Three years since October 7th.
Three years.
Three years ago today (our time) more than 1500 people were raped, tortured, brutalised, mutilated, kidnapped, murdered -- that's about 1200 murdered, 250 kidnapped, and uncountable number tortured, mutilated, raped.
The stories are still heart-breaking. Most I can't read. And I know I couldn't watch some of the worst of the horror.
These are just a few --a very few -- of some of the least horrifying...
“Factual truth, if it happens to oppose a given group’s profit or pleasure, is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before.”~ Hannah Arendt from her essay 'Truth and Politics,' collected in her 1961 book Between Past and Future [hat tip Stephen Hicks]
A poster points out a FUN FACT about last night's NRL Grand Final:
shows a broken professional pathway system in NZ where we can’t keep a lot of talent because the NRL has a clearer pathway with more money offered.
And it’s only going to get worse for NZ.
We need to find a way to offer bigger contracts to young players at pro level.
At the moment unless you’re a star schoolboy ear-marked by the All Blacks you’re not going to get those big money contracts.
The commenter, of course, is dead right.
By their own design, the Rugby Union has forgotten who makes "Big Rugby" possible, i.e, the players, So they've instead ensured a professional transmission belt of junior talent directly into rugby league. Bravo!
And now, as they're discussing again how to rearrange the deck chairs in their own back office, with barely any reference to what goes on out in their stadiums -- or to how they might better arrest rugby's slow decline in support and in numbers of clubs -- they still seem bereft of any good ideas, about how to fund what they patronisingly call "grass roots rugby" so that their big rugby cheques can keep coming in.
If I may, ahem, might I suggest an idea I proposed a couple of years ago ...
Here's an idea. A simple one. A simple idea to directly and organically link the money-making areas of the game with the grassroots, and to reward the makers of the homegrown player: How about when a senior player "goes to the show," those who helped make that junior player successful are rewarded.
That is to say (based on the current set-up), if a player is selected from his/her club to go to provincial level, money is directed back to the club, perhaps in proportion to the player's playing fee. They're rewarded for growing and nurturing that talent. And even though they lose the player for some of the season, the club and its coaches and support-folk at the club will still see reward for all their effort. And will be motivated to do more in future.
Take that principle to the next level.
Let's say a player is then selected for higher honours, even to a Super "franchise" to which the club is not linked. Then a portion of that higher "Super" fee will be directed down to the province, and also down to their club. Once again, everyone who played a part in growing and nurturing that player is rewarded, and all of them retain on ongoing interest in the player's success, even if (as happens too often now) they never see the player again except on the telly.
But see them on the telly now and club/province/region is just as happy, 'cos they know they're going to be rewarded for the player's success.
Everybody's smiling. And it all happens organically -- no central planning needed.
Naturally, the same principle would apply to national honours -- a "commission" if you like, filtering down through the factors that helped talent-spot, nurture and produce the player -- and even to a player's Japanese or Euro sabbatical. In the professional era, all that means a professional payment. And a portion of that could head back to the heartland, keeping the whole rugby community tied together instead of squabbling over the doling out of ever-decreasing spoils.
There are currently about 280 full-time players across the men’s and women’s games in New Zealand, and more overseas -- not to mention the many more receiving payments of some kind. Imagine oi some portion from all of them were directed back very visibly to those who helped make their success possible.
Imagine what this might do for heartland rugby. Instead of withering away as the higher levels of rugby grow fat, as they are now, heartland rugby instead gets a chance to grow fat with them, most especially the clubs, coaches and provinces who are most successful at selecting, nurturing and producing the best talent.
The system used to work in Australian Football (VFL/AFL) until shorter-term thinking and the marketing bunnies took over there too. It can work just as well here.
I'm not simply saying "go back go the good old days," but there were things that worked then that can still be encouraged to work now — most particularly the strong links between clubs and the upper levels, with fans showing loyalty to their regional reps because they'd been elevated from their own clubs, and the players themselves retaining that connection — club first — coming back and playing and supporting and helping out around the club. Not as a matter of charity, but because that's just what you did. Just like the famous ethic of "cleaning the sheds."
Fan loyalty is key, 'cos in the end that's where the money comes from (either from fans themselves, or from sponsors who want to be in front of fans' eyes). And also key is to keep directing large amounts of that money back into producing the players who make the game possible, especially to the clubs who make it all possible.
If there's no emotional connection to a sport, what's the point?
So clubs are still the place where it needs to all happen. At the moment when players arrive at the big time it's like they've landed from the moon. Clubs lose their players and live off crumbs while administrators ignore the clubs, and commentators rarely talk about them.
Change the way that money flows, however, and commentators might start talking up the players' clubs, provinces and their previous coaches and mentors, and all of them might receive both more respect and a regular payday.
This would be a way to begin paying back those in heartland rugby who make Big Rugby possible.
In the week when, as a Counties supporter, we're reminded of why provincial rugby matters -- why, when a player thumps their club's logo on their jersey, they really mean it -- might I suggest this would be a way of ensuring it will continue to matter. (And for Counties supporters still pissed off at what S*per Rugby has done to the province, it might even help us some round.)
I commend the idea to your attention.
[Dave] Rennie revealed that he watched plenty of rugby over the past weekend and feels the NPC still has a vital role to play in the New Zealand rugby landscape.
“I watched a huge amount of footy on the weekend, so I think it’s a great comp,” he told NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking Breakfast show. “It’s a part of our rugby fabric here.
“NPC rugby is tribal, and you’ve got people who, in some of those smaller unions, may not be massive supporters of Super Rugby because a lot of their players don’t get to maybe represent one team they’re scattered a bit, whereas they get a chance on the weekend to go down and watch players whose fathers and grandfathers have worn the jersey before.
He also emphasised how important the NPC is in terms of producing Super Rugby players as well as All Blacks for New Zealand.
“It’s a real point of difference from a World Rugby perspective; I reckon it’s the greatest provincial competition in the world, semi-pro basically now, and that feeds Super Rugby, which is important to then go on and feed your All Blacks,” he explained.
“So that’s massively important and needs to be maintained.” ...
“My job is also to look at what’s best for the game. Hence the reason I’m saying that. Look, I think the NPC is massively important and I reckon if you survey the country, you find there’s massive support for that competition.
“It’s been brilliant this year. Real credit to all the players and staff involved in it; it’s been an excellent product and good for our game.”
"One of the main reasons people conclude capitalism has failed is that they judge capitalism by what governments and societies call it rather than by what it actually is. That becomes obvious when they describe the supposed failures of capitalism and proceed to list subsidies, bailouts, regulatory barriers, political favoritism, protectionism, and government-created privileges which are features that involve political intervention in markets rather than laissez-faire capitalism."~ Rock ChartrandAlso:
A friend writes with a brilliant summary of the NIMBY attitude on display "at an earthy non-political club" whose only goal is to build enjoyable low-cost mountain huts for those who love the outdoors. Their huts -- called 'Mountain Turks' -- cost only around 10% of the average DOC hut, and are more comfortable.
The hut’s design is based around the unusual but highly effective use of a large plastic water tank. Using this structure avoids many of the problems associated with standard construction techniques in the alpine environment such as snow and moisture ingress caused by high winds. The design has proved to be strong, light enough for easy movement by helicopter and rugged enough to withstand the rigours of an alpine environment.Good idea that.
What's not to like?
Everything, apparently, with around ten percent of the members at a recent meeting rising up in opposition. The "older, grey-haired people." The NIMBYs. Their reaction? Horror.
"Before you give the government new powers, try the 'Munger Test': cross out 'government' and insert the name of the politician you trust least. Then see if you still like the idea..."~ from the podcast 'Public Choice and Politics Without Romance' (with Russ Roberts & Mike Munger)'
The Greens' tax plan, released in June, promises more than $32 billion of new revenue over four years. It relies on a "super-rich tax" (their renamed wealth tax) and an inheritance and gifts tax. (The current Wealth Tax has already been revised down by fifty percent since last year's "alternative budget." Expect any return, if implemented to continue that trend.)
They would also lifts the corporate tax rate for some firms and reverses the coalition's changes to interest deductibility.
at the 2023 election National promised that the govt would be in budget surplus (& not on a make-believe measure) and that debt would have been falling by now. (Both Labour and National numbers rested on make-believe assumptions. Likely to be true this time too).
The promises, like the forecasts, are worth nothing. Why? Because Treasury is required to report on the basis that the Ministry of Finance told them that a re-elected govt would suddenly 'get religion'" -- would suddenly become fiscally responsible; would suddenly lose the spending bug.
Yeah right. Like that's ever going to happen.
Willis is still spending more than Grant Robertson’s 2019 pre-COVID "Wellbeing Budget," and she has no plans to unwind the post-COVID government bloat.
There is no likelihood of Willis getting the responsibility religion any time soon.
But maybe this time it will be different.
In 1964, a young University of Michigan anthropologist went to live with a tribe untouched by modernity.
What he found destroyed the noble savage myth.Then his own discipline spent the next four decades trying to destroy him for publishing it.The field was long dominated by a myth.
Postwar anthropology, inspired by Rousseau and Marx, held that "savages" were peaceful and cooperative. Violence, hierarchy, and inequality were supposed to be diseases of civilisation, invented by property, colonisation, and markets. Abolish those, and the natural harmony of man would supposedly return.Then a kid from rural Michigan went to check.In 1964, Napoleon Chagnon, one of twelve children from a poor family in Port Austin, traveled to the Venezuela–Brazil border. He went to live with the Yanomamö, roughly 20,000 people scattered across the Amazon rainforest, largely untouched by the state, by markets, or by modernity.He would return nearly thirty times over the next three decades. His 1968 book, Yanomamö: The Fierce People, sold nearly a million copies and was translated into fifteen languages.But this is what he actually found: Raids between villages were routine. Infanticide was common. Women were regularly abducted and traded after violent conflict. Headmen, as a rule, were killers. Chagnon mapped Yanomamö genealogies using early computer methods, learned the language, and lived inside the villages for months at a stretch. The data was not hearsay.A particular finding broke the field. In a 1988 paper in Science, Chagnon documented that the unokais, men who had killed in raids, had on average more wives and more surviving offspring than non-violent men of the same age. In a state of nature, violence was being reproductively selected for. The Rousseauian premise ran backwards.If violence, hierarchy, and inequality were what civilisation produces, they should be rare where civilisation is absent. Chagnon found the opposite. Where the state, the market, and modern institutions had never arrived, up to 30% of adult male deaths were violent. The men who killed were the men whose lineages survived. In the modern United States that figure is under 1%. [In today's New Zealand, the figure is 0.3%.]The reaction was immediate. Marshall Sahlins, one of Chagnon's former graduate teachers at Michigan, turned on him. Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel circulated a warning to the American Anthropological Association (AAA) describing "an anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Joseph Conrad, though not, perhaps, a Joseph Mengele." Salesian missionaries in the region joined the coalition. What Chagnon had found could not be answered on its merits, so the man who found it became the target instead.Then came the book that ended him. In 2000, journalist Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado. He accused Chagnon of triggering a measles epidemic through vaccine experimentation, arming rival factions to stage conflicts on film, cooking his data, and behaving as "a war criminal or even a genocidaire." The New Yorker ran Tierney's companion article the same month. Chagnon's career effectively ended before any serious investigation reached a verdict.But every serious charge eventually collapsed. The vaccine complied with WHO protocols. The measles epidemic predated Chagnon's arrival. Venezuelan physicians, the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Michigan, the American Society of Human Genetics, and the U.S. Department of Health each investigated. Each reached the same verdict: no crime, no cover-up, no fraud. Jane Hill, who chaired the AAA's own inquiry, wrote privately that Tierney's book was "a piece of sleaze, that's all there is to it." [Alice Dreger, a historian of medicine and science, concluded after a year's research that Tierney's claims were false and the Association was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods and not protecting "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges." The controversy is covered in the 2005 book Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It by anthropologist Robert Borofsky, and Dreger's 2015 book, Galileo's Middle Finger. Chagnon himself revisited the topic in his later book, 2013 Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes: the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists.]The AAA task force issued its own report in 2002 anyway, condemning Chagnon for prioritising his research over the Yanomamö. Raymond Hames had already resigned from the panel mid-inquiry, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a National Academy of Sciences member, quit the AAA in protest. Three years later, the AAA membership voted to rescind the report. In 2012, Chagnon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The following year, Sahlins resigned from the Academy over it.The noble savage myth itself outlived the twentieth century's political movements. Today it powers the decolonial framework that dominates the humanities and much of political discourse. The claim is unchanged: violence, hierarchy, and inequality are artefacts of property, civilisation, and colonisation, and would vanish once those were abolished. Three decades of Chagnon's evidence showed the claim was wrong. The re-tribalisers ignored the evidence.In the absence of the institutions the utopians wanted to destroy, human beings behaved more violently than within them. The discipline that could not answer his data answered his character instead. That is what an intellectual monoculture does when evidence contradicts its premises. It goes after whoever brought the evidence.
