Why you’re wrong about “Joker”

Crossposted from Dreamwidth

• Joker is not a comic book movie, at least in the sense of giving you anything you would remotely expect from a comic book movie. It has some character names and place names the same as in the comics, and near the end there’s a scene which will be instantly familiar to anyone who knows anything about Batman, but there are no superpowers, no costumes, no heroes, no fantasy or science fiction elements at all. People who enjoy comic book movies but not bleak gritty character dramas won’t like it. People who enjoy bleak gritty character dramas but not comic book movies will find nothing objectionable in it.
  
  (Mild spoiler warning, by the way. I don’t get into specifics but you may find the edge of surprise dulled on some elements of the movie if you read this post before you see it.)

Economics... again. (Sigh.)

In April, New Zealand’s Labour-led government raised the minimum wage from $16.50 to $17.70 per hour. Basic economic theory, which I have perforce become acquainted with over seven years of taking undergraduate notes in a far-flung range of subjects, would predict that the unemployment rate must rise proportionally. Being also acquainted with the methods by which economists arrive at basic economic theory, I am therefore entirely unsurprised to read that

New Zealand’s unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent in the second quarter of 2019 from 4.2 percent in the previous period, compared to market expectations of 4.3 percent. That was the lowest jobless rate since the second quarter of 2008, when it was 3.8 percent. Unemployment rate in New Zealand averaged 5.99 percent from 1985 until 2019, reaching an all-time high of 11.20 percent in the third quarter of 1991 and a record low of 3.30 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007.

—Trading Economics

In case you’re wondering, yes, the second quarter of 2008 was towards the end of the Labour Party’s previous term in government, as was that record low in 2007, and 1991 was in the first term of the National government before them. Trading Economics has a graph of the New Zealand unemployment rate for the last thirty-three years, which I’ve taken the liberty of colour-coding rather crudely in Paint according to the leading party of government. (Note for Americans: in New Zealand as in most of the rest of the world, the left-leaning party is branded red and the conservative party blue.)

I don’t want to read more into this than is warranted. National took the reins of government from Labour twice during this period, and both times came shortly after worldwide financial crises, so I’d be cautious about blaming them for the big upticks in unemployment at those times. Crises aside, the longer-term trend is downward. What I do want to point out is that there is no sign of the upward drift that orthodox economic theory would lead us to expect during Labour’s tenures, despite the fact that they raise the minimum wage every year by much bigger increments than National does.

This semester I’m taking a first-year economics class, again. It’s struck me right from the start how much it’s re-treading ground I’ve been over and over since the first time round, seven years ago. If that doesn’t sound surprising, by contrast I’ve been assigned to papers in various health professions each semester since 2013, and every year there’s been a module on cancer, and every year there’s new insights about how cancer happens and what healthcare providers can do to fight it. That’s what progress looks like. That’s how you know a discipline is open to learning new truths.

In fairness, this semester’s lecturer has mentioned a few things which, in previous economics classes I’ve been to, have been skated over completely. He did take care to point out, for example, that sometimes people don’t buy certain goods or services not because they don’t want to pay the market price but because they can’t – the first time I’ve ever heard this distinction highlighted. (Unfortunately he seems to have missed some rather major implications of it, but we’ll get to that.) Also he’s promised an upcoming block of lectures on market failures, which up till now I haven’t heard economists talk about to students below third-year.

Still, as in previous years, the lecture material treats labour as just another good or service, which workers sell and employers buy. When you draw a supply-and-demand graph, the demand curve slopes downward, meaning that the more something costs, the fewer people will be willing to buy it and the less of it will get bought. Meanwhile the supply curve slopes upward, meaning the more it costs, the more people will be willing to sell it and the more of it will be available for sale. Where the two curves cross, the amount people are trying to buy equals the amount available for sale, and the price at which that happens is the market price or “equilibrium” price. They’re called “curves” but they’re usually graphed as straight diagonal lines. The slope of each curve is called its “elasticity”.

I’m not allowed to ask questions in lectures, and after any lecture there’s usually a few students wanting to talk to the lecturer and their practical need for information obviously takes precedence over my idle curiosity. But after the lecture introducing the concept of a supply curve, I had a rare opportunity for conversation.

Love and thunder

Crossposted from Dreamwidth

It’s official: in a couple of years’ time there’s going to be a fourth Thor movie in the MCU, and it’s going to be titled Thor: Love and Thunder, and it’s going to feature Natalie Portman as the Mighty Thor and be directed by Taika Waititi. I can’t wait.

There’s a contingent of YouTubers who see it as their bounden duty to pour vitriol on anything with the faintest whiff of “political correctness,” which in practice includes all female-led fantasy, science fiction, and superhero movies. Some disavow any misogyny and I guess quietly hope we won’t go look up what they’ve said about Captain Marvel and Mad Max: Fury Road and Rey in Star Wars and the latest Ghostbusters and the Thirteenth Doctor on Doctor Who. Others are louder and less coherent – “liberals are ruining my childhood, literally no-one asked for this, let’s burn Marvel to the ground!” style of thing.

I mean, one of the complaints is true: Portman isn’t anywhere near as big and muscular as the Mighty Thor. But if that’s your main problem, I have something devastating to tell you about Mark Ruffalo.

If you’re even less familiar with Marvel comics than I am and not clear how Natalie Portman can play Thor, what with him being male, here’s the basics. In the comics, unlike either the Norse myths before them or the movies after them, anyone who can lift Thor’s hammer Mjolnir gains not only his powers but his identity. The usual Thor is a guy called Donald Blake, but there have been several others, including an alien called Beta Ray Bill and a frog and, in a comics run in 2014–2015 titled The Mighty Thor, Blake’s on-again off-again love-interest Jane Foster, i.e. Natalie Portman’s character from the first two Thor movies.

The let’s burn political correctness to the ground! brigade of course hated The Mighty Thor and campaigned for it to be cut short, and some of them claim credit for it ending – which it did with the completion of its story arc, making that claim roughly as plausible as most of the other things these people say. They also say, for instance, that no-one liked Captain Marvel either, a movie which made over a billion dollars at the box-office; and that everyone hated the bit in Avengers: Endgame where all the female heroes band together, a scene which I’ve elsewhere seen criticized only for being too little too late.

So why am I looking forward so eagerly to Thor: Love and Thunder? Most people who write enthusiastically about the MCU seem to have started as comics fans. I suppose I might have been one if things had gone slightly differently, but in fact I never got into any comic as a kid; I was a Tolkien geek instead. And it’s not far to go from Tolkien to Norse mythology. So with most MCU characters the movies are my first sight of them – but not with Thor and his associates.

I did become aware, obviously, that Thor had been reinterpreted as a cartoon character, and I was enough of a purist (you’ll be shocked to hear) that I found this mostly annoying. It didn’t help that the cartoon character was blond, clean-shaven, and a bit of an airhead, where the god is supposed to be ginger-bearded and short-tempered. Worse, not all comics writers have any clue about Shakespearean English, and you’d get sentence constructions like “he didst goeth,” which to me is chalkboard-nails, microphone-feedback, corner-of-tabletop-in-the-elbow-nerve infuriating.

(Not that Thor should technically have been speaking Shakespearean English at all, of course, but even I can forgive comics writers for not filling their dialogue bubbles with Old Norse.)

Now our watch is ended

Crossposted from Dreamwidth

So everyone’s angry with the way Game of Thrones ended. Some people are being very rude about it. I gather someone’s started a petition to have the final season rewritten, and presumably to have watched Game of Thrones in the first place these people have to be over the age of seven. I haven’t heard for a fact that Dave Benioff and Dan Weiss have received death threats, but with all the entitlement and nerd-rage fizzing in social media right now it would be more surprising if they hadn’t.

I’m not completely happy with it myself, mind you. There are some things that I think went wrong, and I’ll get to some of those. I’m also aware that quite a few of the things I’m OK with a large number of other people aren’t, and I don’t feel like picking fights for no reason. But I feel the sweeping judgements people have made about Benioff & Weiss’s writing competence are unwarranted, especially considering how well they did for so many years before this. Also, you can’t watch anything Thrones-related on YouTube now without screeds of whinging in the comments, and it’s getting irritating.

Everybody’s saying the last season was “rushed”, and that’s true to an extent, but I don’t think it’s the root of the problem. The problem is that there’s a difference between advancing a narrative, which Benioff & Weiss have been doing solidly for years, and resolving a narrative, which they’ve just had to do without assistance from their source material. You can advance a story indefinitely given starting premises and a reasonably realistic imagination; but realism won’t resolve it for you, because reality, not being a story, never gets resolved.

Which may or may not be the underlying reason for the source material problem. It’s been eight years now since the last Song of Ice and Fire book came out, and George R. R. Martin has stopped making promises about when The Winds of Winter is due. And there’s at least one more book to come after that one. Supposedly. Apparently Martin gets a lot of personal remarks about his age and health in this context, which I think is uncalled-for. I think Martin could live to be three hundred years old, and fill a bookcase with A Song of Ice and Fire, and it would still be no nearer ending. I have seen no evidence that the writing of A Song of Ice and Fire is a process with an end-point. Seven-part stories don’t have whole new protagonists appearing and plot arcs blossoming in Part V.

I gather Martin wanted the show to run to ten seasons, and Benioff & Weiss pushed for seven, and what we ended up with – eight, with the last two shortened – was the compromise they settled on. It certainly did feel rushed, but I don’t know that lengthening seasons 7 and 8 out to ten episodes each would have fixed that. I think the series as a whole could have done with one or two less subplots; most of the Sand Snakes and Euron Greyjoy threads in particular could have been dropped without too much violence to the overarching story, and then we’d have had a bit of breathing room to resolve a few other things. (Bear in mind that Benioff & Weiss already cut a bunch of subplots out completely, to complaints from book fans.)

Now I’ll move on to the main specific complaints; some I agree with fully, some partially, some not at all. Here I really do need to cut for spoilers.

The challenge of weeding out racism

Like many New Zealanders, I was inspired by our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s declaration in the wake of the terror in Christchurch that “This is not us.” I took it as a signal of our intentions for the immediate future. From now on, from this day forward, this is not us. From now on we are vigilant for the early warning signs of white supremacist violence. From this day forward we reject every expression of racism and hatred and stop it in its tracks. To this promise we pledge ourselves. So say we all.

Taken as a statement of New Zealand’s past and present – the comfortable bubble we were all living in up until that Friday – I’m afraid it was inaccurate, as many other New Zealanders have sad cause to know intimately. We are a nation where cries of “Go home!” follow brown-skinned people down the street. We are a nation that elects anti-Muslim racists to Parliament and appoints their party leader to the second-highest position in the land. We are a nation whose primary political divide in our most recent election was between those who were racist against Māori and Pacific Islanders and those who were racist against Asians.

I happen to have the tremendous good fortune of being a white man; the only racism I’ve had come my way was a couple of the half-dozen occasions when I’ve been mistaken for Jewish. And yet even from this position of privilege I’ve seen plenty of racism directed at others. How much more visible must it be to those on the pointy end?

(Content note: If racism in New Zealand is the last thing you need to be reminded of just now, I’d advise not reading any further.)

There was the guy in the supermarket who yelled “Come on, [racial epithet]!” when a South Asian worker, busy arranging trolleys, briefly got in his way. There was the guy who expressed regret, in tones of deep distaste, at how his country was being “taken over” by “persons of a yellow persuasion”. There was the guy on the bus who hypothesized that the East Asian owners of the internet café next to the bus stop had taken down the bus timetables to fool potential customers into parking there. There was the guy who, having come off his bike to avoid a car rounding the corner, shouted not “Watch where you’re going!” nor “I’ve got a right to use the road too!” but “Bloody Asians!”

I’ve heard people yell at the television “You’re not Māori!” when a commentator claimed otherwise who didn’t look Māori enough for their judgement. I lived through the time when Ardern’s party (before she entered Parliament) blocked Māori customary property claims to the foreshore and seabed while allowing commercial ones, and sold this policy to the nation as “the Māoris want to stop you going to the beach” (to complete the irony, the Māori claimants more often wanted to ensure public access to beaches). I heard people then joke, since by then our laws had abandoned the racist blood quantum criterion for telling who counts as Māori, that maybe they would still be able to go to the beach if they “feel Māori”. It wasn’t that long ago. New Zealand is still pretty much the same people now as it was then.

Once, conversing about my job with a social work lecturer after class, I happened to mention that in my dentistry classes there was a high proportion of Asian students. Insofar as I had a point it was to puzzle over why so few Pākehā students were going into dentistry (the paucity of Māori and Pacific Islanders in the health professions is, alas, less mysterious). But the lecturer – whose inclusive attitudes I had until that point admired – took me to be saying something quite different. “Yeah,” he said, “they shouldn’t let them in to take those places off our people, should they?”

The Ides of March

Today I saw the best and worst of what people can be. The best, first-hand; the worst, mostly via Facebook. I live in Dunedin, which is about a five-hour drive away from Christchurch, southward down the coast. I’m going to start with the bad thing, even though it happened later, so that I can end with the good thing. Quite apart from the fact that the good thing deserves the attention more, I believe that’s the way the world is going; courage is, gradually, conquering hate.

Today New Zealand got in the world news for about the worst possible reason. Our decades-long run without a public mass shooting has been broken, and the number of people killed in political terrorist acts in the entirety of our history has gone up from three to over 40. In Christchurch, this afternoon, during the Friday prayer, a white man walked into the Al Noor Mosque in Riccarton in the central city, sprayed the place with bullets, and fled. Soon afterward, a white man walked into the Linwood Islamic Centre a few kilometres across town, and began shooting.

Co-ordinated attacks by two shooters, or did the Riccarton shooter get in his car and drive to Linwood? I’ve heard both, and at a time like this I think it’s especially important to be mindful of the limits of one’s knowledge. The police also found at least one car bomb and defused it. The number of people killed is currently estimated to be in the 40s. Several of them are known to be refugees from the war in Syria, some of them children. One man has been arrested and charged with murder. Three others have also been arrested; last I heard, one had been released and the other two were being questioned. Presumably the police cordoned off the area and took in anyone who happened to have a firearm in their car.

I gather the shooter livestreamed the attack, and also published a manifesto online, just in case anyone was in doubt that the main motive for terrorism is notoriety. I understand that the local internet providers have been working to take them down, and good on them. Let me copypaste a Facebook post by a friend of mine who’s seen the manifesto:

Here’s a few quick facts from this shooter’s manifesto that he published online, so that you don’t have to read his pathetic excuses and unintelligent hate-speech.

• He isn’t even a Kiwi. He’s an Australian citizen who was here temporarily. A little ironic considering he’s anti-immigration.
• He originally planned to attack the mosque in Dunedin, because of a video on Facebook that he saw from the Otago Muslim Association.
• He was most influenced by Candace Owens. I really hope that she faces the consequences of her disgusting rhetoric over this.
• He supports Trump’s nationalist and anti-immigration stances.

There’s literally nothing else of value. Don’t read it.

I have not seen either the video or the manifesto. I have seen the shooter’s name. It will never cross either my mouth or my fingers. May it be swiftly forgotten.

---

Now for the good thing. I didn’t hear about the shooting until this evening because, when it was happening, I was regretfully heading back to work after attending the Dunedin branch of the School Strike For Climate. It was astonishing. I’ve been in many protests in my time, helped orchestrate a fair number of them, and I have never, ever seen one as well-organized and inspiring as this. I’m pretty sure I have, at times in the past, tutted and waxed superior over the maturity of teenagers, for which I humbly apologize. I won’t do it again. I think the last time I saw George St filled like that was when they threatened to take away Dunedin Hospital’s neurology unit, and before that the war on Iraq. And this was put together by high school students.

For all that pundits make money touting this or that existential threat to civilization that we all need to be shaking in our shoes about, climate change is the only one that’s both real and imminent. (Nuclear war is a genuine danger but a remote one. Peak Oil is a secondary consequence of the same institutional stupidities that are causing climate change. Nothing else qualifies.)

It’s already begun; New Zealand has had a “hundred-year flood” every year for over a decade now, two of them right where I live and two more just out of town on the Taieri Plain. I knew when last winter was unseasonably mild that an unprecedentedly hot summer was on its way; I even went around telling people there were going to be big bushfires in Australia. I didn’t predict they would come as far south as Tasmania, and I certainly didn’t count on them hitting New Zealand as well, but both things happened. These events are a tiny foretaste of what is to come if we don’t take drastic action.

New Zealand doesn’t account for much of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but because of our small size we’re a good location for experimental social changes that the world can then scale up from. After both our major political parties embraced neoliberalism in the 1980s, neoliberals elsewhere in the world pointed at us – prematurely, it turned out – as a success story. A decade ago we got the opportunity to lead the way as developers of smart green technology, and we squandered it and hung our economy on milk instead. Can’t we please be world leaders again?

It’s easy to fall into despair over the magnitude of the problem, and that despair is a major contributor to the political inertia that has caused it. That’s why today’s demonstration brought tears to my eyes. Today I saw teenagers with a better handle on grassroots political organization than my generation ever had. Today I saw where the political will can be found to solve this problem. Today I know there is hope.

---

On this day 2062 years ago, a determined posse of political activists, deeply concerned for the integrity of the Republic of Rome, publicly murdered the man at the hub of the changes that they feared, and so brought about the very crisis they had hoped to avert. Their act fell short, however, of the ineffectuality of terrorism, because Julius Caesar was a genuine centre of power. Terrorism by definition strikes at the powerless; it is the epitome of cowardice. And it never succeeds. Mohandas Gandhi in India eschewed violence, and India broke free of the British Empire. The IRA in Northern Ireland embraced violence, and Northern Ireland remains a British province. The numbers across history bear out the lesson of these two examples; violence, even against legitimate targets, reduces a political movement’s chances of success by over half. Terrorist violence guarantees failure.

So, out of the action today that deserved the world’s attention and the action that hijacked it, I know which one I believe represents the future. I stand for courage, I stand for truth, and I stand for hope.

The imminent and well-deserved demise of Tumblr

On 3 December Tumblr announced it was getting rid of adult content, starting in two weeks from the announcement. Tumblr management has never been competent at the best of times, but this takes the cake. This will kill the site.

Those of you who don’t have Tumblr accounts will scarcely imagine what a dumpster-fire this is. Just to start with, the main draw of Tumblr was that it was the one social media site that allowed adult content. What Tumblr has just done is basically what I’ve seen a couple of local hospitality businesses do – a pub on the Otago University campus years ago, and a café in Port Chalmers more recently. Both had quirky art-work that gave them an alternative vibe; both were bought by new owners who removed the quirky art-work and tried to rebrand them as bland mainstream venues; both promptly went out of business. The campus pub was eventually revived by a competent proprietor; the Port café is currently sitting empty, a monument to the folly of erasing a successful enterprise’s main point of distinctiveness. The same fate awaits Tumblr.

I was on Tumblr for nearly two years. My original hope, when I joined, was to spread this blog a little further, since after six years I have exactly two followers here. This was not to be, because Tumblr’s search software passes over posts that contain links to other sites – far from the only way in which Tumblr fails its users – which meant that the links to this blog were only seen by those few of my followers who happened to be online at the moment I posted the links. Additionally, I gained Tumblr followers relatively slowly; I think my peak following, after two years, was 182 including spambots. I think this may have been because I declared on my blog header that I was a nudist but didn’t intend to post any nude photos, which lost me both the people who think nudism is skeevy and the people who want to see nude photos. But I can’t be sure.

(Tumblr advertises itself as being good for artists. How are they any good for artists if they make posts with external links non-searchable, you might wonder, so that artists can either get their art seen or link to places where people can pay them for it, but not both? Well, they aren’t, that’s how. And yet, so many of us put up with them, until now.)

The announcement came in the form of an official letter from the Tumblr staff account, which I would go through and point out all the lies except that it’s all lies. The new guidelines ban, and I quote, “images, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples,” in case you were wondering why the phrase “female-presenting nipples” became a commonly repeated joke in early December. So Tumblr is apparently enlightened enough to talk in terms of gender “presentation”, and yet reactionary enough to frame femaleness as inherently more sexual than maleness. Remember, this is not an old policy. This is a policy devised in 2018 by the curators of one of the internet’s biggest platforms for feminist and LGBT content.

Most of us first knew something was going wrong on 16 November, when the Tumblr app disappeared from Apple’s App Store. For those like me who used Tumblr on our computers rather than on mobile, the first sign was when Tumblr responded by suddenly making huge numbers of posts non-searchable, based on their tags – not just things like #NSFW and #nudity but hundreds more, some quite inexplicable. I never did find out why we suddenly couldn’t search for #chronic pain. Meanwhile, posts tagged with things like #white supremacy and #white genocide continued to pop up in search results.

Our first thought was that this was a ham-fisted attempt to deal with the exponentially-increasing nuisance of pornographic spambots. Any post on any subject at all whose count of responses reached five digits would suddenly start getting reblogged by porn-themed accounts with generic comments like “Cool, see my site here.” You could report and block, report and block, report and block, and new bots would keep on coming. They weren’t intended to attract the eyes of the bloggers they were harassing, but to piggyback off them to hoist their coders’ porn sites up the Google search rankings. You see, the way Tumblr works, if you reblog a post and add a caption, then there is now a link to your blog from every other blog that has also reblogged that post. If thousands of people have reblogged it then that’s thousands of links, all from legitimate content-bearing webpages that real people read, and that’s what Google’s search algorithms look for. So our first response was: well, yay that the staff are doing something about this at last, but they need to get a lot smarter about it, please.

Of course we were quite mistaken to think Tumblr management had suddenly started caring about their users’ experience of the site. The pornbot coders wised up within a week or two and reprogrammed their bots to use the tag #SFW and no unsearchable tags, which it turned out was all it took to get past the algorithms. Those of us who conscientiously tagged Pre-Raphaelite paintings as #nudity (so people could filter them out on their work computer just in case their boss looking over their shoulder got the wrong idea) continued to be punished for our honesty.

The next hypothesis was that it was about the child porn, and that does seem to be what sparked Apple’s ire. Tumblr’s strategy for dealing with paedophiles was exactly the same as their strategy for dealing with Nazis, to wit “have a Block function and let the users do all the work”. I’m glad to say I never saw any myself, but many other users had been making complaints to the staff about the problem for years, with the same results as every other complaint to the staff. Getting dropped from the App Store, now that was something they cared about.

But while the App Store incident undoubtedly fast-tracked the adult content ban, the truth is it had been coming for months. Like many other social media platforms, Tumblr’s business plan is to hire out their users’ eyeballs to advertisers. They evidently noticed that their site was getting popular with the social justice crowd and in particular the Black Lives Matter movement, and they apparently had a big plan in the works to capitalize on that. And many advertisers baulk at the idea of people seeing their ads right next to GIFs of sex acts. So the nudity had to go. We used to think that if Tumblr had just one virtue, it was that they understood that not all nudity is sexual and not everything sexual is degrading; now it turns out they just didn’t care about being degrading until there was money in it.

On top of all that, there’s a draconian piece of legislation coming into force in the United States next year called SESTA/FOSTA – I can’t be bothered looking up the acronyms but the ST in both halves stands for “sex trafficking”. Nobody with any human decency could oppose stopping sex trafficking, which makes it the perfect pretext for interest groups pushing less creditable agendas. Under the new law, social media hosts based in the US will be liable for allowing sexual solicitation on their sites, even unknowingly, even if it’s just one ad. This is why Facebook, from next month on, is going to start cracking down on anything that could remotely be interpreted as a sexual invitation, up to and including posts consisting of “looking for a good time tonight ;)”. This legislation will incidentally stifle discussion of sexuality or sexual orientation in social media; I’m pretty sure that’s a plus as far as its originators are concerned, but it might come as an unpleasant surprise for some of its more liberal supporters.

How deleting Facebook posts saying “looking for a good time tonight ;)” will contribute to stopping sex trafficking is: it won’t. But at least Facebook understands that you need human intervention to make this sort of thing work. Tumblr think they’re going to accomplish it with software, and indeed with ludicrously simplistic software. They’ve promised that nude paintings and breastfeeding photos and news articles about nude protests will be safe once they get their programs properly trained, but the algorithm they’re using could not possibly make such fine distinctions even if you trained them on all the data on the internet for a thousand years. You may have seen funny Facebook posts about the photo-captioning AI, trained on pictures of fields of sheep, that tagged all fields as “sheep” and failed to recognise sheep in any other context. It’s the same algorithm.

---

Nude images follow.

Cannabis

So it turns out the Otago University Proctor has been burgling student flats and nicking people’s bongs. There was a big protest against him last week, which I sadly couldn’t attend due to a class. I remember a time when the student libertarians could make common cause with us campus Lefties on cannabis decriminalization, if nothing else, but all the right-swinging commentary I’ve seen on the issue this week has been of the bog-standard cookie-cutter “if you think this is abuse of power go live in North Korea” variety.

It is morally wrong for a person in authority to break into people’s private spaces and remove things unless their authority is specifically and publicly constituted to grant them the power to do that, and the Proctor’s is not. This follows so straightforwardly from the trust principle that I can’t be bothered laying it all out. It is equally clearly morally wrong to constitute any authority to give its bearer the power to break into people’s private spaces and remove things unless the things in question pose sufficient risk of harm in that space to outweigh the breach of trust occasioned by the break-in. Any law which grants (for example) the police such powers is an immoral law and ought to be both changed and, until it is changed, resisted. Again, taking the trust principle as the basis of morality, which I do, that follows as night follows day. And I’ve argued the trust-morality connection over and over again on this blog, so I shall skip over that too. The only remaining question, and the topic of this post, is: does cannabis pose a risk of greater harm than is caused by arrests, seizures, prison sentences, and permanent criminal records?

The answer to that question is as follows:

No.

Well, that was easy. See you next ti—

...oh, all right. Here, have a graph. If you click it, the link will take you to the data behind it.

There are exactly zero confirmed cases of death from cannabis use – in stark contrast with alcohol and tobacco, both of which are legal. For addictiveness it’s roughly on a par with caffeine. It is associated with the same sorts of respiratory injuries that tobacco is, but that’s (as far as researchers can tell) because it’s delivered as a smoke and so comes along with tars and similarly harmful products of combustion. Hence if your drug laws are to have any semblance of logic or consistency, either you must allow cannabis or you must ban alcohol and tobacco. And if you’re thinking about the latter option, the United States already tried that with alcohol and it was a disaster.

Cannabis does bring a heightened risk of developing schizophrenia if it’s heavily consumed in adolescence. That, I’ll grant you. And it is reasonable to ask how, once legalized, it would be kept out of the hands of teenagers, given that the surest way to get teenagers to try something is to tell them it’s for adults only, as the tobacco companies know to their tremendous profit. But I’ll tell you a big secret: prohibition isn’t keeping it out of the hands of teenagers either. If you sell a substance legally, you’ll probably think twice about selling it to under-age people because that’ll get you in trouble. If it’s a prohibited substance you’re in trouble anyway, so why narrow your market?

The damping effects of cannabis on motivation are much better-known than the medical evidence for them actually warrants. Part of the problem is that people assume the cause upon seeing the effect. I have long hair that I can’t seem to get the knots out of, and I don’t wear shoes much, and so I have often been asked by complete strangers where they can score some pot in Dunedin; whereas you probably wouldn’t make that assumption of an internationally successful scientist and author like, say, Carl Sagan. On the handful of occasions when I have smoked pot, I’ve found my motivation increased rather than lowered – one time I stayed up all night writing.

I won’t deny there are people who take up cannabis and proceed to lose all interest in life; but, as is typical with other substance dependencies, I suspect you’ll find this is a sign of underlying stressors like an abusive home life or an unsustainable work or study schedule with no other way out. And if someone is having substance problems, it’s easier for a legal supplier than an illegal one to refuse their business, as G. K. Chesterton long ago pointed out with regard to alcohol. Perhaps this is why Portugal has experienced such a drop in drug-related social problems since they legalized all recreational drugs there.

There are of course many wild claims out there about the health benefits of cannabis; if you believe some people, it’ll cure everything from cancer to the common cold. It’s hard for researchers to find out which of these claims have substance on account of, you guessed it, prohibition. I mean, sure, a government can license a pharmacology institute or whatever to do controlled experiments, but they can’t exactly license the entire supply chain so the institute can get hold of enough of the stuff to run anything with a meaningful sample size. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that cannabis is an effective painkiller, and last I heard there was some evidence – at a “not sure yet but worth following up” level – that it might slow the progression of some cancers.

Even if you want to be cautious about recreational cannabis, there is absolutely no justification for keeping it from being used as a medicine. Obviously it wouldn’t come from the pharmacist as a cigarette, since smoke and tars do so much damage to your lungs. And it’s a bit slow to get working when taken orally, hence why people sometimes get into trouble the first time they try edibles, eating more and more just because it hasn’t hit yet. The fastest form of delivery might be a nasal spray; your smelling nerves take in molecules from the air because that’s how smell works, and they’re a direct channel to the brain because that’s how nerves work. For people with impaired olfactory function, an inhaler might be a second option.

Actually I started writing this a few days before the protest. I was editing some lecture notes in a university library a couple of tables away from the door to a videoconference room, and three students went in and proceeded to hold what was evidently the Nay side of a video-link debate on the legalization of cannabis. The male one of the three had a particularly loud and annoying voice, but all of their arguments were so stupid that I must, in charity, suppose that they had been roped in to argue the Nay side without believing a word they were saying. (This is why I’ve never done competitive debating.)

Their worst argument of all was against medicinal cannabis. We don’t need it, said Mister Loud Voice, because we’ve already got painkillers. Maybe if I hadn’t had so many pharmacy lectures in the last few years that wouldn’t have sounded quite so head-smackingly silly. Yes, we have other painkillers. We have paracetamol (what North Americans call acetaminophen), which is safe unless you have liver disease. We have non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like aspirin and ibuprofen, which are moderately safe unless you have stomach ulcers or acid reflux. We have corticosteroids, which do nasty things to your bones if taken for any length of time, and we have opioids, which right now are killing Americans in record numbers as the cohort who got addicted to them en masse in their teens enter retirement. A lot of elderly people have both liver and stomach trouble and can’t really afford to make their bones any weaker than they already are. What possible justification can there be for denying them a safe, effective painkiller?

Close behind was the bit where they said their main concern about cannabis was that it might lead people on to other, more harmful drugs. Yes, I’m sure that happens. But do you know why it happens? It happens because once you’ve got into cannabis, well hey, you’re already breaking the law and thumbing your nose at a disapproving society, so why not go for a harder-core experience? The same happened with alcohol when that was prohibited. Once again, legalization would lighten the problem, not worsen it.

All the same, that argument does illuminate the cultural mindset that hangs like a ball-and-chain about the ankles of the legalization movement. The basic problem is one of our mental categories for hazardous substances. Some substances are filth and some are poisonous and some are medicines and some are chemicals, but the troublesome class here, the one cannabis has been put into, is the class we think of as Drugs! (The exclamation mark should be pronounced as a horrified gasp.) I can’t just call them “drugs”, because that word, like “chemicals”, has an application which is scientifically meaningful, morally neutral, and vastly broader than the colloquial one. Drugs in the scientific sense do include cannabis, and also alcohol – the phrase “drugs and alcohol” makes about as much sense as “vehicles and cars” – and caffeine, and nutmeg, and St John’s wort, and moisturizers, and anything else that has a dose-dependent effect on the human body or mind.

Drugs! as a subclass of drugs share no common attribute but that they are illicit. But because they’re a culturally recognisable category, it’s easy to think of them going together. Thus, to Mister Loud Voice and millions like him, cannabis goes naturally with heroin and cocaine and methamphetamine because they are all Drugs! The government in its infinite wisdom has recognised that people should not use Drugs! and so has passed laws against them. If you let people use one kind of Drugs! then you are declaring that Drugs! are OK after all, so of course they’re going to move on to other kinds of Drugs! as well. In case you haven’t guessed, I think the very concept of Drugs! hinders rather than helps us in developing rational drug safety policies. But that’s by the by.

So if there’s nothing wrong with cannabis, why is it illegal? I don’t think Mister Loud Voice used that particular argument, but others certainly have. The answer, of course, is that most law-makers think that way too. But why did it become illegal in the first place? Recreational marijuana, previously the most popular legal alternative to alcohol, was banned in the US just when Prohibition was lifted and all the enforcement officials were looking for new jobs. Medical cannabis followed in the 1970s as a casualty of Richard Nixon’s War On Drugs. And the US has enough clout internationally that a lot of other countries still think it’s an example worth following. I’m chary as a rule about Big Bad Government conspiracy theories, but in this case we have a paper trail and a confession:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war Left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

John Erlichman, Assistant to President Nixon for Domestic Affairs, speaking to Harper’s Magazine in 1994

And nowadays of course you have the private prison industry in the US, which has threatened to sue several states if they legalize cannabis and thus reduce the prison population with its convenient supply of cheap labour and legal inability to vote. So in summary, the Proctor of Otago University has committed burglary against the community he is tasked with serving in order to uphold a legally-sanctioned societal prejudice known to be based on fifty-year-old racist lies. I would have joined in the protest if I could. Consider this my contribution.

Don’t let fascists steal free speech from us

Two “alt-right” speakers from Canada, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, have decided they will, after all, go ahead with their visit to New Zealand (temporarily cancelled) where they will espouse their views. The venue is, as I write, being kept secret. Previously, they wanted to speak in an Auckland venue called the Bruce Mason Centre, but were denied that opportunity at the instruction of Auckland Mayor Phil Goff. This has raised concerns about freedom of speech in New Zealand, and not just among those who agree with their position. Chris Trotter, New Zealand’s most respected Left blogger, has taken up the cause in several recent posts on his blog Bowalley Road.

I’ve been drafting this post for two years now; the issue keeps coming up and going away again, and I have to change the bits where I relate it to current events. It’s a bit bigger than I can really pin down in one post. I’m going to skip out some things I originally planned to say about particular progressive concerns that some believe constitute assaults on free speech – trigger warnings, safe spaces, cultural appropriation – because they just make the whole thing too unwieldy. I may devote more blog posts to them in future. Today my topics are: What is the ethical basis of the right to free speech? What sort of policies do we need to build around it? And what are its limits?

Political discussions frequently open with assertions of rights that the disputants hold to be incontrovertibly inviolable – endowed, in the famous words, by the Creator. But what makes a right a right? Why is it that some good things you might want are your “right” to enjoy, while others are merely privileges? What makes the difference? And what if one of your rights can’t be granted without breaching someone else’s rights? What do you do then? This sort of question is why I like to go back a bit further, behind the concept of rights to their basis in ethical philosophy.

In case you’re a new reader, I’ll just quickly run you through my basic moral philosophy. Morality isn’t something objective, not if by that you mean it’s something “out there” in the universe, independent of our minds. You can’t logically prove a “should” statement from an “is” statement without at least tacitly calling in another “should” statement, and if you try to prove that second “should” statement you just go around the circle again, and so on forever. And perhaps that’s just as well, because if morality was something “out there”, then any intersection between moral facts and human well-being would be coincidental. Appeals to moral authority, even cosmic moral authority, don’t help: “You should obey the authority” is just another “should” statement and another trip around the circle.

Hence, morality is subjective. But “subjective” is not the same as “arbitrary”. To call something “subjective” just means it’s an experience that people have rather than a thing in the universe – it’s “in here” rather than “out there”. Sweetness is subjective, but no-one disagrees as to which is the sweeter of maple syrup and grapefruit juice. You can justify a “should” statement; you just have to back it with an “I want” statement. (I want to be healthy, therefore I should exercise more than I do.) As a social species, pretty much anything we want requires cooperation with other people, and cooperation requires trust, so we evolved moral instincts to allow us to trust each other. Therefore, in my view, trust is the basis of all morality.

To earn trust, your actions must fulfill three conditions. They must be benevolent; they must be consistent; and both of these facts must be clear to other observers. Benevolence alone is not quite enough. Pure benevolence, the greatest good for the greatest number, is the moral philosophy known as utilitarianism. The harmonics of cold calculating efficiency that cling around that word somewhat misrepresent the idea; “utility” in the philosophical sense includes beauty and joy as well as usefulness. However, the “calculating” part is bang-on. Utilitarian philosophers spend a lot of time balancing harms and benefits and fretting about whether they’ve left something out. And I don’t know about you, but that makes me nervous. I can’t help worrying that they might end up putting the things I care about on the “sacrifice for the greater good” side of the equation.

When you factor in the consistency and the clarity, utilitarianism gives way to a couple of other moral schemas. One of them is virtue ethics – if you practise being a good person until it becomes habit, your actions will be clearly and consistently benevolent. This isn’t particularly relevant to today’s topic, and I mention it only for completeness. The other one, however, is the answer to our question: the origin of rights. To be clearly and consistently benevolent is to commit to doing some good things all the time for everybody while refraining from doing some bad things ever to anybody. When a society makes such a commitment, whether in law or custom, it thereby grants its members the right to enjoy the good things and the right not to suffer the bad things. That’s where rights come from.

And that helps us answer our other question. When you have to choose one right over another, you should honour the one that best serves the principle of trust. Suppose you’re a surgeon, and you have in your hospital five people urgently needing different organ transplants and also a healthy young person who’s come in for a sports injury. A utilitarian calculus might prompt you to at least consider killing the young person to harvest their organs, sacrificing one life to save five. But of course if you did that, no patient could ever trust you again not to kill them for their organs. The trust principle would therefore accord with what (I sincerely hope) your moral instincts tell you and render such a course of action unthinkable.

Since the seventeenth century most of the questions vexing Western political theorists have been variations of “What is the right balance between peace, justice, and freedom?” When you find yourself facing a trade-off between the three, how do you choose which to preserve and which to sacrifice? (This is not quite the same as the question actually driving social progress, which is “How many crumbs do we have to give these annoying poor people before they’ll shut up and go away?”) What’s often not noticed is that peace, justice, and freedom all have the same end-goal, i.e. not having to fear violence any more. Peace means you don’t have to fear violence from strangers. Justice means you don’t have to fear violence from your neighbours. Freedom means you don’t have to fear violence from the state.

But you can never have complete freedom in any society, because freedoms are necessarily in tension with each other. If you are free to do some particular thing, that means I am not free to stop you from doing that particular thing, and vice versa. So, for instance, you are free to play irritating contemporary music and there’s not much I can do about it, but I am not free to walk around in public wearing the amount of clothing I feel physically comfortable in. If I call the police and complain about your music I’ll be ignored, unless it’s very loud; if you call the police and complain about my nudity I’ll be arrested. Conversely, if I try and cut the power cord on your stereo I’ll be the one in trouble, whereas if you threaten me with assault unless I put some clothes on the authorities will probably agree I had it coming. (As you see, legal freedoms tend to get skewed towards majority cultural groups and away from, in this case, those of us who have autistic sensory issues.)

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Now we can narrow in from freedom generally to freedom of speech in particular.

Against enforced monogamy

The issue of sexual violence has never gone away. The #metoo movement is just one more response to it, though so far one that’s been getting more notice than many. In the last, I don’t know, month or so, the media at large has at last started to notice the well-established connection between misogynistic violence and mass shootings, and the word “incel” – involuntarily celibate – has achieved a greater currency than it had before. I gather “incel” was first coined to describe the experience of being queer and unable to find someone of the gender you like who likes people of your gender, but it has now unfortunately been very firmly appropriated as a self-identifier for that subset of men who (a) aren’t getting sex and (b) believe they are owed sex. And this of course has led to suggestions that maybe mass shootings would be averted if more women would “take one for the team” and have sex with incels. Because, apparently, some people aren’t content with being horrible human beings in the privacy of their own homes.

I have seen it claimed, mind you, that incels aren’t real because it’s not actually hard to find someone to have sex with and these men must be just being needlessly picky (or obsessive) about their choice of partner. I can’t hold with this. For some people it may be easy to find people to have sex with, but there are many circumstances which make it difficult for others. One, as already noted, is being the only queer person in your offline circle. Various disabilities – physical and social – have similar effects. It’s not the not getting sex that makes incels horrible people, it’s the belief that they are owed it. Men who believe they’re owed sex are horrible people whether or not they’re getting it, which brings this digression nicely back to the point.

A couple of weeks ago a guy walked into Santa Fe High School in Texas and shot people, killing ten of them. Following an excellent suggestion that’s been passed around Twitter and Tumblr, I’m going to refer to the perpetrator as “Shooter #101” (this was the 101st mass shooting in the United States this year). The mother of one of the dead, Shana Fisher, has claimed that her daughter was repeatedly harassed by Shooter #101 for a date and ultimately turned him down publicly in front of the school, and that she was the first person he shot. Several articles on the incident have used this for a lede. Apparently it hasn’t been corroborated by witnesses – which is bad enough, but I’ve worked in journalism in a very small way, I can understand going ahead with the article on the assumption that the mother knew what she was talking about. What’s not forgivable is that this was how they framed this element of the case:

And these are far from the worst. You see the narrative being put forward here? Men (overwhelmingly) do the shooting, but never fear, we can always find a way that it’s ultimately a woman’s fault. Women are put on earth to meet men’s needs, and men go astray when women fail to fulfill that function. Men’s sexual and romantic yearnings give them a proprietary right over women’s bodies, attention, and time. Most commentators would recoil from this position if it were stated openly; the danger of framing male violence as the headlines above do is precisely that this narrative sneaks under the radar as a tacit premise instead of being exposed to challenge as an explicit proposition. To men who do believe that women owe them sex, this subtextual confirmation helps that belief fit just that little bit more comfortably into their picture of the world.

Is the writing on the wall?

At the top of this page, for the last five years, my blog header has announced that my job is to take notes in lectures at the University of Otago on behalf of students with disabilities. This is still the case this year – but it may not be next year. I love this job and I want to come back to it as long as I can, but I’m not sure there will be anything to come back to. I think the University (not the Disabilities Office but someone higher up) is trying to stealthily disestablish my position.

In mid-2012 when I started working here, I was given nine lectures a week – nearly twenty hours of work, since I have to edit the notes after I’ve taken them. Then from 2013 to 2015 it was more like fifteen or sixteen classes, dominated by dentistry, over thirty hours. Not quite full-time, but enough to save money for a holiday in Japan. In 2016 the hours dropped off a bit and I started an expensive course of dental treatment and my savings carried me, narrowly, through the summer. But then last year the bottom fell out of the student enrolment for the service I provide. From fourteen or so note-takers the Disabilities Office went down to two, of which I was fortunate to be one. Most concerningly, every one of the students enrolling had been enrolled in previous years; not a single one was new to the service. This year I’m back down to nine classes and, once again, all the student names are ones I’ve seen before. Sorry, let me rephrase that. Once again, both the student names are ones I’ve seen before. I gather I’ll have a few extra classes from a couple of additional students, but not every week. Something has gone wrong.

Apparently, according to my supervisor, the University’s official position is now that we shouldn’t be providing notes for people who don’t absolutely need them, because no-one’s going to be taking notes for them out in the real world and they need to practise doing it for themselves. I’m still not sure how that translates to absolutely nobody new signing up for note-taking; I suspect, but don’t know how I could find out for certain, that the University has stopped mentioning the service in their marketing or at Orientation or wherever my clients used to hear about it before. That means that when my current students graduate and leave, I – like a couple of hundred other Otago service staff members so far – will be out of a job.

(The other option, as I’ve been reminded since I first wrote this post, is peer note-taking, which is when the University pays another student in the disabled student’s class a lot less than they pay me to hand in a copy of their own notes. This has helped me out on occasions when I’ve fallen ill and not had time to arrange a swap with another professional note-taker. But it’s not going to be the same quality as what I do, because they don’t have the training I’ve had, they mostly don’t have my typing speed, they won’t have developed a good system of digital shorthand like I have, and being busy students they don’t have the time I do to devote to editing. Also, I’m told – I can’t substantiate this – if the disabled student and the student note-taker don’t get on, it’s not unheard-of for the note-taker to do bad notes on purpose to hand in while keeping the more accurate version to themselves. Hiring professionals does make a big difference. Switching to purely peer note-taking would still constitute a huge downgrade to the service the University offers.)

I know, I know, mine is not a neutral viewpoint. As both an employee whose livelihood depends on this service and a disabled person myself, I am obviously not going to feel very good about this. But frankly, the University’s reasoning is bullshit. It’s the same tired justification that’s always trotted out for denying accommodations to disabled people: “Take away the crutches and they’ll learn to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.” Well, see, the thing is, those are actually rather apt metaphors, but not the way their users intend. Taking away someone’s crutches and pulling people up by their bootstraps both, if you were to demonstrate them literally, have the same effect: the victim falls flat on their face.

But isn’t one of the goals of education to allow people to integrate freely in society and thus live life to the fullest extent of their capabilities? Absolutely. But taking away accommodations does the opposite of that. It’s true that the world outside the tertiary education sector doesn’t have many note-takers, but I would venture to suggest that that’s because the world outside the tertiary education sector doesn’t have many lectures. Dentists don’t have to type for hours every day, but dental students do. The University’s new policy will mean there’ll be people who couldn’t follow their dream career in dentistry because they couldn’t type; which, given Otago has the only Dental School in the country, is a gross dereliction of duty.

Some disability advocates declare that disability is “socially constructed”. This is neither false nor nonsense, but it’s so misleading as to leave people less enlightened after they’ve heard it than before, unless they’ve taken a cultural anthropology course or similar and learned what this progressive-intellectual shibboleth actually means. It emphatically does not mean that disability is all made up. It emphatically does not mean that people are only disabled because everyone around them treats them like they’re disabled. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite. Let me explain.

The word “disability” is often used as a synonym for “impairment”, but there’s a subtle distinction which is worth highlighting. Impairments are not socially constructed in any meaningful sense. An impairment is what you physically can’t do with your body that most people can, or can only do with great effort that most people can do easily. (I’m including your brain as part of your body, obviously.) A disability is what obstacles your impairment poses for you as you participate in society – as you work, as you study, as you socialize, as you consume entertainment, and so on. An impairment cannot be removed at will, or it wouldn’t be an impairment. To remove the obstacles to social participation that constitute a disability, society must accommodate impairments. People with impairments are disabled because society doesn’t acknowledge the impairments enough.

An example to make the distinction clear. Short-sightedness, long-sightedness, and astigmatism are all visual impairments. But only very severe forms of these conditions are disabling in our society, because the accommodations for the milder forms – eyeglasses and contact lenses – are accepted without question as normal. If your bank made you take your glasses off “so we can see your face properly” and then made you fill out forms in tiny print without them, then you’d be disabled. If you had to take them off to get your driver’s licence photo and then weren’t allowed to wear them while driving so law enforcement could match you to the photo, then you’d be disabled. If all eyeglass-frames came in one ugly, ill-fitting style, and the people selling them told you you should be grateful to have glasses at all, then you’d be disabled. If strangers and casual acquaintances came up to you in the street suggesting you’d be rid of the need for that contraption on your head if only you would try the new eye-strengthening course they’ve been doing (it’s called Sight Naturally, it’s based on ancient tribal colour lore, you never see the tribespeople in National Geographic wearing glasses, do you?), then you’d be disabled.

There’s a confusion here, by the way, which applies especially to mental and intellectual impairments. Lots of people say they’re in favour of helping people with such conditions. But when they say that, they’re picturing treatments which will wipe away the impairment and turn the patients “normal”. Failing that, they’d rather mentally impaired people disappeared behind institutional doors than be out and about on the street where decent people might bump into them (think of the children!) At a disabilities conference that I, yes, took notes for to earn a bit of extra cash last year, one speaker described dinner party conversations where she would mention that she worked in a mental health facility. “It must be hard keeping them contained. Was the woman who killed herself one of yours? You’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t such a drain on society.” Then she would reveal the truth – that she was paid to test the facilities in the capacity of a client. “Oh, but you don’t seem like you’re about to stab us!” “No, but the night is young.” The goal of mental health treatment, as of all disability accommodations, isn’t to turn the client “normal”. It’s to give them their life back.

From all this it follows that, if you remove a disability accommodation that was previously available, you are creating disability. You are disabling people who happen to have impairments. That stain will be on the University’s hands if my job disappears next year or the year after. I hope their lavish new landscaping project is worth it.

Meanwhile, I have the rather urgent concern of finding an alternative source of income. Because I’m disabled too. I’ve previously mentioned the social anxieties which make applying for work a terrifying ordeal for me. But that terror is upon me. The writing is on the wall.

I support Madeline Anello-Kitzmiller

There’s a news video from New Zealand going round the world at the moment. It was taken by a casual attendee at the Rhythm & Vines Festival in Gisborne for the New Year. Two women, one of them topless, are walking through a casual crowd; a man watches them pass, then sneaks up behind the topless woman, gropes her, and runs away. Both women turn around, walk over to the man, and hit him. The women are Madeline Anello-Kitzmiller and her friend Kiri-Ann Hatfield. The man who assaulted Anello-Kitzmiller hasn’t been named.

Why am I just telling you what happens in this video, instead of showing you? Because I wanted to show you Anello-Kitzmiller’s statement on the incident instead. I’ve never previously seen the ethical core of naturism and body-positive feminism stated so comprehensively and so succinctly.

...I would like to point out that I had that body art done at the festival. There was actually a stall selling the “glitter tits” get-up, and I paid to have it done, as well as many other girls I saw walking around with it. In addition to that, the waterslide at R&V was handing out $50 to the first man and woman to go down the slide naked, and another $50 to the next man and woman. I saw plenty of naked men that day getting absolutely no harassment for revealing themselves. There were naked men in the mosh; my best friends got naked and ran through the crowds; I saw plenty of guys walking around with no shirt on and a handful of girls as well.

So I want to ask you, what is the difference? Both men and women have nipples, although men’s nipples are seemingly useless and my breasts are there to feed children, should I ever choose to have them some day. The difference is that women have been over-sexualized for way too long and it needs to stop. I wanted to share my body because I think it’s an important step to normalizing the naked body and desexualizing [it]. The more often people see nudity, the more they realize... that it’s nothing to gape over. Nudity at festivals helps erase pornstar ideals of what our bodies “should” look like. My breasts are not sex toys. They are not an invitation. My body is beautiful, and no matter who says otherwise, it cannot and will not demean my own self-worth. Nor should it for anybody else.

I’ve been accused of “trying to turn New Zealand into America” in a few comments. This is a narrow-minded accusation. Besides, the similarities are there regardless. The amount of naked people running around at Splore in New Zealand would be severely overwhelming for those of you who couldn’t handle a few bouncy “glitter tits” at R&V. I will say that the majority of New Zealand has seemed to be more conservative than Portland, Oregon, but sexual harassment happens everywhere, all over the world. I have never experienced so much hostility at a festival before, but I don’t doubt that there are festivals in the States where the crowd is also less free-spirited than others.

I have been accused of “asking for it” too many times to count. It’s disappointing that people really believe that what you’re wearing has any connection to what you actually want. Comments stating that I was “asking for it” or that I “had it coming” are promoting rape culture. When you say something like that, you are justifying that man’s actions when he violated my rights to my own body, and you are telling other like-minded people that, should they ever want to sexually assault or rape another human being, it’s OK. It is never OK and we are never “asking for it”.

...The cool thing about being able to get naked at festivals and like-minded events is that you don’t have to get naked if you don’t want to. Do what you’re comfortable with and only do what makes you happy. I personally love being naked because it made me realize that I am indomitable. Nothing anybody says about me or my body could ever wound me. At Rhythm & Vines both men and women came up to me and told me that I was disgusting, that I should cover up, that I [should be] ashamed, that I was a slut, but I kept my top off all night and I danced until 6am and I had the best time of my life regardless.

On “trying to turn New Zealand into America”, I’m surprised that such an accusation was ever made, because I was under the impression that it was more the other way around. It’s American censoriousness in particular that nudists tend to blame for the restrictive nudity rules on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The recent movement to banish breastfeeding from public spaces – a bizarre bit of prudery unheard-of even in Victorian times – is as far as I can tell very largely American, and doesn’t seem to have taken hold here. I think the truth is that the United States contains both the most and the least nudity-friendly places in the English-speaking world; Portland, Oregon, is evidently among the former.

[EDIT: A Tumblr mutual informs me that the last part of that sentence is sadly not true. However, the United States does contain San Francisco, where public nudity was temporarily legal, and Brattleboro, Vermont, where it still is. Also, I’m ashamed to report that my attention has been drawn to a recent incident in Auckland where a woman was evicted from a bus after a fellow passenger took offence at her breastfeeding. I still think this is far from the norm in New Zealand, but I can’t in all honesty maintain that it “hasn’t taken hold.”]

While New Zealand sadly doesn’t attain Brattleboro standards of body acceptance, our nudity taboo is far from absolute. My town hosts a nude rugby match most years, though they’re not doing it this year; the Kawarau Gorge bungy-jumping station used to let people jump naked for free until they found they were losing too much money; and the whole country had a “National Nude Day” (mostly pubs offering specials to naked customers) for a few years about a decade ago. I used to belong to a group that went walking nude in the bush around Dunedin, and most people we met responded positively. And, as Anello-Kitzmiller points out, nudity is at least tolerated at many New Zealand summer festivals – a tradition going back to Nambassa in the 1970s – and was specifically encouraged at Rhythm & Vines. Which means that everyone who’s commented to say her toplessness was “inappropriate” is simply wrong.

That is, however, a minor error compared to the premise that, if her nudity had been inappropriate, then it would have been OK for the man who harassed her to do what he did. Of course, personally I think that nudity ought to be acceptable everywhere it’s physically safe. But even given that we can’t snap our fingers and wish for society to outgrow all its repressive norms overnight, there is no way sexual harassment is an allowable means of enforcing those norms. If female toplessness had been banned at Rhythm & Vines, then the proper response would have been for a security team member to bring her a towel or spare shirt and explain their standards. The assailant would still be no more justified in his actions than a truck driver is justified in killing cyclists who stray into the wrong lane.

The other argument is of course that old chestnut “He’s a man, he couldn’t help himself.” There were half a dozen other men in that video and they somehow managed to help themselves (although they didn’t help Anello-Kitzmiller by doing anything like intervening). And it wasn’t as if he took one look at her breasts and zoned out or something; he waited until she had gone past and then made his move. The assault was a deliberate choice on his part. If he had genuinely been unable to help himself, then he should have been under restraint or at the very least in the care of a minder. Since he was able to help himself, deterrent action such as Anello-Kitzmiller and Hatfield took was the appropriate response.

Frankly, I think “He couldn’t help himself” and “Her nudity was inappropriate” are both smoke-screens for our society’s ugly underlying attitude. Both are nonsensical on the face of it, but both make sense if you make one abhorrent ethical assumption: “Men may act on any sexual impulse they feel towards women.” Then everything falls into place. Skimpy clothing becomes inappropriate anywhere sexual activity is inappropriate. The assailant couldn’t help how he felt about Anello-Kitzmiller’s breasts.

And no, you can’t take gender out of it by restating that as “People may act on any sexual impulse they feel towards anybody.” Our society does not condone women acting sexually, nor men acting sexually towards men. Accordingly, men are granted much broader freedom with our bodies in casual contexts like music festivals. The festival I go to at New Year’s doesn’t encourage nudity, yet there were plenty of men going shirtless in the heat this year. If I, a bisexual man, had sneaked up behind one of them and groped him, and he’d (rightly) hit me, how many people do you think would have defended my actions on the basis that he was “asking for it”?

(In case you’re wondering why I, a nudist, go to a New Year’s festival that doesn’t allow nudity, it’s partly a shortage of options down this end of the country but mainly about the music. I love traditional folk music and I have bigger autistic sensory issues with loud thumpy contemporary music than I do with clothing even in the summer heat. And I wear a kilt, which helps. And for the hottest days there’s a small swimming-hole upstream of the main one where hardly anyone goes.)

The same assumption again must be behind the frequent rejoinder: “Men are turned on by breasts. How do you intend to change that?” There’s no need to change men’s feelings. What needs to change is how men consider themselves entitled to act on their feelings. Suppose you’re hungry in the supermarket – I’ve used this analogy before – and you walk past a big bulk bin full of chocolate chips or something. Do you dig your hand in and grab? Not if you’re over the age of about four. Do you stand there staring and drooling? Not if you have any self-control at all. And chocolate doesn’t even have human rights. The problem is not that men think breasts are nice; the problem is that men think breasts are permission.

Which gives us good grounds for hope that men can change. Men do seem to have evolved to like the look of breasts – I’m afraid there’s not much evidence for the idea that this response is created by society or culture. But society and culture do determine what constitutes an acceptable or an unacceptable way to behave. Our culture needs to change, and it can change if we put in the work. I salute Madeline Anello-Kitzmiller for her contribution to that work, both by displaying her body and by penalizing that man for disrespecting it. Whether you join her in the former effort can only be your own personal choice; but we all need to contribute to the latter. Let’s build a zero-tolerance policy for sexual assault and harassment at every level of society we can influence, starting now.

I thought I would feel better about this than I do

As of when Winston Peters finally made up his mind who to go with yesterday, Jacinda Ardern is now Prime Minister of New Zealand, in a coalition government formed of Labour, New Zealand First, and the Green Party. I have mixed feelings about this. There was no big surprise in the special votes; as commentators evidently better-informed than me predicted, they took two seats off National and handed one to the Greens and one to Labour. And, as any New Zealander with half a brain could have told you, the prospect of a National-Green coalition (raised in all seriousness by some pundits evidently lacking that endowment) was a chimaera.

The good part of my mixed feelings is obviously that we’ve got a new government, which – if not for the presence of New Zealand First – would have been the left-most one of my lifetime. In concrete terms, this country’s decades-long trajectory towards Dickensian inequality and poverty might actually go into reverse. We might get a liveable minimum wage. We might get housing for homeless people. We might get unions strong enough to make a difference. We might get an economic strategy that doesn’t depend on turning our rivers into sewers and lying to the world about it.

The bad part starts with New Zealand First. I don’t think we’re in for a three-ring circus like the National-New Zealand First coalition government of 1997, because this time Winston hasn’t brought in a cadre of loudmouths with egos as big as his own. Jim Anderton’s old gibe, calling the party “Winston First”, is even truer now than when he made it in the 1990s. But I don’t know, and I’m not looking forward to finding out, how much of its left-wing promise the Labour-Greens bloc has had to concede in order to secure Winston’s support.

I do know, as I’ve said on this blog more than once, that Winston’s anti-immigrant stance is a cynical façade put on to garner votes. I also know that Winston is 72 years old, and likely to retire within a decade – possibly by next election, depending on how well his health weathers old age. What happens to New Zealand First then? Will it crumble, leaderless, into irrelevance? Or will Winston be succeeded by one of his many sincerely racist admirers? And then will New Zealand have its own Brexit, its own Trump, to deal with? These questions scare me.

Also not comforting is the fact that National still has two more seats than Labour and the Greens combined. I’m not confident enough in my expectation of a stable coalition not to worry about what that will mean if it does fall apart; and I’m bamboozled, frankly, by the fact that it happened at all. How does a government preside over as big a social and economic crisis as this one has and still attract more votes than its competitors? What does it say about my country’s soul that nearly half of us are prepared to shrug off the child poverty and homelessness we’re seeing now as long as the men in suits get to hang on to more cash come tax time? Are we all clones of Cersei Lannister?

I don’t like not understanding these things, I honestly don’t. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick to claim to be mystified by your opponents’ stupidity and malice, and more to the point it’s purely performative. It makes a good show if all you want is to assure people on your own side that you’re one of them, but it doesn’t budge your opponents an inch except to confirm their belief in your stupidity and malice. And if you really care about your political ideals, it’s your opponents you want to be shifting. The fact that I don’t understand what motivates people to vote National means I have no idea how we can motivate them to vote more leftward. Maybe that’s the real reason why this election result brings me so little joy.

Mass shootings are not a mental health problem

A few days ago, an old white man fired a lot of guns into a crowd of people at a music festival in Las Vegas. Apparently he also shot at a nearby fuel storage site in a failed attempt to cause an explosion. You can find his name on the news sites; in the distant hope of setting some kind of example with the ultimate goal of cutting off the notoriety that motivates others to emulate these killers, I’m not going to repeat it. He killed 59 people, I think the current count is, and wounded a number estimated at over 500. Some people are calling this the biggest mass shooting in US history, which of course has prompted others to bring up bigger ones, like the Greenwood Massacre of 1921 and the “Battle” of Wounded Knee in 1890. Perhaps they mean the biggest mass shooting by a single shooter.

Last month I said the following about the politics of climate change in the hurricane-torn US, and it goes treble for gun control and mass shootings:

More often, however, “Don’t politicize this problem” means “Your politics offer a better way of fixing it than mine do, and I’d rather people didn’t figure that out.” I can sympathize with a preference for peace over contention, but politics can be operationally defined as the set of problems which are more important than not being contentious.

Gun control laws work. They don’t prevent every single possible shooting, but they cut them down dramatically. Here in New Zealand, we have civilized gun laws. You cannot buy a gun in The Warehouse here like you can in Walmart in the US. You can’t open-carry in New Zealand. Nobody keeps a handgun for “protection” – you don’t need one, because you know other people don’t have them either. The last time anyone shot and killed members of the public here was in 1990, when I was twelve, at Aramoana north of Dunedin. (There have been a handful of incidents since when angry men shot their family members.) In Australia thirty-five people were killed at a place called Port Arthur in 1996, so they tightened up their gun laws and the government bought everybody’s guns off them, and they haven’t had a mass shooting since. You can Google other countries and their gun laws and mass-shooting prevalences for yourself. You’ll find the pattern holds.

Yes, there have been scary incidents in my life when I was exceedingly grateful that the person confronting me wasn’t allowed a gun; and no, they weren’t carrying guns illegally. Turns out our firearms licensing laws actually do make it difficult for dangerous people to get hold of them. So not many people in New Zealand want American-style gun “freedom”. But I’ve met one or two who do, enough to have figured out what’s wrong with their arguments. First up: no, America, you do not have more freedoms or better-functioning democracy as a result of your guns. New Zealand has the same freedom of expression that you do, rather better freedom of religion in practice, a much more representative electoral system, far less gerrymandering, automatic voter registration, and vastly more time to vote when elections roll around. Your idea that your guns keep dictatorship and corruption at bay is a peculiarly American fantasy.

The guy I’m thinking of reckoned the whole problem with American mass shootings was that they let people have guns without taking a mental health exam. He was recommending target-shooting as, he said, a tremendously calming sport. Apparently it’s meditative to squeeze a trigger and see a hole appear in the centre of a target. I told him this wouldn’t work for me because I have terrible, terrible aim. I can’t skip a stone over a lake or win a game of pool against a three-year-old or get past level 1 of a first-person-shooter video game. I didn’t add that I would fail his mental health criterion, that I have exactly the same psychiatric diagnosis as the guy who killed six people in Santa Barbara in 2014 – and also, at his age, the same difficulties with romance and sexuality that he was so enraged about.

Now if you’re wondering, no, I’ve never killed anybody, and no, I don’t think I would have done if only I’d had access to a gun at age 22. Which just goes to show: mental health is not the problem. Though hyperbolic, Michel Foucault’s assertion that mental health diagnoses are primarily a method of social control isn’t completely off the mark. I’ve seen an otherwise pleasant-seeming person try to get library security to eject another library user who was making a bit of noise, not because of the noise primarily but because – in a harsh, horrified whisper – “She’s a handicap!” As a funny-looking person myself (my fashion options are basically “deliberate eccentric” or “aimed at normal and missed”), I occasionally get things thrown at me in the street: usually water-balloons, once an egg, once a lighted cigarette. One acquaintance, when I mentioned this, responded with sympathetic incredulity “I guess some people just have mental problems.” No. This is how people treat people with mental problems. This is the behaviour of a mentally normal human being towards someone they feel entitled to disrespect.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t concede that like most laws, in practice if not on paper, gun restrictions disproportionately target people of colour. That has certainly been the case in New Zealand, from 1869 when selling guns to Māori became a crime to 2007 when armed police stopped traffic and raided people’s homes and arrested seventeen people, most of them Māori, on dodgy charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act. It’ll be the tenth anniversary in about a week, and I don’t think we should let them forget. But to suggest that Americans of colour are better off with their on-paper right to bear arms would be a joke in very poor taste. Ask Tamir Rice or Philando Castile how that worked out for them.

There’s always a lot of discourse about either race or mental illness after mass killings, depending on whether the killer was white. You don’t hear so much about gender, despite the fact that it’s a better predictor of deadly violence than either. I know of only one mass shooting by a woman ever, that being the one that inspired the Boomtown Rats song I Don’t Like Mondays. What does seem to come out repeatedly when people analyse these killers’ backgrounds after the police have shot them dead is anger, hatred, possessiveness, and entitlement, and especially towards women. It’s entirely unsurprising to me that people remember the Las Vegas killer pushing his girlfriend around.

Anger and possessiveness are going to take a lot of time and work to expunge from the culture. In the meantime, the quickest way to make a difference is to prevent these people from getting their hands on the means to kill dozens from a distance. In the longer term I can’t help thinking that the American sanctification of the right to bear arms – that is, the right to have the power to kill – itself encourages the attitude that deadly violence is an appropriate response to perceived social wrongs. Either way, America, you’re never going to fix this problem you have without gun control.