Whatever happened to the idea that building and maintaining infrastructure is council's core business?

  

YESTERDAY MORNING, THE RESIDENTS OF Waipukurau were awoken to loudspeakers in the street "spreading the message of immediate and vital water restrictions" after a "major leak."

South Wairarapa residents endured water restrictions two weeks ago due to leaks in their water infrastructure.

All summer, water and sewage has continued to pour downs Wellington streets, while water restrictions are imposed in Wellingtonian's homes and the council starts planning for a state of emergency. (An announcement this morning says Wellingtonians should prepare for "Level 3" restrictions, and the declaration of a "drinking water emergency.")

And on Boxing Day in Auckland, thirty-six of Auckland's beaches were off limits because they were contaminated with poo.

It's all a bit shit at the moment, isn't it. All too literally.

Billions of dollars are supposed to be needed to fix New Zealand's threadbare infrastructure after what's said to be decades of underground under-investment.  Local Government New Zealand (a lobby group for the very people who under-invested) reckons we are "heading toward a tragedy if more is not invested in council infrastructure, and that people need to get used to double-digit rates increases." Infrastructure New Zealand (a lobby group who chases government dollars for its members) reckons the number of billions needed is somewhere near 200 billion.

The solution from both lobby groups is supposed to be lots of central government cash.

Meanwhile (to pick one council just at random, since it's where I live) Auckland council's rate this year are going up another 7.5 percent this year. And that's with a mayor supposedly reluctant to raise them. And to pick another (let's use Wellington since it presently has the highest-profile mayor) they've just voted to "invest" $330 millions dollars in a tumble-down town hall —on the back of a 12.3 percent rate rise which still doesn't cover what could be a billion-dollar hole in their accounts.

Um.

May I ask a polite question?

Just what the fuck is the primary purpose of local fucking goivernment? 

Whatever happened to the idea that building and maintaining infrastructure is council's core fucking business?

If I refer to my handy copy of G.W.A Bush's history of Auckland Council (if you just give me a moment to find it) we find that the clamour for setting up the damned thing back in the 1840s was because sewage was flowing in the streets. Specifically Queen Street. "Auckland," wrote the 1847 editor of The New Zealander, while it is "erected in the healthiest country in the world, has enough filthy lanes and dirty drains to keep up a virtual plague, had it been situated in a less airy country." Set up finally in 1851, its core business (reflected in its six committees) was Bye-Laws, Roads, Public Works, Public Health, and Charitable Trusts. This reflected Lord John Russell's instructions to Governor Hobson back in December 1840 that "district governments" should be set up "for the conduct of all local affairs such as drainage, bye-roads, police, the erecting and repair of local prisons, court-houses, and the like."

Much responsibility has been taken away from councils since (bye-roads, police, the erecting and repair of local prisons, court-houses, and the like) so from the Lord's list we're left, as core business, just drainage.

Fucking drainage.

You know, the stuff that's supposed to contain that stuff that's running down our streets.

This is what Labour's Three Five Six Waters was supposed to solve, taking away this the core business of council. National has binned that, but continues to dangle to councils a somewhat similar carrot. Because some councils were, and still are, keen to off-load the job of drainage to someone else. 

But if I may again ask another polite question: Why the fuck aren't councils doing the fucking job they were specifically set up to do?

Huh?!

It's not like they've been keeping rates down while they've under-fucking-invested.

New water infrastructure is desperately needed around the country because, for the most part, for at least two decades, council's haven't been doing their core work.

Why do I say two decades?

Guess why: just over two decades ago, in 2002, the then-Local Government Minister was the hard-left Alliance Party's Sandra Lee. And it was then that local government debt began to rise dramatically — not because councils around the country were over-investing in infrastructure; not because they were going hard on their core business; not at all because they were building, maintaining and upgrading roads, bye-roads, drains, pipes and parks as they were damned well supposed to. For the most part, instead, with some significant exceptions, they weren't. What they began building instead was a lot of expensive fucking monuments. 

Monuments mostly to themselves.

The culprit here was Sandra Lee's Local Government Amendment Act 2002, which granted to city councils, district councils and regional councils a "power of general competence" (I know, right?) which would enable them to enter into any activity they wished, with the only limit being their imagination and the pockets of their ratepayers.

Prior to Sandra Lee's Local Government Act, councils could only do what they were legally permitted to to, i.e., to carry out their core business. After Sandra Lee's Local Government Act, however, the leash was off. And council credit cards started straight away racking up debt for vanity projects everywhere. 

I'd like to say I told you so. I'd like to, so I will. Because I was as outraged then as I am now:

Libertarianz Leader Peter Cresswell is outraged at today's announcement by Helen Clark and Minister of Local Government Sandra Lee to grant local authorities "a power of general competence" in order to "enhance the well-being of their communities." "The well being of everyone in a community is more likely to be enhanced by retaining a tight leash on councils," says Cresswell, "since most councils have already well demonstrated they struggle for competence."
    "Local government throughout New Zealand's history has demonstrated its utter incompetence in handling the loot they confiscate from ratepayers by wasting it on such idiocies as the New Plymouth Wind Wand, the Auckland Britomart edifice, and the Palmerston North empty civic building." he said. ...
    "More substantially," says Cresswell, "there is a crucial constitutional principle at stake -the constitutional principle that citizens may do whatever they wish, apart from what is specifically outlawed, whereas governments and councils may only do what is specifically legislated for. The main purpose of this constitutional principle is to keep a leash on government, both central and local. It is this leash that is beginning to gnaw at local governments, and it is this leash that Clark and Lee propose to untie."
    "It is a dangerous step to take," warns Cresswell, who points out that councils are being given more 'freedom' at he same time as the Resource Management Amendments Bill threatens to take away even more freedom from New Zealand property owners. "The constitutional principle is being reversed," he says. "Even as they propose giving local government wider powers to act, they are taking away the power of individuals to act for themselves," says Cresswell. "Every property owner should rise up in protest," he says.
    "Libertarianz will be making a strong submission on the consultation document," says Cresswell. 

Which we did. For all the bloody use that it did: The Clark Government passed it, a succession of Local Government ministers since since has kept it, and every bloody local councillor ever since Sandra's "permissive" Act has spent like a drunken sailor on shore leave with a start-up founder's credit card.

The New Zealand Local Government Funding Agency (LGFA) supplies around two-thirds of that council debt, and last time I looked their tab was just over $18 billion. That's about $20,000 for every ratepayer. Add to that an existing $5 billion of Auckland and Christchurch council debt. And those numbers are every year by around a billion a year as ballooning rates rises fail to keep up with even-more ballooning council spending.

And as you can now see, it's not like they've been spending much of it underground.

In Christchurch they've been turning the city into "an innovative and modern community with major facilities from Akaroa Wharf to Te Kaha Canterbury Multi-Use Arena." In Wellington they've been watching the city's infrastructure crumble while they vote to spend hundreds of millions on earthquake-prone inner-city monuments of questionable value. And here in Auckland, council have allocated yet another billion dollars (plus fuck-ups) to pour down the ever-expanding black hole of Len Brown's train set, plus several hundreds of millions more to continue transforming the place into "one of the world's most liveable cities."

A shame there are very few plans to make it an affordable one.

What on earth is to be done?

You know, here's an idea.

Instead of keeping Sandra Lee's Local Government Act and binning Three Waters, which is where this new Coalition Government is at the moment, how's about — and hear me out, now that you've all heard the story —how's about we bin Sandra Lee's act and tell fucking councils to stop over-spending, to close down their PR departments, and to get back to their core fucking business.

Maybe you could suggest something like that to Simeon Brown, who's the current Local Government minister. 

But you'll have to explain to him first who Sandra Lee is, and what she did back then to stuff things up. Because I don't think he was born then.

IDENTITY POLITICS: PART 1 - By your ‘azza’ group shall ye be known.

Good to see one of the Blue Team explicitly pushing back against identity politics. A rare thing, but necessary -- and especially good, because he clearly states the cure: individualism.

What is identity politics [writes National's Simon O'Connor], and why does it matter to you?
Well, the first thing to understand about identity politics is that you don’t matter. All that matters is what group, or tribe, are you are part of:
Are you black or white, Māori or Pākehā; are you gay or straight, young or old – in the fact, there are so many various and possible group identities are almost endless.
What isn’t included is you – your life, your experiences, your thoughts, desires, or ambitions.
To embrace identity politics is to say that the group is always more important than the individual. And so, all that matters is that you fit into some sort of group, usually based on your race, or gender, or ethnicity....
At the heart of identity politics is the rejection of you as an individual. You are no more than the groups you are assigned to. And once in these groups, there is no hope, there is no redemption. Just perpetual victimhood and oppression.
We should reject identity politics and intersectionality and instead celebrate everyone for who they are in their own right. Martin Luther King’s words are truer than ever – let us judge people by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. 

Right on!

So, since Labour-Lite are finally realising they're little more than just Labour-Without-the-Identity Politics -- and pushing back on it -- and we're entering an election year in which identity politics is already front and centre -- as many "adult human females" and "middle-class cis white boomer males" might already appreciate -- it seems like a good time to repost (in several parts) an excerpt from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

Today: What is Identity Politics?

“Cultural relativism began as an intellectual critique of Western thought but has now 

become an influential justification for one of the contemporary era’s most potent 

political forces. This is the revival of tribalism in thinking and politics.” 

~ Keith Windschuttle 

"If the west resorts to tribalism to defend civilisation, then 

civilisation is already irredeemably lost." 

~ Yaron Brook

[...]
This particular brand of nonsense comes under the bigger heading of “identity politics,” but it could just as easily, and more simply, be identified as the modern-day tribalism that it represents. It is a politics that identifies people by their group identity in order to effectively silence them – the Christchurch killings being a particularly gruesomely extreme example of what that can mean. Yet it's dangerous whichever side of the alleged political spectrum from which it emerges.

I’m going to start by talking about what this thing called identity politics is, where it came from, how it has morphed since – how identity politics has been used to shut down speech -- and what you can do to counter it.

PART 1: What is Identity Politics?

“We hear, since emancipation, much said by our modern coloured leaders 

in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, 

race men, and the like. One man is praised for being a race man and 

another is condemned for not being a race man. In all this talk of race, 

the motive may be good, but the method is bad. 

It is an effort to cast out Satan by Beelzebub.”

~ Frederick Douglass

I write this here today as a cisgendered, heterosexual white male[1]. So as everybody imbued with this notion would “know,” what I say here should only be taken seriously by other folk who share that identity. Because as “everybody knows,” your identity – your gender, your sexuality, your race, your class – these are the things that truly define you.

You speak “as a woman of colour.”

You speak “as a disabled lesbian.”

I speak, Galt forbid, “as a white man.”

In more-and-more meetings and debates in recent years, these words “as a/azza” have become not just the accepted way to begin speaking – like a reflexive cough at the start of every speech -- like some natty politically-correct version of reciting your whakapapa – but an implicit admission that one’s views will be irretrievably coloured (ahem), either positively or negatively, by the group of which one is an unchosen member.

American politician Ayanna Presley put it bluntly at progressive activists’ 2019 Netroots Convention, warning folk that only those raising the right voices, coming to the table “as a something,” were welcome there:

If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalised and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice!

Ayanna Presley is black. Her call – “brown face, brown voice; black face, black voice” – is “the very essence of identity politics.” Yet only five decades before, in the vanguard of change (or so he hoped) Martin Luther King declared on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

"One day"? King’s day has still not come. Judged by contemporary cultural affairs, that blessed day may have to wait a few more decades yet.

The morality of identity politics can seem benign, when for instance the new Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle guest-edits Vogue [as she did back in 2019], choosing for its famous cover not the usual stylishly sleek model but instead a rainbow coalition of appropriately figured stars (Fig. 2).

The message behind her choice of cover stars was clear enough [argues the Spectator's Joanna Rossiter]: you are moral not because of what you do but because of who you are – be it female, transgender, black or freckled.

Yet that, right there, is the identitarian message: “you are moral not because of what you do but because of who you are.” Because of the group into which you fell accidentally at birth.

The group into which one falls may be defined by race. Or it may be by class, by ethnicity, by disability – by freckles – by hair colour (if you’re a ginger[2]) -- or by geographical area. The important thing here however is that while you may choose your ideas and your values, you did not choose your group.

(And everyone is treated in this ‘lowest-common-denominator’ way; as if this is all about you that really matters.)

And also, as you will no doubt have noticed by now, while all groups are allegedly equal, there will be implied a clear sense of victimhood making some groups more equal than others.

There are some groups, we see, whose speech should not be set free. ["Cis white males" and "adult human females" increasingly prominent among them.]

We’ll discuss this galloping inequality shortly. But the fact your defining group (or groups) is unchosen is important here. It’s important because it ignores, and makes un-important, every human being’s defining attribute: which is their reasoning power. This modern tribalism serves to remove reason from modern debate, and to elevate instead the trivial, the accidental, the irrational.

Philosopher Tara Smith insists that “it's not irrational by mistake …. It's brazenly irrational. It's irrational on principle. It is anti rational.”

Its view is: we don't need reason. I don’t respect it. I don't go by reason. I go by race, ethnicity, geography, et cetera. Solidarity with my group is more important than evidence or logic. Tribe over truth.
    It erases the individual. You personally do not matter. [What’s important is] you “as a woman.” Now, you’ve always got to be on the lookout for the “azzas” – “as a woman,” “as a gay woman,” “as a white male” … “Azza.” But notice that you, the individual, Thomas, Maria, … You're a token. You're one of them – of your “azza” group.

By your ‘azza’ group shall ye be known.

This in a nutshell is “identity politics.” It’s as if they think your gender, your sexuality, your race, your class are what determines your thought. And in fact, yes, this is precisely what “they” do think. Determinism is not dead, it has just shrivelled up and morphed its way into what’s now called “identity politics.”

CONTINUED IN PART 2: 'Determinism is not dead, it just smells that way'

[1] For those unaware of this nomenclature, “cisgendered” means “denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.”
[2] Tim Minchin, “Only a ginger can call a ginger ‘ginger’” – excerpt from ‘Prejudice’ (2009)

Taking your eye off your knitting

"Could [government, central or local] have mitigated [the damage caused by Cyclone] Gabrielle? Lurking behind that question is the abolition of Catchment Boards when they were merged into Regional Councils [by Michael Bloody Bassett] in 1989. We were told at the time that their task to restrain the rivers from flooding was largely over. I wonder if the residents of Esk Valley think that today. Dropping a responsibility down in the bureaucratic hierarchy often results in reducing its ability to do its job....
    "I wonder whether central government has yet learned that its propensity for centralisation does not always work. Many Cantabrians loathed the way they were pushed around or ignored by Wellington [after the Christchurch earthquakes]. Centralisation is a powerful force in New Zealand politics. While there may be a little difference between Labour and National on this dimension, it was National which was in charge dealing with the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquakes....
    "[T]here is a tendency in central government to see itself as much more competent that local government, underestimating local competence and overestimating its own. Additionally, Wellington bureaucrats have a tin ear to local aspirations. We will see whether Labour gets the balance better in 2023 than National did after 2011."

~ Brian Easton getting some things right in his otherwise lacklustre post 'Gabrielle’s Trumpet challenges fiscal stability' [hat tip Point of Order]

"If NZ's political class had looked to the history of gun control efforts they would have seen they were walking a well-trodden path that leads to a dead end. But then again, if they had enough foresight to know that ill-considered restrictions on personal liberty are usually counterproductive and often breed rebellion, they probably wouldn't have gone into government." Bonus #QotD

"Once again, responding to a horrendous crime by inflicting knee-jerk, authoritarian restrictions on innocent people proves to be an ineffective means of convincing people to obey. Specifically, New Zealand's government—which also stepped up censorship and domestic surveillance after bloody attacks on two Christchurch mosques earlier this year—is running into stiff resistance to new gun rules from firearms owners who are slow to surrender now-prohibited weapons and will probably never turn them in...
    "As of last week, only around 700 weapons had been turned over. There are an estimated 1.5 million guns—with an unknown number subject to the new prohibition on semiautomatic firearms—in the country overall...
    "Officials should have seen it coming...
    "Arguably, defiant gun owners are just being realistic in seeing little to gain by obeying restrictive laws that have their greatest impact on those who pose no threat to their neighbours...
    "If New Zealand's political class had looked to the history of gun control efforts they would have seen that they were walking a well-trodden path that leads to a dead end. But then again, if they had enough foresight to know that ill-considered restrictions on personal liberty are usually counterproductive and often breed rebellion, they probably wouldn't have gone into government."
        ~ Jerome Tuccille writing in Reason magazine
.

"Under pressure, democracies have a nasty habit of acting like panicked crowds, suppressing anything frightening or just different in a search for security and conformity... a grim illustration of just how vulnerable the "liberal" element of liberal democracy can be." BONUS #QotD

"Under pressure, democracies have a nasty habit of acting like panicked crowds, suppressing anything frightening or just different in a search for security and conformity...   "In the wake of [the brutal mass murders committed at two mosques in Christchurch], the country's government has succumbed to blind reaction by restricting speech, depriving innocent people of arms, and heightening domestic surveillance—intrusions into individual rights that are inherent whether or not governments and majorities formally respect them.  

  "It's a grim illustration of just how vulnerable the 'liberal' element of liberal democracy can be." 

          ~ Jerome Tuccille, from Reason magazine's 'In New Zealand, a Democracy Turns Against Itself'.

Gun buyback: Correlation is not causation [updated]

THE LABOUR-LED GOVERNMENT'S compulsory 'gun buyback' legislation is said by the Deputy Prime Minister to cost somewhere around $300 million. That would buy a lot of policemen.

So clearly the Labour-led Government, along with everyone else in Parliament except ACT's David Seymour, has concluded that this compulsory buyback will keep New Zealanders a lot safer than a lot more policemen will.
That doesn't say a lot for our policemen. (Nor does that figure say anything about the realistic cost of the buyback, which is more like billions than millions.)

But what do we know about how much safer the compulsory gun buyback will make us?
The fact is, neither the Labour-led Government, nor anyone else in Parliament really knows, because they haven't and won't have the time to do that research.

What they are really relying on is the alleged popular success of the Australian compulsory gun buyback after the Port Arthur massacre. So it's worth asking just exactly how successful that gun buyback was in making Australians safer. So I went to look for research that did look at how successful that had been in reducing lethal violence. In 2016 Science Direct published 'A systematic review of quantitative evidence about the impacts of Australian legislative reform on firearm homicide,' which concluded:

Australian studies have not found evidence of changes in lethal violence following gun law reform. Empirical findings about Australian gun law reform contradict ‘popular’ views about those laws...

    These [studies] examined various different time periods, and used a range of different statistical analysis methods. No study found statistical evidence of any significant impact of the legislative changes on firearm homicide rates.

That sounds fairly conclusive, right?

In fact, if you look at the rate gun deaths from 1998 to 2014, you would think New Zealand and Australia already had the same restrictions on guns:

Source: GunPolicy.Org

And yet Australia already has these restrictions that New Zealand politicians are now eagerly rushing through.

So what is going on here? Why do those two declining figures (great news, by the way!) seem about the same even though the two country's gun laws are so different? Why does the popular 'knowledge' of the Australian buyback success not tally with the Australian studies that have found no evidence of changes in lethal violence following gun law reform? Why, in summary, do empirical findings about Australian gun law reform contradict ‘popular’ views about those laws.

And what does it say about the gun buyback programme that the decline began nearly a decade before?

The simple answer from the researchers is this: that the rates of gun death were going down in any case. The evidence from those researchers is that the buyback did not cause the decline (which as you can see form the graph above began before 1996) it simply correlates with its continuation.

Correlation is not causation. Perhaps the popular view is so different because that simple lesson is still widely unlearned.

SO WHAT DO THE the results of Australian research on their buyback programme over there tell us we should expect to see as a result of spending around $300 million on the compulsory buyback programme here? "The results," says one, "suggest that the [buyback will] not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates." In short, concludes another:

Although gun buybacks appear to be a logical and sensible policy that helps to placate the public’s fears, the evidence so far suggests 23 that in the Australian context, the high expenditure incurred to fund the 1996 gun buyback has not translated into any tangible reductions in terms of firearm deaths. 

As I was saying, $300 million would buy an awful lot of policemen. Not to fool ourselves that more policemen would have foiled this or any other shooting -- because a police response time of 36 minutes even of the almost-miraculous 6 minutes* to arrive at a site where unarmed people are being shot is telling proof otherwise -- but if we must have knee-jerk law and rushed spending decisions as a result of this massacre, why not head down that path instead of criminalising otherwise law-abiding gun-owners. (Not forgetting that the murderer himself broke existing gun laws in modifying his weapon before his lethal spree, reminding us that no matter what laws are passed, criminals -- like gangs -- will still ignore them whenever they feel like it.)

AND IF WE ARE serious about avoiding another atrocity like this one -- which is after all the alleged aim of this expensive legislation being rushed through with such unseemly haste -- then another unanswered question seems to present itself, which is this: what would you might most want to have with you when a man with a gun bursts through your door and starts shooting? A policeman to defend you all would be a fine thing to have, but in their absence – and experience from around the world tells us that a policeman can never be there in time to defend us – what you may most want is something to scare the gunman off. Just as this arsehole-with-a-gun was finally frightened away by a very brave man threatening the coward with an EFTPOS machine and with a shotgun the gunman had already discarded.

Because self-defence is still legal in New Zealand, just, under Section 48 of the Crimes Act “If one fears for their life or that of another.” Good law. The very same law that police are covered by when using firearms for their activities. Law however that is not set in stone, and that the police have for some time been wishing to overturn.
Could the outcome of the Mosque shootings have been different if the police upheld the law on self-defence instead of vilifying anyone who uses firearms for self-defence? We can never know.

After the Christchurch atrocity, and the political reaction to it, crime researcher Dr. John Lott asks the obvious question:

Police are extremely important in stopping crime, but the police can’t be there all the time. The police themselves understand that they virtually always arrive on the crime scene after the crime has occurred. And that raises a real question, what should people do when they’re having to confront a criminal by themselves?

Anyone like to have a crack at answering that? Because your politicians haven't. And won't.

But you should keep asking it.

We do know already that this rushed legislation will be followed by other more considered legislation, imposing further restrictions on gun ownership, and considering again a programme of costly gun registration. If there is an agenda, it will become apparent then. We must hope, and remain vigilant, that the agenda does not go from vilification of this legal right to removing it from the books altogether.

Because then where would we and other brave men be when we do need to defend ourselves? 

THIS IS NOT AT all to say that a government has no moral right to regulate weapons. Of course they do. Governments (properly) hold the legal monopoly over the use of force in a given geographic area. That's a fundamental definition of what a government is. Being a primary means of projecting force means that weapons and the regulation thereof must be permanently on their radar. But by what principle should this be done? As philosopher John Mccaskey patiently explains, 

To see why it is proper for a government to regulate weapons and to understand the principles by which it should, we need to go back to some fundamental principles of moral philosophy, political philosophy, different kinds of rights, and the nature of government... 

    You have a natural right to defend yourself against an attack, using unlimited force if necessary. But it still might rightly be illegal for you to own or carry a gun... 

      Remember, the proper question is not, 'Why can the government restrict my access to guns?' The proper question is, 'What share of its legal monopoly on the use of force should the government share with its citizens?' The proper answer is, 'Whatever is needed for those citizens to protect themselves when the government cannot.'

Those remain a Q+A that this government, and this country, still need to have. Why don't you begin asking and answering it for yourself?

* * * * * 

* The New York Times lays out the probable response timeline which, however rapid, still allowed the murderer to leave the first place of carnage and drive across town to create another:

It is unclear exactly what time the gunman entered Al Noor, which was crowded with worshipers for Friday Prayer. But the police said that they received the first call for help at 1:41 p.m., and that the first officers arrived there six minutes later.
    The video recorded by the gunman, which was livestreamed on Facebook, showed a man trying to tackle him inside the mosque, only to be shot and killed.
    Six minutes after firing his first shot, he drove away. Three minutes later, a siren can be heard on the video as he is driving to the second mosque.
    The siren becomes louder, then fades, suggesting the police and the gunman may have just missed each other, with officers and medical personnel racing toward Al Noor as he was pulling away. 
    About 30 front-line police officers would be on the streets of Christchurch around lunchtime on an average Friday, said Chris Cahill, a detective inspector who is president of a local labor union for police officers.
        When that first panicked call came in, he added, the dispatcher would have sent all of them to Al Noor….

    The police said a special armed tactical unit arrived at Al Noor Mosque four minutes after the first officers, or 10 minutes after the initial emergency call…
    “Any police force in the world — to get to the scene in six minutes, a specialist team there in 10 — that would be a success,” Cahill said.
Patrick Skinner, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer now working for an American police department, agreed.
  “I’d say that the police response was rather quick in a tactical sense,” he said, noting that the officers were rushing into a violent situation that was still unfolding — and that had been encouraged by individuals espousing bigotry and hatred.
    Still, it was not fast enough. The officers arrived to a horrific scene, with the dead and wounded outnumbering the city’s usual on-duty police force.

.
.

The knee jerks, and, after having jerked, what's left?

IN THE WAKE OF the Christchurch atrocity, there are calls to ban outright so-called hate speech, and the pitchforks for it are already out: Already the temporary bans against websites hosting the murderer's video have been extended, and black lists are being drawn up to permanently ban websites, workers, speakers and Twitter feeds for offending against the self-righteous mores of the mob.

Atrocity begins with cheap opportunistic hate speech against minorities [declared the Greens' Golriz Ghahraman at a 'vigil' shortly after the event]. It began with hate speech, allowed to spread here online. History has taught us that hate speech is a slippery slope to atrocity. We now know that New Zealand needs to address this.

This was us, she insists. All of us, not just one Australian with a gun. Hate speech is always a slippery slope to atrocity she proclaims -- erroneously (and narcissistically) offering up as as partial proof of both, in her speech immediately after this atrocity: the barrage of hate she says she herself receives online. The conclusion she draws from the "barrage": that this was not an aberration from overseas.

And address this, she demands: but how? By damning all white people as colonialist oppressors, as her colleague Ms Davidson was at that same vigil? By 'calling out' anyone who expresses reservations about being encouraged to wear a Muslim headdress (a headdresss damned by by many Muslimas themselves as a symbol of feminine oppression)? By decrying anyone as "racist" who adheres to what they call "Islamophobia" (despite the General Secretary of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organisation, declaring it to be"factually incorrect and counter-productive to define Islamophobia as 'rooted in racism'”)?

In any case, the demands are being addressed now, however, by those listening to her calls and those much like them: by the black lists being sent to police, to Twitter, to ISPs and Facebook and to every guardian of real or online communication who can enact a permanent or temporary ban on speech they deem hateful (black lists based almost wholly upon the authors' views of what they themselves just don't like). Addressed by immediate bans on publications and videos. Addressed by the knee-jerk calls to give more power to security services to carry out their own interventions, their own investigations, their own intrusions  -- security services who failed utterly to avert this atrocity despite the millions of dollars and already intrusive power they already possess, and before the just-announced inquiry into their abject failure has even been held. (“When it comes to Simon Bridges calling for enhanced powers for NZ spy agencies," observes security specialist Paul Buchanan, "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.”)

And how good a diagnosis is Golriz's anyway? For what, after all, is this thing Ms Ghahrahman calls "hate speech"? "Hate speech" is so amorphous a thing it is crying out for definition.

And maybe that's the real point of the term: precisely that it is so very hard to define.

You see, for a censor, or for any high priest of the public square, that of course is so much the beauty of this anti-concept of "hate speech." Because if you yourself get to define what "hate speech" is, and this "hate speech" thing is being banned, then you yourself get to ban whatever sort of speech (and speakers) you yourself dislike.

It's a beautiful thing, censorship, when you're the one holding the whip.

Or would like to.

Especially when you've devised this apparently elegant way -- this anti-concept -- of keeping the whip hidden.

TO REMIND YOU (SINCE we've been talking about this idea of anti-concepts several times in recent years), an "anti-concept" is

an artificial, unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate ...
    Observe the technique involved . . . . It consists of creating an artificial, unnecessary, and (rationally) unusable term, designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concepts—a term which sounds like a concept, but stands for a “package-deal” of disparate, incongruous, contradictory elements taken out of any logical conceptual order or context, a “package-deal” whose (approximately) defining characteristic is always a non-essential. This last is the essence of the trick...
    [I]f a man accepts a term with a definition by non-essentials, his mind will substitute for it the essential characteristic of the objects he is trying to designate . . . . Thus the real meaning of the term will automatically replace the alleged meaning.

This is why "anti-concepts" like "hate speech" and "Islamophobia" are witch-doctored up in the first place -- to dismiss ideas (and those who hold them) without even a hearing in return.

So-called "hate speech" is an anti-concept witch-doctored up to obliterate free speech. The process is working. Observe that "hate speech" itself is so suitably amorphous that even Wikipedia struggles to wrap its head around the concept:

Hate speech [says Wikipedia's authors] is speech that attacks a person or a group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

So we have allegedly three ingredients to hate speech: 

1. speech that attacks; and 
2. the objects of those attacks; and 
3. the attacks are based on "membership" of some group.

The objects of attack are clearly defined. The speech itself: not so much. 

And that itself is really the whole point.

Leave ill-defined in advance what an "attack" looks like -- an "attack" that is wholly and solely verbal -- and there is instantly a chill felt down the collar of anyone who wants to say anything about anyone.

It is doubtful even today that someone could declare that all arguments have been settled and all debate prohibited. It is enough to achieve that aim today, however, simply by declaring that someone or other has or may have been "offended." Or "violated." Or "threatened." Threatened by speech that in itself constitutes on threat. And on that basis of offence alone, every would-be speaker can be silenced, and every debate declared "settled" before it even starts. So it is today after Christchurch:

->Mainstream news sites are announcing a "crackdown" on their online comments sections, and calls to remove so-called "extremist" content.

->Demands are being made for platforms like Facebook and Twitter to "deplatform" people on lists being rabidly drawn up by the woke.

->Commentators as innocuous as Duncan Garner and Sean Plunkett also face calls  to be deplatformed by their media managers. "It's now a public safety issue," declares Golriz.

->Websites are being blocked by ISPs here and in Australia (who, immediately after the atrocity, blocked any website who posted the live video of the murders) but who have since elected to continue those blocks after being asked to by the government.

->And other websites are being blocked, or face blockage, because they just somehow quietly slip onto someone's black list (including this one, gentle readers, which someone elected to place in the category of "hate and racism" on one popular website filter used by companies around the world) and then face up to a future of gentle but gradual suffocation.

->Meanwhile, un-woken workers are being sacked and "panel discussions" are being urgently held around the country about how to do all this grassroots censorship even better: Russell Brown for example leading a panel discussion tomorrow "on how Artificial Intelligence and other technology can help us create safer societies"-- or as Brown himself describes it: "about the place of technical solutions in quelling online hate speech and fake news. Are human moderators enough?" Or (the unwritten implication here) should we immediately implement censorship by robot.

->And of course knee-jerk censorship will already make it almost impossible to determine and understand the views of the only person who actually (presumably) does know why he did it, i.e., the author of the atrocity himself, whose rambling so-called "manifesto" faces disappearance down a near-permanent black hole at the behest of the government.

It has become so insane that Martyn Bradbury (yes, Martyn Bradbury) is looking like a fount of wisdom in summing up some of the (over-)reaction:

Attempting to connect the violence on Friday with right wing opinions, the defence of free speech or concerns about immigration and conflate that with all white people as racist murderers is a sure fire way of eroding the solidarity in sorrow that has bound many.

MUCH OF IT MAY be well-meaning (if not "Davidson and Ghahraman's ... determination to leverage-off the Christchurch Mosque Shootings to unleash an uncompromising anti-racist campaign encompassing the whole of Pakeha New Zealand"), but the chilling effect of the suffocation is real enough. And real even if bans, black lists and blocking don't work out. If I may paraphrase a post by Amy Peikoff on this principle, it occurs to me that this down-home version of Attack Watch is a case study in the application of Ayn Rand’s observation that force stops thinking:

In Chapter 8 of his book, 'Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand,' Leonard Peikoff writes, “[I]f and to the extent that someone’s gun becomes a man’s epistemological court of final appeal, replacing the law of identity [A is A], then the man cannot think.” 

    So, to those who have not joined the chorus conflating all white people with racist murderers, or who still have reservations about Islamists and Islamic culture, or who identify and condemn the seething identity politics of both right and left as being culpable: When you think thus independently and then hear about these sackings, de-platformings and black lists, do you say to yourself, even for a millisecond, that you will now have to be more careful when criticising Golriz or Islamism or the Prime Minister publicly? Never mind that, if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably the kind of person who would go ahead and act as you had before anyway. That’s not the point. People decide to resist the institution of government controls all the time, but that does not mean that those controls, if and to the extent that they are imposed, do not stop thinking. 

    Some might argue that this kind of grassroots 'Attack Watch' doesn’t threaten the use of force of any kind, nor the imposition of any penalties, so this is in fact not an example coming under the principle. (The black lists and block lists, for example, are not being drawn up by governments but by networks of private volunteers.) But if you think about it, the only reason that people even care about the existence of these lists, is because they know that, even if there has not yet been a threat of penalties of any kind, such penalties might not be far behind. [Sections 61 and 131 of the ill-named Human Rights Act 1993 for example already threatens you with severe punishment for what it calls "Inciting Racial Disharmony"--and this is even before Ms Ghahraman et al get started on revising it, as they will.] 

    This is why phrases like “enemies list” might occur to you when reading these approving and widespread calls for this grassroots censorship. If you feel the slightest bit intimidated by the creation of these lists, for example, or these "technical solutions"–even if you tell yourself you will not be affected by it, that you will continue on, as before–then you have experienced a small taste of what Ayn Rand meant. [As have, for example, the websites already blocked by ISPs for hosting, wittingly or unwittingly, the live video -- and the ISPs themselves who are "asked" by the government o continue the ban to please the government, even though there is not, at this point, any legislation compelling them to do so.) 

    The initiation of force, or threatening to use force, is evil. This is why even a fairly heavily veiled threat of force by our government is cause for concern.

You should never compromise with those who want to use acts of violence to extinguish freedom, reminds Margaret Thatcher, because if you do you then the very things for which you stand are extinguished.

Let us resolve not to extinguish freedom here. Especially not by the jerk of this knee.
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