing business.

As for me, I have already received the best Xmas present I could possibly hope for: my partner has been offered a job at a NZ university so we are both coming back permanently in 2011. I may no longer be in academia but at least she is and I can work on the consultancy without fear of losing everything if it does not work out. Plus, once back in NZ we can write our collaborative and individual articles about the SE Asian country we have lived in the past 3 years without fear of deportation or defamation lawsuits. There is much material that needs to see the light of day, so I am looking forward to being able to put thoughts to paper on that score.

In any event, may your holidays be as happy as mine.

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Unattributed paraphrasing as unspoken flattery?

From time to time I read bloggers who complain that there work is stolen by MSM “repeaters” and repackaged under the repeaters’ by-line or in a story under their name. This form of plagarism is hard to prove conclusively because unless the repeater uses phrases word for word, s/he can claim that fortuitous intellectual coincidence rather than malice was involved.

Then I read Kerre Woodham’s column in today’s HoS. The tone is similar to the thrust of my post earlier in the week about the rise and fall of Paul Henry. That’s OK, as a number of people have taken the view that TVNZ management is as much if not more responsible than Mr. Henry for the debacle that his “insensitive remarks” has turned into.

But what are the chances that she and I would both use the phrase “bullet proof” in paragraphs specifically referring to the moment at the Qantas Media Awards when Henry decided he was invulnerable? Since her version appears five days after mine did, is it a wonderful coincidence and example of great minds thinking alike or an example of the type of repeating that other bloggers have complained about? In other words, is this Kerre’s “Noelle moment” or am I reading too much into it and being too possessive of a widely used argument and phraseology?. Readers can compare both essays and decide for themselves.

Either way, I guess I should be flattered–except that she gets paid to write things that I dole up for free.

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The masculinisation of this blog (or how it became a pissing match).

Over the past few months my partner has observed that KP has increasingly become a boys club. Part of that, she notes, is that I write about security things and boys like guns and war, so tend to dominate commentary on those themes. I have pointed out that I write about plenty of other things, and that Lew covers a range of subjects that are not exclusively “male” in orientation. And yet 95% of our commentators are male.  And, as my partner also observes, their comments tend to become the intellectual  equivalent of pissing matches or penis length arguments rather than reasonable exchange of views in which the worth of opposing perspectives is acknowledged. She includes me in the pissing match crowd. 

I attribute the apparent masculinisation of KP in large part to the fact that Anita’s long hiatus has deprived the blog of the gender balance it needs, in part because Anita writes from a feminist perspective and about gender issues from a wimin’s point of view. That of itself is interesting because when she does (and Anita does not write exclusively about gender-related themes), the comment threads show a disproportionate number of females in the mix. In effect, there appears to be a self-segregation going on: men read and comment about “boy” topics and wimin read and comment about “girl” themes. This can be seen on a larger scale in the topics covered by political blogs written by wimin versus those (the majority) written by men, which makes me think that the “problem” is not exclusive to KP.

This bothers me. I do like to think of myself as writing about exclusively “male” topics since I believe that subjects such as international relations, foreign policy, labour politics, democratisation and regime change, and security issues are (or should be) matters of universal interest. Likewise, I do not believe that topics such as rape, child-raising or workplace harassment are exclusively female concerns. But until Anita comes back, it appears that KP is becoming the political blog equivalent of a (somewhat polite) rugby clubhouse.

So I guess the question of the day is whether there is a self-segregation of wimin’s versus male topics, and if in fact this blog, for worse in my view, has become masculinised (sic) beyond repair.

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Evaluating the KP debate experiment.

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

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

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

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

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

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Hello tworld!

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

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

L

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I write like…

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

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

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

L

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A Quarter Million Page Views.

In the scheme of all blog things, it is a small milestone but still worth a mention. Yesterday we passed 250,000 page views. It has been 18 months since KP started up, and we have built a steady readership base since then. We tend to get between 300-600 page views per day, 200-300 on the weekends. Given that we average around +/- 20 posts a month, that is not too bad. I expect that readership will increase once Anita comes back on line after her hiatus.

I tend to think of KP as a”boutique” blog: non-partisan. non-orthodox and non- doctrinaire Left,  more studied (some would say over-intellectualised) than slanted, as much class-oriented as it is post-modern (especially when it comes to identity, environment and gender), with posts that are considerably longer than the norm. For NZ it is also different in the amount of coverage dedicated to comparative politics, international relations and security affairs. It takes a certain type of reader to enjoy such a mix, and given our rules of decorum, a certain type of commentator to reflect on the posts.

All of which is to say thanks for the reading. We shall endeavour to keep providing informed commentary and critical analysis of contemporary issues, and we hope that you will keep us honest with your thoughtful critiques and points of order.