There are (and/or have been) more than 5 nuclear powers*, that’s not the only thing that sets them apart.
“Whataboutism” is a very convenient way to disengage from the point I was making. Regardless, if China must be repelled from Taiwan, and there is only one position in that conflict we can justifiably take - what is the justification? Why can we only side with a potential US led alliance instead of choosing any other side or sitting it out?
Sweet, you’ve done Russia & China, now do the USA, France & the UK? These are the 5 permanent members of the security council, and i’d guess probably not coincidentally are the 5 empires that survived the aftermath of WW2 and are all responsible for historic and ongoing questionable behaviour.
Obviously there are differing amounts of good or bad any one of these imperial countries might have, are, or will do - but you can’t pretend that there is one perfectly good or one perfectly bad empire. That suggests that there is a variety of positions to take on any future conflict between those powers.
If conflict occurs is where & when NZ’s choices get constrained. We then need to make deliberations about how we can guarantee our sovereignty, and who could, or couldn’t forcibly change decisions about who we ally with at any given point. And in today’s day & age what sort of reprisal attacks could (and would likely) be made either directly against our territory, against our citizens or our infrastructure.
All of which to say is that the decision is not at all black & white, and the balance of decision making will change over time. Particularly if the US led alliance descends into the worst of their impulses it would become more & more likely that arguments get made that they’re all just as bad as each other and there really is no moral right choice. If you’re an anti-imperialist you’d probably say ‘yeah duh!’ to that.
That’s the problematic aspect of both sides approaches which give equal weight & import to at least two sides of an argument no matter what. And its especially bad when its editorial decisions that determine that equal weighting.
Two examples that come to mind is how for such a long time climate change denial was given equal footing (and is still given loads of airtime) despite a mountain of evidence that most of their arguments were tosh.
But lately Modern Monetary Theory which is absolutely a heterodox theory gets barely any mention even though it is one of the strongest counters to the mainstream economic approach which is almost all we hear despite strong arguments that it doesn’t consistently describe reality.
Its not that easy to narrow down what the scope of a University’s expertise would be though - take Victoria University of Wellington. Let’s look at say, the Arts department because they have one and I know some about it.
Would you say that VUW can thus allow expression on any topic of study that Arts schools typically study because the methodology across any of the specific topics is broadly lumped together?
Or, is it no, they can only talk about History, if within the Arts school they have a History Department? Well in that case, should they be expressing opinions on all of History, or only on those areas of History that they actually study?
OK well within that History department they are teaching courses on Pacific History, US History, some periods of European History so they can only opine on that.
Or should they only be allowed to talk on the specific periods / topics of US History that they are running courses on? Or should they only be allowed to talk about particular methods of Historical study when called upon so Dolores Janiewski (who was an awesome lecturer 20 odd years ago when I was there) is only allowed to talk about I dunno 20th Century US Feminism?
Realistically the people who could determine whether or not someone has enough expertise to be considered an expert opinion are the Universities.
Re the WCC asking the Government to butt out, that isn’t a matter of expertise but more one of jurisdiction, democratic rights responsibilities & freedom than a matter of free speech.
National is weird in that I think there’s some people who are just that callous and don’t care about the consequences so long as their class of people does better. Then there are some who are no doubt true believers and think despite all the evidence that the neo-liberal magic economy actually exists. And then there’s just the naive socially conservative traditionalists who see it as necessary that the poor need to be punished for their situation etc.
The hospitality collapse specifically, I dunno I think they’re just throwing shit against the wall at this point. Like, you’re not buying enough morning coffees because you’re at home, so get back to the office. But also, we’re going to put up your bus/train fairs by 70% so now you’ll have even less spare money for coffee. And the public transport is creaking so we’ll build more roads to get you into the city where parking is getting harder & more expensive to find.
Its mostly brainless policy. I try to remind myself not to attribute to malice just plain smooth-brainness stupidity. Brown in particular is so captured by the road transport ideology that he hits every problem with the road hammer because they all look like nails to him.
Even harder to measure when you’ve been sacking all the public servants who might have been able to find a way to do it too I guess!
Actually, just back on that, the framing of that target has always disgusted me, its just wholly negative and meaningless - someone living in their car is no longer in emergency housing but nobody would consider that a good thing.
Its really frustrating that stuff like that is not only allowed to fly, but gets parroted by the media and then becomes embedded as a way of viewing the problem.
A far more positive target - one significantly more difficult to achieve without actually having to invest money - would be to measure the number of people in secure, permanent housing and set a target to get that near 100%.
Give them time.
Read stuff about van Velden’s work history and you’ll quickly gain the impression that she has never actually had to do a real job for any serious length of time outside of being an MP.
Born in '92 - so she’s 32 I think and graduated from UoA in 2016, so 8 years between then & now. First elected to Parliament in 2020, so reduce that to 4 years. Oh, and before uni she was at one of the countries most expensive college’s in Auckland.
In that time she worked for Hooton’s lobbying firm, and then became a staffer for Seymour where according to wiki her “sole task” was lobbying for the End of Life bill, which seems to have meant hanging around Parliament and talking to MPs about it.
Act’s bio for her does note that she has “been a factory worker and corporate affairs consultant”; which kinda reads summer student job and then the lobbying to me.
Anywho, all of that is to say that a person who has likely never experienced difficulty with employment, and never had the experience of work that the majority of NZers have had is striving to undermine and remove what few rights workers have managed to carve back over the last wee while.
Given you revert to pejoratives so readily, I have nothing further. Good day!