A word of qualification: When a person says “NOTHING irks me more than….” what they are saying is probably not true. Surely there’s at least something that irks them more than what they’re about to talk about. They’re not lying, or course, they’re just using that turn of phrase for rhetorical effect, to point out that what they’re about to describe is really annoying to them. So please, allow me to do the same.

NOTHING irks me more than partisanship that is so severe that those who suffer from it have completely blinded themselves to reason – prepared to engage in publicity stunts attacking people who dare to disagree with their political views, accusing them of moral failures, utterly shutting out any awareness of glaring double standards or special pleading. I’m talking about people like Al Sharpton and Barbara Ciara. Read on.

You may have heard of the recent News Story about the Chimp that went nuts and attacked a woman in Connecticut. The police ended up shooting it dead. You may also have heard of US President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package that has taken major criticism from various people and groups. One such person is Sean Delonas, a cartoonist for the New York Post. He drew (and the paper published) a cartoon of two police officers, one of whom has just shot the chimp dead, and the other of whom is remarking, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” Here’s what it looks like:

Is this the first time a US president has been compared to a monkey on account of his poor ideas? If you have a memory that stretches back only a number of months, you’ll know this is not the case. President George W Bush has been on the sharp end of exactly this comparison numerous time. People said he was stupid so they depicted him as a monkey to make this exact point.

Here’s an example over at the Hollywood Liberal: An artist depicted George Bush’s face by using monkeys to create the image. The artist was a non-white man (you’ll see why this matters soon), and the image caused protests (not police action or state intervention, but protests carried out by citizens). The manager at the exhibition saw the piece and demanded that it be taken down (the artist says that the manager was going to arrest him, which is a little silly. He’s a manager, not a police officer). The writer at the site had this to say: “Touchy, touchy, touchy, I wonder why the guy got so upset about the painting. Could it be that the Truth hurts. Everybody on the entire planet knows that monkey boy is a Monkey, but Republicans just have to deny reality no matter how stupid they look doing it. “You painted Bush with monkeys?” Oh my Godddd!” Store that away in short term memory: Bush is called “monkey boy” and any offense taken at this is ridiculed. I’m not complaining about this – people have the right to an unfavorable opinion, after all.

Or here’s another one – this time from the “Black Voices” web domain. Ouch. Scroll down to see Bush depicted as a Chimpanzee (ouch again) with a gun.

There are hundreds of examples – literally. I’ll save you the monotony – HERE is why you get when you do a Google image search for a combination of “Bush” and “Monkey.” Take it as fact: it happens a lot, OK?

Now somebody has done the same thing to Obama. They thought his Economic stimulus package was stupid, just like many people thought a number of Bush’s ideas were stupid, so they portrayed him in a way that derided his competency. They portrayed him as a monkey. His package was so bad, the cartoonist thought, that it could have been written by a monkey.

No problem, right? Wrong. Now things are different. Hundreds, maybe thousands of attacks on Bush’s competency by calling him or comparing him to a monkey is fine, but this – this is racism. Hatred. Bigotry. it reminds us of the bad old days when niggers got lynched (yes I know that’s a terrible word, that’s why I used it, to make the point). This is a whole new ball game.

Read about the furor this cartoon of the chimp caused HERE. Al Sharpton and other leaders from “various groups” are to protest outside the publisher’s offices. He’s not alone:

Barbara Ciara, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, said The Post showed a “serious lapse in judgment” by running the cartoon.

“To think that the cartoonist and the responsible editors at the paper did not see the racist overtones of the finished product should insult their intelligence,” Ciara said in a written statement. “Instead, they celebrate their own lack of perspective and criticize those who call it what it is: tone deaf at best, overtly racist at worst.”

Overtly racist. Overtly. If you call Bush’s intelligence and ideas into question by depicting him as a monkey, people understand that it’s an attack on how smart he’s being. But do the same to a black President and you’re being racist. Overtly so.

How is it that people who present themselves as politically savvy can be so absolutely naive? If somebody wants to criticise Obama’s competency, what animal would they prefer? This is a very old method of attack: Fake outrage. Don’t bother to even try to deny the point being made, just concoct some obviously false charge of racism (or homophobia, prejudice against short people, insensitivity towards people who… um, I don’t know, sprained their ankle as a kid, take your pick), and chant, march, wring your hands, demonize people, wail as loud as you can and try to bully those who disagree with you into apologizing.

Are you people (yes, I said “you people,” oh no I must be a racist, even though I’m talking about people who engage in a certain tactic, not people with a certain colour) really that stupid, or are you actually being duplicitous here?

(While writing this post, I noted that Scott [errata: oops, I mean Trevor] over at The Will to Exist made the same point during Obama’s campaign when someone made a T shirt portraying Obama as a Monkey.)

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I can’t keep up. I started the Say Hello to my Little Friend podcast at a great rate of knots, largely because I had a lot of material ready to go. My employment situation was very different back then, and I have very little time to work on site updates and podcast episodes now compared to those good old days. Making a decent podcast episode takes a long time – gathering sources and doing a bit of research, writing it, recording it. You get the idea.

So I’ve made a unanimous executive decision. I’m going to work on having one new podcast episode per month. I have a lot of my own papers that I need to work on for publication, and they need to take priority. I’m sure you’ll cope.

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“Anti-competitive behaviour.” It’s a term that we associate with abuse of someone’s position of power and unfairness. I want to show you two examples of things that have been called “anti-competitive.” One of them is deserving of these associations, and one of them is not.

Here’s the first example:  Telecom New Zealand. Telecom is New Zealand’s largest telecommunications company. It owns New Zealand’s copper telephone line network, and the majority of people in New Zealand who have a landline have Telecom as their Telephone service provider. As a result of its monopoly position in physical resources, Telecom also has significant control over what other companies are able to offer when it comes to both landline and internet services. How did Telecom get to this powerful place? By competing with the other companies in the industry and successfully making its way to the top?

No. Not even close. Wikipedia overs a summary history of the company here. Telecom used to be owned by the New Zealand Government. There literally was no competition. Everyone used Telecom’s services and physical resources because this part of the market was not really a “market” at all, but something more like a government department. In the most obvious sense, this was an “anti-competitive” market, and it prevented consumers from having any choice, removing any need for Telecom to do better than any other company in order to win customers. That is how Telecom gained the position of dominance that it now has. Telecom was privatised in 1990, which immediately improved new Zealand’s telecommunications scene. Competing companies arose and prices and services improved. But when Telecom was privatised, it was sold as one massive block: One private company had a pre-made monopoly because of the immoral advantage that it had enjoyed as a state owned monopoly. Because the government had made the mess in the first place, it has since intervened numerous times to take steps to fix some of that mess. Read about it at that wiki page. In short, Telecom has unfairly (uncompetitively) gained a huge advantage over other companies who have had to work from the ground up to gain enough popularity and market share to compete with Telecom.

This type of “anti-competitive” behaviour is, in my view, the kind of thing that really deserves that name and all the innuendo that goes along with it. The next example, however, does not.

My thanks to dizzle at idrankthekoolaid for bringing this example to my attention.

I like Mozilla software. I use Firefox as my browser and Thunderbird as my email client. I had the option of using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, but I prefer not to. But it looks like Mozilla don’t think their software is really good enough to catch on. It’s amusing in a strange way that they don’t have as much faith in the merits of their own software as their users do. Here’s what I mean: have a look at this quote from computerworld:

The European Commission has granted Mozilla, the open-source collaboration behind the Firefox Web browser, the right to join the antitrust case against Microsoft, a spokesman said Monday.

The EC, Europe’s top antitrust authority, charged Microsoft last month with distorting competition in the market for Web browsers by bundling in its Internet Explorer browser with the Windows operating system.

If the charges stick, Microsoft could be forced to change the way it distributes IE, as well as pay a fine for monopoly abuse.

Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s chairwoman, said in a blog posting that appeared over the weekend that she wanted to offer Mozilla’s expertise “as a resource to the EC as it considers what an effective remedy would entail.”

She said there isn’t “the single smallest iota of doubt” that Microsoft’s tying of IE to Windows “harms competition between Web browsers, undermines product innovation and ultimately reduces consumer choice.”

Let’s think about that: Microsoft, a private company, makes an operating system called Windows. Mozilla could make an operating system, but they don’t. They choose to make a web browser and give it away for free. Microsoft makes a web browser (Internet Explorer), which is part of Windows. The fact that they make a popular operating system means that a lot of people have internet explorer, because they buy Windows. This gives Windows a competitive edge in the market. Microsoft have – uncoerced, and enabled by the fact that they are so popular in the marketplace, given their product more exposure and availability to end users.

Does this “harm competition” between Microsoft and the makers of other browsers? No. It is competition. This is Microsoft competing. When you compete, you are trying to give yourself an advantage by getting more people to make the choice to use your products. They can make Windows however they like. They can make Internet Explorer however they like. They own them. They dragged themselves into their position of popularity and market dominance by selling more stuff. Computer makers don’t have to sell Windows with computers, but they choose to. Home users don’t have to buy computers with Windows on them, but they choose to because it’s cheaper than some other options, and customers know how to use Windows. If you want your browser to be more popular, then make it better. Firefox is better than Internet Explorer. This stupid socialist myth that Mozilla entertains, that absurd belief that they have a right for Microsoft to go easy on them and make Windows in such a way as to not tempt people to use Internet explorer is fundamentally immoral. When people compete against you, they are trying to make it harder for you to succeed. Get over it.

I don’t like Microsoft. They lack class and style. Their stuff is expensive when considering its quality (in my humble opinion). However, if you don’t like the fact that Microsoft includes Internet Explorer with Windows, then go and create your own operating system, and include your own browser.  Do a ebtter job at what they are doing. What you don’t do is sue somebody else for selling it’s property as it sees fit. Firefox isn’t orange any more.  It’s red.

Freakin’ commies. I hate them.

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I interrupt the usual blog to complain about the fact that I can’t sleep. It’s 12:25am on Monday morning, I have to get up for work at about 6am, and it’s 28 degrees Celsius (that’s 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit for my American friends). That might not be much where you come from, but here it’s hot for this time of night!

I guess I can’t complain too much when I see the heat and the awful fires in Australia wreaking such havoc and claiming lives.

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I work full time, and the time I spend at home after work and on weekends is fairly valuable. The upshot of this is that while I remain in these circumstances I simply can’t spend as much time as I’d like to reading, keeping up with subjects I like to follow, and writing pieces for publication. It’s a vicious cycle really – In order to get an academic position it’s important that I keep abreast of my field and continue to have a publication output, but as long as I’m not in an academic role where these things are part of my job expectation (and while I’m also working full time in a different type of role), it’s not always easy to do these things.

That being said, here is what I’m working on at the moment on a very part time basis:

“Chasing the justificatory Goalpost” – This is a piece that’s actually nearly finished, and I really must get around to getting it submitted. I may have mentioned it before, actually. It’s a piece criticising some proponents of political liberalism (especially Gerald Gaus) for employing a sliding goalpost when it comes to the criteria that he uses to exclude policies with a religious basis from legitimacy in a modern democracy.

“Is there an Echo in Here?” This is a comment on the way that critics of divine command theories of ethics are just parroting previous criticisms of those theories, without taking into account the more than adequate responses to those criticisms that have been in print for many years now. I actually submitted this one to a journal but had it turned down (I’m comforted by the fact that my PhD supervisor had the same experience with this particular journal). I must brush this one off and submit it elsewhere.

“Luke 16:19-31 and historical background” – I need a better title for this one. In a departure from philosophy and a return to theology and biblical studies, this is a piece on new Testament Studies. It looks at the well known tale of the Rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16 and offers agreement with the thesis of Joachim Jeremias that it is in fact an example of Jesus’ use of a contemporary and widely known story (i.e. one that he did not invent or necessarily agree with) to make a moral point against those who used it. I look at some dismissals of this thesis and show them to be lacking in merit, and I look at some implications of the thesis.

“Loathsome Spiders and Angry God” – This one is on historical and systematic theology. In the debate over the nature of eternal punishment – in particular in traditionalist critiques of the annihilationist perspective, Jonathan Edwards is exalted as some sort of hero for the traditional cause, and if we poor benighted annihilationists would just look at his powerful reasoning, we would be put in our place. In this piece I look at the reasons that a couple of theologians have given for saying this, and explain how it’s a load of rhetorically loaded claptrap.

“Intuitionism as Reliabilism” – This one is a foray into epistemology, not really my major area of expertise, so I need to prepare carefully. For those who know what these terms mean, “intuitionism” and “reliabilism,” you’ll know that they are typically construed as competing theories. Here I suggest that they need not be construed this way, and that in fact intuitionism is best seen as one species of reliabilism.

“Natural Law and the Divine Will” – it is sometimes thought that Natural Law theories of ethics and Divine Command theories of ethics are always exclusive of one another. Here I explain that while this is sometimes the case for specified types of Natural Law or Divine Command theories, it is certainly not always the case.

“The Liberal Theocracy” – Not so long ago I did a podcast episode by this name. This article is a more detailed version of that presentation. I explain that the supposed contrast between a liberal democracy and a theocratic society is a false one, founded on either ignorance or bias, or both.

“Responding to Wolterstorff on Divine Command Ethics” – I’m currently reading the latest book from Nicholas Wolterstorff entitled Justice. In it, he offers an argument against divine command ethics. For me, that’s like painting a bullseye on his forehead.

And last but definitely not least:

“The Moral Argument” – This is a full length book project, and given my rather vicious time constraints at the moment, it’s a long term project, in which I explore various historical formulations of the moral argument for the existence of God. I then delve into the meta-ethical issues in the context of contemporary analytical philosophy and argue that in fact the existence of moral truths consitutes powerful evidence for the existence of God. I close by responding to objections to the argument.

So that’s what’s keeping me busy right now!

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[This is a corrected version of this blog entry. For some reason, my original post got cut short, so I've had to re-visit it and add the ending.]

Today is Waitangi day in New Zealand. It’s a day when we commemorate the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, an historic agreement between the Crown and Iwi (Maori tribal groups) that has come to be regarded as a founding document for New Zealand.

During the Labour Party’s lengthy term as the government of New Zealand, a term that – much to my own relief – ended recently, a perception was either built up or perpetuated that the left is the friend of Iwi in protecting their rights as provided in the Treaty, while the right were out to undermine those rights in the interests of their own evil, greed and desire to exploit people.

Perhaps it is this cartoonish misconception that motivated two people to attempt to physically attack Prime minister John Key yesterday when he arrived at Waitangi to take part in commemorations for the first time in his term as PM.

For many people, and many Maori people in particular, however, this perception was severely rocked when the Labour government passed the Foreshore and Seabed Act in 2004. Among other things, the new law prevented cases about certain types of Treaty grievances to be taken to any type of court, and declared via legislation, that the legitimate title to parts of New Zealand’s foreshore and seabed are held by the Crown. The legislature stepped right into the middle of the judiciary and pre-emptively ended disputes that would otherwise have been heard by a tribunal. For many Maori and others, this was seen as part of a trend towards corruption and thuggishness by the Labour government. For some it was seen as “betrayal,” suggesting that the left should naturally be seen as supportive of Treaty rights and seeing that these are provided for. Somehow, the Labour Party had created this image of itself and managed to get people thinking that the opposite is true of the right.

This image is fundamentally wrong. The foreshore and seabed Act showed people that, and the friendliness of the current National government towards the Maori party and Maori interests has shown it further. Interestingly, other than the Maori members of the Labour party who left that party in outrage in 2004-05, the most vocal critics of the Act were members of the ACT party, generally regarded (rightly or otherwise) as the most “right wing” party in Parliament. How could this be?

[This is where the original version of this post got cut short. The remainder follows.]

The answer is simple: On the left, individual rights and contractual arrangements are dispensable in the name of the “good of society,” even when that good is only construed in terms of a policy goal of furthering the left’s agenda (for example, state ownership of natural assets). The right (not the absurd caricature of the right as some sort of greedy despotic fascist state that is painted by some social commentators) in New Zealand shares much common ground with the classical liberal tradition in political philosophy (National has unfortunately courted the Labour vote by sacrificing much of this, but that’s another story). In that tradition – unlike the collectivist outlook of the left – individual rights and contracts that generate them are not expendable when the state deems them to get in the way of its pursuit of the ideal society. A Classical Liberal approach is one that has no place for a Government that steps in and changes the rules to ensure that people can’t plead their cause in a dispute between the state and the private party. To act in that way would break down the very conceptual distinction between left and right, between collectivist and individualist.  You’re allowed your day in court and no big brother is going to stand in your way. Far from being a force to be feared when it comes to upholding the obligations that the Crown have to Iwi, the fact that the Maori Party is now allied with the parties of the right (in spite of National’s unfortunate slide towards big social spending and its pandering to the fans of social engineering), and the fact that that perceived bastion of Iwi safety, the Labour party, is no longer in power, should actually serve as some encouragement to those who have become frustrated that legitimate treaty issues have received such poor treatment.

Now if only National would take less tax, spend less, kill fewer babies – and a bunch of other things that aren’t springing to mind just now – we’d be getting somewhere.

Glenn Peoples

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