Category: General

John Ansell is angry that someone who is Māori got discharged without conviction for a drink driving offense. That’s a privilege only afforded to Pākehā, after all. Cameron Slater, aka “Whale Oil” is willing to stand up for the rights of the victims of rape, but only after we further victimise them and make them prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they aren’t frauds.

Both Ansell and Slater are conspiracy theorists, and there’s nothing wrong with that (obligatory reminder that I wrote a PhD and a book defending belief in conspiracy theories and the right of conspiracy theorists to express their concerns). However, Slater and Ansell are vapid conspiracy theorists, engaging more in political rhetoric than evidence-based thinking, playing to their mostly right to far right audiences. They are the kind of people who give conspiracy theorising a bad name (and make my job harder, not that this is relevant; I just wanted a chance to gripe).

John Ansell’s anti-Māori views, particularly around an apparent conspiracy by the Crown to enrich Māori at the expense of Pākehā have been discussed on this blog in some depth here.

What’s interesting, then, about Ansell’s latest tirade is just how naked his contempt for Māori is becoming. He has gone from trying — and failing — to look moderate and only targeting his so-called “griever” Māori to just being openly anti any attitude associated with being Māori and being pro any attitudes associated with being Pākehā (not his preferred term). This makes his latest blogpost almost amusing: getting off a drink driving conviction (indeed, most offences) is surely one of the most Pākehā thing ever?

Ansell’s contempt for Te Ao Māori shines through in his writing, For example this:

Until some brave civilised Maori speaks out and turns his or her people against the glorification of primitivism and the anti-social behaviour embodied in the haka and the powhiri, the culture of violence and dishonesty will not change.

and this:

Although I’m being satirical here, how can such angry rituals as hakas and powhiris not be fuelling Maori youth violence?

Not just contempt, but a two-faced use of “satirical” to boot. Either that, or he doesn’t understand what it means. That being said, this line is particularly funny because of Ansell’s wanton ability to ignore stats in favour of his own prejudices:

Only problem with that, Nanaia, is that some people in New Zealand are treated more fairly and more equally than others.

Ansell is the kind of person who only likes statistics when they suit his purpose. So, while he’ll claim, contra the stats, that Māori are very privileged, he’ll also happily accept stats about crime which give him purpose to say:

But of course, there’s another possibility: that Maori commit most of the serious crimes, and not so many of the non-serious ones.

For someone who claims Māori are stuck with “primitive” worldviews, that’s a remarkably essentialist, primitive view to hold. Then again, he holds a lot of primitive and essentialist views, like this “no one can escape their ancestry” claim that Paki could be genuinely remorseful because:

Considering he comes from a rebel tribe that breached the Treaty and illegally took up arms against the Crown in the 1860s, excuse me if I doubt Tuku Morgan’s assurance — let alone Paki’s lawyer’s – that he is “genuinely remorseful”.

Ansell’s conspiracy theory here is devastatingly simple: rather than it being the case that Paki was discharged without conviction because the three other accused, who had already been dealt with by the courts, had been discharged without conviction (thus upholding one of the key principles of Ansell’s beloved colonial judicial system, equal treatment under the law for the same offence, it is, rather the case that:

Paki’s three accomplices were let off precisely because they were mates of the king’s son. Why else would a gang of thieves be treated so leniently?

Of course, to make this claim Ansell’s basically has to ignore the very real possibility that had this been a bunch of Pākehā teenagers, it probably would never have gone to court. We can argue all day as to whether that would be just, given the low arrest and conviction rate for Pākehā generally (compared to the same offences committed by Māori), but that’s not a discussion Ansell’s is likely to want to have, given that it would undermine the very arguments his claims of conspiracy are based upon, the mythical notion that Māori are somehow privileged.

Now, let it not be said that I am downplaying the seriousness of a drunk driving conviction. Frankly, I think that is a serious crime and, as a society, we should be consistent in our condemnation of such activities. However, given that Māori are significantly over-represented in the crime stats for this kind of behaviour (really quite significantly so when you look at relative population sizes) and we know that Pākehā often get away with such behaviour with just a warning from the police, if there is any claim of conspiracy we should be suspporting here, it’s one about how, as a society, we are ignoring the institutional racism that is clearly evidenced by both the police and the courts. To make Paki out as some kind of abhorent monster and yet ignore the real issue is immoral. Indeed, if there is any lesson to be taken from Ansell’s tirade, it’s that you have to be Tainui royalty before you’ll get accorded the many privileges Pākehā benefit from the judicial system.

Next time: Cameron Slater

Russell Brown has the Hard News (as does Bryce Edwards)about the latest revelations surrounding the ongoing Kim Dotcom saga (for new readers, go here and here to see why this might be interesting to those of us who analyse conspiracy theories). To summarise:

• Political pressure from the government of the day was applied so to override the SIS and Immigration New Zealand’s (quite legitimate) worry that Dotcom’s criminal past was a liability, and
• The new information now renders more likely the claim that Dotcom was granted residency in Aotearoa (New Zealand) in order for the FBI to grab him.

The former claim seems easily satisfied by the available evidence, so attention is on/questions are being asked of the Government to explain why the Minister responsible, Jonathan Coleman (or a member of his staff) put pressure on supposedly neutral civil service organisations to grant Kim Dotcom residency. He was, as we now know and they knew then, someone who said organisations had legitimate concerns over, given that he was under serious investigation by the FBI.

The latter claim, about how this evidence of political pressure renders the associated conspiracy theory – that Dotcom’s residency in Aotearoa (New Zealand) was engineered to make it easier for the FBI to get at him – is, if not rendered entirely plausible, getting closer to being judged as being probable. Certainly, as hypotheses go, it looks like the more general claim, that something very dodgy indeed happened in the process of granting Dotcom his residency ((Even the leader of the political party Dotcom funds has stated she would have been loathe to grant him residency, given the available information.)), is very probable indeed (thus making some claim of inappropriate political activity probable) and if we add to this the complicity of the police and the GCSB in improperly surveilling and raiding Dotcom, the increasingly unlikeliness of the Prime Minister’s claims to have never heard of Dotcom prior to the raids, it looks as if we really should consider a theory about a conspiracy (a sub-type, in this case, of inappropriate political activity) as being in the pool of the best available explanations for the events in question.

I’m not saying the conspiracy theory is the most likely explanation. Rather, I’m saying that we should be considering that possibility seriously. There is another available explanatory hypothesis that goes something like “The Minister put pressure on Immigration to let Dotcom gain residency, despite the SIS’s concerns, because the government wanted Dotcom under the wealthy investor immigration scheme.” That hypothesis certainly fits the evidence and whilst you can still ask “Why did the Minister ignore the serious implications of the FBI investigation into Dotcom?” the answer to that question is likely to be framed in terms of “But think of all that filthy, filthy lucre he is going to spend whilst on us whilst living here?” rather than “Conspiracy!”

The question, then, is which of the two aforementioned hypotheses is more independently likely? I.e. Which hypothesis would we consider likely based simply upon past/prior behaviour by the government? Frankly, I think you could be forgiven for saying “Either!” Given what we know about the motivations and standards of the current National government, it seems that it might just be about getting Kim Dotcom into the country as a wealth-creating machine. Yet, given what we know about National’s standards of governance and accountability, it does not seem unreasonable to think that they have no qualms about acting unethically and supporting quasi-legal, sometimes illegal actions by institutions associated with the state.

So, there seems to be prior form in favour of either hypothesis. Then again, both might be true (although that would be confusing).

For someone who wrote a book defending belief in conspiracy theories, I’m often very loathe to say “This looks like a warranted conspiracy theory to me!” However, in this case I’m increasingly of the mindset that if it turns out that there isn’t some conspiracy going on which explains the increasingly bizarre story of Kim Dotcom and the Government Who Wanted to Send Him to America, then National has an issue with the public’s perception of just how transparent its government’s actions are.

As of yesterday I can happily say that the copy-edits on The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories are now complete. Roll on the end of the month when the “happy” process of indexing the book over the course of a fortnight can begin in earnest.

I’m not sure what the formal relationship between an author and their copy-editor should be, but I decided that I was allowed to do a little, light rewriting. Not too much: I allowed myself the luxury of rewriting one paragraph every chapter and tightening some sentences. In a few cases it was absolutely necessary: from time to time I would find a referent “it” that was misleading (or confusing) and from time to time it wasn’t clear what moves I was making. Thus a light rewrite here, a small change in text there.

I did have to resist the temptation to rewrite everything: the two months between submission of the manuscript and seeing the copy-edited prose has done me no favours whatsoever. While I don’t think of myself as a sloppy writer, sometimes the text tends to show evidence otherwise. Of particular note was the bibliography, which I just allowed Endnote to generate. This, it turns out, was a mistake (as was not asking whether I could have submitted the text as a TeX file).

Still, it’s in, now. As is the final(ish) cover design for the book. Let me show it to you:

I think it looks rather nice, especially since I commissioned it. Artistic thanks to Tim Denee, whose work in this matter has not gone unrewarded.

I was sitting in a car, stuck in Ponsonby traffic with my Mother, listening to National Radio, being bourgeois. My Mother and I do not share the same political affiliations, but we also aren’t at loggerheads with one another. Indeed, on some matters we agree completely, like the increasing irrelevance of the New Zealand Labour Party to the political scene. It was, then, quite interesting to find myself defending the idea that maybe, just maybe, David Cunliffe is being conspired against by elements of either his own party or the National Party (or both).

Let’s put all the cards on the table: it turns out that someone in David Cunliffe’s office (which includes the possibility it was Cunliffe) wrote a letter to Immigration in 2003 asking what the hold up was in processing Donghua Liu’s residency application. This turns out to be problem not necessarily because the letter was ill-advised or dodgy (we will come back to that) but rather because a few days earlier Cunliffe was asked whether he had any dealings with Liu and had said an unequivocal no. The letter showed that this wasn’t strictly true, and given that there was (and still is) a scandal brewing within Labour about donations Liu gave to the Labour Party, this made a bad situation even worse.

Now, for those of you who don’t know who Donghua Liu or David Cunliffe are, the facts are these: David Cunliffe is the leader of the major opposition party in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and wants to be PM come September. He has not exactly fired in the polls and the Labour Party seems to be losing rather than gaining votes at the moment, mostly because it seems quite content to fight with itself rather than with a government that it seems to only disagree within on the principle of being in opposition to it rather than because of principles which distinguish it from the government of the day. Donghua Liu, on the other hand, is a business person who donates money to all and sundry and also engages in assault. This latter characteristic of Liu ended the ministerial career of Maurice Williamson, who wrote to the police about Liu’s charges and insinuated that as Liu was rich and bringing money into the country, prosecuting him might be a bad idea.

People on the Left and the Right in New Zealand have been rightly worried that Williamson’s support of Liu looked like it was a case of money for favours; the revelation that Liu also donated to Labour whilst it was in government and Cunliffe’s office wrote a letter of support for Liu’s residency application which features the following:

Mr Liu wishes to set up a joint venture including Well Lee Ltd, Equus Hawk 08 Ltd and Tian long Property Development Co Ltd to export large quantities of agricultural and horticultural products to China.

It is hoped that products from the company will be available to the market in July 2003.

looks a little (and this is the topic of serious debate so it is not a settled issue) like “Well, he’s planning to grease the economic wheels of the nation, so can you rush things up a bit for him, please?” I.e. money for favours. Now that it turns out Liu also donated over $100000 to the Labour Party, this does make everything look quite suspicious.

Cunliffe’s reaction to the Liu story was first to make veiled threats against his own caucus and then accuse the government of a smear campaign. The former move was presumably to stop the faction in the Labour Party caucus who despises Cunliffe from moving against him whilst the latter… Well, it seems like a reasonable supposition: it turns out that the journalist who uncovered the letter from Cunliffe’s office had to wait a month for it while the Minister of the Crown who received the official information request sat on it. By “sitting on it” I mean that he didn’t release it in a timely fashion to the media but he happily told members of the government about it, including the Prime Minister. John Key has admitted to knowing about it for some weeks. Someone at the WhaleOil blog – which is rumoured to be basically fed information by the lackeys of a key, government minister – intimated that news damaging to Cunliffe would leak the day before the letter was released. ((Although that might just be coincidence: just because Cameron Slater is this year’s award winning blogger does not make his blog a reliable source of news.)) In theory Cunliffe should have been notified about the release of the letter before the media got a hold of it, but that did not happen. All in all, it seems like it’s all kinds of dodgy, almost as if someone was waiting for just the right time to smear Cunliffe and bring the party he leads into further disrepute.

However, there is another issue. Cunliffe has an image problem which predates the revelations about Liu. Cunliffe was elected to rejuvenate the Labour Party and lead it to victory. However, he has presided over a party which continues to not do very well in the polls and he has scored no significant hits against the PM, who continues to be popular with the general public. Cunliffe also has a reputation for being arrogant, and he seems to be playing towards this weakness rather than against it. Rather than admitting “Yes, a mistake has been made: over ten years ago I signed a letter of support for Mr Liu!” he has gone on the attack. Now, Cunliffe may have done nothing wrong in writing that letter (although I, like some, worry about the whole “mentioning his business interests” thing) but by attacking his own caucus and then the government, Cunliffe looks like he is spinning when really he should be back-pedalling. It doesn’t help that Cunliffe is not a popular choice for a potential PM. The unpopular candidate shouting “Conspiracy!” and accusing the popular PM of being in on it does not exactly endear one to the general public.

Some might say this is a pathetic point to make: no matter what the PR value is in saying “It’s a smear/there’s a conspiracy!” surely we should assess the claim of conspiracy and not worry about the consequences of the claim? I agree entirely: indeed, I’ve written a book about that very fact. However, I can’t help but think that Cunliffe is making the job of investigating the claim of conspiracy harder on all of us by being so utterly unapologetic on what is, in the end, a stuff up by his office. After all, this is someone who wants to be PM and yet didn’t do the due diligence to see if he had ever had any dealings with Liu and answered a question with an unequivocal “No!” when a more circumspect “Not as far as I am aware!” would have been prudent. If he had said the latter and then a ten year-old letter had turned up he could have gone “Look, that was ten years ago, before anyone knew much about Mr. Liu: I think you can understand why this letter, out of the thousand of similar letters I have written, escaped my notice.”

Still, maybe this really is a pathetic point on my part and it’s possible I am not adhering to the standards I advocate in my own work. That might be because I think the Labour Party is essentially dead (a line which will probably come back to haunt me in a few years time, I am sure) and thus my lack of empathy to the fortunes of the party means I’m ignoring the very real issue here. Perhaps the best response here is that when someone who looks like they are covering up something complains about someone else being involved in duplicitous activity, it’s hard to take the first person seriously. That being said, it does look as if it’s entirely possible Cunliffe didn’t recall the letter and made a simple mistake (albeit one which is associated with a whole bunch of mistakes made by his associates in the Labour Party). He could have been wiser about it, but none of this should distract us from the more serious and quite well-evidenced claims that a) the government sat on this information and b) someone might have set Cunliffe up to fall. Unfortunately, the suspected culprits happen to be an increasingly popular government whilst the victim (such that he is) is an unpopular politician belonging to a party known more for factional infighting than anything else.

They say we get the politicians we deserve. The gods above and below help us if this is true.

Despite criticising Martin Butler’s book on the alleged missing tunnels in North Head, “Tunnel Vision”, I did end my review with:

Still, there is something to commend about Butler’s work: he actually went out and did some site investigation of his own. In an appendix to “Tunnel Vision” he details the results of some ground radar work he commissioned, and the results of these new scans are very interesting and, I believe, warrant further investigation. Martin is applying for permission to excavate in the anomalous areas and I really hope he gets it (although I would qualify that by saying he needs an archaeologist to undertake the actual exploratory digging). Whilst its possible that at least one of the areas he surveyed is a known-but-missing gun emplacement that Dave Veart and company tried to locate but never found, some of the anomalies, if they turn out to be tunnels, would be genuinely surprising and unaccounted for in the official history. As such, I’m eager for these anomalies to be investigated and, if they show the existence of hitherto only suspected tunnels, I’ll happily tell the world about it.

Butler has been seeking permission to perform his proposed dig for a while now, and, for reasons which aren’t entirely clear, I get a lot of correspondence asking for updates. So, a few days ago, I emailed Martin about it and so the following post his site, was born. From the looks of it, things are progressing well and, basically, he’s simply waiting on Parliament to pass a bill which will give back Maungauika to its rightful owners.

There a few interesting tidbits, at least to my mind, to be found in Martin’s progress report. For one thing, he writes:

I have recently been asked if this should be an election issue in the surrounding electorates of North Head. If I lived in the area, I would certainly want to know why a senior Minister of the Crown, in a key position, Jonathan Coleman – Minister of Defence does not want to support an independent investigation of the Torpedo Yard.

I suspect the answer is simply: “Because as far as the Ministry of Defence is concerned, the Department of Conservation investigations settled the issue.” If you think there’s no mystery to uncover, why would you bother supporting another investigation, the results of which you are sure you already know? Especially in a case in which if you choose to support it and nothing was found, the Opposition might then use against you, tarring you as a conspiracy theorist?

However, Martin is coming at this from the perspective of believing that the MOD knows the prior investigations were faulty, whitewashes or the like. As such, he sees Jonathan Coleman’s reluctance to support an independent investigation as suspicious. After all, it’s an independent investigation: it’s not like it’s going to cost anyone anything. However, there are political costs to giving or looking like you are endorsing such an investigation, so I remain unconvinced that the reluctance of a series of Ministers to reopen the North Head case shows that something suspicious is up. Now, maybe Butler has evidence of that to present in his new edition of “Tunnel Vision”. I admit to not being convinced by the evidence in the last edition, but I’m also willing read the new version with an open mind.

For another thing, it’s interesting that he talks about ‘forgotten tunnels’, although he does so in quote marks. Is this a sign that he’s open to the notion that there might be no intended cover up but, rather, that some tunnels have gone missing due to an incomplete historical record and changes to the hill face? Or is it wry observation that talking about ‘forgotten’ tunnels gets you more respect and attention than talking about tunnels which are missing because a cover-up is still in existence? I guess we’ll see: I, for one, will be getting a copy of “Tunnel Vision” as soon as it’s released so I can review it anew.

Last week in The Podcaster’s Guide to the Galaxy we discussed the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines MH370. Now it transpires that some of the families of the missing passengers are seeking to raise $5 million dollars to encourage a whistleblower to come forward and reveal what really happened.

A few things things:

1. This all rather assumes that there is a whistle to blow. It’s possible that no one knows anything more (or, nothing particularly interesting that isn’t already in the public domain)

2. What happens to the money if there isn’t a genuine whistleblower. Oh, there will be plenty of people who will contest the money, let there be no doubt, but there’s a very real possibility no real whistleblower might emerge. This could be because there is either because there is nothing to report or the people they report to can easily match the offered $5 million.

3. Expect the families to dispute who to pay out to, as individual family members may very well side with one alleged whistleblower over another. The $5 million could easily disappear in divisive litigation.

4. The parallels between narratives about the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 and 9/11 are interesting here. A common refrain in the skeptical community with respect to the body of Inside Job hypotheses is that a whistleblower would have come forward by now, given the financial reward by the press for doing so. People within the 9/11 Truth community either dispute there really would be a huge benefit to blowing the lid on 9/11 (given that the powers that be would have said person’s guts for garters) or the Establishment can take comfortably reward such potential whistleblowers or that no one person knows enough to blow the whistle.

Some of these theories get a bit confusing, since some in the 9/11 Truth community claim that whistleblowers come forward all the time. It just happens to the be the case that they are routinely ignored. I think that’s actually the most interesting hypothesis in play here. What if a whistleblower did come forward? You don’t have to kill them or bribe them to silence them; all you need do is spread enough disinformation about them that most people won’t trust a word they say.

Now, certain skeptics will say “That’s preposterous!” but worries about disinformation being disseminated by influential institutions should not be dismissed out of hand. Governments, for example, have engaged in disinformation campaigns in the past, sometimes to hide their conspiracy (or conspiracy-like) activities. It’s not out of the question that should a genuine whistleblower turn up, that disinformation will be disseminated to tarnish their reputation. Indeed, it would help if less-than-genuine whistleblowers were also on the scene, so you could tarnish the real thing via guilt by association. A really clever conspiracy would even manufacture the disingenuous “whistleblowers”…

My suspicion is even if the families do generate the $5 million dollars of enticement, it won’t produce much in the way of results. It will, I think, produce new conspiracy theories to explain away the lack of whistleblowing, or the fact no one accepts the testimony of whistleblower X or Y, but that’s to be expected. Meanwhile, I still think the most likely explanation is a tragic accident.

Not that my opinion really matters to the families of the missing passengers and crew. Arohanui.