What I’d need not to have known, to have voted National

I spent quite a while tweaking that title. I’m still a little angry over the way the election went. I don’t think I’m going to be less angry any time in the next three years. But it’s become undeniable that this isn’t like 1999, when most of the country had just plain had enough of the National Party’s bullshit, and our main concern was to make sure Labour didn’t slide too far to the right. Come to that, most of the country had had enough of National’s bullshit by 1996, it’s just that a critical minority made the mistake of trusting Winston Peters. This time, we need to try and understand what’s going wrong for the Left in New Zealand. We can’t retreat into comfortingly aggressive slogans about how our opponents are just pigs and their voters just sheep.
I want to be very clear about one thing from the start. When I talk about the Left, I’m referring to a certain cluster of political theories and attitudes; I do not mean a particular party or parties within New Zealand’s parliamentary system. I was six years old the last time Labour could say they stood for workers and the poor without people coughing behind their hands. I am not interested in Labour returning to 40% of the vote if it has to abandon the struggle for equality (again) to do so. My vision is not of a country where National is pretty much still in government only they wear red ties instead of blue. But on the other hand it’s vital we learn something from this. We’re going to need to have some very forthright conversations about what is and what is not essential to the Left. And we’re going to need to reach a general consensus. And after that, anything that turns out to be a secondary concern is going to need to be sidelined unless it’s a means for achieving the primary concerns, and that question is going to need to be settled on the basis of evidence.

I was wrong about the election

I made some rash predictions last time, and also at least one factual error: the Greens did once have an electorate seat. In fact on Saturday night National was returned to Government with a bigger majority than ever. This means one pattern in history hasn’t been broken (National has never had fewer than three terms in a row since it first formed) but another one has (no third-term government in New Zealand history has ever increased its majority). As things stand the National Party holds an absolute majority in Parliament, one of the things MMP was supposed to prevent. The numbers won’t be complete until the special votes come in from New Zealanders overseas, and they tend to favour the Greens. But they won’t be enough to reverse what happened on Saturday. Everybody on the Left is trying to figure out what went wrong, and I’ll join them in the next few days – there are some very odd patterns in the numbers that need attention paid to them. Meanwhile I’m just posting this so you don’t all think I’m sulking.

Election rant (this is how I write when I have a time limit)

My plan, you see, was to finish the previous post within the week and then run a short series of posts on election issues coming up to polling day. But no, somehow I just couldn’t either marshal my thoughts in a timely fashion, nor give up on it and leave it as a draft and write other stuff in the meantime. Note to self: that is how you maintain a blogging schedule, it isn’t going to work otherwise. Now polling day is tomorrow. And by law you can’t publish anything between midnight and 7pm on polling day that might influence someone’s vote. So I have to get this finished in the next seven hours. And you all get to see how I write when I haven’t got time to go back and edit.
As usual I have to be conscious that a lot of my readers are not New Zealanders. Recently I seem to have been oddly popular in Turkey, and a while back it was the Ukraine. So I guess I have to tell you about all the parties as well. I could link you to them, but frankly that seems like more work than just writing, especially because whenever I wander away from this editor page to look something up it takes me ten minutes to get back. I should perhaps mention that I am a little bit medicated right now as well. Actually, no, first I have to explain New Zealand’s electoral system, for New Zealanders as well as non-New Zealanders, as you’ll see.
Back in the days of First Past the Post National and Labour were the only realistic options going. Back then we voted the way I think Americans still do, that is, we cast a single vote each for the local electorate candidate, and the government was whichever party had a majority of the seats in Parliament. Now imagine what happens if you have a lot of electorates with a small preference for National, and one or two electorates with an overwhelming preference for Labour, and you can see why this doesn’t necessarily end up representing the country. And you can imagine how likely it would be that a new party would break into more than one electorate at a time. So we had a two-party system. A vote for any other party was a wasted vote and, if you and your partner both happened to favour different parties, you might form a pact not to vote at all, because your votes would just cancel each other out. Which unless you spend the entire election day at home seems to me to be a highly exploitable situation, but whatever.
I feel like shouting very loudly at this point because we changed this in 1993. 1993. I’ve been saying “we” but in reality I have never voted under this system. Never. Not in my life. I turned 18 in 1996, and cast my first vote under the new system, which is called MMP – Mixed Member Proportional. There will be New Zealanders voting in this election who weren’t born last time we were still using First Past the Post. And I am still seeing people on Facebook talking about “wasting votes” by voting for the minor parties. Or asking people to make sure a Labour electorate candidate got in “so that we have one more Labour MP in Parliament.” Or even talking about their votes “cancelling out”. And while I deplore violence, I must in honesty report that talk like this gives rise to images in my brain involving grabbing people by their jackets and head-butting them while yelling “It doesn’t! Work! That! Way! Any! More!”

Purity vs. consent

Content note: rape culture, victim-blaming, sexual entitlement
Seeing as you’re reading this on the internet, you are presumably already aware that somebody hacked into a whole bunch of well-known women’s electronic devices (most prominently Jennifer Lawrence’s), stole nude photos which were not intended for publication, and posted them on Reddit. No, I haven’t seen them. No, I won’t be looking for them. Yes, I’m aware that the theft has been given an offensive and puerile name online, and no, I won’t be using it. I’m not really here to talk about it anyway. I’m here to talk about an attitude I’ve seen coming through in people’s responses to it. If you are unclear at all as to what’s wrong with looking at nude pictures of people who haven’t given their permission for you to look at them, start here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or, for some appropriately thunderous sarcasm, here (“It’s basic logic: If you don’t want your wallet stolen, don’t have money. If you don’t want to be strangled to death, stop breathing”).
I’m not a big risk-taker myself, but my faith in humanity must be, because I often read the comments on articles like that. Here are some excerpts.

I agree with your view and urge you to direct your obvious energy and intellect to the cause of banning pornography.

There are zero photos of me naked on the interweb. Know how I know this? I’ve never taken one (zero, coincidentally, is the number of people who would be interested in seeing said photos were they to exist, but I digress). Knowing they’re in the spotlight and knowing that predators like the criminal who hacked their accounts are out there, I do think they’re silly for taking the risk of sharing photos of this sort...

Just one question. Why did JLaw have nude pics done in the first place?

Can we have more articles supporting sending naked pictures to loved ones? I think any idiot should be allowed to electronically send their face atop their exposed body.
On the other hand, maybe people can learn from their mistakes, and not try to avoid the idea of deserving to have regrets. Is it perhaps possible that, though all rape is rape, girls can voluntarily do things with their body that they wish they never did?
Maybe, I’ll receive a scathing response from the public, who will tell me, “Even though this hacking has been happening for years, it is a woman’s choice if she wants to take that chance.”

If you’re an attractive female celebrity, you can be certain that at any point in time there are hundreds, if not thousands of people (some of them newspaper reporters), doing their absolute best to hack into any and all of your personal information. Hence, it would be prudent to restrict the amount of personal information you store in a digital form.

To be honest, I feel no sympathy for anyone affected by this hacking.
Anyone who allows their sensitive, personal, private information on the internet – no matter how “secure” the storage location – shouldn’t be at all surprised when that information is stolen. It’s unfortunate that there are people in our society willing to exploit others, particularly women... But ultimately, I cannot see anyone naïve enough to misuse technology in this manner as blameless.

Someone did point out to that last person that people’s medical history is stored in the Cloud, so that any new doctor they go to can access it quickly. Try the thought experiment: replace “nude photos” with any other kind of private information, and nobody would try to pretend that the hack was anything other than the nasty assault on personal autonomy that, indeed, it was. The “It was their own silly fault” stance makes no sense.
But you know me. I’m never content with “It makes no sense”. Let’s see if we can find a perspective from which it does make sense, and see if that teaches us anything.