strypey

Breaking the Supermarket Monopoly Over Grocery Supplies in Aotearoa

2026-09-25T00:48:36Z

Urrgghh. In the middle of looking after a younger family member during the school holidays, I thought I'd forgotten to hit publish on this piece here, and in the process, completely forgot that I'd decided to publish the KiwiDelivery piece on the Disintermedia blog instead. Please consider this a rough draft, published for comparison, and go to the Disintermedia link above if you want the polished version.

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The purpose of this post is to describe KiwiDelivery, a proposal for a publicly-owned, renewables-powered alternative to the corporate supermarket duopoly. We'll get to that. But first, let's set the scene.

Back in March I wrote a thread on my Mastodon account, responding to Bomber Bradbury's advocacy for a state-backed supermarket chain. A policy he's called for a few times on his weekly podcast The Bradbury Group. Bomber must have been pleased as punch when the Greens announced policy aiming to do exactly that, by forcing the supermarket duopoly to sell a chunk of their operations - retail stores and logistics infrastructure - to a new, publicly-owned supermarket chain; 'KiwiMart'.

With all due respect to Comrade Bradbury and the Greens, this is right up there with 'GST off fruit and veges' as far as uninspiring policy goes. For one thing, it would involve risking huge amounts of public money on a business venture. One that no corporate extractor thinks is viable enough to invest in. This seems ... unwise.

Secondly until we get a woooden stake right into the heart of the corporatist policy vampire ("neoliberalism", "the Washington Consensus"), and kill it dead for good, even success could end in failure. Where the public purse takes all the risk, and corporate extractors get most of the benefit. Because if KiwiMark worked out it could be sold off to said extractors by the next NatACT government, on the basis that the state has no place in the supermarket business.

In this case - much as it sticks in my craw - I happen to agree with them on this one. Supplying food can and should be done in a decentralised way, ideally by community-controlled organisations. The supermarket system is already too centralised for my liking, and depending on the state for food security is literally putting all your eggs in one basket.

I agree with what Kieran McAnulty said on the Bradybury Group in March; public provision isn't a silver bullet for everything. I would add; especially when the public service has been been corporatised, restructured and starved of resources for decades. Take a look at KiwiBuild, or the current state of our public health system. Would you want your food supply to depend on a system run like this?

I'm all for revitalising the public service. For public ownership of connecting infrastructure, like the electricity grid, and the road and rail networks. For universal public services in areas like health and education, where commercialisation creates observable perverse incentives. But we can't wish all that into existence overnight. Adding another mission-critical load to an already overwhelmed public service is a recipe for disaster, not food security.

Side note: One thing I learned from looking into the corporatisation of universities is that much of the "wasteful public spending", bemoaned by corporatists like the NatACTs, is a direct product of their reforms. Academic departments used to share resources on an organic, 'who needs it now' basis. When universities were corporatised, each department became a separate 'business unit', and any resources shared with them by other departments are now 'expenses'. So the total on-paper cost of running them goes up, even though no extra resources are being used.

Another example is the cost of flying MPs around the country. When AirNZ was 100% publicly-owned and run as a public good, flying MPs around was just part of its role as the national carrier. If those flights were accounted for at all, they were expenses on the AirNZ balance sheet. But once AirNZ was corporatised, those flights were pushed onto the MPs expense sheets, and counted as public spending. Same flights, same provider, but suddenly a massive costs to the public accounts every year.

But I digress. Coming back to the idea of a state supermarket chain, this is a solution that reflects a lack of deep thinking about the problem. Which is not that we don't have enough owners for our highly centralised, corporate-controlled, grocery supply chains. The problem is that we ended up with these in the first place.

The supermarket chain duopoly is a symptom of that problem, not the cause. For one thing, in a country with robust anti-monopoly enforcement, it never would have come to this. But although anti-monopoly enforcement is definitely required - and incrementally starting to happen thanks to the Grocery Commissioner - that can only open up space for better food supply systems.

So what's my vision for this, if it's not the KiwiBank of supermarkets (KB is also a mostly failed solution to an essential service dominated by an oligopoly of extractive corporations)? Again, no silver bullets here. But I do have a few ideas for how I'd attack the problem as Minister of Groceries.

At the risk of repeating myself, we can't propose radical and effective solutions if we don't have a deep understanding of the problems we're trying to solve. So what is the real guts of our supermarket problem? It's pretty much the same as the social media problem, in a word; centralisation. Resulting in chokepoints where financial vampire taps can be applied to extract wealth from customers (Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow wrote a whole book about exactly this, called Chokepoint Capitalism).

So as with the social web, whatever our solutions are, they need to have the goal of decentralising the system. Moving us away from a handful of grocery supply chains, and towards a diverse network of food supply webs. While still having sufficiently robust food supply institutions, and enough of them, to ensure food security for every community. Purely peer-to-peer food webs, driven by idealism, volunteer work and affinity networks, have value as proving grounds for new ideas, and ways to temporarily fill gaps. But by themselves, they're not going to cut it here.

The creation of the a Grocery Commissioner has already taken an important step to move the grocery supply network in this direction. By mandating that wholesalers owned and operated by the duopoly must supply to any retail store on fair terms, rather than giving preferential treatment to stores within their own chain. But this needs robust enforcement, with serious penalties any time they don't do it. Up to and including a forced separation of retail and wholesale operations, as we did in 2001 with Telecom NZ and the fibre-optic network, and a few years before with electricity retail and lines businesses (but sadly not with generation businesses .. yet).

The next step is to ask serious questions about why we drive across town to a warehouse-sized store to get groceries. Instead of getting them from superettes and greengrocers at our local shops, within walking or biking distance. There are a number of reasons, but the main one is that it's cheaper. A *lot* cheaper. At least on an individual / household basis (although I suspect the total resource cost to the country is much higher).

There's also the catch-22 of local shops not having enough space or turnover to supply specialist items that only certain people buy (eg coconut yoghurt for dairy-free yoghurt lovers like me). But if we could get the prices down in local dairies and superettes, and more people buying food there, that would mostly take care of itself over time. As the logic of competitive markets actually did its work for a change.

So why do local shops charge so much more - sometimes twice as much - for the same goods?

One reason is the aforementioned lack of access to wholesalers at competitive prices. I've known a few people involved in running small dairies over the years, so I know a lot of their stock is bought at retail prices from Pak'nSave. They have to mark it up significantly just to cover the full costs of doing business.

Another reason is that most local shops don't own the building they operate out of. Instead they pay exorbitant commercial rents to yet another bunch of rent-seeking parasites. Who can still profit from untaxed capital gains even if they leave shop buildings sitting empty for years, without the perceived hassles of having tenants. So shop owners have little choice but to pay the asking price, however unreasonable it might get, or go out of business (and many have).

Another reason for high prices in local shops may be lack of effective competition. A knock-on effect of the above, resulting in a lot of dairies, greengrocers, and superettes going bust. Replaced with $2-shop-style stores selling designer landfill, or empty storefronts, or most galling of all, retail outlets for 2 other kinds of economic parasites; real estate companies and tenancy managers.

So what can we do to revitalise local shops, and bring their prices down without bankrupting them?

1) As mentioned above, robust enforcement to prevent wholesalers using price discrimination to allow supermarkets within their own chain to compete unfairly.

2) Educate shopkeepers about their government-backed right to access wholesale goods at fair prices, and how to report any discrimination they experience.

3) Rent stabilisation on commercial lease buildings, when at least 50% of what they sell is food (not junk). Maybe even with an obligation to let them rent-to-own the buildings their shops are in, as individual businesses, or as a body corporate for a block of shops (say, a struggling mall).

4) Ensure access to cheap credit for people wanting to start a business selling at least 50% food, in a residential area. Unlike subsidies, loans are generally paid back. They do come with a fair bit of risk when the borrower is a new business, but this would give the state an instrinsic motivation to make sure the grocery market is as competitive as it can be, so give them the best chances of paying back that startup loan.

There are probably more things we could do to support local shopping options, where people can use active transport instead of cars, and buy fresh food more often. Those I've listed are pretty vague, and need plenty of work on the details. But so does 'start a state-run supermarket chain'. At least the ideas I'm sharing might actually go some way to solving the problem.

So that's revitalising local shops. But there's another way we could replace the weekly drive to the stupourmarket, freeing up people's time for other things, and reducing energy use and carbon emissions in the process. That's by making more use of delivery services using cargo bikes or electric vehicles. The need for contactless delivery during lockdowns was the Proof of Concept for this, as are the vege box deliveries set up by CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) schemes.

Grocery and meal delivery is another groups of services that cost far more to use than they actually cost to run. Thanks to various layers of economic rent-seekers - like Uber Eats, and the supermarket dupology's delivery suppliers - who use access to almost bottomless capital to drive most local competitors out of business, and then ramp up prices. Classic enshittification.

Again, we need robust anti-monopoly enforcement to bring some market discipline to these parasites. But again, that only opens up space in the relevant markets. How can we ensure that community-driven delivery businesses - co-ops, social enterprises, CSAs - have the resources they need to start stepping into that space? This is where the money Bomber and the Greens propose to spend on state-run supermarkets could do far, far more good in pursuit of the same goal; robust competition for the supermarket duopoly.

What I suggest is, rather than set up KiwiMarket, set up KiwiDelivery;

Buy a fleet of electric vans. Along with charging stations, solar panels and sodium ion battery banks, enough to keep all the vans charged for all day use.

Hire some local app designers and Open Data people to build Free Code ordering app software, using Open Standards. Workers who will then spend at least some of their earnings in Aotearoa.

Set up an ordering website using onshore hosting. Protecting the digital sovereignty of the service and the people using it, and growing the local hosting market.

With all this in place, kiwis could order directly from wholesalers, via KiwiDelivery's trade account, and have their order delivered to their home or workplace at a time convenient to them. With little to no carbon emissions. Completely cutting the duopoly retailers and their price-fixing out the equation. KiwiDelivery could be run as a State-Owned Enterprise, producing a modest return for the public as its shareholder. But it could also be run at cost (including sensible capital retention to cover hard times), as a public good. Like a publicly-owned co-op.

The best part is, whatever the fate of KiwiDelivery as a business venture, it would at least deliver some benefits. For a start, it would definitely prove that there are alternatives to driving a carbon-spewing car across town to a giant warehouse, once every week or 2, and spending an hour or 2 doing so. Also that there are alternatives to the utter waste of urban space that is a supermarket parking lot. Most of which could eventually be repurposed for intensive housing, given they're right next to a food supply, and usually on public transport routes.

KiwiDelivery would cost a fraction of what it would cost to set up a supermarket chain, and be more likely to work, because using it would be more convenient. Even if it didn't, at least it would bring a fleet of late model electric vans into the country, which could be repurposed. Instead of leaving behind a bunch of empty buildings and disused parking lots, as failed supermarkets do. I'm not that smart, but even I can see that this would be a much better spend of public money.

The other thing even a failed KiwiDelivery would leave behind is a set of battle-tested delivery ordering software, with all its components designed from the ground up to interoperate in vendor-neutral ways. This Free Code software could be used by anyone wanting to run a grocery ordering portal, provide apps for existing ones, operate a delivery service that delivers for them, and so on. If the KiwiDelivery business failed, the software could continue to be funded as a public good, or development could continue independently, funded by the groups who continue to use it.

In that situation, interest-free public loans could also be made available to not-for-profit groups starting ordering apps or delivery services. All of which would likely result in more competitors for the supermarket chains, and more choices about where and how to buy our food.

A similar service could also be set up for meal delivery, using a fleet of renewably-fueled, publicly-owned vehicles. I can even imagine a model where ordering apps - whether for groceries or meals - are obliged by law to be interoperable with any delivery service. So customers could combine their preferred ordering app with a wide range of food vendors and delivery services, from different companies, instead of being forced to use whichever delivery service is bundled with an app.

In summary, there's definitely juice to be extracted from learning about what's worked in the past, or not, and why. As well as running small-scale, low cost, public service experiments we can study for the same reasons. We need to break the habit of trying to solve problems by treating the superficial symptoms, instead of addressing their causes at the deepest level we can analyze. If we want to solve thorny, structural problems, involving deep inequalities of power and resources, we need to get creative.

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Some Home Truths About House Shortages, Housing Affordability, and the Generation Gap

2026-04-29T12:58:29Z

This piece was originally published on The Daily Blog back in 2017. A lot has changed in the last decade, and I'm pleased to report that the “generation war” narrative I criticised here has mostly dried up. But one thing that hasn't changed is the housing crisis in Aotearoa, which has only got worse, and the political history I laid out here still seems relevant.

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Geoff Simmons of TOP (the Opportunities Party) recently wrote a guest blog for TDB, in response to some rather harsh criticisms of TOP [2026 note: renamed the Opportunity party in 2026] and its millionaire founder Gareth Morgan by regular TDB writer Chris Trotter [2026 note: not any more].

I agree with Simmons about Trotter’s mostly ad hominem vent against Morgan and TOP, and the fiscally conservative (one might even say “neo-liberal” *gasp*) Clarkite policy positions he puts forward, while in the same breath accusing TOP of being “neo-liberal”. But Simmons loses me when he drifts off into a similarly weird rant, claiming that the important political divide in 2017 Aotearoa is between “Boomers” and “Millenials” (where do ‘still renting in our fourties’ Gen Xers fit in?). As Adam Conover explained to a bemused marketing conference, “generations don’t exist, we made them up”, which is good news for the millenials subject to constant accusations of being a narcissistic “selfie generation”.

It’s also important to understand, because when taken beyond dinner party polemic, the “generation war” narrative leads to some dangerously naive political positions, based on attacking anything that National and its spindoctors can manage to blame on “boomers” rather than neo-liberal policy. A good example is when Simmons attacks…

"Auckland Council’s Mike Lee who opposed the Unitary Plan to chase the votes of the NIMBY baby boomers.”

This is an incredibly short-sighted view, which fits nicely with National’s narrative that the housing availability shortage and the housing affordability crisis are all one problem, caused by lack of supply. Increase the supply, and the price goes down, right? Works for bread and pencils, why not houses?

There are a number of economic reasons why not, but the most obvious one is that supply can’t be increased as rapidly in the housing market as it can in the bread or pencils market. The availability shortage has been created by a number of things, and only one of them is a series of governments that haven’t done anything to ensure that new, quality housing is built at a rate at least as high as net immigration. Others include:

* government policies like the Clark Labour government’s “Jobs Jolt“, combined with increasing corporate buy-up and mechanization of farms, which have gutted rural communities, sending economic refugees into the cities in search of jobs. It’s sadly ironic that this is almost exactly how too many urban Māori ended up stranded in jobless city lives, after being forced off their land, or priced off with rates and other cash costs.

* rules allowing non-residents to own land and houses here, which almost no other country allows. The country is peppered with massive “summer homes” owned by the global 1%, which they might only stay in a few days a year. Although, if we just give away citizenship to the global rich (eg Peter Thiel), limiting property sales to residents won’t help much.

* rules that allow untenanted, empty properties to be written off as a tax loss, so there’s no incentive to make sure every property not being used by its owner is rented out.

* public housing stock being sold off rather than the supply being increased with new builds, in line with population growth.

As well as not addressing the other causes, the problem with increasing supply as a policy solution to the affordability crisis is that there’s a hard limit to the amount of housing that can be sensibly built on a pair of small, earthquake-prone, volcanic islands. Plus, the more houses you build, the more space you need for all the other land uses the people in all those houses want land for. Replace every public park with houses, every piece of arable land with houses, every flat bit of national park with houses, and every road and car park with houses, and you would solve the housing availability shortage for generations to come, right? Would Simmons call people who opposed that solution “NIMBY”? Would he claim that those who cited environmental concerns were really just concerned about the value of their property investments?

Of course not, because anyone thinking about the long term can see that this solution would cause more problems than it solves. It’s especially important to consider the long game at a time when we’re going into energy descent, and we need to increase our resilience by growing more of our food closer to where we want to eat it. We need policies to re-establish flourishing economies in the regions, so people can build secure lives there, not pack people together like battery hens in the cities, with in-fill housing built on every place that used to have a vege garden and fruit trees. The relaxing of rules to allow more intensive housing is a policy intended to benefit the corporate developers who can raise the capital to build intensive housing, and the landlords who will rent it out at the same price they currently charge for a house with a section.

Even if we could cover every square metre of Aotearoa in high-rise apartments, there’s no guarantee that would solve the housing affordability crisis. While supply is obviously one influence on prices, and the real availability shortages have contributed to the perception that property is a good investment for speculators and professional rent-seekers, the affordability problem too has a range of causes, some of them going back at least to the 1980s. These causes include:

* the abolition of low-interest, government-issued mortgages for first-home buyers; one of the first economic actions of the Rogernomics Labour government

* the transition to a casualized, low-wage economy, which began under National in the 1990s, with the Employment Contracts Act and the beginning of dismantling the social welfare system

* the massive increase in the prices of pretty much everything, despite the promises of the neo-liberals that competition would make everything cheaper

* public housing stock being sold off rather than increased in line with population growth, building quality replacements for any units where tenants are allowed to rent-to-buy. Adequate public housing reduces the demand for private rentals, and the rent stabilisation (“income-related rents”) that the Clark government restored for public housing tenants, acts as a moral anchor on rents charged to tenants in private rentals, as well as a benchmark for the minimum quality of rental housing [2026 note: the Healthy Homes Guarantee Act passed under the Ardern government also addresses this].

But as I think TOP are aware, one of the main drivers up until recently was not having any kind of Capital Gains Tax (CGT), which is also something almost no other country does. Those with sufficient bank credit could rake in fortunes in untaxed income by constantly “flipping” properties, something people who have to sell their labour for income generally can’t do. This massive transfer of wealth from labour to capital is illustrated by figures given by John Minto in a another recent piece on TDB:

“Minimum wage workers pay around 26% of their incomes in tax and GST while the highest income New Zealanders pay less than 5% of their incomes (from salaries and capital gains) in tax.”

National’s CGT on ‘sales less than 2 years after purchase’ is actually a simpler system to administrate than Labour’s proposed ‘exception for the family home’, while achieving the same thing. But I would extend it to 5 or 10 years. Who buys a house to live in and absolutely *has* to sell it in less than 5 or 10 years?

All of these things make it much harder to afford rent and save for a deposit, harder to get a mortgage, and harder to pay it off in a reasonable timeframe, no matter how frugal you are. Over a couple of generations, this structurally confers massive advantage on the children of home-owners, especially those from small families, and massive disadvantage on the children of renters, and/or those from large families. As Thomas Picketty showed in ‘Capital in the 21st Century’, this is one of the drivers of increasing inequality from generation to generation. But it’s a line that divides property-owning families like mine from tenant families [2026 note: I'm talking about extended families, I'm a renter myself]. This is not what generational inequality looks like, it’s what feudalism looks like.

Besides, as the authors of ‘The Spirit Level’ point out, nobody wins a race to the bottom. Those with more security and financial wealth end up paying anyway, one way or another. Even if only in the the form of living in an immiserated society, or in the case of the “Boomers”, being expected to pay for their children’s education, keep them living at home into their twenties, and underwrite their first home purchase.

Like all good disinformation, the “generation war” narrative contains a grain of truth; namely that kiwis who were educated or got into the job market before the introduction of student loans, employment contracts, or exploitative private mortgages (see below), are not as badly screwed over as those of us who weren’t. But it loses that grain of truth in a field of strawman arguments, mostly based on implying that “Boomers” and their parents, as a *generation*, were the architects of this neo-liberal blitzkreig. Certainly the politicians who passed neo-liberal policy into law were older than Gen Xers, but just because all trout are fish, that doesn’t mean that all fish are trout.

Most kiwis, working class and middle class, “Boomers” and older, fought the impostition of neo-liberal “reforms” tooth and nail, shoulder-to-shoulder with younger “Gen X” activists. Together, we won many small victories that kept hospitals and schools open, prevented the privatization of roads and water supplies, and brought in proportional representation in general elections and many local body elections. All this despite being consistently betrayed by political parties who railed against neo-liberalism in opposition, and slavishly administrated it while in government.

* Labour in 1984, leading to the emergence of the Alliance

* National in 1990, leading to the emergence of NZ First

* NZ First in 1996, leading an implosion of NZ First and the brief flicker of Mauri Pacific

* Labour again in the early 2000s, leading to the implosion of the Alliance, and the emergence of the Greens and Māori Party

* Māori Party in 2008, leading to the emergence of Mana, then Internet-Mana

* Labour again in 2014, leading to the implosion of Internet-Mana, driving Mana back into bed with the Māori Party [2026 note: now known as Te Pāti Māori], and creating a vacuum that TOP is arguably attempting to fill.

This sad history of flip-flopping serves as a warning to those who naively think that everything can be fixed overnight by voting for a Labour/ Greens/ NZ First goverment, or for giving the balance of power to a smaller party like Māori/ Mana, TOP, or even the Cannabis Party for that matter. It also demonstrates that the essential political divisions at work here are not those between generations, but the gulf between the 1% and their neo-liberal lackeys, and the rest of us.

I think Victor Macgill put it best in his response to Simmons in the comment thread:

“We need real alternatives not another negative rant and rave about how bad the enemy is”

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Protecting the Right to Vote, or Protecting the Right? An Open Letter to Wiremu Thomson

2026-02-18T04:49:36Z

Tēnā koe Wiremu,

I got your email address from your website (https://wiremuthomson.nz/), after getting a leaflet about your voting petition in my letterbox. I share your concerns about making sure that everyone who has a long term interest in our country gets to take part in electing the representatives governing it. Not those who see Aotearoa only as a set of resources to extract. But I don't believe limiting voting to citizens is the best way to achieve that.

A number of points to consider;

1) citizens can have their right to vote removed if we are outside the country for more than 3 years. See;

https://elections.nz/media-and-news/2023/rule-change-for-overseas-voting/

Even those born here and likely to return, many of whose whānau and friends are still here and affected by government decisions. Even those whose whakapapa guarantees them all the rights and privileges of any other citizen, under the terms of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and He Whakaputanga.

I hope you'd agree that as citizens we have an inalienable right to representation in government. Officials can't revoke other rights of citizenship, like our passport, because they think we've spent "too long" outside Aotearoa. Why should they be able to deny us our right to vote if we decide to spend a few years living overseas? Which in this globalised world, with our country hobbled by inequality and the resulting poverty, is often the only way we can get ahead.

When people are required to return to NZ every 3 years to retain eligibility to vote, it privileges those who can more easily afford the cost and time commitment of long distance travel, and whose health enables it. While discriminating against the less wealthy, and those with disabilities or health challenges. This may or may not be contrary to the Bill of Rights Act (IANAL), but it certainly violates the spirit of it, and the principle of universal human rights.

A petition demanding that citizens' right to vote is respected regardless of their whereabouts is one I'd sign.

2) Limiting voting to citizens doesn't confine it to those who have a long term interest in the wellbeing of Aotearoa, its people or its environment. Take Peter Thiel, a US tech billionaire who was essentially able to buy NZ citizenship in 2011, having spent only spent 12 days in the country. See;

Citizen Thiel

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/indepth/national/how-peter-thiel-got-new-zealand-citizenship/

Duty-free “Apocalypse Insurance”: Revisiting Peter Thiel’s New Zealand Citizenship;

https://repository.uclawsf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1870&context=hastings_international_comparative_law_review

3) I agree that allowing Active Investor Plus (AIP) visa holders to vote, despite being required to spend only 21 days here every 3 years to maintain their residency is unwise. As with Peter Thiel, these people are treating Aotearoa as an "apocalypse bolthole", to quote Matt Nippert's NZ Herald article linked above. I don't support the existence of the AIP visa. But putting that aside, making people eligible to vote purely on the basis of having an AIP is effectively auctioning off our sovereignty to the highest bidder, along with the property we sell them.

4) Permanent Residents too (as defined by Immigration NZ) have made a long term commitment to Aotearoa, Unlike Peter Thiel and AIP holders. The visa obligations to obtain Permanent Residency require spending 2 years continuously living here before being granted that status, and to show they are committed to living in NZ long term;

https://www.immigration.govt.nz/live/resident-visas-to-live-in-new-zealand/permanent-residence/becoming-a-permanent-resident-of-new-zealand/

A permanent resident has the same tax obligations as citizens, and their lives and futures too are affected by the decisions of NZ governments. I believe it would be antidemocratic and unjust to prevent them voting in the election of those governments. Although I'm open to the idea of requiring them to spend a full 3 year Parliamentary term as a resident before being eligible to vote.

I'm also open to the idea that their ability to vote here is a privilege not a right - as it is for citizens - and that it may be reasonable to revoke that privilege under some circumstances. For example if they leave the country for an extended period, putting their long term commitment to living here in question. But this already happens if they leave for more than a year. I see no reason they shouldn't be represented in government while living here.

5) People with any open-ended residency visa are eligible to vote in NZ elections after 1 year of continuously living here. I'm open to the idea that this is too short a time, and that like Permanent Residents, they ought to be required to spend to spend a full Parliamentary term as a resident before being eligible to vote. But if someone is living here for years at a time they too are affected by government decisions and deserve representation.

6) There are strong arguments to support the idea that the current government, like their counterparts overseas, are engaged in active voter suppression. Passing changes to electoral rules that are arguably intended to create eligibility for people likely to vote for them (eg AIP visa holders), and make voting harder for people they believe are likely to vote against them (eg removing the ability to register to vote on election day). Prisoners, for example, are citizens, and government decisions affect their lives more than almost anyone else. As I argued above, I don't believe governments have a right to declare them ineligible to vote.

Any changes we propose to election rules, especially around voting eligibility, must be carefully weighed. To ensure they're not serving this corruption of the electoral system.

In a system of representative government, rigorously defending the right to vote, and to full democratic participation in the practice of government, is crucial to defending our other human rights. Thank you for putting your personal time and resources into working on this, according to your own understanding of the issues. I hope to have an opportunity to engage with your further.

Nāku noa,
Danyl Strype
Waikato, Aotearoa

PS You have shared your thoughts about this in a public leaflet, so I will publish a copy of this open letter under the title 'Protecting the Right to Vote on my personal blog at;

https://strypey.dreamwidth.org/

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Health Workers are a National Treasure, Thank You For Your Service

2025-08-06T04:17:46Z

I want to thank all the tireless health workers who helped me last night. Starting with the Healthline operator who I would have spoken to about whether I needed an ambulance, if they had funding for enough staff and the wait time wasn't estimated as half an hour. At that point I wasn't convinced I had half an hour left. Also the 111 operator who I called instead, who calmly talked me through what had happened, dispatched an ambulance, and told me what I need to do - if I could - to prepare for their arrival.

I want to thank the ambos who found their way to me. Despite the odd, upstairs entryway to our flat and the outside light not working, as well as the fact I hadn't managed to make it to the door yet to unlock it. Who explained everything they were doing as they did it, and answered my curious questions, as they checked my heart, drove me to the hospital, waited for half an hour or so to unload me, and pushed me in a wheelchair up to A+E.

I want to thank the A+E staff. The triage nurse who took my details from one of the ambos and sent us through to the waiting room. The receptionist who checked my details, then after I'd waited for almost three hours, listened patiently to my rant about why I couldn't keep waiting there and needed to go home and sleep. The nurse who heard the same rant, and had the awkward conversation with me about how it was my right to leave, but medically her advice had to be keep waiting, and she couldn't say for how long.

I'd also like to thank the security guard who pushed me down to the front entrance in a wheelchair and called a taxi for me. I guess there's no funding to pay wages for orderlies anymore? It would have been better if he hadn't left me sitting outside the front entrance in the winter cold, at 3am, waiting for a taxi that took about 15 minutes to arrive. But wheeling patients around is not a security job (unless we're having a meltdown I guess) and contracted security guards aren't trained to consider these things, if they're given any training at all.

Finally, I'd like to thank the taxi driver who drove me home. I've always found it weird that one can arrive at the hospital in an ambulance, potentially in fear for your your life, then end up organising your own ride home when you leave. It's likely many people on low incomes decide to stay at home, or drive themselves to the hospital - against the ambos' advice that it might be unsafe - because they can't afford a taxi ride, and they don't have anyone they can ask to pick them up.

Anyway, the taxi driver was calm, friendly and good-humoured. Chatting away to me, despite the late hour, and the fact that he'd only had about three fares in an eight hour shift (thanks Uber, I hate it). Talking to someone who didn't seem stressed, in a comfortable, quiet, low-light situation, was just what I needed to start winding down after the whole ordeal.

As an autistic person with ADHD, sitting in a bright, noisy, crowded waiting room, with uncomfortably low backed seats, is an overwhelming and highly unpleasant sensory experience. Especially for hours at a time. Doing it while suffering from a migraine style headache, caused by some kind of illness I've had for a few days, on top of the chest pain that led to my trip to hospital, was psychological torture. Especially after midnight, when I desperately wanted to sleep.

Because I'd been using my Android all day, and I couldn't see anywhere to plug it in, it was nearly flat. So I didn't want to distract myself with a podcast in case it died just when I urgently needed to contact someone. All I could do was try to reduce the sensory input, by putting my noise cancelling headphones on and pulling my beanie down over my eyes. As the hours passed, more people got seen, and more seats became available, I end up trying to partially lay down. As I said to both the receptionist and the nurse, after more than an hour or two of that, I'd rather die in the comfort of my bed than keep waiting for what could be five minutes or five hours.

I'm happy to report that I didn't die in my sleep, not yet anyway. I've had about 9 hours sleep, and now I'm in bed with a hot water bottle, my medical cannabis vape, and water by my bed if I need it. I've had a coffee and I've got food. I still feel like I've been hit by a truck, and I probably still need medical attention. But I'd rather make an appointment and wait for it here than go back to A+E, even now that I'm not exhausted and scared.

Despite my distressed and sleep-deprived condition, I did my best to praise the staff for their service at every stage of the process. I told a number of them that they were all doing great work, that they're underpaid, and underfunded, and that the shitty conditions this government is forcing them to work under is a crime. I wanted them to know that I understand the real cause of the shitty experience I was having. Not. Their. Fault.

I dare any corporatist pod person who thinks the problem with our public health system is lack of "efficiency" or "productivity" to go up to A+E - in any hospital in the country - and find a single person who isn't working their tail off. Often working double shifts due to lack of staff. If there was anything those people could do to move us through faster, they would be doing it. They work jobs that are insanely difficult and stressful even under ideal conditions, because they *care*. It must break their hearts to be so overloaded and unable to give patients the care we really need.

When someone is taken into hospital by an ambulance, to be kept in overnight for observation, they're at some serious risk and probably not having a good time. In a country as wealthy as Aotearoa, it's not acceptable for them to be left in a waiting room for hours. There ought to be a bed available where they can rest while waiting to be seen, and they ought to be able to see a doctor in a timely fashion.

To do that, we need to properly resource our public health system. We need to hire more people. Not only medical staff, but support workers who can make sure we're not wasting the time of highly skilled doctors and nurses on administrivia. We need to pay them all better too. As I said to the taxi driver, there's something profoundly wrong with a society where you can make more money building weapons than saving people's lives.

More importantly, we need to give medical staff more say in how their workplaces are run. It's amazing how many people will work for less money if the conditions are better, and I'd say that goes double for people in caring professions. This would benefit the public too. Because if doctors, nurses and ambos had final sign-off on the design of public health services, instead of bean counters and managerialists, maybe those services would actually work properly? Imagine if staff in hospitals chose their managers, rather than vice-versa?

We can have universal public services that functions properly. I know, because when I was a child, we still did. It took the corporatist governments of Roger Douglas (Labour, late 1980s) and Ruth Richardson (National, 1990s) almost 20 years to mostly dismantle them, leaving us with the struggling remnants we have now. The question is, how are we going to get them back?

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Having Our Say on the Social Insecurity Amendment Bill

2025-01-10T04:08:27Z

"Submissions" closes at midnight on the Social Security Amendment Bill;

https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/sc/make-a-submission/document/54SCSSC_SCF_09FDCD32-87EF-4C46-E703-08DD18052784/social-security-amendment-bill

What they're doing is passing policy that throws hundreds or thousands of people out of work, cutting WINZ staff numbers, then (this bill) increasing the amount of paperwork people have to get processed successfully to get and keep a benefit. The inevitable result is more poverty, homelessness, hungry children, domestic stress and violence, crime, and imprisonmemt.

They say it's about "jobseekers", which implies healthy people taking a public funded holiday from working. But in the WINZ system, "jobseekers" includes people like me who have medical conditions (some lifelong) that make it difficult or impossible for us to work fulltime.

All of this will be much worse for people from racial minorities - including Māori - and our neurospicy whānau, all of whom are already discriminated against by WINZ and the criminal injustice system.

https://pmn.co.nz/read/politics-/punitive-policy-or-a-pathway-to-employment

In summary, bad words. Bad, *bad* words 🤬

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Subterranean House Move Blues

2024-09-06T09:33:16Z

A couple of days ago, I finally finished moving the last of my stuff into my new home. As anyone who has done this before will understand, I didn't get much else done for the past week or so. So now I'm preparing to triage the backlog that's piled up.

Like a lot of neurodivergent people, my coping strategies adapt to the spaces I inhabit, and I find moving house extremely disorientating. On top of that, this my ninth new home since the start of 2020, and that's not even counting all the places I stayed for a few weeks in between. So moving house now comes with a side salad of triggered trauma, and that backlog is looking like a massive wall I have to climb with my fingernails.

Only the most urgent things will get done this week - or even next week - while I finish settling into the new place and getting myself organised. Updating my mental inventory of where everything is (eg coffee beans, grinder, plunger), adapting my routines and processes to the new space - from the day-to-day (eg making a coffee) to the week-to-week (eg grocery shopping... to top up coffee beans) - and so on. TGIF!

If you're waiting on me for anything, please don't. Unless it can wait as long as a month or two, while I work through the backlog. If it really depends on me, and it's urgent, we've probably already talked about it, but keep being a squeaky wheel. I'm more likely to deal with things right now if I keep getting reminded of why it's urgent.

Wish me luck!

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Everyone - Part 3 - What's Going Wrong With the Green Party?

2024-07-17T12:28:10Z

Fair warning, this gets long. Very long. That's why I've broken it into sections, so you can skip the boring bits:

Prologue: Who am I and why do I care enough to write this, carefully edit it over weeks, and then make it public? Not a Green member, but a Green ally.

Part 1: My "identity politics" problem; How could a socially liberal anarchist have a problem with identity politics?

Part 2: All Greens are equal, but some Greens are more equal than others? What happens when paying your dues becomes secondary to being born with the right identity markers?

Part 3: Is the universal compassion and egalitarianism that underlies green values and policy at risk? Do identity mandates make parties more vulnerable to entryism?

Part 4: How many one-off incidents can you fit in a trend line? Everything that goes wrong in public is the tip of an iceberg, and there's been a bunch of things of late.

Part 5: Diversity and inclusion for who? Has enforcing a narrow framing of "diversity" reduced the capacity of the Greens to hold space for other forms of diversity?

Part 6: Radical solutions to address root problems; dissent is collective error-checking, limited terms are good for MPs, diversity can be cultivated organically.

Epilogue: Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. What can happen to movements that keep going the way the Greens seem to be headed?

Coda: Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. Or what goes around, comes around.

Prologue: Who am I and why do I care enough to write this, carefully edit it over weeks, and then make it public?

In one of the pinned posts on my fediverse account, I describe myself as a greenie and human rights activist, with loud opinions about media and technology policy. With an overall political bent that could be described as left-libertarian or anarchist (of a vaguely Chomskian/ Graeberian variety).

Drawing on both revolutionary theory and my own readings of history, as well as my observations over three decades of political activity, it's clear to me that electoral politics is limited in its ability to address the problems created by capitalism. But it's equally clear to me that where a pluralistic electoral system exists, elected representatives can do measurable good within those limits, and that refusing all participation allows it to become an uncontested tool for capitalists and other authoritarians. Which seems best avoided.

So while electoral politics has never been the central focus of my own activism, I have become a member of a number of small parties to help them get the numbers to register a party list. As an act of solidarity with friends and allies involved. The most involved I've ever been in electoral parties was a one-off candidacy for the Cannabis Party - running against United Future MP Peter Dunne in Ohariu in 2008 - and my brief stint as the elected Communications Officer for the Pirate Party of NZ, short-lived as it was. During which my main achievement was to convince the rest of the board, and then the membership, that decisions about the party could be made through online participation by its members.

I've never been a member of the Green Party of Aotearoa (and quite likely I'd be rejected if I applied). But a lot of people I consider friends and political allies have been members, even officials and MPs, or still are. I still consider the party an important political ally of the environmental movement and the progressive left. If they believe what they say about taxing wealth, to rebuild our rotting infrastructure in ways that are both sustainable and futureproof, and to restore universal public services - and I believe they do - I want to help them succeed.

So this not a public airing of internal disagreements, nor am I rubbing my hands with glee as the Greens struggle from one crisis to another. Quite the opposite. I'm aware that as an outside ally I can openly publish what concerned party members may only be able to whisper in private. So my intention here is to offer an outside perspective, in the hopes that it can help - in some small way - to right the ship.

Part 1: My "identity politics" problem

As befits any rational humanist who advocates for human rights, I'm very socially liberal. Annoyingly so, as my oldest friends would no doubt confirm.

Since my early teens, I've spoken up both privately and publicly for the equal rights of women, Māori, immigrants of colour and their descendants, homosexuals, gender non-conformists, people with disabilities (whether physical, intellectual or cognitive), non-human animals, and the ecosystems we're all embedded in. Pretty much anyone that conformist mainstream culture has tried to treat as an inferior, with less rights, just because they differ from the mythical "average New Zealander". Despite what I say here - in fact because of it - I intend to keep doing this for as long as I draw breath.

So while I am, technically speaking, a heterosexual Pākeha, and a man born a man, I'm not a right-wing nut job, who thinks that anyone who doesn't have my in-born privileges should know their place. Convenient as that accusation may be when I'm openly critical of the strategy and tactics of "identity politics", for similar reasons to the ones Frances Lee explains beautifully in a series of pieces they wrote in 2017.

This paradox seems to annoy some people.

But quite frankly, that's their problem. Being annoyed is a pretty minor downstream effect compared to being publicly shamed, or viciously smeared, or losing your livelihood, or having CSAM injected into your server in an attempt to get you put in jail. I think it's high time to stop rationalising this kind of behaviour and start talking about the rampaging elephant in the room.

So what does any of this have to do with the Greens?

Part 2: All Greens are equal, but some Greens are more equal than others

Over the past decade or so, I watched with growing concern as the public communications and internal rules of the Greens began to change in ways that were clearly alienating people. Including some of their most enthusiastic early supporters and members, some them since the proto-Greens party known as Values. As time went on, newcomers to the party were increasingly being pushed into high level positions, including on the party list. Often at the expense of long-serving party members, whose ability to do the job as well - if not better - was never in question.

Why? Perhaps because of things like rule changes guaranteeing spots on the party list to people with certain identity markers (see section 8.2 of the 2022 Candidate Selection and List Ranking Procedure). Rather than being corrected against, oppressive hierarchies based on in-born identity, such as gender, ethnicity, or sexuality, were being enforced in reverse. Other values, such as long term commitment to the green movement and the party, diplomacy and persuasion skills, and the ability to keep a cool head under fire, seemed to become secondary to the otherwise laudable goal of diversifying representation.

This doublethink version of "identity politics" - popular with corporate managers, neoliberal bureaucrats and reputation launderers - has become a sacred cow within the party. So much so that careerists and bullies regularly use it to shield themselves - and the party - from legitimate criticism.

Part 3: Is the universal compassion and egalitarianism that underlies green values and policy at risk?

Solving problems begins with identifying them. To this end, I recently posted on the fediverse about my theory that those identity marker mandates in the candidate selection rules - and the discourse surrounding them - could be the vulnerability that allowed someone like Darleen Tana to become a Green MP. Despite being a person co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick later described as "completely at odds with our party’s values, policies and kaupapa", and having no experience as a Green candidate before the 2020 election.

What I said was;

"I support political parties having robust processes to ensure their people are not being blocked because of identity markers (gender, ethnicity, sexuality etc), from promotions they deserve. That demonstrates a genuine commitment to social justice.

But when ticking identity boxes become a primary criteria for candidate selection, that's how you end up with debacles like Elizabeth Kerekere, Golriz Ghahraman, and now Darleen Tana."

Read in context, these are shorthand references to the political scandals surrounding these MPs, not personal attacks on them. The Kerekere affair was certainly a failure of caucus unity and membership solidarity, whoever was at fault, but I still don't know what to make of her ousting. While it's hard to have much sympathy for Tana, or her husband, I'm definitely sympathetic to MPs like Ghahraman, and Julie Anne Genter, who are clearly buckling under intense workplace stress. As I most certainly would in their place, and much quicker too.

Many of the replies to this post were thoughtful and open-minded. But inevitably some of them resorted to strawman arguments, based on the smear that I feel threatened by seeing positions of power and influence held by women, or brown people, or homosexuals. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of the miasma of nonsense that allows a Darleen Tana to avoid critical scrutiny for long enough to become a Green MP.

Here's a summary of my exchange with the chip on one person's shoulder;

1) I post a structural criticism (see above)

2) The reaction is a deflection and a thinly-veiled personal attack implying I'm a "RWNJ" (Right Wing Nut Job)

3) I respond in good faith, attempting to bring the thread back to the point of the original post

4) The reaction puts words in my mouth, misrepresenting my structural criticism as a personal attack on Golriz Ghahraman ...

> "DEI hire"

... and then doubles down on the hyperbolic ad-hominem;

> I think you're pushing a barrow for misogyny and racism

I can just imagine them thinking as they posted this; 'He'll never see this razor sharp critique coming!'. Or to put it another way...

Nnnnnnobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Cardinal Fang... bring out... the Comfy Chair!

I welcome disagreement, if it's well argued and fact-based, and I'm more than willing to admit when I get it wrong. But the style and tone of these posts demonstrate that it doesn't matter to this person whether I'm right or wrong. If it did, they would be addressing the arguments I actually made.

What mattered to them is that I was spouting heresy - and worse I'm an apostate - and I must be punished. In my experience - both online and off - warning shots like these, if not heeded, proceed to presistant campaigns of character assassination and calls for ostracism.

The age of the film this meme references makes it clear there's always been people like this in activist politics. They've always been part of the Green Party of Aotearoa, and that's fine, they need representation too. The problem is they've been allowed to make rules for the whole Green party, and until recently, control its political strategy too.

Part 4: How many one-off incidents can you fit in a trend line?

The narrowed political vision resulting from these ideological blinders can be seen in things like staging a leadership coup against James Shaw, but missing the step of coming up with even a single candidate to run off against him. Let alone one capable of doing the job.

Or the other co-leader at the time, Marama Davidson, issuing a delirious hot take on camera, blaming people of a particular gender and ethnicity for all the country's violence. Practically rolling out the red carpet for political opponents, who quickly started handwaving at statistics produced under her own ministerial portfolio, which painted a very different picture.

Now you can point out that she was ambushed by camera-wielding Useful Idiots, after having been run down with a motor vehicle by others, and that's true. Obviously I condemn those actions. But a competent political strategy team could have planned to avoid this.

This happened after Davidson participated in an aggressive counter-protest, against a professional concern troll whose gigs are well known to attract actual fascists. For a start, competent strategists would have anticipated that this could result in counter-escalation, and damaging media coverage.

Really competent strategists would have convinced Davidson not to be there. For the same reasons Jeanette Fitzsimons, Rod Donald and Russell Norman weren't at the National Front's flag-waving stunts at the Cenotaph during their co-leadership, despite supporting the counter-protests against them. Maybe I'm being unfair to the Green strategists. Maybe they tried and Davidson wouldn't be convinced. That would point to a huge failure of leadership and good sense on her part, and more evidence of the party pushing people into jobs before they're ready to do them well.

But even in those circumstances, competent strategists could have protected the party - and Davidson herself - from the worst potential consequences of that decision. By making sure there was a team around her at all times running interference, and having transport ready to get her offsite as soon as things got heated, so there wouldn't be a chance for riled up reactionaries to aim a motorbike or a camera at her.

Coming back to Golriz Ghahraman, perhaps I'm wrong that she would been just as effective - and much happier - as an extra-Parliamentary activist than as an MP. Or perhaps I'm right.

But even if I am wrong on that, competent strategists would have convinced her to stand down. Well before she started coping with her stress by stealing designer handbags, bringing herself and the party into disrepute. For her sake, as much as anyone else's.

Besides, those focusing on a perceived personal attack on Ghahraman are missing the forest for the trees. If it was just Ghahraman, or just Kerekere, or just Tana, it would be fair to dismiss it as an abberation. Like we did when Ian Ewen-Street decamped to National after two terms as a Green MP. Because it was an isolated incident in an otherwise unified caucus.

But what we have here is a trend, and anyone with eyes to see can tell it's getting worse. I've offered one theory that might explain at least some of it. I've yet to see anyone offer a more convincing theory. That in itself, and the bad faith argumentation offered instead, are all data points worth considering.

Part 5: Diversity and inclusion for who?

Even as they were gold-plating an ideologically narrowed "diversity" and holding it up as a sacred cow, the Greens have in many ways become less socially and politically diverse. In the 1990s, although their pet policies didn't necessarily make it into the party platform, the Greens included a wide range of activists who have since been pushed out, or simply walked away in frustration.

Alternative economics people who advocate for community currency projects, who I've heard high-ranking Greens sneeringly dismiss as "funny money" people. People who oppose 1080 or water fluoridation. People who are passionate about holistic health, and sceptical of vaccines. Whatever your opinion on these issues, some of these people helped to build the party from the ground up, in good faith.

Then there's people who champion freedom of expression and internet freedoms, who were alienated by the majority of Green MPs voting for the Harmful Digital Censorship Act (hat tip to the three who crossed the floor to vote against it, including Gareth Hughes, who championed the crowdsourced Internet Rights and Freedoms Bill). Just as they would have been if Greens had voted for the TICS and GCSB Acts that turned the GCSB into a proto-Stasi.

During my time in the Pirate Party I met a lot of young libertarians who leaned rightward economically, but told me they voted Greens because of their principled positions in defence of privacy, media freedoms, copyright minimalism, transparent government, democratic participation, and so on. I doubt they still voted Green in 2023.

As the old saying goes, the left looks for traitors, the right looks for recruits. The Greens' loss has been the right's gain, aside from those who left for other left-wing parties like Mana, and more recently the rejuvenated Te Pāti Māori. A lot of those alienated people decamped to the Outdoors Party, Internet Party, TOP, ACT, and pre-COVID Winston First. Others to Billy Te Kahika's Public Party and a plethora of other tiny post-COVID paranoia parties, and to post-COVID Winston First.

The inevitable counter-argument is that these people were always right-wingers or bigots, or both, and the Greens are better off without them. But I've known and worked closely with a lot of these people, and in the vast majority of cases it simply isn't true. This elitist attitude is a combination of sour grapes, and exactly the kind of essentialism that's rightly rejected when it's applied to people from minorities who commit crimes. Greens ought to know, better than any other political movement, that we are all shaped by our environment, in political development as much as biological.

The failure of the Greens to keep holding space for contradictory views, and working towards consensus, is a sad failure to enact another of their key principles; appropriate decision-making. One practical consequence is that it has lost them members, allies and voters. Existing and potential.

For a single-issue activist network, where keeping the focus on a specific set of shared beliefs and goals can be more important than the size of the support base, this is nothing to worry about. For an electoral party that can't just spend money to reach potential voters, depending instead on boots on the ground is any many neighbourhoods and interest groups as possible, it's an existential threat that needs to be taken seriously.

Part 6: Radical solutions to address root problems

This is not a counsel of depair. For anyone in the Greens who is ready to acknowledge that there's a problem and do something about it, I have three suggestions.

First and most importantly, stop letting the People's Front of Judea run the party.

Those who remember the 1980s Labour government know that political parties - even those born of grassroots social movements - can become professionalised and lose touch with their activist base. That when that happens, they become vulnerable to being hijacked by their political opponents.

One of the key tactics of these hijackers is to push a strict party line and characterise dissent as disloyalty. In a truly democratic party, open dissent is to be encouraged - even when its wrong-headed - not shouted down. Disagreed with, definitely, argued with, sure. But with the dignity and respect and commitment to intellectual honesty that were once the universal hallmarks of the Greens' approach to politics.

So I'm not proposing you cancel the cancellers, shout them down, or marginalise them. That would be a continuation of the problem, not a solution. Just that you need to stop walling off their opinions and tactics from internal criticism.

Party members or allies who have reservations about identity mandates, or anything else, deserve to be heard. Without being condemned, shamed, or smeared. Even if their thinking is being warped by subconscious bias. Even if they've got it totally wrong, having people listen to understand, is the first step to helping them get it right.

Secondly, set a maximum term limit for Green MPs of 6 years.

Allow members to serve as many 6 year terms as they like, for as long as they have the support of the party membership to do so. But ensure they take a least a 3 year break between them.

This in itself would allow for more diversity of Green representatives. It would increase the pool of Greens with Parliamentary experience, who could serve as mentors to first-time MPs, or as support people for MPs who are struggling. But more importantly, it would mitigate the accumulation of stress that leads to compulsive shoplifting, or bullying of other party members, or standing over people in Parliament.

Thirdly, get rid of any and all identity mandates.

Without those, there's no reason to parachute people like Darleen Tana into the party list, often with little or no history with the party, just to make sure you can meet quota. For every highly capable MP like Chlöe Swarbrick, or Teanau Tuiono, or Efeso Collins, or Lan Pham, you risk a Tana or an Elizabeth Kerekere.

Sure you need bunch of other policies and structures to make sure a diverse range of people are recruited into the party, and given training and opportunities for advancement. So the candidate pool is inclusive enough to produce a diverse party list organically. With regular reviews to see how well it's working and improve it as necessary.

But from what I've observed, the Greens were always good at that stuff. So even if my suspicion is wrong and the mandates cause no problems whatsoever, I still don't think they're necessary.

Epilogue: Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away

In the first decade of this century, there was a thriving anarchist movement in Aotearoa that had been growing since the 1980s. With affinity groups and practical projects all around the country, supporting a dizzying range of activist campaigns and infrastructure projects. From local infoshops, social centres, community gardens, and food rescue teams, to country-wide print zines, and news gathering and online publishing projects.

So what happened? The same things I've seen happening in the Greens over the last decade or so, taken to truly disturbing extremes.

Rumour-mongering and manipulation replacing honest and open critcism, and robust but respectful debate. Oppressive hierarchies being reversed instead of abolished. People being censured and banished without due process, including for breaking rules about things you can't say (out loud).

In any political movement built on the passion of volunteers, rather than the spending of astroturf funding, this stuff is cancer. People become confused, and distrustful, and afraid, and then exhausted, and alienated. Sooner or later either they too get purged, or they just shrug their shoulders and walk away.

Having been active in the movement for over a decade by that point, helping to start a bunch of those infrastructure projects, including Aotearoa Indymedia, I was hard to purge. Wisely or not, I was too stubborn to give up easily. I spoke out, in face-to-face conversations, in meetings and in writing, about exactly what I was seeing, and why I was concerned about it. But most people were too afraid of drawing fire, and it was too little, too late.

I was misquoted, bullied, and ostracised (selectively, they still wanted to benefit from my technical skills and infrastructure maintenance). I was misrepresented as speaking up for oppression, bigotry, bullying and violence. The very things I was trying to expose and help fix.

Eventually the social environment became too toxic. I cut my losses, resigned from my roles in any groups or projects the cancer had spread to, and moved on. Hanging my shingle at disintermedia.net.nz, and working with organisations like Permaculture in NZ and NORML NZ. Co-founding CreativeCommons Aotearoa/NZ (now TohaToha), which led to my association with NZ Open Source Society, and supporting the Loomio Cooperative in their early days.

I think Peak Absurdity was reached not long after, when a handful of leftist identitarians turned up to protest against an activist-organised Climate Camp, complete with megaphone and comically huge banner. Why? Because a person once accused of abuse - under very questionable circumstances I might add - had been allowed to help the project, in a purely off-site technical capacity. As Karl Marx famously quipped; history repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce.

These days, you have to look hard to find the remains of that once-thriving anarchist movement. The Aotearoa Indymedia website, once a clearinghouse of activist news from a wide range of citizen journalists and activists groups around the country, is gone from the web. After years as a zombie project, the features column a private blog for a narrow group of activists, the open publishing newswire choked with unmoderated spam and tofu.

Why am I publishing this? Because I'd hate to see the Greens go the same way.

One advantage of having been cancelled already is that I've lost the fear of it that makes people censor themselves. Someone has to be the unsophisticated child who says out loud that the Emperor wears no clothes. Since I'm a longtime ally of the Greens, not a members, and not subject to their internal "accountability", it might as well be me.

Coda: Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering

"... violence often refracts within and around a political movement that endorses it".

- Timothy Snyder, Professor of History

Perhaps the saddest example in radical history of this self-consuming dynamic was the decline of the Situationist International. A network of highly creative post-Marxist groups, whose members played key roles in political uprisings all around the world in 1968. The most famous being in Paris, home of SI guru Guy Debord.

After this peak, the SI starting purging members and whole groups, one by one, until there was only Debord and one other member left. Debord purged him too, of course. Eventually, in a final reductio ad absurdum, he purged himself, by ending his life.

Debord's writings are full of insights that remain relevant to anyone wanting to leave the world better than we found it, maybe even more relevant than they were in his time. But his final act offers a tragic illustration of the old anarchist principle that rather than our actions being justified by the beneficial outcomes we're trying to achieve with them, the outcomes we get are unavoidably determined by the kinds of actions we take. As well as Snyder's insight that the treatment we aim at our political opponents, inevitably reflect back on our own.

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SATIRE: Taylor Swift Generated by AI

2024-01-28T11:00:58Z

CreativeCommons CC-BY-NC 4.0

[please note: this piece is satire, intended to be laughed at or ignored, not taken seriously. It was definitely written by an actual human and *not* an AI. Seriously. I republished it on the Disintermedia blog in 2024, but I'll leave the full text here because it's fun :P]

Fans of Taylor Swift have been shocked by the revelation that the artist's image was generated entirely using experimental AI image generators. It was revealed that Swift is, in fact, Trevor Swift, a 200 pound truck driver from Surrey, who participated in a generative AI experiment in 2005. Asked by researchers to imagine any kind of image he liked and describe it to the AI, he says he asked it to create "a widely covered person in mass media, eliciting a range of public opinions and perceptions of her life and career. With a complex reputation that is examined and debated in various publications, yielding social approval and admiration globally while also being a subject of scrutiny and controversy."

Swift says he was surprised and amazed when the AI spat out a press kit for a fictional female country singer. Complete with a set of staged-looking photos of a stunningly beautiful young woman, with long blonde curls and a devil-may-care expression. Convinced this image could sell millions of albums, he asked the AI to generate lyrics for a couple of album's worth of country songs, hired a singer who superficially resembled the woman in the generated images, and set about getting a record contract, eventually signing with Big Machine Records.

Fast-forward almost two decades, and the fictional singer-songwriter, whose work has been generated by increasingly sophisticated AI, has become a household name, with a huge fan base. Swift, who has been piling up the profits from his ownership of the Taylor Swift IP, has long since given up driving trucks, "I loved the lorries and I kept on doing it, kept on driving for as long as I could," he says, "but I soon realise that generating enough Taylor Swift to satisfy the fans was going to be a full time job."

Asked what he will do now that the cat is out of the bag, Swift is philosophical, "It's been a good run. Taylor Swift has made a lot of people happy. Maybe they'll keep buying the records and going to the concerts even though they know she's artificially generated." If not? He laughs, a little nervously, "well, I guess I'll be going back to traffic jams, truck stops and mince pies."

Representatives from Taylor Swift's current record label, Republic Records, have made public statements claiming that the stories about Taylor Swift being artificially generated were themselves artificially generated. "Taylor Swift is a real woman and a talented musical artist, who signed with us in 2018, and released a string of massive hit records through our company and its distributors. She performs live in all concerts billed as being Taylor Swift concerts, using her real female body and voice. Any suggestion that Taylor Swift was generated by AI and is played onstage by a series of body doubles is entirely fabricated."

But a former Big Machine Records executive spoke to us a few days later, on conditions of anonymity, claiming that she was already suspicious by the time Taylor Swift's last album with the label was released. "Haven't you ever wondered why every photo and video looks like a slightly different woman? That's why the management switched to Republic, and that's why the four albums released with our company were "re-recorded" and re-released. They knew the jig was up if they stayed with us. By changing record companies, they ensured anything we said about Taylor Swift being artificially generated by an AI would be dismissed as sour grapes."

Fan reactions have been mixed, with some taking to social media to defend the deception, pointing out that all celebrity images are fabricated anyway, usually by groups of people who fabricate them professionally. "How many celebrity names were given to a baby by their parents?", demanded one video comment, "How many celebrities look like their glamour photos when they get out of bed in the morning?" Others demand Taylor Swift be cancelled for leading them down the garden path, leading to increasingly hostile debates about whether it even makes sense to cancel someone who's been artificially generated. "What are we trying to achieve?", asked @ Taylor4Life on social media platform The X-Files (formerly known as the Twitter), "Sending a message to other artificially generated media personalities that they shouldn't be? That's kind of dumb."

As for the music press, and the tech press, they seem to be thrilled to have some juicy celebrity gossip to write about. "It's organic clickbait," said the pseudonymous author of the Synthetic Pain blog, which covers the intersection of the music industry with bleeding edge technology, "the stories practically write themselves."

This satirical story is licensed under CC-BY-NC. You can share it freely, but if you want to use it in anything commercial, you need my permission.

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Never (original short story)

2023-11-03T00:47:38Z

CreativeCommons CC-BY-NC 4.0

It was blue. Blue. I didn't know what to make of it. Nobody did. But there it was, on the card, in blue and white. I was so surprised, I barely noticed the date, or rather, the lack of a date. All the blue text said was one, simple, solitary word.

"Never".

I showed the card to my parents. My Dad said it must have been misprinted. My mother was more encouraging, "maybe it means exactly what it says?" "But how can that be?" I asked, "I mean, 'never'? Really?".

I didn't know whether to be thrilled or terrified.

My parents got out their cards for comparison. There was my father's date, in the usual green font. He was in his mid forties and still had just under thirty years until he died of natural causes. My mother's was red and as we all knew, had known for as long as I could remember, she only had a couple of years left.

I asked them why they hadn't opened the envelope containing my card when I was born. Why they had waited until I was eighteen. "The same reason we didn't let the scan technicians tell us your sex", Mum told me, smiling softly, her eyes moist with memories whose rough edges had long since been softened by the passage of time, "we wanted to let you surprise us." "We thought we'd had the biggest surprise of our lives where the midwife told us you weren't a boy or a girl", added my father. "Can we take it back?", I asked, "if it's a misprint, a mistake, some kind of April Fools joke gone wrong, I really want to know. If it's right ..." I couldn't even finish the sentence. It was inconceivable. It must be a mistake. But I had to know for sure.

My parents sat on either side of me on the worn fake leather couch at the Department of Mortality. We'd been waiting for several hours and the smell of stale cologne and floor polish was making my eyes water. The waiting room was small, like a dentist surgery, except that all the magazines covering the chipped veneer of the coffee table were about funeral parlours and monumental engravers. I realized I was chewing my knuckles and snatched my right hand away from my mouth with my left. Minutes later, I realized the left knuckles were in my mouth. I sighed and wedged both hands between my knees.

Finally, the receptionist caught my Mother's eye and waved us through. The office was even shabbier than the waiting room and the rumpled man behind the desk was smoking two hand-rolled cigarettes, holding them in one hand while he pecked away at the keys of an ancient desktop computer with the other. The optical disc drive had been wedged open and repurposed as an ashtray holder, which was full to overflowing with half-smoked butts. He grunted and jerked his head in the direction of three chairs, each sitting in a halo of empty floor that looked like it had been rapidly cleared only minutes before, in order to place them there.

The man took a final, vengeful stab at his keyboard and settled back into his chair, peering at us over his reading glasses, and clearing his throat with a sound like a kitchen blender full of gravel. He wore what might once have qualified as a suit. His creased brown pants, which almost matched the threadbare jacket casually draped over the back of his chair, were accompanied by a shirt the colour of nicotine-stained fingers and an orange bow tie, flecked with soup stains. We waited for him to say something, but he didn't. He just sat, and stared, and occasionally coughed.

My parents and I looked at each other. Just when it seemed like one of us had decided to say something, the man spoke. His voice was surprisingly smooth and debonair, giving the distinct impression he was lip syncing to a statement someone else had recorded earlier. "The ...", he began, then thought better of it. He started again, "we checked the deep data processes that produced your ... child's prognosis".

He paused, again, for an uncomfortably long time.

"We can find no flaws".

He chewed on his lips, as if he found this news profoundly agitating. Just as I took a breath to reply, he went on.

"We have checked your cards against the algorithms and your due dates too come out exactly as predicted when you were born. There has been no mistake".

He took a deep and noisy breath, making a show of adjusting his tie and straightening his filthy glasses. "Good day to you", he said, and went back to his irritated typing, as if we were no longer in the room.

That was over two hundred years ago. My parents died exactly on their due dates, just as everybody did. My mother was electrocuted in the swimming pool when a malfunctioning automated lawnmower trundled into it. My father, having been preparing himself for years, remarried a couple of years later. He died in his early seventies of an undetected brain aneurysm. I'm still here. Grey haired, but healthy as a horse. Still, nobody knows why.

Nobody I know these days was born before my hundredth birthday. I'm lonely, in a way that nobody more than a century younger could understand. I never married. Never had children. How could I do that to them? Knowing I would outlive them all?

But I'm not completely alone. Every few months I go back to the Ministry of Mortality, worrying, and later hoping, that some improvements made to the deep data cluster in the intervening years will make it spit out a date this time. It never has. Every time, I drink a glass of whiskey with the rumpled man in the orange bow tie and we wonder why we're the only two people in the world to ever get a blue card, saying "never".

This story is licensed under CC-BY-NC. You can share it freely, but if you want to use it in anything commercial, you need my permission.

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Universal Insurance for Natural Disasters Funded by Climate Polluters

2023-10-23T11:35:00Z

It was less than a year ago that unprecedented flooding damaged or destroyed more than 5000 homes and businesses in Tamaki Makaurau. In the immediate aftermath, former National leader Simon Bridges, by then the CEO of the Auckland Business Chamber, was calling for affected businesses to get support from the wider community;

“While the government cannot be a backstop to the uninsured, the chamber is working with central government on the flood recovery and how best to support businesses that have been significantly impacted – and in particular, those which still cannot operate.”

It's not often I agree with Simon Bridges, but as it happens, I don't think small business should have to rely on user-pays insurance to fund their recovery from natural disasters. Especially when that could have serious knock-on effects on other people's access to insurance. Michael Naylor, a Senior Lecturer in Economics at Massey University, wrote in late January;

"In the worst case scenario, the weekend's floods might mean some sections of [Auckland] city become too expensive to insure by mainstream insurance companies."

In Aotearoa, we have EQC (EarthQuake Commission) for collectively-funded earthquake insurance. So why not replicate or extend that to cover other kinds of natural disasters? This would go a long way towards both universal coverage, and avoiding unpredictable spikes in user-pays insurance premiums. Which I presume are two reasons EQC was set up in the first place.

But what’s the fairest way to pay for it?

Some natural disasters, like the downpours that have condemned houses in Whakatū (Nelson) and now Tamaki Makaurau (Auckland), are known to be amplified in frequency and severity by climate change. To subsidise the rising costs of cleaning up the resulting mess, businesses could be obliged to contribute in to a natural disaster insurance scheme, in proportion to their emissions.

Contributions from corporate polluters, who are best placed to afford full coverage from user-pays insurance, would have to be locked in. But small business could be allowed to opt-out of both payments and coverage. If they really think climate change is a hoax, then they also think they're facing the same natural disaster risk they always have, which user-pays insurance is adequate to cover. Right? I'd really like to see them put their money where their mouth is.

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The Tightrope Between Tinfoil-hat Paranoia and Rose-tinted Naivety

2023-08-18T17:02:52Z

This post was republished as one of the Indymedia Stories on the Disintermedia blog, under the title Rob and Me.

---

In the late 1990s, like a lot young and idealistic anarchist geeks, I was inspired by EFF founder John Perry Barlow declaring independence for the internet ("cyberspace", as some people were still calling it). I was fascinated by the potential of the net for democratically coordinating action among global citizens. These were the days of the "anti-globalization movement" (a meaningless buzzphrase coined by corporate media, see footnote). A series of huge, distributed protests, coordinated on a global scale, through online networks like People's Global Action. I joined and created a lot of email lists, and I saw a lot of this happening in real time.

It was on one of these email lists that I first encountered Rob Gilchrist. I didn't get on with him at first. Like many activists (well.. real activists... but we'll get to that), he could be abrasive to deal with online.

After I moved back to Ōtautahi at the end of 2000 I ended up meeting him in person. He was already involved in a few of the groups that pooled resources to create the InterActive activist centre, which we set up in 2001. At the time, a network of local groups was communicating on yet another email list about setting up Aotearoa Indymedia. I was part of the Ōtautahi Indymedia group, which helped find a space to rent for InterActive, organise a network connection, and source computers, inspired by examples like the original Independent Media Centre in Seattle. This pushed me into regular contact with Gilchrist, and I still remember him insisting I install PGP email encryption on the InterActive computers, and claiming to have found a "bug" (listening device) in the building.

I was suspicious of Gilchrist from day one. To this day, I couldn't tell you exactly why. Something just... smelled wrong about him and his origin story. I was so suspicious of him I contacted a few geeks friends, who I'd seen at public meetings against state surveillance, asking if they had any idea how to check his background without tipping him off, or his handlers.

But I was young and green, and my understanding of the ins and outs of anti-activist spying was pretty limited. I presumed that anyone spying on us would hang around a few weeks, a few months at most, whether they were informants for the cops, corporate-funded contractors (like Thompson & Clark), or more sinister alphabet agencies. By then, I figured, either we'd get wise to their game, or they'd finish their operation and vanish. My spidey-senses never stopped tingling when I had anything to do with Gilchrist, but when he was still around a couple of years later, I started to rationalise it away.

As a result of both my own activism, and my role as a roving reporter and ambassador for the Aotearoa Indymedia website, I spent the next few years going to all kinds of protests, picket lines, occupations, public meetings, conferences, and camps, all around Aotearoa. Gilchrist turned up at a surprising number of them. Often doing what seemed like really useful work.

I never fully trusted Gilchrist. But I freely admit to developing a grudging respect for his commitment, and asking myself some hard questions about the possible sources of my distrust. After all, I thought, paranoia is an occupational hazard for any long-term activist. Got to keep in check. After he gained the trust of a number of the older activists I respected, it started to seem crazy to think he was a spy, spidey-senses be damned.

How wrong those rationalisations were. Because my intuition, as it turned out, was right on the money.

In December of 2008, just a couple of months after the Operation 8 raids that unleashed shocked and awe on activist communities around the country, investigative journalist Nicky Hager exposed Gilchrist's real game in the Sunday Star Times newspaper. Hager's article revealed that for about a decade, the cops had been paying him $600 a week (on top of his social welfare benefit) as an informant. A comfortable salary at a time when benefits were about $2-300 a week.

There were a number of lessons in this experience for me. But the most important one was to trust my intuition. Because when I screen out any jumping at shadows that's coming from anxiety - and if I pay attention I can tell the difference - my intuition is always right. I don't know how this works, but it does.

I've read theories about deep pattern-matching abilities, which lurk beneath the rationalising surface of the mind, but who knows. My experience has consistently been that when I let my rationalisations shout down my spidey-senses, it always blinds me to an important truth.

For the last 15 years or so, I've walked a tightrope strung between the twin poles of tinfoil-hat paranoia and rose-tinted naivety. It's possible to over-correct in both directions. As Chomsky once pointed out, just because there are lots of crazy ideas out there labeled "conspiracy theories", that doesn't mean there are no real conspiracies. On the contrary, he says, history is full of them. The trick to staying out of the conspiracy rabbitholes people can tend to go down, I reckon, comes down to two things.

Firstly, I try to be clear about what I *know*, and how. Keep my focus on that. Speculation is useful to a limited degree, if it helps me come up with ways to test possibilities, and gain more useful information. But if I spend too much time speculating, and not enough time testing and discarding, the fantasy world of the speculation can take on a life of its own. As the Wizard of New Zealand used to say, "never believe your own bullshit".

Secondly, along similar lines, I'm very careful not to get lost in the things my spidey-senses are tingling about. Which ironically, seems to get easier the more I *listen* to them, and trust what my intuition is trying to tell me. It's important to unplug and go for a walk, hang out with friends, watch a funny movie, listen to music, juggle, sing, confuse the cat with silly dancing, anything fun that distracts me from the paranoia-inducing stuff I'm probing, and helps me to put it in perspective.

Can I prove any of this story about my personal history with Gilchrist? Can I prove I was suspicious of him from the start? Can I even prove I'm the same Strypey that spent years reporting for Indymedia? Don't know. Probably not, unless there's a Web of Trust that connects you, dear reader, to someone who knew me back then. You can choose to believe me, or assume I'm a raving nutter. That's entirely your business.

But although I can't prove I didn't read about it in the newspaper, or find it online, I can direct you to a range of sources that confirm the Gilchrist story. Turns out there's a few Rob Gilchrist's in the world. Or at least, people with names similar enough to his to come up when you web search it. For your convenience, dear reader, I've spent a bit of time sorting the wheat from the chaff.

In order of publication, here is everything a quick web search turned up on the subject of paid police informant Rob Gilchrist. Both corporate media articles and op eds, and blog pieces from a range of political alignments. It's notable that this is a rare case where activists, journalists, and bloggers - on both left and right - mostly agree with each other. That it's gross and unethical for the cops to be paying a guy a salary to spy on and sleep with activists.

Many of these links date back to a time when news and blog sites still had their own comment sections. Rather than outsourcing that to the datafarms, probably the first of their many mistakes that helped the datafarms eat their business.

Anyway, when you skim a few of these comment threads, it's also notable that many of the shorter comments are spouting the same handful of talking points. I presume this is because they're either being posted by sockpuppets doing PR arse-covering, or Useful Idiots echoing those sockpuppets when the talking points fit their biases.

Note, to create equal opportunities confusion for both local *and* overseas readers, when it comes to dates, I've used the ISO 8601 format that pretty much nobody else uses (year-month-day).

2008-12-14 - Crossing the line: the activist who turned police informer
https://web.archive.org/web/20090531212020/http://www.nickyhager.info/crossing-the-line-the-activist-who-turned-police-informer/

2008-12-14 - The activist who turned police informer
https://web.archive.org/web/20081217031940/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792177a6619.html

2008-12-14 - Who the police were spying on
https://web.archive.org/web/20081217042627/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792188a6619.html

2008-12-14 - How Gilchrist was found out
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216020616/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792178a6005.html

2008-12-14 - Anti-terror squad spies on protest groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20081214131056/https://www.stuff.co.nz/4792627a11.html

2008-12-14 - Chief of police called in over spies
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/chief-of-police-called-in-over-spies/B4KJMTY7HSGGIDVQS5DE4EEJ7U/

2008-12-14 - Sunday Star Times
https://thestandard.org.nz/sunday-star-times/

2008-12-14 - Police state
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2008/12/police-state.html

2008-12-14 Rob Gilchrist : Police Informant
https://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1551

2008-12-14 - The SST Police spying story
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_sst_police_spying_story.html

2008-12-14 - How Gilchrist was found out
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216120311/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76507/index.php

2008-12-14 - Police anti-terror squad spies on protest groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20090127054440/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76508/index.php

2008-12-14 - Rob Gilchrist: I'm a Police Information (video clipped from TV3 news)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPTtG9x1hlo

2008-12-15 - Loose lips sink ships…
https://newmasses.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/loose-lips-sink-ships/

2008-12-15 - State snooping on activists
https://fightback.org.nz/2008/12/15/civil-rights-fast-disappearing/

2008-12-15 - Is the NZ left naive or paranoid?
https://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2008/12/is-the-nz-left-naive-or-paranoid.html

2008-12-16 - Gordon Campbell On The Transition Package, And Paid Police Spies Within Protest Groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20090202062628/http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/gordon-campbell-on-the-transition-package-and-paid-police-spies-within-protest-groups/

2008-12-16 - Police using spies and lies to make case
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216120315/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76514/index.php

2008-12-16 - Special Intelligence Group targetting political dissidents.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100514224310/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76343/special-intelligence-group-targetting-po

2008-12-16 - Unsubstantiated accusations
https://web.archive.org/web/20100514083018/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76345/unsubstantiated-accusations

2008-12-16 - The limits to tolerance of the police
https://thestandard.org.nz/the-limits-to-tolerance-of-the-police/

2008-12-16 - Capitalist state just doing its job
https://web.archive.org/web/20081228113024/https://workersparty.org.nz/2008/12/16/capitalist-state-just-doing-its-job/

2008-12-16 - Rochelle hits back
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/rochelle_hits_back.html

2008-12-17 - Rob Gilchrist - police informant for 'anti-terror' unit
https://web.archive.org/web/20081220142203/http://indymedia.org.nz/feature/display/72017/index.php

2008-12-17 - Who else are they spying on?
https://thestandard.org.nz/who-else-are-they-spying-on/

2008-12-17 - The Murky World of Rob Gilchrist
https://web.archive.org/web/20111124055808/https://nzagainstthecurrent.blogspot.com/2008/12/murky-world-of-rob-gilchrist.html

2008-12-17 - Greens say spy passed information to police on anti-Taser protest
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/greens-say-spy-passed-information-to-police-on-anti-taser-protest/QZH7FI7HGSP7C5ZVPVHXYE74V4/

2008-12-17 - Garth George: Greens' criticism of covert police surveillance a fair cop (doesn't mention Gilchrist by name but is a response to the preceding article)
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/igarth-georgei-greens-criticism-of-covert-police-surveillance-a-fair-cop/Z4I7NQNPYFYSWW2C6CAJKVIQEY/

2008-12-18 - Strange Bedfellows
https://web.archive.org/web/20090113224854/https://blog.greens.org.nz/2008/12/18/strange-bedfellows/

2008-12-18 - Police spied on unions
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2008/12/police-spied-on-unions.html

2008-12-18 - The Gilchrist case gets murkier
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_gilchrist_case_gets_murkier.html

2008-12-18 - https://ludditejourno.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/police-and-terrorism/
Aotearoa – the most terrorist dense population in the world

2008-12-19 - State Of It: Police SIG Unit Wasted On Tag-Busting
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0812/S00364.htm

2008-12-19 - Mark Eden-Should The Police Be Monitoring This Man? (a rare exception, this blogger supports the spying, but check out the comments...)
https://web.archive.org/web/20110101143750/http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/12/mark-eden-should-police-be-monitoring.html

2008-12-20 - 'Nice little memento' for police spy
https://web.archive.org/web/20121107005757/http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10549050

2008-12-20 - Bill Ralston: No spying line a cop-out
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/ibill-ralstoni-no-spying-line-a-cop-out/PR7LGCGPVTHF4EOSO55MOGCLSE/

2008-12-20 - Matt McCarten: Spying on lawful organisations should set alarm bells ringing
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/imatt-mccarteni-spying-on-lawful-organisations-should-set-alarm-bells-ringing/M3U53JZ5KSSX6RMREKQZCPHSWM/

2008-12-21 - Activist to take police to court over informant
https://web.archive.org/web/20100518073112/http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/770658

2008-12-21 - Pepper sprayed activist to take police to court over provocateur
https://web.archive.org/web/20110610141333/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76380/pepper-sprayed-activist-take-police-cour

2008-12-21 - Rob Gilchrist sent naked photos of teenage activist to police
https://web.archive.org/web/20090122211120/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76545/index.php

2008-12-21 - The Gilchrist saga gets yucky
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_gilchrist_saga_gets_yucky.html

2008-12-21 - It’s not often that I agree with a Commie, but here’s an exception to the rule
https://kiwipolemicist.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/its-not-often-that-i-agree-with-a-commie-but-heres-an-exception/

2008-12-24 - NZ: The beauty of hindsight - police informant caught after 10 years - Indymedia UK
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/12/416010.html

2009-01-10 - What DeLillo can tell us about Gilchrist
https://books.scoop.co.nz/2009/01/10/what-delillo-tells-us-about-rob-gilchrist/

2009-04-25 - The activist who turned police informer
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/features/760466/The-activist-who-turned-police-informer

2009-07 - How Police Spy Rob Gilchrist Was Exposed By His Partner
https://web.archive.org/web/20170427040356/http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr38-180c.htm

2009-07 - Police Informer Caught After 10 Years of Spying on Activists
https://web.archive.org/web/20100712175956/http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr38-180b.htm

2010-07 - Aotearoa NZ Military Imposters - Robert Stephen Gilchrist – Christchurch New Zealand
https://web.archive.org/web/20100712141550/http://www.anzmi.net/gilchrist/gilchrist.html

2012-07-07 - How To Avoid Getting Robbed
https://web.archive.org/web/20170409064726/http://archive.indymedia.org.nz/article/82640/how-avoid-getting-robbed

2013-02-12 - Case for compensation, says police spy's ex
https://www.stuff.co.nz/editors-picks/8289572/Case-for-compensation-says-police-spys-ex

2013-02-13 - Police spy sues for mental pain
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8285326/Police-spy-sues-for-mental-pain

2013-02-25 - Spy sues cops for pain of decade of deception
https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/8345622/Spy-sues-cops-for-pain-of-decade-of-deception

2013-11-7 - Better work stories?
https://boundmaus.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/better-work-stories/

2014-08-07 - Rob Gilchrist On Nicky Hager
https://thestandard.org.nz/rob-gilchrist-on-nicky-hager/

2015-08-30 - Former spy paid to infiltrate Greenpeace and unions
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/71357903/former-spy-paid-to-infiltrate-greenpeace-and-unions

2015-07-04 - Police spy's girlfriend: I want answers

2018 - Activists and the Surveillance State (this is a book, but the blurb references Gilchrist)
https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/activists-state-surveillance-political-policing/

Footnote: the "anti-globalization movement"

What exactly was this "movement of movements" against, and what it was for as an alternative? These are reasonable questions, but they're very hard to answer, simply because there's no one answer. Every political group that contributed - and perhaps every person involved - will have their own answers, and they'll all be different. For me it was a movement against the massive social and environmental harms caused by neoliberals, as they took over the state in many countries - both rich and poor - and used it to shift control of resources and regulatory powers from the public to corporations; deregulation, corporatisation, privatisation, etc.

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Moved to Disintermedia Blog: Just how does one switch from FarceBook to fediverse?

2023-07-28T03:45:54Z

This post was been moved off my personal blog and incorporated into a larger piece on the blog of the late lamented Bridge Seat Co-op. You can now read it on the Disintermedia blog.

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Moved to Disintermedia blog: Indymedia and the fediverse - a Comparison

2023-07-27T10:54:04Z

This post was been moved off my personal blog onto the Disintermedia blog.

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The fediverse; a Federated Universe, of Federated Diversity

2022-11-26T10:49:38Z

Update 2022-11-27: I've added in a couple of links to places you can find out more about the many software tools available for using the fediverse and how they work together.

When a new wave of immigrants arrives on the shores of the fediverse, all too often there's confusion and heated agreement about whether and how the software tools and their interfaces can work with the cultures of the newcomers.

There are two two equally untenable positions here. To be clear, I'm summarizing the overall discourse, not putting words in any particular person's mouth. But this is what I suspect each side is *hearing* from the other.

1) Build it yourselves, regardless of the historical reasons why your capacity to do that is limited

2) Build it for us, the way we want it, or we will shout at you and call you names.

We need to get beyond this dichotomy, together.

How might we escape the chains of this dichotomy?

It might help to start with a mutual recognition that

fediverse isn't just a joke name, it can be an aspiration; to use federated technology to celebrate and embrace human diversity in all its forms. A federated universe, of federated diversity.

Then, a mutual recognition that while the fediverse is a multi-cultural society, shaped by many waves of immigrants from marginalized groups, there's always room for more.

So what does all this mean in pratice?

In the DataFarms, diversity is stock photos of middle class millennials of different ethnic backgrounds, plastered over a monolith of technology that works one way for everyone. One company controls the technology, and through it, the people using it.

In the fediverse, diversity is groups of people, building different experiences of a social web. Different apps for different people's needs. We can all co-create the technology.

Black Twitter has decolonized their corner of a DataFarm and made it work for them.

There's a lot of ways something similar can be done here, but it won't work quite the same way. Instead of pushing against a monolith, that is, at best, indifferent to their needs, it will involve pulling things off the shelves of a fediverse toolshed. Whose toolsmiths want to know if their tools can work better for you, without degrading their use for anyone else.

If there are tools Black Twitter needs that are missing entirely from the shed, we need to know what those tools do, how you want them to look, how you want them to work. The more specific you can be, the easier the needs will be to understand.

But the toolsmiths need you to understand that they are volunteers, not employees, with limited time and energy for this work. It will take time. If you have your own toolsmiths, or aspiring toolsmiths, we want to meet them!

Perhaps now, having explored a vision of federated diversity together, we can listen to understand each other, and transform those two untenable starting points into fuel for our forges?

1) You know what you need, how can we help you build it under your control, the way you want it to be?

2) What we see so far is not what we need, or what we want. We need to know that we can get help to get our needs met here, while keeping control over our culture and our destiny.

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Depression is Lonely But This Too Shall Pass

2022-11-24T04:19:28Z

All my life, I've gone through long periods of crippling depression. Depression and I are old adversaries, like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, The Doctor and The Master, MacGyver and Murdoch. This post is for all my fellow depression survivors and especially those who are new to the club.

I was once asked if depression could make a person hate being around people. My answer? Hell yes.

Depression is exhausting, and social interaction uses up way more energy than we're normally conscious of. Also, depression is usually accompanied by its old pal low self-esteem, which can make us unusually anxious about upsetting other people or damaging relationships with them. If John Paul Sartre never suffered from depression, he summed up the experience nicely in his famous "hell is other people" line.

It really helped me to learn that there are a number of kinds of depression, and a person experiencing a depressive episode often goes through a number of them. One of them is sometimes known as 'irritable depression'. As I understand it, it's actually a combination of depression and mild mania. It can be hell to go through, but it can also be a sign that you're coming out of the depths of the depression, starting to recover. Your system is trying to get your moods back in balance, and over-correcting a bit at both ends (huge thanks to another fellow survivor, Andrew Solomon, who explained this in his magnum opus 'The Noonday Demon').

When I'm suffering from the irritable stage of depression, I find it helps to limit contact with strangers or new people (although being alone in a crowd can be strangely comforting), and spend as much time as I can with old friends and family that I'm close to. People who I know I can tell about how I'm feeling, and will forgive me if I'm a bit prickly to be around (although they tell me I feel like I'm harder to be around than I really am). YMMV :)

It also helps to keep telling myself "this too shall pass". In fact, I would go so far as to say this mantra has kept me alive at times. Good luck!

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Moved to Disintermedia blog: Political Strategy and Ethical Technology

2022-11-02T02:01:21Z

This piece has been moved to the new Disintermedia blog.

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Where Did Strypey Disappear to?

2021-10-14T05:26:18Z

This is a message for everyone I've been working with on ethical tech projects over the last few years. I think it’s time that I let you all know that, with great sadness and frustration, I am formally withdrawing from all voluntary work commitments for the foreseeable. Please remove any privileges or access on your community platforms that you are concerned about casual contributors having, and leave me out of any issues discussions or fediverse threads about project work.

You may have noticed I haven’t participated much in anything over the last year or so. This is because of a series of increasingly disruptive events in my personal life since the start of 2020. I had hoped to be able to bounce back by now and pick up where I left off. But it’s become clear that my path to recovery is going to be a longer one than I anticipated, and that it requires me to step away from everything I can, and simplify my life as much as possible.

I wish you all well with any ethical tech projects and other social change work you are involved in.

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Gun Control Needs to Apply to Police Too

2019-10-21T18:01:03Z

I believe strongly in nonviolence and I support policies to reduce the amount of gun violence in Aotearoa. I have already signed at least one petition supporting the new New Zealand gun laws.

I have to ask though, are these campaigns also opposing the normalization of gun use by the NZ Police? We've seen in the US what happens when Police routinely patrol with easy access to guns. People who fear Police are more likely to carry guns to protect themselves, more likely to use them on the Police and each other, and Police are more likely to shoot them. Worst of all, unarmed, ordinary people going about their day are more likely to get caught in the crossfire and maimed, or killed.

I've been following the news from Aotearoa here in China, and I'm hearing that Police want easier access to the guns they routinely keep in their patrol cars - something I don't think ought to be allowed - and they want Armed Offenders Squad officers patrolling around with weapons on a daily basis. This also puts more guns into the community, in the hands of people who often handle them with less restraint than civilian gun owners, because they are less likely to be help properly accountable. Even when they kill people. As of 2015, NZ Police had shot and killed 29 people over the last 65 years, and probably injured many more.

As my Dad always says, "if you arm the cops, you arm the criminals". If we want to reduce the incentive for outlaws to arm themselves with guns, one of the best ways is to limit the ability of the Police to arm themselves with guns. The Armed Offenders Squad ought to be the only NZ Police unit that has access to guns, and they should only be out in public using them when there is an incident to respond to. Anything else is mission creep towards an anti-democratic paramilitary occupation.

Kia manawanui.

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Climate change is real and forced by humans, but we can fix it

2019-05-22T17:58:43Z

This was written as a response to a discussion about climate change on a rationalist site. Even among rationalists, there are still people parroting talking points generated at corporate PR conferences. This is truly concerning. So here's my 2 cents on the issue. Then back to the short stories, I promise ;)

Climate change is a) happening and b) anthropogenic (there are plenty of natural forces involved but we're the ones with our thumb on the scales). Yes, it's an existential threat to any complex, keystone species that depends on a complex web of life for survival (ie us). The various talking points of those who have reasons not to accept this, are mostly strawmen, calculated to miss the point or argue against claims nobody is making. The rest are just contradicted by the evidence. All of the talking points are summed up at skepticalscience.com and rigorously debunked, with links to the relevant scientific papers. If anyone can come up with an argument not dealt with there, or solid evidence for why one of them is wrong, I'd be very interested to see it.

Carbon is, in the language of economics geeks, an unpriced negative externality, and most of its forms cause more problems than just contributing to climate change (eg look at the stats for people dying of respiratory conditions in cities with bad fossil fuel pollution). Unfortunately, trying to fix that means threatening to taking money away from corporations who will fight tooth and nail, like the artificial psychopaths they are, to avoid paying to clean up their own mess (see: the story of Bhopal in the documentary The Corporation). So while I support a revenue-neutral carbon tax, paid out equally to everyone as a citizen's dividend (whether at a country scale or global scale, I don't care), I'm not holding my breath.

I tend to agree with George Monbiot that the most effective things individuals can do are stop eating animal products and stop flying in jet planes. Between them, aviation and animal farming produce the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. So growing salad in greenhouses (or just eating produce in season), instead of flying it around the world, is just sensible. Massively reducing (or ideally abolishing) animal farming, and the massive grain monocrops most of it relies on for feed, and putting most of that land back into market gardens, food forests, and wild reserves, would help a lot too.

None of this is to say that there isn't snake oil being pushed out there as "climate change solutions". Of course there's greenwashing going on, and people trying to cash in on the grants and investments that are increasingly being directed into this area. A few examples

Make Genetic Modification Great Again

The genetic modification pitch is a good example (usually expressed using vague PR euphemisms like "biotechnology" or "bioengineering"),

> "if you wanted to reduce the risks of climate change, the right place to put resources is biotechnology. Bioengineered green plants seems like the most promising way to get CO2 out of the atmosphere (or equivalently, to produce carbon-neutral chemical fuels)."

Genetic modification is just as likely to produce plants that soak up less carbon, breed uncontrollably, and spread their transgenic properties to other species of plant. I agree that green plants are definitely the most promising way to sink C02, since the C02 we're releasing back into the atmosphere was soaked up by them in the first place. But why not just use natural ones? If for no other reason than we don't have time to wait for novel ones to be developed.

If you massively increase the amount of land reserved for wild nature, the plants that grow there will soak up heaps of carbon, and the forest floor that builds up under them will soak up anywhere from twice to ten times that amount as it gets denser and more bio-diverse. As well as becoming increasingly better habitat for non-humans and providing more nature immersion opportunities for humans, which have been shown in multiple studies to have both psychological and physical benefits. It's win-win-win.

Make Nuclear Fission Great Again

Another example of this corporate cash-in is the nuclear zombie's attempt to become become relevant again. The problem with nuclear fusion is that it doesn't produce energy reliably yet. The problem with nuclear fission is that it really is bad. The waste problem is totally unsolved. The decommissioning problem is totally unsolved, meaning that the retired reactors we already have need to be kept contained for thousands of years, potentially longer than our civilization will last. Another problem there is that containment is also a problem that remains totally unsolved, as we saw with Fukushima. Any time we build a new nuclear fission plant anywhere near the coast or geologically active area, we're basically creating a giant time bomb that can kill and poison people for thousands of generations to come. They will not thank us for this.

Basically the only countries that have the existing nuclear power plants are ones that needed to refine fissionable material for nuclear weapons. Selling nuclear to the US public was one of the earlier projects of Edward Bernays, the father of PR. Nuclear power allowed weapons-grade radioactive material to be put under a techno-utopian halo, as well as giving the weapons industry somewhere to dump a bunch of their by-products (as did water fluoridation, but that's another story).

Thorium reactors are an improvement, in that they can't produce another 3 Mile Island or Chernobyl because their process automatically shuts down instead of melting down. But they still produce life-destroying waste and a decommissioned reactor, both with a half-life in the thousands of years. They are, at best, a stop-gap solution for countries that have already made the mistake of building nuclear fission plants and need something to feed the waste into, to make it marginally less dangerous.

Then there is the carbon emissions involved in construction and operation of each plant (thousands of litres of concrete, extraction and transportation of the feedstocks etc). There is no reason for countries that don't already have a nuclear problem to start making one for themselves now. Especially when there are a multitude of barely explored possibilities in:

* solar: direct water heating, salt pumps, solar furnaces, photo-voltaics, including the new generation transparent ones that can be layered over device screens or windows in buildings and vehicles.

* wind: some great work has been done in NZ on small-scale, single-blade and horizontal turbines, allowing wind energy to be captured in places where the wind is more irregular, and closer to where the power is needed.

* hydro: I know a guy who powers his farm, including power tools, on a water wheel powered by a relatively small creek, with a bank of old forklift batteries for storage (note: he also has a home-made solar hot water heater and a wet-back for the fire that heats the house in the winter)

* biomass: see the work on using plant waste to make biochar and gas, David Blume's work on harvesting algal blooms to make liquid biofuels, and the Bio-Bus powered by biofuel made from food waste and sewage

* wave: anywhere with tidal flows has massive amounts of kinetic energy if we can figure out how to harness it

* exercise: there's kinetic energy being expended that could be harvested to generate electricity anywhere there are people using a gym (or walking, or dancing)

* hydrogen: this has massive potential as a way of storing and releasing energy from intermittent renewables like solar and wind as needed, reducing the need for batteries.

* capturing waste energy: I saw a copper tube coiled around a metal chimney, that would emit boiling water when the fire was going full bore, if you poured cold water in the top

* etc. etc. etc.

Appropedia.org is full of practical information about this kind of stuff.

So how can we tell when a proposal is about jumping on the bandwagon and when it's really about fixing climate change? A few critical questions I start with are:

* does it create proprietary technology (eg patents on bioengineered plants or bacteria) or other rent-seeking activities, which would allow corporations to make profits out of other people's work for decades if not generations?

* does it require centralizing more power (of regulation, action, or funding) in the hands of state-corporate bodies, making it unworkable for communities via community groups, cooperatives, or local governments?

* does it fail to simultaneously address at least one other environmental problem; air, water, or soil pollution; habitat loss and extinction; fossil fuel dependence (including nuclear); loss of topsoil and fertility; over-production and non-recyclable waste; avoidable transportation; energy inefficiency?

* is there a reasonable likelihood it will contribute to one or more of these environmental problems or create new problems?

If the answer to all of these questions is "no", it might actually be about trying to address climate change. Adding to this list may be the most useful thing a group of critical thinkers can contribute to the debate right now.

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Everyone - Part 2 - Universal Friendship is a Radical Goal

2019-01-09T07:10:54Z

BTW Anyone who declares me evil for holding the views expressed in this piece, and demands that they (or I) be scrubbed from this website for expressing them, is simply illustrating my point. Also, if you happen to think I'm not entitled to hold or express these opinions because I happen to be a "Cis-Het White Class-Analysis Man", I highly recommend 'Excommunicate Me from the Church of Social Justice' and 'No Justice Without Love: Why Activism Must Be Generous', two important essays on the same topic by Frances Lee, who is neither cisgendered, heterosexual, white, nor a man.

This is a response to a 2005 article, '10 things the left should see the back of right now ' by Isla Williams. I know this is now an old post, but the issues she responds to in points #5 and #8 have not gone away. In point #5, Williams says:

"Look there Mr Cis-Het White Class-Analysis Man! I’m gonna let you into a little secret: most of the working class people in the world are neither male nor white! A great number of them are neither cis nor straight! An intersectional analysis is, as it has always been, also an empirically and materially proper class analysis because this is the way the world is."

I agree with the comment made by Biffard Misqueegan, when the article was posted on LibCom by Joseph Kay, that this misses the point. There may still be the occasional old-school, workerist paper-seller who thinks that anything other than workplace-based labour struggle is a middle class issues. But the main criticism being raised against Safer Spaces Policing is not about it's content, but it's practice.

It's possible to show support for women's liberation, anti-racism, decolonizations, queer solidarity, animal rights, environmental defence, and so on, while building relationships and broad alliances. Doing this makes the left more diverse, and thus more resilient and effective, and many of us have been arguing tooth and nail for doing this since the 1990s. I would argue it was this kind of intersectional work that resulted in the massive movement of movements dismissed in Williams' piece as a "summit-hopping activist milleux" (thus buying into talking points, carefully cultivated via the corporate media, that focused attention on the summit-disrupting mushrooms so as to totally ignore and dismiss the mycelium of ongoing grassroots organizing that produced them, but I digress ...). Safer Spaces Policing, on the other hand, not only fails at building relationships and alliances, it valourizes destroying them as a political practice.

When one's family, friends, co-workers, or online correspondent makes a comment that shows a lack of solidarity, this can be seen as an opportunity for a teaching moment. A chance to clearly communicating one's objections to the comment, while also using a rigorous exchange of views to gain a deeper understanding of why people hold reactionary views, and maintaining a respectful tone to build a platform for further teaching moments in the future. Safer Spaces Policing, on the other hand, involves declaring to the person that they are not only wrong, but *evil* for holding such a view, and demanding that they immediately recant it. If they do not, they must be immediately de-friended, blocked, banished, declared a non-person, and an enemy of the left and humanity in general (note: I'm not saying that these response are never appropriate as a last resort, just that it's counterproductive for them to be the first response).

In point #8, Williams says:

"If you are saying things like 'stop splitting the left' because you are protecting your sexually-abusive and/or racist mates, then jog the fuck on. The left should feel glad to split from you.

If you are saying 'stop splitting the left' because you want the ideas of your groupsicle to be hegemonic, then get a grip. The left has always been diverse and has always had real internal disagreement – read some of the letters of the 19th century greats to work this out if you must. This has nothing to do with it being an effective force."

This kind of practice does split the left. Not by increasing its theoretical or social diversity, but by fragmenting it into ever-smaller shards that cannot work together, because that group still talks to so-and-so, despite their heretical views on whatever. It's high school snobbery as politics, with all its elitist in-group/ out-group melodrama. It's also a practice that, once normalized, is easily manipulated to break up groups, campaigns, and networks, and destroy activist infrastructure projects, on behalf of corporations and their PR companies, the cops, or the alphabet agencies (remember COINTELPRO?). I'm sure I'm not the only one who has seen this happen, yet our inability to have free, uncensored discussions about it without devolving into flame wars and excommunications (online *and* in-person) leaves us vulnerable to it.

Another result of this approach is that many working class people feel they are not welcome in the left because they don't have the correct views. Sadly, most working class people do not yet have progressive views on every aspect of gender, race, trans-/homosexuality, and so on (arguably *nobody* does). Indeed, given that the most progressive views on these issues (from an anarchist perspective) are not mainstream views, the only way anyone could end up holding any of them is to be regularly exposed to respectful debates with people who already hold them. If any and all discussion on these topics (especially online) boils down to "agree with me or fuck off fascist", this is both counter-productive and self-marginalizing.

Ironically, this elitist and vanguardist practice offers an explanation for why conservative nationalist movements have been able to attract increasingly large numbers of working class people who are left-leaning, but not "activists", into their orbit. Along with many others whose anti-authoritarian/ libertarian attitudes would normally make anarchist movements attractive to them. If a person knows they can go into conservative nationalist spaces and openly express dissenting views about discrimination, but that they can't go into liberal internationalist spaces and question our sacred cows without being shouted down or kicked out, guess which ones seem more attractive to them, let alone more democratic and libertarian?

The solution is not, of course, to jettison anti-discrimination politics, which have always been part of the left (although there's always been rigorous debate about the nitty-gritty details of them), but to jettison the vanguardist, scorched earth approach to them. There is an urgent need to rediscover the value of open-minded debate, tolerance of dissenting views, and the ability to continue trusting people even when we disagree with them about important things. More importantly, there is an urgent need to resist the capitalist tendency to dehumanize and instrumentalize each other, to ensure that we see each other as complete human being, whether friends, allies, or even enemies, but never tools to be used or discarded in service of "the cause". If we can achieve universal friendship among all oppressed people, revolution becomes just a matter of organizing with our friends.

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100 People Paddling a Boat Towards the Top of a Waterfall

2019-01-03T19:55:37Z

There are 100 people paddling a boat towards the top of a waterfall. One person realizes the danger, and raises the alarm. Do they stop paddling? Do they start back-paddling against the other 99? Or do they keep paddling towards the danger, while loudly yelling "we all need to stop paddling into danger"?

This is analogous to the situation activists find ourselves in. If the issue is climate change, then in this scenario, the boat represents industrial civilization. If the issue is digital cages, the boat represents the internet. Either way, the other 99 people represent everyone we care about. We can jump out of the boat, but everyone else going over the waterfall is still going to affect us.

We can take a fatalist position that the boat is doomed, and do and say nothing. We can raise the alarm while paddling towards the abyss with everyone else, in which case our message rings hollow. We can raise the alarm without paddling, in which case we're just making noise. What are we asking everyone to do? If we back-paddle while raising the alarm, our message is more likely to be taken seriously, and we're modelling what needs to be done.

It's true that if only one person back-paddles, the other 99 will still propel the boat over the edge. But it's equally true that exactly the same thing will happen for sure if the person raising the alarm isn't walking the talk (or in this case paddling it ;) A majority back-paddling is needed to effect change, but *someone* has to be brave enough to be the first one paddling against the mainstream, and cop all the flack that comes with that. It's equally essential that a small group are brave enough to listen to the 'voice in the wilderness', and join the back-paddling effort, so that solo back-paddler isn't just written off as a crank and ignored.

Originally posted on the fediverse.

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How I learned to stop worrying and love everyone - part 1 - How Did We Get Here?

2018-09-08T20:24:31Z

Ok, so I want to spend a bit of time talking about social justice activism as it plays out in geek communities in the early 21st century. Now, if you're not a geek, or a social justice activist, or both, you're probably thinking, "well who cares?", and fair enough. This rant (I'd be flattering myself to call it an "essay") is not written primarily for family entertainment purposes, although I aim to make it entertaining so it's not a painful struggle to get through. My goal here is to provide myself with a firm place to stand next time I get drawn into yet another one of those awkward and seemingly irresolvable debates about what straight white guys (like me) should and shouldn't do, to make the geek communities we take part in more welcoming and "safe" for people who aren't straight white guys.

The first challenge whenever we talk about this stuff is just how many straw man arguments we have to wade through, from people on both sides of the aisle. I mean it, there is literally an army of scarecrows waiting to be slaughtered, both by those who think it's enough to just treat everyone as equals, and those who think groups needs "Safer Spaces Policies" to make sure that actually happens. This is a problem, because a lot of people get so tired of wading through this bunch of predictably beside-the-point arguments before a proper dialogue can even begin, they get into the habit of going straight for the rhetorical flamethrower any time the subject comes up, and that can be intense and scary. I suspect I might be one of those people, which is why I've been feeling for a long time that I need to write about this.

Oh, in case you're not familiar with the phrase "straw man argument", it's a way of describing an aggressive reply to something other than what you actually said. Like if you say, "I think that woman who drives the forklift at work has beautiful hair", and your friend says, "you know, it's really inappropriate to sexually objectify people you work with". Wait, what? You never said anything about asking her on a date, or even finding her sexually attractive, you just complimented her hair. That's something you're just as likely to do if you're gay, and not sexually interested in woman at all.

The point your friend is making is not unreasonable in itself, it's just that it doesn't necessarily follow from what you actually said. Your friend is jumping to conclusions about what else you might have been thinking, and then making an implicit accusation based on those assumptions, which is not just slaughtering straw man - as the saying goes - but is also passive aggressive (we'll get to that). They're assuming "bad faith". When a person is told - indirectly but unmistakably - that the person they're talking to is assuming bad things about them, then tend to return the favour. Cue the rhetorical flamethrowers, and the chances of having a discussion where both people learn something from each others' perspective gets smaller and smaller.

How many of you noticed that the example I gave assumed that you - the reader - are a man (or at least identify as a man). How many of you assumed I didn't notice that? If I gave that example in a face-to-face conversation, how many of you would have launched into a lecture about how the gender bias in my choice of example is symptomatic of an unconscious unwillingness to be gender inclusive? Hopefully you wouldn't, but there are definitely people who would, because whenever these topics come up, their default mindset is to assume bad faith.

As it happens, I did notice the gendered nature of my example immediately after I finished writing it, and I had a go at rewriting it to assume a female reader, then with neutral pronouns. But then I reminded myself it was intended to be a light-hearted anecdote based on the sort of well-meaning miscommunication that happens in real life, and that I'm essentially talking to myself here anyway. There's nothing wrong with picking my own gender for an anecdote, and anyone who picks on that is most likely doing so to give themselves an excuse to dismiss anything they feel uncomfortable about further on in the piece. In other words, it's a straw man. They're assuming bad faith, but at the same time, notice how I'm primed to expect a nitpicking response that fails to engage with the serious issues I want to take about. To some degree, I'm assuming bad faith too.

How did we get here?

This is an important question, which I can't answer for everyone, but since this is about giving myself a place to stand, I can say a bit about how I got here. Which is what the next piece in this series will be about. In part three, having given myself a place to stand while talking about finding a place to stand, I'll actually get to the point. I hope.

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Hacker Holiday (original short story)

2016-10-27T10:24:57Z

CreativeCommons CC-BY-NC 4.0

The sun was being slowly eaten by the gentle jaws of the hills when Trevor finally arrived home. It had been a long day. He had installed a new set of condenser wells in some of the dryer parts of the farm, and his hands were blistered and sore from gripping the shovel as he dug the holes for them.

It had been a good spring, with plenty of rain, warm, and not too acid. But there was drought coming. Trevor could feel the thirst in the wind at times. He would need all the wells he had, and more, to keep the younger food forests irrigated, not to mention for drinking and washing.

He had picked some loquats on the way back to The Cave. They had yet to fully ripen, but Trevor liked them this way, before too much of the starch decayed into sugar, masking the zesty bite. He sat on the sod roof, savouring the sour-sweet taste of the fleshy parcels. Later in the season they would make good jelly. As the last of the ambient light seeped away through the cracks of early evening, he went inside to make dinner, only to find he was not alone.

"Sally!" he gasped, throwing his arms around her shoulders and pressing her face into his sweaty chest, "I wasn't expecting you for months!"

His daughter fought free of his smothering embrace, so she could reply without having to speak through a mouthful of musky shirt.

"Hi Dad. I couldn't face doing the last leg by airship in the end . All that time in the air makes me feel like a grumpy cloud."

Even with the latest solar cell canvas hulls, and the most streamlined, lightweight bodies the design communities could come up with, the airships still couldn't fly nearly as fast as the planet-cookers used to.

"I took the e-train down from Tamaki Makaurau, and got Irene to pick me up in her buggy."

"She finally got the battery fixed?" he asked, "or did you have to stop and recharge every half an hour?"

She grinned, "I brought her new battery with me on the train. She would have picked me up anyway of course, but you know, never miss an opportunity to put good karma in the karma bank."

Trevor allowed himself a wry smile. It was something he'd told her often while she was growing up. He realized it was a terrible distortion of the complex doctrines of the old sanskrit word used by Hindus, Buddhists, and Hippies, to reduce karma to a crude double-entry accounting metaphor. But it had done the trick. His daughter had grown up effortlessly generous, and happy to help whenever she could.

"Lies to children", he muttered, quoting the old Terry Pratchett book about science that he used to read to Sally in her early teens.

"What's that?", she asked, looking up from the "thank you" message to Irene, which she had been tapping into her beat-up handheld. She went on without waiting for an answer.

"You're connection is crap Dad. 1 gigabit?!? No wonder people think you've gone into hermitage. You really ought to get a petabit router for your netballoon."

"Maybe you can help me with that while you're here?", he suggested. "I need to pull down some firmware updates for my tractor and a few other things around the place too. I just never seem to have the time. I keep their networking stuff turned off and hope for the best.

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, sure, any other basic helpdesk jobs you want me to do, while I'm on holiday from kernel hacking for eighty hours a week?"

She smiled. Of course she would help upgrade the software on all his hacked together farm equipment, and probably end up replacing the operating systems on half of it, and writing patches for any bugs she found. He found it a painstaking chore, and never lost the fear of making mistakes that would fry the silicon like hot chips, while she could do it in her sleep. Besides, she felt twitchy if she went for too long without hacking on something.

At least he always had the sense to avoid the proprietary gear from the big, flashy shops, on the main street in town. It was often cheaper to buy a whole new piece of equipment than pay licensing fees for the latest version of the sloppy software on the one you bought a year ago. From the few times she'd got access to their highly secretive source code, she couldn't help but think it was programmed by letting a roomful of drunk baboons dance on keyboards. The corporate manufacturers who made the hardware generally outsourced the software side to overpaid amateurs, who knew far more about marketing trends than sensible data structures, and the comments in their code consisted of terse, unhelpful phrases like "fixed that variable thing".

"I'll tell you what", he said, "I'll make you a nice, home-cooked dinner, with fresh veges off the farm, and some eggs from the ducks, and you can tell me all about your trip here. Then, after you've had a good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast, we can talk about farm stuff. Alright?"

"Sounds great Dad". Her smile cracked open, and lurking behind her eyes he caught a glimpse of the wild child he had known.

"I'll go wash off the dust of the road while you cook."

This was not just a metaphorical flourish. Trevor knew what a ride in Irene's open-top, electric dune buggy was like. Thrilling but dirty.

It's good to have her home, thought Trevor, even if it was only for a few weeks over the summer solstice. Some of the farmers never saw their kids after they left for the city, and they never knew why. Trevor did, but there was no point trying to explain it to them. A bird released, avoids cages. He started rinsing the veges, humming tunelessly to himself.

This story is licensed under CC-BY-NC. You can share it freely, but if you want to use it in anything commercial, you need my permission.

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ThoughtBill (original short story)

2016-08-23T02:36:08Z

CreativeCommons CC-BY-NC 4.0

Kevin couldn't remember when he'd outsourced most of his thinking to private companies who served it back to him through the internet. He couldn't remember, because he couldn't access his My.MemRy account. Maybe the datacentres that served MemRy to users like Kevin were having technical difficulties. It was also possible he'd got behind on his internet bill, but he couldn't check because he couldn't access the BudGIT server either.

The last thing he vaguely remembered was paying his ThoughtBill, and worrying about how high it was. All that thinking about copyright images of sweaty, scantily clad men had added up. He had tried to keep his mind on things that weren't copyright. But the more he tried not to hear the pop song, or re-imagine bits of movies, or recall photos, the more he thought about them, and the more it cost it him in licensing and legal fees.

Kevin wasn't sure what to do. Partly because his phone and every other quick way of communicating with anyone who might be able to help needed the internet to work. But, more importantly, because he'd decided some time ago that his strategic thinking wasn't as good as the machine learning algorithms at EnhancePerform, and now he couldnt reach their servers either.

Kevin felt a grumbly feeling in his gut. He had checked three times today, and the SmartFridge still hadn't ordered any more food. The feeling wasn't doing anything to improve his mood. The idea of going for a walk occurred to him, that usually cheered him up. But the pedometer on his Pebble wasn't getting any internet signal either, and his PersonTrainer would be grumpy if he exercised without capturing at least the basic biometric data. Besides, without access to a map server, how would he find his way home afterwards?

Kevin's mind wandered for a while, but it kept circling back to the same place. Without an internet connection, there was nothing he could do. He was still slumped on his couch, staring with glazed eyes at the blank screen of his DataWall, when the paramedics arrived. His confused expression told them everything they needed to know. "Another internet eviction" they said with a shrug, as they bagged up his stiffened body for disposal.

This story is licensed under CC-BY-NC. You can share it freely, but if you want to use it in anything commercial, you need my permission.

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Public Service Networks (original short story)

2016-08-09T04:57:22Z

CreativeCommons CC-BY-NC 4.0

Legend held that the digital republics started off as businesses. That people had chosen to become netizens of this or that republic. That in the early days you could hold a passport for as many republics as you liked, or wander freely online with no passport at all. It all seemed like some kind of pirate utopia, and nobody really believed it.

It could be worse though. The same old stories say that there used to be territorial republics that put up border fences around pieces of the world. People would have an account made with the republic whose claimed territory they were in when they were born, or the republic their parents had an account with. Sometimes they were allowed to have an account with more than one republic at a time, but it involved paying off the right people and submitting a lot of forms, and some republics just didn't allow it.

That part of the story is just as hard to believe, when for as long as anyone can remember, people have arrived in a new place and set up an account with the local public services network. The idea of having to choose one public service network for life, or them being able to decide who can and can't travel in the area their services cover, just seems weird. Who would put up with a system like that?

This story is licensed under CC-BY-NC. You can share it freely, but if you want to use it in anything commercial, you need my permission.

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