Word of the day

Penumbra–  a surrounding area or fringe, a zone of influence or activity that is less distinct or certain; a partly shaded region between fully dark and fully lit; a part of a shadow in which only some of the light is blocked, used especially about a shadow made during an eclipse; partial shadow between regions of full shadow (the umbra) and full illumination; the diffuse area around the dark central area of a sunspot; something that covers, surrounds, or obscures; a shroud.

Sowell says

Nothing has been more common in history than for victims to become oppressors when they gain power.

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) April 1, 2024

Woman of the day

Woman of the Day Phoebe Chapple born OTD 1879 in Adelaide, the first Australian and the only woman doctor to be awarded the Military Medal for gallantry in the field.

Phoebe’s upbringing was affluent – she sometimes visited her patients in a phaeton driven by a liveried coachman… pic.twitter.com/C74c914XLN

— The Attagirls (@TheAttagirls) March 31, 2024

Quotes of the week

Conservatism is a difficult word to talk about in Britain, because people immediately think of the Tories. But I do think small-C conservatism is someone who has a fundamental understanding of loss, an understanding that to pull something down is easy, to build it back up again is extremely difficult. There is an innate need in us to rip shit down, and I’m personally more cautious in that respect without it being a whole political ideology that surrounds me. – Nick Cave

The concept that there are problems with the world we need to address, such as social justice; I’m totally down with that. However, I don’t agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. – Nick Cave

Making art is in itself the great expression of joy and optimism, in my view. That’s why we need it. Music, art, reminds us of our fundamental capacity to create beautiful things out of the fuckeries of life. – Nick Cave

We have become so used to seeing people get cancelled in the name of ‘social justice’ that we often lose sight of just how cruel and barbaric this practice really is. Reputations are ruined, livelihoods are destroyed and families are torn apart, usually just because someone has uttered an unfashionable opinion, or accidentally committed an un-PC faux pas.

Time and time again, we see how merciless the woke mob can be, even as it poses as compassionate. – Lauren Smith

Imagine living in a world where sitting in your own living room and saying “men can’t be women” could result in the police logging a “hate incident” against your name.

Imagine, too, that your legally protected right to express such an opinion counted for nothing because all that mattered was whether the person who heard you perceived it to be offensive.

If you live in Scotland, this is the world you will be living in as of Monday. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s prank by the Scottish Government, despite the date when it comes into force. – Gordon Rayner

The Telegraph has been told that Police Scotland – which has just announced it will no longer investigate certain low-level crimes – is diverting resources so it can investigate the expected influx of accusatory phone calls it will receive from those offended by other people’s opinions.

The force has promised to investigate every hate crime complaint it receives, and if the complainant (or victim, as they are officially referred to) insists they were upset by something they perceived to be a hate crime, it will be logged as a non-crime hate incident (NCHI) even if there is not a shred of evidence of any crime being committed.

Little wonder that women’s rights campaigners fear that the new law will be used by trans radicals to settle scores and silence anyone who dares to challenge their world view.  

If George Orwell was still around, he could perhaps write a book about it and call it Twenty Twenty-Four. – Gordon Rayner

Dr Michael Foran, lecturer in public law at the University of Glasgow, says the new legislation “brings the criminal law into your home” even when you are having private conversations. – Gordon Rayner

We are looking at an army of local spies potentially taking anonymous reports from other local spies and passing them on to the police. Some people are very gleeful about this and they’re going to report everyone they don’t like. It’s very Stasi and it’s absolute insanity. – Susan Smith

If you genuinely imagine I’d delete posts calling a man a man, so as not to be prosecuted under this ludicrous law, stand by for the mother of all April Fools’ jokes. – J.K. Rowling

Schools are running out of exercise books, library funding has been cut, so things that bring people together are being cut and the SNP seems to think that the way to build a more tolerant society is by calling the police. – Lucy Hunter Blackburn

I don’t have the political nous and youthful energy to take the establishment on. I like to earn the money that comes from corporate functions. And the last thing you want is someone from Human Resources running you through a police check before they book you. – Simon Evans

To say we should not presume male advantage in a sport unless we have specific data for that sport is like saying that just because most of the apples in a tree have fallen to the ground, one shouldn’t presume the remaining apples are also subject to gravity,” he said.

There is overwhelming evidence of male advantage from across different sports and there is little to be gained from demonstrating this again and again, sport by sport, – John Armstrong 

Cadbury, Iceland and other big firms seem to be bending over backwards to appease a community of the offended that does not really exist outside of their market research.

The end result of this is that various traditions are flattened into a beige corporate mush. The Easter holidays are still marked, with egg hunts and hot cross buns, but businesses go out of their way to deny any link to Christianity, as if the mere mention of the Christian faith were somehow offensive or exclusionary.

Most Britons of all faiths and none have no truck with this woke erasure of Easter. Attending a ‘multifaith search for seasonal treats over the early spring long weekend’ doesn’t sound like anyone’s idea of fun. The fear of causing offence is sucking all the colour out of the world. – Lauren Smith

Lawyers are a proxy for regulation. To get a feel for how destructive regulation is, you could maybe look at the number of lawmakers. Compared with the combined average of Denmark, Singapore, Norway, Ireland and Finland, New Zealand has 50% more Ministers, 156% more departments, and 280% more portfolios.*

Or you could simply measure the exploding number of pages of regulations and statute law over the years and guess at how that strangles enterprise. But that would barely do full justice to its stultifying effect either.  – Peter Cresswell

We don’t have the rule of law any more, but rule by lawyers. When Mencken wrote that in 1924, New Zealand had roughly one lawyer per 1,000 people. We now have nearly three times that number — and we’re less free, less safe, and our taxes have increased at least tenfold.

The number of lawyers in the country is a proxy for our level of (over)regulation, of the extent to which we’re being strangled by the grey ones. And look at how the blood suckers have grown, especially post-WWII. And they keep growing, with around 3% more of the bastards every year. – Peter Cresswell

Sometimes I wonder whether the true aim of modern “progressives”—progress toward what, one is tempted to ask—is to provoke such a strong and even violent reaction among conservatives and old-fashioned liberals that it would retrospectively justify their division of humanity into the woke, which is to say themselves, and the fascists, which is to say everyone else.

Another possible explanation is that they are satirists: that they want to see how far they can fool elites into accepting evident absurdities, thereby exposing those elites for the sheeplike nullities that they are.

With regret, I have come to the conclusion that they are in deadly earnest. I should here point out that earnestness is not the same thing as seriousness, indeed it tends to be destructive of it. Earnestness is to seriousness what sentimentality is to feeling: It is the straining after something that is not authentically felt or believed. – Theodore Dalrymple

The human mind being so subtle an instrument, it is possible that there is not a stark dichotomy between sincerity and having an eye to the main chance. One of the great advantages of wokeness is that it allows for both at the same time. A person can make a very decent career out of being passionately devoted to a cause, for causes these days pay very well, or can be made to do so. Doing good works and doing well have become entirely compatible.

Without going quite so far as Marx, who made of economic self-interest an epistemological principle, it is surely a fact of human nature or psychology that people tend to believe what it is in their interest to believe. It is in the interest of bureaucracies, for example, to believe that all group differences arise from the operation of prejudice and discrimination, to be corrected by—yes, themselves.

Moreover, once such a belief is adopted, it is defended as desperately as any population defends its city from a siege. How many of us give up a belief the first time we hear a valid argument against it? This is so even when nothing much is at stake, let alone when there is something as important as a livelihood.

Therefore, we are perfectly capable of persuading ourselves that something is so when we know it not to be so. Unfortunately, this seems to me more and more necessary for people to make any kind of career in the modern world. – Theodore Dalrymple

Although Ardern tried hard to divide Kiwis along every imaginable line for her own political benefit, an inescapable fact is that a profound cultural factor, way bigger than her, unites us all together. We have our roots in making our way through our own industry. When people started to migrate to NZ, whether indigenous or not, they had to depend on themselves, friends and family for survival. There was no welfare state back then. Out of this history, an important part of our culture became the “can-do” attitude – Kiwi ingenuity, the number 8 fencing-wire, practicality – taking calculated risks that many in the Old World had lost. – Robert MacCulloch

The job of politicians is not to make choices for people – their job is to set up a system of rules – create a level playing field – that allows us freedom to make our own decisions. We know what’s best for us, not them. Successes & failures follow from our choices. What we share, regardless of ethnicity, is that we don’t want to “look for light, hope & fulfillment” from politicians. Ardern should spend time at Harvard reading books – not teaching how to lead from her life experience in Morrinsville & Podium of Truth. Start with some philosophy about how government should protect fundamental rights & liberties, leaving people with the freedom & responsibility to carve their own path in life. – Robert MacCulloch

We want more medical doctors, not more spin doctors, – Christopher Luxon 

The critical thing is the Budget and getting the balance right in that Budget, because we could carry on doing things as they are, or we could go to full austerity mode,” Luxon told the Herald.

“We want to find the balance, actually – balancing wasteful spending so that we can protect frontline services, [while providing] tax relief and growing the economy. That’s the key thing that we need to land this quarter. – Christopher Luxon 

We don’t misgender them.

Trans people misgender themselves.

We just refuse to play along.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) April 2, 2024

In 2016 more than 40 per cent of the population here were revealed to be on the mooch — 40 per cent of households paying less tax than they receive in cash benefits, 3 per cent paying around a quarter all the income tax that supported them.

And now, in 2024, that Treasury “working paper” tells us that we’ve now officially passed an important milestone, which is this: More than half of all New Zealanders are on the mooch. 

More than half. Mooching off the other half.

More than half of this country’s population is now receiving more in government largesse than they pay in taxes, while an ever-diminishing percentage of the population if forced to pay for them. – Peter Cresswell

This is actually what inequality looks like — the productive being forced to fund the unproductive, unequally.

Measured this way however, it does obviously undeservedly impugn some honest folk on lower incomes, and many moochers and parasites on higher incomes because they’re sucking down government cash.

And at the same time it also fails to measure the various bureaucrats, bloodsuckers and parasites who work directly for government, or indirectly as a consultant or the like to help business-folk avoid being done over by government.

Yet it does show us that we’re ever closer to the day arriving that the poor bastard in the cartoon above becomes reality. – Peter Cresswell

We should not be criminalising people saying common sense things about biological sex, clearly that isn’t right.

We have a proud tradition of free speech. –  Rishi Sunak

I have little sympathy for those defacing the rainbow crossing in the same way I have little sympathy with those defacing the Treaty display, or throwing paint into the foyer of the Israeli embassy.

However, many progressive politicians and media are happy to be inconsistent. White paint on rainbow crossings is hateful. Fake blood in foyers is freedom. And that is what makes these progressives dangerous and fundamentally opposed to our values of liberty and democracy.

They believe in one law for them, and another for others they disagree with.

When they speak of freedom and rights, they only mean for them.

When the speak of the importance of protest, is is only for them.

When they talk of hate speech, it is only ever something that applies to others.

And democracy is only good when it delivers what they want.

While watching inconsistency is frustrating, particularly in our political and media landscape, there is one plus side – it exposes progressives for who they are to those wise enough to see it. – Simon O’Connor

51% of humans are biological females, they simply deserve their own category of sport, free from any person, who is not female. It’s not rocket science it’s not hard. Let’s be kind to that 51% because for the whole of the modern Olympic era they have not had anywhere near parity

— Sharron Davies MBE (@sharrond62) April 3, 2024

Freedom is not the same as its exercise. I am free to say anything I like, but that is not to say that I do say anything that I like, or that I say the first thing that comes into my head. I could do so if I so wished, but I do not wish to do so. Nevertheless, the awareness of my freedom is a source of relief, pleasure or contentment to me, and even acts as some kind of moderating influence on me. That, perhaps, is why the attempts at censorship by the self-appointed police of political correctness, not legally-enforceable but nevertheless socially effective, so often call forth intemperate and sometimes downright disgusting explosions of outrage and opposition. It causes people to forget that it is not because someone forbids us from saying something that one ought to say it, nor does one attain the truth merely by saying something that is the opposite of a tenet of political correctness. To say something that offends may give us a moment of gratification, as a child or adolescent delights to say something that shocks the adults, but it is not the way to promote truth. Two oversimplifications do not make for a right understanding.

Censorship in the name of civility ends in its opposite. Civility, like tolerance, is a habit of the heart, and attempts at imposing it expunges it from the very place it ought to be. To change the metaphor slightly, legislation is a cuckoo in the nest. – Theodore Dalrymple

I hope every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex will be reassured by this announcement, and I trust that all women – irrespective of profile or financial means – will be treated equally under the law. 

If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once. – J.K. Rowling

Thank you for your kindness ❤️🙏 My doctors are hopeful I can indeed heal my deep trauma. After trying many different therapies in vain, I've found that taking the piss out of people who come at me with faux concern is the most beneficial. That, and crystals. pic.twitter.com/At39vcHODC

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 3, 2024

The Establishment has regrouped. It is now known variously as the PMC (professional managerial class) the ABMs ( academic, business, media) the Lanyards etc. It includes most politicians and influential lawyers/judges. Its distinguishing attribute is class snobbery – particularly the use of piety about vogue/luxury beliefs to sniff out those to be “othered”. Its democratic constituency is heavily skewed toward women. They’re typically more class conscious/anxious than men. The Establisment use of legal power to abuse class privilege/enforce piety will provoke partisan (class) division. It will fuel the rise of Trump-like resistance politicians in most countries that are over-producing these poisonous elites. – Stephen Franks 

The Coalition Government is doing its best to ensure the country is colour blind. Hence the disestablishment of the Maori Health Authority and the co-governance of Three Waters Entities.

It’s about time. A country divided by race is a country with no future.

A country where some votes are of more value than others is not a country with a real democracy.

A country where local government is run by  appointments is no democracy either.- Peter Williams

Five of the biggest councils in New Zealand are pushing to increase their borrowing caps even higher! But a simple look at where the money is currently being spent will tell you that these councils haven't got a lack of money, they've got a lack of competence. pic.twitter.com/Hlm3YGn8IW

— New Zealand Taxpayers' Union (@TaxpayersUnion) April 3, 2024

New Zealand is a small nation with a unicameral Parliament and a unitary state. We had a prime minister determined to lead the way and all the political power needed to do so. That New Zealand did not not make substantial progress in those years suggests the improbability of future leaders succeeding where Ardern did not.

Moreover, the global context cannot be ignored. New Zealand’s efforts, however earnest, are but a fraction of what is required to address the climate crisis. Even if progress is made here, the primary emitters, with far larger carbon footprints, show little willingness to follow suit to the degree necessary.

So, the pragmatic path forward for New Zealand is to continue to pivot towards adaptation. This entails investing in infrastructure resilient to the impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels and increased weather volatility. Before anything else, we need to be prepared for the inevitable consequences of a warming planet.

Building resilience may not be as inspiring a crusade for youngsters and the pied pipers of professional activism. But it is the more realistic course of action. And it will do more for future generations than demands for a miracle. – Liam Hehir

I am not like these two successful Māori in other ways as well, but what we share is an acknowledgement that there is no right or wrong way to be Māori. That ignoring the diversity within Māoridom only hurts and divides us further. 

We are not a hivemind, we share this wonderful culture and history, but we do not have to all see it the same way.  – Haimona Gray

This is the issue – who gets to be Māori in the media is so deeply gate kept that the Māori experience is filtered through a lens so coloured by political bias and privilege that it bears no resemblance to the real views of many Māori.

This wouldn’t be a problem if there was a diversity of opinions shown, but the regularity of Simon Wilson or Martyn Bradbury appearances highlight the sad reality that these are media pitching a singular point of view. One that is not Māori, just aristocratic.

That’s the way these gatekeepers want to keep it.  – Haimona Gray

 Grant Robertson wrecked the Government’s books in just two years, in 2022 and 2023, after Covid was behind us.

No one can explain why Labour kept borrowing even after Covid, spending over $30 billion more in 2023 than during the lockdowns. – Matthew Hooton

No longer is this just a strike about the climate – it is now also about toi tu te tiriti, it is about freeing Palestine, ending the fast-track approvals bill, keeping the ban on oil and gas, and lowering the voting age to 16.

It’s about everything, basically. Everything except the most important thing they could be doing as children… learning.  – Heather du Plessis-Allan

 I am not sure if Scotland has a big enough prison to put all the women in who will not call rapists “she”, who will not deny biology, who are sick of being harassed for not thinking that the sterilisation of gay children is a good idea.

We think these things not out of any hatred of trans people but because we want to protect vulnerable women and give children time to decide who they want to be. We don’t want to lie to them about changing sex, when it is gruelling and actually not possible. – Suzanne Moore

Here was a lesson in solidarity, in sisterhood and the simple but incendiary power of saying no.

Much of this fight has been about just that. Women saying no and women having boundaries and that is why the liberal left has been so fundamentally useless with their blurry “be kind” mantras, which mean be kind only to men. Or anyone who claims a minority identity. – Suzanne Moore

The age of “no debate” is truly over. This is good for women and, of course, for free speech. Many were against these dumb hate crime laws, which were once again the SNP parading its so-called progressive values while undermining Scotland’s proud Enlightenment history and its notion of freedom of belief. This fuzzy but authoritarian legislation now lays bleeding because of one stupendous woman.  – Suzanne Moore

She walks it like she talks it, gives fabulous parties and most unforgivably has tremendous fun. For this alone she should probably be burnt at the stake.

This is a woman who knows how to use social media more effectively than almost anyone. Elon is probably begging for a tutorial.

At a do the other night I was chatting to an actual rockstar and he said, “I will tell you who IS a f–king rockstar … JK Rowling”.

Ain’t that the truth? – Suzanne Moore

Left unchallenged and unanswered was whether the sheer size of the initial monetary stimulus was too big (almost certainly), whether given that size it was incumbent on the bank to respond more quickly when it was clear we were in a supply shock or a series of supply shocks rather than a demand shock. Other overlooked points included whether people not in the bank had shown the “amazing foresight” he claimed was absent, whether the stimulus itself caused an asset price bubble which left some people high and dry, and whether the structure of the stimulus was too inflexible and too inclined to encourage banks to lend money to people who could ill-afford that borrowing.

The interview got me reflecting again about just how many of our current problems are caused by our response to the pandemic, and how much we need a proper inquiry into the actions of decision-makers during that time.

Every day there are signs of the post-pandemic economic grind. Our collective and substantial loss of purchasing power. The numbers of businesses, charities and sports teams quietly going broke because their balance sheets were so weakened through the pandemic that they can’t cope with the current recession. The large number of house-for-sale signs and the very few sold stickers as house owners struggle to come to terms with the shrinking value of their biggest asset. It’s a long tail of bent and broken dreams.

And it’s not just the economy. Many of our current societal ills are either directly caused or exacerbated by pandemic-era decisions. – Steven Joyce

We need a proper inquiry into all of this so that we learn what there is to learn for the next pandemic, before those lessons are forgotten.

There are plenty of people who want to consign Covid times to the dustbin of history, but the actions taken then keep coming back to haunt us.

It may have been that all of the decisions of the time were unavoidable and couldn’t have been done any other way, but surely we owe it to ourselves to ask the questions. This thing has cost us tens of billions of dollars in our collective wealth and blighted many people’s lives. It seems to me we have sufficient cause to be intellectually curious about the answers, even before we consider the likelihood of experiencing another pandemic in the future. After all, even key ministers of that time are now prepared to accept that the second Auckland lockdown went on too long. – Steven Joyce

One of the key questions the inquiry needs to answer is whether allowing the Covid health response to trump everything else throughout the pandemic period was the best course of action, or whether we could have preserved life without going to the extremes we did or for as long as we did. Was there a better decision-making process than just handing the keys to the director general of health? And did the panic of the time sacrifice calm rational decision-making? After all, once that panic passed, we suddenly got a lot more sanguine about Covid hospitalisations and even deaths.

Getting Blakely to mark his own homework and that of his profession will be about as effective as getting a Reserve Bank Governor to mark his own monetary policy work. The passive “fireside chat” approach the current inquiry has taken to date does nothing to dispel the theory that Blakely is too close to be objective. – Steven Joyce

If we don’t properly revamp this inquiry, then we might as well shut it down. But it’s important that we don’t. We owe it to ourselves to have a good uncomfortable look at what happened and what we might do differently next time. After all, that is how we learn. – Steven Joyce

The Fourth Labour government ultimately imploded over the unresolved tensions between the cautious Lange and the aggressive Douglas; and they were all in the same party. Luxon’s challenge isn’t exactly analogous, but the similarities are too significant to ignore.

May the radicals prevail. – Damien Grant