Amna Khalid (who is Muslim) writes on the insanity where an art history professor was sacked because he showed an image of a 14th century painting to his art history class.

The painting depicts the Archangel Gabriel delivering to the Prophet Muhammad his first Quranic revelation.

The professor even warned his students that he would be showing the image (so those offended could avoid seeing it) and explained that the so called prohibition on images of Muhammad is not universal in Islam.

But he got sacked all the same. For showing a painting to an art history class.

Khalid notes:

But most of all, I am offended as a Muslim. In choosing to label this image of Muhammad as Islamophobic, in endorsing the view that figurative representations of the Prophet are prohibited in Islam, Hamline has privileged a most extreme and conservative Muslim point of view. The administrators have flattened the rich history and diversity of Islamic thought. Their insistence that figurative representations of Muhammad are “forbidden for Muslims to look upon” runs counter to historical and contemporary evidence. As Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, reminds us, Muslim artists since the 14th century have depicted Muhammad visually — images that were painted “by Muslim artists for Muslim patrons in respect for, and in exaltation of, Muhammad and the Quran.” Such images were, “by definition, Islamophilic from their inception to their reception.” Far from being forbidden, many Muslims, even today, appreciate such figurative representations. While more common among Shia Muslims, even Sunnis are known to have made such images. (In fact, the painting the professor showed was commissioned by a Sunni king in the 14th century.)

In dismissing the instructor for alleged “Islamophobia,” Hamline has revealed its reductive and simplistic view of Islam, Islamic societies, and Islamic art. In an age when administrators are eager for faculty members to decolonize their syllabi, Hamline’s position is a kind of arch-imperialism, reinforcing a monolithic image of Muslims propounded by the cult of authentic Islam. What administrators at Hamline fail to realize is that in privileging this particular version of Islam, which looks to theology for sanction, they have reinforced the very version that is the product of colonial codification.

Stuff reports:

Is having cake in the workplace really a health hazard? It seems Britain’s top food regulator thinks so.

Susan Jebb is the chairperson of the Food Standards Agency in the UK, and a professor of diet and population health at the University of Oxford. …

“If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

Jebb argued that passive smoking inflicts harm on the people around you “and exactly the same is true of food”.

No end to their desire to control our lives!

Henry Cooke has gone through NZES data to look at who voted Labour in 2020 but not 2017, on the assumption they are the ones who have now left Labour. The true situation will be more complicated than that, but Henry is right that most of those who have abandoned Labour probably fall in this group. He identifies a number of attributes to them:

• Older than the average voter
• More likely to be female (58% were)
• Have household income over $100,000
• Own their own home
• European
• Lean right – 46% rate themselves a 6 to 8 on a 0 to 10 left to right scale, compared to 33% of all voters
• On policy issues they are less focused on income inequality, are more liberal on abortion, more likely to think Treaty settlements have gone too far
• On Jacinda they were massive fans – 93% rated her 7/10 or higher compared to 70% overall

These are the voters Hipkins needs to win back.

1. Richard Sedan 4,791 days
2. Wiliam Massey 4,687
3. Keith Holyoke 4,157
4. Peter Fraser 3,548
5. Helen Clark 3,267
6. Edward Stafford 3,248
7. Robert Muldoon 3,149
8. John Key 2,945
9. Sidney Holland 2,838
10. Joseph Ward 2,595
11. Jim Bolger 2,593
12. George Forbes 2,018
13. Harry Atkinson 1,943
14. Jacinda Ardern 1,912
15. David Lange 1,839

This blog post is by PaulL, a regular commentor and sometime contributor to Kiwiblog.

In recent times there has been a lot of discussion of a worker shortage. Statistics say that we have a high workforce participation rate (there are as many workers as pre-COVID), and we know some industries such as tourism are employing fewer people than pre-COVID. How can we be short of staff?

This post is an attempt to unpick what’s going on.

Stats NZ has reported that annual inflation remains high at 7.2%. Components are:

• Non-tradeable 6.6%
• Tradeable 8.2%
• Home ownership 18%
• Food 11%
• Fruit and vegetables 20%
• Transport 8.4%

The cumulative effect of quarter after quarter of high inflation is significant. The cost of living is 14.1% higher than the last election and 19.8% higher than when Labour took office.

In most developed countries, inflation is now declining. It has dropped in France, Canada, Germany, EU, US, Ireland and UK.

Titewhai Harawira has died aged 90. My condolences to her eight children and many many grandchildren and great grandchildren.

My views on Titewhai changed over time. I have to admit to a degree of admiration for her sheer determination where she appointed herself in charge of accompanying the Prime Minister onto Waitangi, and no amount of kaumata could stop her.

She was a force of nature and made a real difference to the cause she believed in.

When someone dies, you should mainly focus on the positive things they did, but also not whitewash their life.

I am disappointed (but not overly surprised) that as far as I can tell none of the half dozen stories on her in the main media sites mention her nine month prison sentence for a “vicious and violent” assault on a mental health patient in her care. This should not define her legacy, but it is significant.

I’ll finish with a quote from a Herald story which reflects her personality quite well:

“People like Kingi Taurua, telling the media he’s afraid of me. He has a tattoo on his face like he’s a warrior but he should have it on his bum.”

Heh.

Just before Jacinda resigned, this news broke:

Experts say there is no evidence inflation pressures are easing after Stats NZ revealed annual food prices jumped the highest in 32 years.

Food prices rose 1.1 per cent in the month of December and were 11.3 per cent higher than a year earlier, the highest increase since April 1990.

ANZ economist Finn Robinson said, “What we’re seeing in that data is no evidence that inflation pressures are easing. At this stage, it’s not encouraging.”

He said Stats NZ’s findings were much stronger than expected.

“When you consider that food prices are usually flat or falling in December because of seasonal patterns in vegetable prices, to see such a strong positive number in December month, that’s a very strong print for the data.”

So a 32 year high for food inflation. Can this all be blamed on Putin?

This graph is fascinating as it shows world food prices started to decline significantly around two months ago, yet food prices in New Zealand are still skyrocketing. So the problem is mainly domestic.

It is no secret that the new Prime Minister was a long term opposition spokesperson for education. He must have been champing at the bit to get in to the Minister’s role with note books full of researched ideas and advice from the very best.

Attendance is one measure of the quality of the system. Attendance data would have been expected to be released in December for Term 3 (and even that is the proverbial – “go down to the hardware store and ask for a long wait”).

It is hard to get school qualifications if you don’t attend.

This is where full attendance had got to in Term 2:

Term 3 MUST be out soon.

I hope there are exceptions to Doulas Adams’ political rule.

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Interesting to see the double standards at play again.

Over on Newsroom, there is a book review that is headed:

Victor Billot reviews a biography of a great New Zealand Communist

Could you imagine any media outlet ever talking about a great New Zealand Fascist?

Fascism and Communism are equally repugnant and extreme. Both have killed tens of millions or more. Both lead to all powerful authoritarian states with almost no human rights. But if you subscribe to the far left, then you get feted and praised and even get a book written about how great you are.

Would Colin King-Ansell ever be described as a great New Zealand Fascist? Of course not, and nor should he.

But neither should we describe as a great New Zealander someone who was a shill for the evil Soviet Union.

Chris Hipkins taking over from Jacinda Ardern is the 8th time this has happened since WWII. The previous seven were:

1. 1957 – Holyoke from Holland 87 days before the election which they lost
2. 1972 – Marshall from Holyoake 306 days before the election which they lost
3. 1974 – Rowling from Kirk, 463 days before the election which they lost
4. 1989 – Palmer from Lange, 453 days before the election which they didn’t get to contest
5. 1990 – Moore from Palmer, 60 days before the election which they lost
6. 1998 – Shipley from Bolger, 733 days before the election which they lost
7. 2016 – English from Key, 319 days before the election which they lost

This is of course no guarantee that Hipkins will lose, but that the track record to date is not great.

An interesting interview with Bari Weiss and Benjamin Netanyahu, especially about his brother:

BW: I want to open this conversation on July 4, 1976. On that day nearly 50 years ago, Israel carried out a stunning mission at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda. A week earlier, a few terrorists, four of them, had hijacked a flight of 248 passengers that were headed from Tel Aviv to Paris. They landed the plane in Entebbe and held the passengers hostage, separating the Israelis out from everyone else, while demanding the release of 53 Palestinian terrorists, many of whom were hardened murderers in Israeli prisons. Their terms were clear. If Israel refused, the hijackers promised to kill the Israeli passengers. 

After a week of planning, Israel’s most elite unit, Sayeret Matkal, carried out a mission to rescue those hostages. And miraculously, almost all of the hostages were rescued alive. The New York Times called it an operation with “no precedent in military history.” Israel lost one soldier in that operation, a 30-year-old unit commander named Yoni Netanyahu. Now, I grew up, like so many young Jews, learning the story of Yoni, reading books about him, his letters, and visiting his grave at Israel’s military cemetery. 

But Yoni was also your older brother. And it’s hard not to see this moment as your origin story. In your new autobiography, that is how you open the book and how you write about it—as a catalyst for the rest of your life and everything that would follow. So I wanted to ask you, how did this nightmarish day shape your view of Israel, of the fate of the Jewish people, and of the role that you wanted to play in both of those things? 

BN: Well, it’s changed my life and steered it to its present course. I had no intention of entering political life or even public life. 

In the course of that day, we heard a newscast which said that Israeli commandos had rescued the hostages and were making their way back to Israel. We were overjoyed. But something marred my joy, because the newscast said that one officer had been killed. I said, “what are they saying, officer?” They don’t say officer. They usually say one soldier was killed. I immediately picked up the atlas in my bookshelf and looked at the distance to Entebbe––you didn’t have Google in those days––so I computed it very quickly: 2,000 kilometers. Three or four Hercules planes, so 200 men. A quarter would be officers because they’d fight to get on such a mission. The odds were one to four. 

We had faced worse odds before because Yoni and I, and my younger brother Ido actually, had served in this tiny unit and we often had to be separated on missions. I always calculated the odds; one to four, so not too bad. Yet I couldn’t resist, so I called my brother, and I said, “Is Yoni back?” I didn’t even ask, did Yoni command that? There was no question about it. They would be our special elite unit, which is a kind of a Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and Green Berets merged together and distilled. He said, “no, he’s not yet back.” I called him a few hours later and asked, “is he back,” and he said, “no he’s not back, but I sense that something is wrong.” Then a few hours later he called me and I said to my wife, “that’s Ido calling to tell me that Yoni had been killed.” And that’s what Ido told me. There was this indescribable silence of agony on both sides of the line. 

The only thing I could think of at that point was that I didn’t want the news to reach my parents through the media. My father was teaching at Cornell University at that time, and I was in Boston, so I made my way through seven hours of indescribable anguish to Ithaca, New York. I walked up the path to my parents house. There was a big glazed window in the front of the house, and I could see my father marching back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back in his typical thoughtful ruminations. All of a sudden, he looked at me. He saw me and he said, with a look of surprise, “Bibi, what are you doing here?” Then he saw my face and he understood immediately. He let out a cry like a wounded animal, and then I heard my mother scream. That was actually worse than hearing about Yoni’s death; it was like a second death. 

In the week of the Shiva—the mourning period—I had lost my sense of taste. I didn’t know if I could live. I didn’t know how I would live, and I thought that my life in many ways had ended as I knew it. And it did. But in the course of the Shiva, facing inconsolable grief, two things happened. The first was that people started giving us letters that Yoni had written to them over the years, and we could see that his story came to life through these letters. The first one was written when he was a homesick, 17-year-old Israeli teenager in the United States and the last one was written literally days before his fall in Entebbe. We immediately set about to put these letters into a book, which has endured for 45 years.

Yoni was a remarkable person. He didn’t have to die to become a legend. He was a legend in his lifetime. For those who knew him and those who served under his command, he was a poet warrior who didn’t want to be a warrior. He really thought of his life, and ultimately his death, as a service to the nation, to protect the one and only Jewish state because history wouldn’t give us another chance. 

How did I extricate myself from this? I said that two things had gotten me out of this impossible abyss. The other one was that Yoni never believed that he was just fighting terrorism militarily. He thought it was a civilizational battle between barbarians and the forces of freedom and human rights. I thought that we had to mobilize the free world to adopt a different attitude towards terrorists, a different moral attitude to puncture their various lies—that they were fighting for human rights while they were trampling them and blowing up babies––to fight against the terrorist states that stood behind them, because international terrorism without terrorist states is basically impotent. 

Until I read this interview, I didn’t know about his brother. I think it explains a lot about his zeal.

Jerry Coyne blogs a letter from a NZ science teacher about the new science curriculum. Take the time to read the full post, but here is some of what will be taught in science:

• That mātauranga Māori is equivalent to science
• That science is a Western knowledge system
• The study of Maori gods and “their powers.
• The tale of Maui and Aoraki
• The concept of mauri, that inanimate objects have a life force

The latter three would be fine in a social studies class, but not in a science class.

A post by PaulL, regular commenter and sometime poster.

I see a lot of noise about the attacks on our outgoing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and whether they contributed to or were the cause of her resigning. Despite the Prime Minister explicitly saying that’s not the reason, we have many journalists deciding to ignore her statements and declare it to be the reason.

I’ve been mulling on the nature and volume of online abuse. I suspect that overall our Prime Minister has found the job very hard over the past few years (and legitimately so – a pandemic is a difficult time, and the whole government worked very very hard). It surely is harder if, after all that work, you see your popularity sliding, and you go from a position where most appearances involved congratulations to one where you cannot pre-announce where you’ll be for fear of noisy protests. The online abuse I’d expect is part of that overall picture, even if not a standalone reason.

The question I’m considering today is whether the online abuse that the Prime Minister has suffered is unique, is misogynistic, and is worse than others have suffered in the past. I’ll note that I’m not sure it necessarily matters whether it’s worse – all abuse is bad, although it is also to some extent part of the territory of politics. I’m not sure calculating degrees of abuse is useful other than in some abstract sense.

The Daily Mail reports:

A Politico reporter who called Pope Benedict XVI a ‘homophobic pedophile protector and Hitler Youth alumnus’ after he died last month appears to have been fired, according to his LinkedIn profile and personal website.

Eric Geller, who wrote about cybersecurity for Politico for more than six years, caused controversy after sharing a news story about late Pope’s death on Twitter with an offensive caption on December 31, hours after his passing was announced.

‘Homophobic pedophile protector and Hitler Youth alumnus dead at 95,’ Geller said in full, in a since-deleted tweet.

The tweet showed that Geller is a dick. Abusing someone who has just died is crass. Insulting the former head of a religion with 1.3 billion adherents who has just died is moronic. And slandering him by insinuating he chose to join Hitler Youth (he was forced to) shows huge prejudice.

But none of the above stops him from reporting on cybersecurity. The response to his tweet should have been more tweets. Not his employer sacking him.

The latest welfare stats show:

• 353,904 people of working age on a benefit
• This is 22% higher than in Dec 2017
• Those on a benefit for more than 12 months up 26% to 257,865
• Maori on welfare up 26%
• Pacific Peoples on welfare up 35%
• Numbers on job seeker who are work ready up 51%!
• Numbers on job seeker for more than 12 months up 49%
• Maori on job seeker up 41%
• Pacific Peoples on job seeker up 67%

What is most amazing about all this, is that almost without exception every single shop I go into to, had an ad up pleading for staff.

As expected, Chris Hipkins has become the presumptive Prime Minister. I’ll blog in more detail on him, but for now will share this analysis at Radio NZ by Brigitte Morton who reminds us he has often been an attack dog for Labour, and a different style will be needed as PM. She covers:

• In October 2021, Northland was sent in to an 11-day lockdown after three allegedly “sex workers” with possible gang connections crossed the Auckland border. Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins accused them of using “false information to travel across the border”. But it was later revealed through OIAs that Hipkins knew at the time that a blunder by officials had been the reason and the women were at no fault at all. He has never apologised or corrected the record, nor has he bothered to even correct the reports that these were gang-related sex workers.
• In the case of Charlotte Bellis, he was forced to apologise and correct the record. But only because the Kiwi journalist, then pregnant and stuck in Afghanistan took legal action. Hipkins, in his defence of the government’s MIQ system used Bellis’ personal information as a political weapon and made incorrect statements about her circumstances, including that she ignore consular assistance.
• Late last year, in defence of the Minister for Local Government Nanaia Mahuta and government contracts awarded to her husband, Hipkins dragged Bill English and his family in to the response. He later made an apology to Parliament withdrawing his comments.
• In 2017, in what was perhaps the most concerning case of questionable judgment, Hipkins used Parliament to dig up dirt for the Australian Labor Party. At the time, the Australian federal government was rocked by citizenship sagas. A number of MPs and senators were forced to resign after it was discovered they unconstitutionally held dual citizenships. Hipkins used parliamentary questions to get information on the status of then Australian deputy prime minister.

This is not entirely surprising as his first job in politics was three years as a senior advisor to Trevor Mallard!

Chris is a likeable nice guy, but he is also willing to play the man, not the ball, and I suspect we will see Labour get more aggressive in trying to smear Luxon.

A guest post by Daniel Barraclough:

On the afternoon of January 19^th, 2023, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern would announce her resignation from the office of Prime Minister and bring` the hope and change era of the Labour Party to an end.

Of all the reactions shared, the one that struck me the most was from a friend on the far right of the political spectrum. Instead of glee or spite, which I had expected, he expressed a genuine sadness. 

Jacinda Ardern had ridden a wave of popular sentiment to power five years earlier, promising transformational change to New Zealand. She swore after her government was done no child would be hungry in school, or would be sleeping in a car, garage, or a decaying and mold ridden home at night. Ardern promised a return of those most Kiwi of values: fairness and equality. This would be the mark her government would leave on our nation.

My friend’s sadness wasn’t due to the anguish that Ardern expressed as she resigned, rather it was the sadness that someone who had promised so much to those who live without hope, had decided that this challenge was too hard and had given up.

Perhaps If you are fortunate enough, you may have the luxury of choosing to ignore the signs of New Zealand’s growing underclass, but that does not make it invisible. Occasionally you may witness homelessness or violence as you commute to work or school, or you see a story on the news and remark at the tragedy of it all. But unless you’ve grown up in a neighborhood where police sirens, helicopters and raging parties on a monday are the norm you will struggle to understand the environment that produces this phenomenon, and how it creates the statistics we don’t like to talk about in New Zealand.

Ardern clearly empathised with these issues, but I don’t think she ever truly grasped their gravity. When Ardern was 21, she spent a semester exploring the United States, nobly volunteered in a soup kitchen, and dreamed of ways to help the world. Meanwhile, I went to WINZ to ask for a food grant and lamented that due to my criminal convictions, I would likely never get to visit the United States or have a meaningful career. 

This may be anecdotal, but it is emblematic of the divide between those that are the human stories behind every tragic news headline, and those who have made it their job to solve them. It is why despite record spending across the public sector, irrespective of the covid response, things have failed to improve in any meaningful way.

The privileged class that makes up the majority our nations politicians, consultants and policy advisors do not have the experience or courage required to grasp the scale of problem they are tasked with solving. This is why for all of Ardern’s rhetoric of ‘transformation’ all that was offered were small changes, institutional reshuffles, and adjustments to already failed systems. Small policy changes will not address intergenerational welfare dependence and poverty. Nor will more ‘radical’ calls for a wealth tax lead to increased home ownership for a segment of society that has normalised prison and the corrections system as just another part of everyday life. Nor will adjusting the metrics used to measure poverty change the reality of a generation of children growing up in motels.

Much of what I’m saying is easy to dismiss as radical and pessimistic. However, we have spent a generation tweaking policy and launching information campaigns while continuing to watch society fall apart. All we are left with now is apathy or new and radical solutions, if we have any hope of tackling a growing social crisis that threatens to destroy our way of life.

The pension, universal health care, free education, social security, and even universal suffrage; all were considered deeply radical at the turn of the 20^th century yet are taken for granted as foundations of our society today. So too will the solutions for the problems of 21^st century appear.

Perhaps you disagree with my prescription, and you believe that overall things are fine and radical change is uncalled for and would frankly do more harm than good. Perhaps you are right, but many have said the same thing about climate change for decades, and we now stand at the precipice of too late to do anything about it. History is full of societies that closed their eyes as the world deteriorated around them. Change is risky, but change offers hope.

I know I do not put forward any solutions in this piece, but that is not my intention. The purpose of this piece is to warn you we cannot look to another bright-eyed politician who spent their O.E working prestigious jobs on the other side of the world to fix the problems that we have chosen to ignore for decades.

The next ‘Ardern’ that wishes to deliver transformational change must understand that which requires transformation. They must steel themselves to the fact the kindness and empathy will not fix the gordian knot that drives the stagnation and growth of our underclass. The solutions will be difficult, painful and will likely cost the political careers of those that dare to face it.