On The Curious Situation Of Business As Usual In Last Night's Labour Party - The Latest Sharma Gauntlets

The latest round of Sharma disclosures are, sorry to say, "politics as usual" on pretty much all fronts.

It doesn't look good. And that's why it's specifically supposed to not happen where anyone outside of politics can see it.

There is nothing especially unusual about MPs and Candidates being "coached" on how to keep information out of the public eye.

I also don't think there's anything particularly unusual about a party's internal disciplinary processes turning out to be (or, at least, being presented as seeming to be) conducted on something decidedly lesser than a "Blind Justice" (or, for that matter, 'Natural Justice') basis - and instead being a strategic exercise first and foremost.

But then - I'm rather biased on that front.

Now I am not, for a moment, seeking to suggest that this kind of thing is 'just how it is' and shouldn't be challenged nor criticized.

On the contrary. As a point of general (and genuine) principle - a certain distaste for top-down and seemingly cabalist party management was partially how we wound up with MMP.

Because people decided - by and large - that they'd finally had enough of Government by fish-and-chip club. If only because said small coteries with control appeared to have a rather nasty habit of springing unpopular and unwelcome initiatives upon an unsuspecting body-politic in a fashion that, with deference to the circumstances of Ruthanasia relative to National's 1990 Election Campaign, say, appeared to have more than a 'hint' of "predetermination" there to them.

Lest I be misconstrued upon this point - I am absolutely NOT seeking to suggest that the Parliamentary Labour Party purportedly convening a pseudo-'Star Chamber' meeting the night before a disciplinary proceeding for a 'rogue MP' ... is somehow tantamount to a re-run of the Neoliberal vandalism efforts of the 1980s and 90s.

As I think I may have intimated above - all of this that's currently happening is just "business as usual". There's nothing out of the ordinary here. The only "crime" one could feasibly make out is that it's been done in such a fashion that various details and various elements to it are being conducted in something closer to public view than usual.

And this is absolutely, most definitely NOT a "Labour issue". It's not even a "National" issue or a "Party of Governance" issue. It is - put quite simply - a Politics and Political Party issue. I can start going through and citing examples running right the way back to Ancient Athens and Republic-era Rome to further furnish the point there if it is absolutely necessary.

Some parties, to be sure, are almost certainly markedly less prone to this kind of shenaniganry ... and other parties are probably markedly less prone to getting 'caught out' in what can be made to look like an unfair gambit.

All in all, about the only thing I happen to think's a bit peculiar here is that Sharma has found himself in this state - on grounds that he's clearly a very bright guy.

Who must surely, surely have had at least some inkling as to the nature of the iniquitous blood team sport that he was about to get himself up and embroiled within when he signed up for candidacy however many moons ago now.

I'm not taking a position in who's right or wrong in all of this. I don't have the facts with which to do so.

It's even vaguely possible that neither (major) side is actually 'in the wrong', really - and that some nefarious third party (within the party) has been winding up Sharma with a view to 'setting him off' in order to accomplish some particular, pertinent aim. Stranger things have most certainly happened in party politics over and down through the years. Who knows.

Yet I can't help but feel that, whatever the ins and outs and rights and wrongs and timelines and white-board chicanery involved ... it's all a bit of a waste, really.

The only figures who'll come out of this ahead are the (metaphorical) vultures.

Or the Press Gallery. 

On National's Uffindell And The Lack Of A Statute Of Limitations In Politics

So, in the wake of last night's breaking news as to Luxon's man in Tauranga, we of the Lumpen Commentariat that is Twitter (and, no doubt, just about anywhere else people gather to gossip and congeal outrage) came alive with the perhaps eminently predictable suite of condemnation. 

And, it has to be said - if we can't rally round as a loose-knit confederation of opinionated sorts to castigate a group of older boys ferociously beating up a 13 year old with wooden furniture-legs ... then there would, indeed, be something very askew with our respective moral frameworks. 

However, from where I'm sitting there's been a bit of a 'jump' here. Namely, that made by various of us from condemning something done by a 5th former, through to demanding that a sitting MP resign.

Now that may be an entirely warranted 'destination' to have wound up at. Or it may not. But the issue here is rather bigger than just Uffindell. And that's why I think it matters to actually slow things down and think things through - and ensure if we're demanding a (figurative) guillotine or going in to bat for the guy, that we're doing so for the right reasons. 

Why is this a bigger issue than just Uffindell? Because, to put it bluntly - our MPs are, by and large, human. Humans have pasts. Some pasts are more insalubrious than others. I think we lose out, oddly enough, if we choose to insist that everybody in our 'Representative House' (not quite the same thing as a House of Representatives) absolutely has to have a squeaky-clean prior record. 

Don't believe me? 

John A. Lee, an MP I hold in rather high regard and who made a demonstrably positive contribution to our country in a dire time ... had prior convictions for theft, liquor-smuggling, and breaking and entering. He did a year in Mt Eden, and I don't mean as a constituency MP. 

Now, all of that got 'overwritten' by his subsequent backstory. He went overseas with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force during World War One, and came back a wounded war-hero. Blood - rightly or wrongly - does seem to wash out all sorts of other stains. 

Slightly closer to contemporary times, we have Metiria Turei. Now, it's difficult to escape the fact that she did, indeed, commit both benefit fraud and, curiously, electoral fraud. In 1993, for the latter, and in the Nineties for the former. 

Personally, I think the main thing she was actually guilty of was perhaps unexpectedly poor political judgement. At least, in 2017 - twenty four years, just under a quarter of a century, after the thing which probably sank her. 

But this is all supposition for another time. 

Lest I be misconstrued (and pilloried in the comments-section) - I absolutely am not seeking to make the case that Sam Uffindell is some sort of latter-day Metiria Turei, nor the second coming of John A. Lee. 

I also fully acknowledge that every so often an MP with a 'background' issue comes along wherein either the sheer malevolence ... or the sheer bathos ... of the circumstance in question means they've fairly little choice but to resign.

David Garrett would be the obvious emblematic exemplar for the latter. You just ... can't quite take seriously an MP (or the party which empowers them to speak for it) who makes a personal cause célèbre out of 'tough on law and order' and removing judicial discretion particularly for for violent offending - only to then turn out to have a rather ... relevant personal history. 

Garrett's case is, however, instructive in another way. There was a man who went through the system and benefitted from notable leniency following his apparent effort to emulate a fictional hitman and steal the identity of a deceased infant. If he'd internalized the lesson, and come out and up and then out again into politics advocating for a more 'nuanced' approach at the pointy-end of the judiciary, things might have played out differently. 

As somebody pointed out on Twitter yesterday evening - that's partially what they, personally, found galling about the current Uffindell scenario. Namely, that Uffindell had, quite clearly, benefitted from not being in receipt of a heavy-handed approach to his youthful assault of a younger kid. And yet had gone and joined a party that's often promoted itself as being 'tough' on youth offending. 

(Although as a brief aside on that - oddly enough, the National Party, last time it was in Government, actually did make some reform efforts for our youth justice system to reduce the number of teens going through the harder edges of our criminal justice apparatus. They just seem curiously recalcitrant to claim credit for that kind of minor movement these days for some reason ...)

All up, I think that's basically it.

When it comes to a situation like this, we - the voting public (on or off twitter) - are probably looking for two things. First and foremost, 'authenticity'. That's a general rule and a given for politics. Hence the antiquated saying apt for the context - that once you can fake authenticity, you've got it made. 

And second (and heavily interrelated with the aforementioned) - something to have happened in response to the putative offending conduct in question. That probably means demonstrable personal growth so you can say you aren't the same guy who did X, along with actually taking ownership of the guy who did do X's actions and making appropriate effort to make things right with the victim / society at large / probably not just God. (I mention that last one due to the American political set-piece wherein pretty much exactly that form of 'repentance' of the 'performative' and barely-even-self-flagellating variety all too often seem something of a one-stop-shop for certain ne'er-do-wells caught-out whilst seeking office)

Having things happen a lot further in the past definitely helps with all of that. Far easier to proclaim you've grown after a number of decades rather than a number of months and sound serious whilst doing so. 

All of this brings us to Uffindell. 

I think there's probably a general awareness - and a certain amount of grudgingly-tolerant leeway - out there in the Kiwi electorate that some people may do stupid, morally reprehensible things when they're younger and at an all-boys boarding school.

And, much more overtly to the point - that twenty two years is plenty of time to grow and become a better man. At least, in theory. 

However, the corollary to that is that the onus is decidedly on National's newest MP to demonstrate that he has in fact done so. 

Which is where, I suspect, Uffindell is going to come rather unstuck. With an intriguing new spin on the ancient political maxim - "it's not the crime that gets you ... it's the cover-up". Or, in his case, and with deference to the rather recent timing of his calling up his victim to apologize - "it's not the crime that gets you ... it's the thing that makes the ethics look entirely performative". 'Authenticity', remember?

Hence, he manages to go from his victim reportedly receiving the apology with a sentiment along the lines of (to quote Stuff's reporting): "he would never forgive the boy who hurt him, but forgave the man Uffindell had become." ... through to, once it became apparent just what Uffindell was intending on getting up to shortly thereafter:

“But then a few months later I sat down to watch the news on the couch with a beer and there he was, running for Parliament,” the victim said. “I felt sick.”
[...]
"But seeing that - it made me feel his apology wasn’t genuine, he was just doing it to get his skeletons out of the closet, so he could have a political career.”

But let's move forward.

The thing that gets me about these skeletal-scandals is that they often seem to blow up far bigger, and give far more emphatic reason to dislike a public figure than anything they may have done (or are intending to do) that's more contemporary. That doesn't sit right with me.

If we're going to dislike anybody, it should be the Nat MP in 2022 for things he's doing in 2022 (or thereabouts, plus or minus a year or two maybe)

Not some idiot 16 year old that's now 22 years in the past and doesn't actually wield political power.

Which doesn't at all men that this current scandal ought have no bearing upon that matter of public perception. Quite the contrary. 

Even leaving aside whether a teenage boy's actions considerably betray the character of the man in later life ... it can fairly be argued that not making amends earlier (indeed, until shortly before going for National Candidacy selection) doesn't speak well to his character, ethics, and judgement as the older man.

Ultimately, of course, none (or, at least, very few) of us are Uffindell. We can't answer honestly what might (or might not) have been going through his head - either on a reportedly near-daily basis over the preceding years, or as he made the decision to front up to his victim as and when he did. 

Personally, and without intending to proffer this as either the definitive truth nor something innately defensible, I suppose I can see how a man might be significantly guilt-wracked by his previous conduct to the point that he has a genuinely hard time fronting up to try and make amends, for a span of years and then decades. Maybe. 

I'm not saying that to try and turn Uffindell into the victim, here, by any stretch of the imagination. I dare say that any queasy feeling Uffindell might have had about looking to engage with his victim should prove soundly eclipsed via many orders of magnitude by those emotions his victim has had to grapple with both over that same period of time, and in imminent anticipation of being contacted by his former tormentor. And that's before he saw the guy's face on a billboard or the 6 o'clock news as some sort of purported bright shining hope. ('Bright, Shining Hope' being a rather relative measure - and in the context of National's current concepts of 'adequacy', I mean ... ) 

It is not, perhaps, beyond the bounds of possibility that Uffindell actually was reasonably genuine with his apology - and was also, correspondingly, rather breathtakingly tone-deaf with how it would look to make such an approach and then some months later commence inserting himself into the public eye as a political aspirant. 

Certainly, I don't think anybody is going to be losing money swiftly by betting against National and various of its MPs proving to be remarkably short-sighted, lacking in strategic cogency, or that simple dimension otherwise known succinctly as 'E.Q.'. 

We can probably demonstrate the inherent truth of that by considering just how many MPs or would-have-been-MPs the National Party has (nearly) fielded over the past two years despite the people National actively entrusts to be aware and out ahead of issues or actively filtering for undesirables ... being aware of various of these guys' occasionally rather bizarre (or, if you prefer, Bezzant) shortcomings and still deciding to wave them on through to candidacy anyway. 

That is to say - the National Party does not appear to have been positively selecting for perspicacity with either its party or parliamentary office-holders for awhile now. 

Although, in fairness - and yes, even in that most unforgiving of arms of our civic judiciary, the Court of Public Opinion, there is at least some scope for a 'duty of fairness' to yet prevail - that 'lack of perspicacity' and/or 'sense' can cut both ways. 

Uffindell's apology appears to have occurred in July of last year. That's probably just under eleven months prior to his election in June's Tauranga by-election. He almost certainly didn't plan for it to happen that way. After all, circa June last year, Tauranga's MP was still one Simon Bridges - who seemed very much to be anticipating sticking around for the foreseeable so as to be able to snatch back leadership of the National Party when Collins seemingly-inevitably imploded. There was no sign a by-election was to ensue. 

Which doesn't mean that Uffindell didn't have a candidacy in mind mid-way through last year - it just may have been mid-late 2023 that he was thinking of, rather than mid-way through 2022. 

Does that change things? I don't know. I'm not sure anybody really does. And besides which - it's rather immaterial, now, isn't it. 

Things happened as they have, and we (or, more likely, the Parliamentary National Party) have to work out what now to do to move forward from it (or through it) in earnest. 

Speaking of which - short of National deciding to do something rather unexpected and somehow keel-haul/waka-jump/whatever a freshly-minted MP out of a job in a safe-seat just won on by-election ... unless Uffindell himself resigns (which should surely result in a record turnaround time between by-elections for a seat), there's precious little to be done about the fact that said MP is now part of our public life.

The only thing that the mass majority of us can really do in this situation is hope that said MP hasn't just learned the lesson of the 16 year old boy, but also the lesson of the truly adult man. Which is one not of Comms, but rather of Values. 

And spends the rest of his time in public life working very hard to not just 'show' us they're better, but to actually be better ; and, one hopes, somehow make a positive forward-proofing difference in exactly the area they came unstuck in in the first place.

Now how they do that, of course ... well, I don't know.

But he better be thinking hard in earnest.

Because like it or not - as of yesterday evening, he went from having one victim who felt manipulated and misled through to having the best part of the entire country potentially feeling not entirely dissimilarly towards him. 

I guess we'll just have to wait and see whether he's better at convincing us that he's a changed and genuinely penitent man than he was the gentleman whom he sought to convince of all of this the first time around. 

On The Meaning Of Richard Prosser - A Saddening Post-Mortem

 

I saw reporting (at first on twitter, and then in my personal messages) that Richard Prosser has died. I do not know the details, although the phrase "after a long battle with depression" seems to be mentioned, with clear purport.

Another phrase which gets mentioned comes from a certain piece he penned in 2013. I shall not quote it here.

Now I am most definitely not here to defend the remarks in question (and, hell, a younger me literally lead the charge internally to have something done about said remarks and their maker) ;

But perhaps it is worth noting that he did not only apologize but actually change his mind after that occurrence. And I do not mean simply in the idle sense of merely issuing a press statement to that effect.

If memory serves he went out in person to engage with the community he'd hurt through his commentary. Both to learn and to make some effort at restitution. It was, reportedly, a humbling experience.

Now obviously, the whole thing shouldn't have happened - that much goes without saying; and while it was positive that some members of NZ's Muslim community were prepared to open homes & dialogue to help him see in an entirely different way .. again, they shouldn't have had to.

Yet given the way that the conspiratorial fringe goes today - it's a rare thing to have somebody actually do that. Go out, meet what would be described as "the other side", and come away a changed man with changed views in consequence.

It's a shame that what he'll be remembered for, it would seem, is the bad call he made (and it was abominable) - rather than the choice to repudiate that & grow.

If we are to turn the death of somebody into a trenchant morality-tale (and it is the inexorable consequence of having been in the public eye with some prominence that this shall, indeed, occur) ... it seems to me that there is somewhat greater value to be had in that side to it.

That rather than simply pointing and jeering at something done wrong near a decade ago, the ensuing subsequent effort at doing right and renouncing the thing is also at least mentioned.

Otherwise, what's the point. Are all such circumstances merely to be 'cautionary tales' of what not to do, with no corresponding pathway showing what one ought to do where one has already done it?

Which also does not mean I am here for a moment to pen a glistening and blemish-free hagiography for Richard Prosser.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

Something that, I'd like to believe, his personal vehemence in favour of 'truth-telling' in columnry (even if that 'truth' could be rather .. divergent from what the rest of us had thought) would mean he'd also appreciate such a principle for his own circumstance.

He most definitely did go down other rabbit-holes both before and after the Wogistan episode. And yes, for the past two years there had observably been quite a bit of ... stereotypical takes about the pandemic situation etc.; (or, in other words, the underlying trait of personality which exhibited itself in the form of the adoption of rather ... fringe views such as the arguable necessity of South Island Secessionism, lay evidently unameliorated in some respects)

Yet I must confess myself rather uneasy at the notion that that ought comprise the sum total to his recollection among us here today. The guy who wrote the 'Wogistan' piece, with various reporting or social media commentary no doubt quoting some choice words or a sentence or two from same to illustrate.

Illustrate the man, that is, rather than merely the column they're drawn from in time.

All up, I guess it's a bit of a curious feeling to see a man one's known for ... twelve years, reduced to a single half-a-sentence quote upon a page in such a manner.

There's no doubt that it's a pertinent piece of verbiage.

And, as I say, the only way that placing it in "context" changes anything even an iota is if it's the "context" of his own repudiation and growing forward from a previous state that should never have existed in the first place.

But that definitely was not all there was to the man. And for a number of reasons I do think that deserves to be recognized. Even - indeed, outright especially - in death.

It's the last time many if not most of us shall hear of him in the active sense. It deserves to be done rightly.

Personally, I'll also remember the awkward-but-enthusiastic and genuinely warm-hearted man who even though I vehemently disagreed (and was quite open about this) with a very large quotient of what he said (and I should easily have fitted into several of the categories he'd condemn in print) - he would still go out of his way in his endeavour to help me.

When I'd wound up in some tight spots - suddenly lacking a place to live etc. for instance, he'd reach out, whether to myself or to other persons around me and ask if I needed a place to stay.

And that's after I'd lead an internal effort to have him excoriated / de-selected, had been quoted in media attacking his stuff, etc. (hence, in part, why one of those occasions was a reaching out to (or, should I say - 'through') 'other persons around me' - he presumably perhaps thought I'd be unlikely to pick up the phone from him directly given the way things were at that time).

I'd like to think that something such as that is also relevant when we are coming to our general assessment as to the proverbial 'measure of the man'.

Again, fully aware that my experience is very different from somebody who's had no engagement with him suddenly waking up to hear a sitting NZ MP had declared in print one shouldn't be allowed on an aircraft due to one's race / religion.

I'll also remember, for what it's worth, that rather amusing incident in 2017 wherein he went into a BusinessNZ event held on that year's election campaign trail, completely accurately stated NZ First's policy of renationalizing part-privatized power-companies (at no more than price they'd been sold for) ...

... and for his troubles wound up with David Seymour declaring him to be "what a f^<king idiot" to the assembled doyens of business New Zealand - this remark of Seymour's appearing, on video/audio on the 6 o'clock news etc. ...

Followed by Winston making a statement about how that wasn't the policy, Prosser had been speaking gravely in error etc. ... despite the fact that the policy in question was, at the time, still right there on the NZF website for all to see.

Events which, one can argue, appear to be at the very least heavily correlated with what had effectively brought his Parliamentary career to a close (insofar as the 2017 NZ First List which was announced a few days later had him dropping I think eleven places and rendering him significantly unlikely to return back to Parliament as a result)

There is definitely something to be said for terrifying BusinessNZ and ACT about the specter of a socialist takeover of NZ through nationalization of industry.

In any case, while he was still around and I'd seen him posting as of a few weeks back .. I have no idea how his personal life had gone. I do recall that he had previously had both wife and child, so my thoughts would also be with them at this time.

Even if we vehemently disagree with people - to somebody else they're family. And it cannot be easy to see the name and features of one's father, say, occurrent in such a fashion about the place, especially given what appears to have happened.

All up - I'm not here to put forward that pithy rejoinder about the impropriety of "speaking ill of the dead", even imminently following their departure from this globe and context of ours. People who genuinely believe in that principle can and shall adhere to it ... and those who don't, well, they shall no doubt do as they do instead.

Yet men are rarely as simple as the two-dimensional caricatures that we seemingly endlessly re-manufacture of them in our heads.

Acknowledging that fact - and presenting a somewhat broader view than just that singular half-sentence of his - does not mean bestowing an uncritical endorsement of a man, their words, deeds, and legacy.

It simply means acknowledging them as human.

On The Alleged Tame-ing Of Luxon

I kinda feel like the sentiment about Luxon's apparent trainwreck of an interview with Jack Tame today is ... not going to play out the way people think.

Yes, yes it's absolutely true and correct to state that Luxon wound up caught in a bunch of contradictions - between stuff he's talking about and claiming is a problem, with what he's actually prepared to do if he wins an election; between things he's said he intends to do, and how these actively feed into problems he has sought to pillory the government over ... you get the idea.

Except here's the thing.

Most people don't have a coherent view of the universe - let alone something as infinitely more internecine as the politics of a small island nation. Our world-views are awash as a morass of mutually contradictory preferences and outrage-inducing red-flag buttons.

Some people take a look at politicians and their presumptive visions - maybe even read some policy manifestos (if anybody still does those) or commentary upon same - before they decide on who they want to vote for.

Others go on whether they feel they can 'trust' someone with power - and that may, indeed, arcen back to whether they can put on a decent showing in front of a camera in answering reasonably simple, straightforward questions. (Answering ... does not necessarily mean answering well or truthfully, necessarily - but that is another matter)

However, for an appreciable quotient of our body politik (as with many other modern, Western democracies) - what they're looking for is a simple resonancy with things they already either believe or can be reasonably prodded or coaxed into believing.

And, as we have observed - that DOESN'T require an internally coherent worldview to be espoused by the politician courting them. Quite the opposite.

It just requires being able to sound-off a veritable checklist of talking-points or hot-button stances - and then let the natural artifice of human cognitive filtering take care of the rest.

People no longer 'hear' the contradictions, if the contradictions are things they're already subconsciously overlooking in and of themselves when it comes to their own personal preferential perspectives.

Further, to add to all of this - it has long been known that New Zealanders tend to like an underdog, and will rally behind somebody who is perceived as 'not getting a fair go'.

I have repeatedly observed that in 2014, for instance, the year of the Dirty Politics revelations ... National's vote actually went up, precisely because we automatically insistently minimized the impropriety at hand - at least partially because the media was perceived to be making a big deal out of it.

It came across that John Key was being hounded by the press and was being beaten up upon - so people tuned out just what (and why) he was being hounded over, and considered him a more sympathetic figure.

Helluva thing, really, to have a multi-millionaire incumbent Prime Minister of six years going up against a Labour party about to deliver its worst result since 1922 ... and somehow have said PM come across as being the 'underdog' or 'marginalized', but that's how it can so easily look from the outside.

Tame's interview was interesting and entertaining; but a whole lot of people out there will, if anything, double down in their emergent support for Luxon.

Not because anything Luxon said or did in that performance was 'smart' or visionary.

But rather precisely because we've all had a situation of some younger guy coming in and asking us 'twisty' questions [which may, or may not, actually have been 'twisty' rather than reasonably direct and straightforward as various of Tame's were] and feeling unfairly put upon in fairly direct consequence.

Exposing that Luxon is not, in fact, (yet) the man to be able to dethrone Ardern does not induce his following to abandon ship.

Because they've already begun to 'buy in'. So pointing out that the would-be emperor is, it would seem, somewhat bereft of clothing ... just makes many all the more determined to dig in and declare they're definitely backing a winner here and never mind any purported 'evidence' to the contrary.

One of the (many) things George W. Bush proved was that you can, indeed, 'flunk' your way to victory. 

On The Actual Lessons Of Russian Equipment Losses In Ukraine

It has been said that a frequent problem of Wars Happening To Other People is that one learns decidedly the wrong lessons to be drawn from them.

This applies both to militaries - but also to other external observers. Particularly where there are 'propagandtastic' reasons for doing so.

The present conflict in Ukraine is already producing quite the escalating pile-up of these.

Yesterday's strike on the Russian flagship of the Black Sea Fleet - the Moskva - is going to be another one.

Except here's the thing.

There's been a lot of corresponding jubilance from Westerners (I am not going to say it's all Americans, but it has significantly seemed to be Americans) about this. That's understandable. Everybody likes backing the underdog.

But the way some of it has been phrased, is as if this event indicates that there's a laughably bad trait to Russian military hardware. And that a "real" warship, a "proper" warship, an "American" warship, would be untouchable by comparison.

Literally, the thing that sparked my mind here was seeing an American doing basically the above and attaching a picture of a current US aircraft carrier and declaring that if the Moskva was what the Russians thought a large warship was - well, this was what a REAL large warship looked like.

Personally, I saw something rather different - a large target.

And that's just the thing.

The reason the People's Republic of China is currently festooning various atolls and islands throughout the South China Sea with missile-batteries is because they see the same thing. A large, expensive, and vulnerable asset that has to get 'lucky' quite a few times in fending off a missile bombardment - whereas the side carrying out said bombardment only has to get lucky a very few times to do significant damage (or, contingent upon payload, potentially even sink the beast - certainly, necessitate a withdrawal back to port for quite some time).

Now, I am not going to suggest - as some have - that surface combatants are obsolete in modern naval operations. Quite the contrary. I think that there's definitely still a role for ships that only wind up underwater involuntarily in contemporary fleets - it just comes down rather heavily to what kind of environment they're operating in, and to what particular purpose they're being deployed. However that is an entire series of conversations for another time.

What I AM going to state - is that the problem encountered by the Russians with the Moskva is not something that necessarily indicates that Russian military hardware is somehow intrinsically bad. Although at the same time, I do think that a 40 year old cruiser in a modern war is going to encounter difficulties. And that any warship being hit in the magazine is in for a rough time - especially in rough seas amidst a storm.

The perilous situation of warships against guided missiles is not a novel one, either. During the Falklands War, the HMS Sheffield was hit by an Argentine-deployed Exocet missile - and while she did not sink as the immediate result of this impact (which may not have even featured the missile detonating), it did disable her, necessitate a complete crew evacuation, and lead to her having to be towed by another craft. It was this last action that actually coincided with the sinking (although it can be fairly argued that it was somewhat inevitable given the conditions and the rather prominent hole to her side from the missile impact).

This latter detail concords with the situation of the Moskva per Russian reports upon the matter - that it did indeed sink, but while being towed and in heavy seas.

As a point of interest, during the much-discussed 'Millennium Challenge' exercise carried out in 2002, which simulated an American invasion of a suspiciously similar to Iraq state, a US carrier battle group - nineteen ships - was virtually annihilated inside a few minutes by a single bombardment (which, to be sure, was comprised of not only missiles - but also an array of other attack-vectors, too).

Now, to be fair and sure - there are a few ... 'issues' (to put it politely) with the degree of extrapolative value for 'Millennium Challenge' to events twenty years later elsewhere on the tides of war. Leaving aside the claims about "cheating" that got made toward the US general who'd been running the not-Iraqi side, or the commentary around 'design flaws' in the simulation that made some things more viable than they might otherwise have proven in practice - the fact is that in theory there's two decades of additional development of naval active protection countermeasures that should make such a scenario less immediately applicable to today or to the American navy.

Of course ... how MUCH less applicable is a somewhat open question. And I would suspect rather thoroughly that few are eager to genuinely test it out in practice. Particularly as I also have little doubt that the weaponry and other such measures that would be deployed by the OPFOR in such a scenario would also have undergone some further development over the similar time-period. Something that's not just a matter for future potentially near-parity conflicts, like the People's Republic of China - but also a potent consideration as applies, say, the Islamic Republic of Iran today.

The point is - it's very easy to laugh at the Russians potentially losing a warship and imagine that the Americans (or some other Designated Protagonist faction) would do inestimably better in a similar circumstance. Ignoring that if the Russian hardware in question is 'inferior', it may perhaps be because it's a Soviet-era ship designed and built in the 1970s and 'modernised' in an era of severely 'lean times' for the Russian military after spending a decade out of commission through the 90s. And ignoring that even the best warships of the largest and most powerful navy of the modern world are similarly vulnerable to similar threats - and themselves quite actively concerned about exactly this prospect.

We could also speculate about the situation observed during Millennium Challenge pertaining to the actual simulated American invasion itself, in relation to the difficulties encountered by the Russians in their own real-life invasion of Ukraine.

I won't go into the details, but suffice to say that in order to be able to carry out a successful invasion of what was supposed to be a weaker opponent (simulating Iraq, after all) - as the Joint Forces Command report itself observes: "the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted."

I shall say that again: in order to carry out an invasion that didn't wind up producing a frankly embarrassing quotient of casualties and frustratingly slow progress, the Americans had to 'cheat' wildly and basically guarantee themselves a win. And that's against a theoretically much weaker (if, it would seem, very well lead) opposition.

Now apply that observation to the Ukrainian invasion, with a functionally close-parity opposition that's being actively resupplied by NATO. All of a sudden, the Russian performance starts to look, perhaps, a bit less 'hillaribad' via comparison to how an American or other NATO force might do in a similar situation.

But let us move back to hardware.

One area where there has been quite a lot of internet guffawing in recent weeks is, perhaps understandably, Russian armour.

The reasons for this are obvious. Social media has been saturated at various points with images of Russian tanks blown up, abandoned, being towed away by tractors, bogged down in mud, and so on and so forth.

We want to believe, in essence, that the only way they work is the same way various of the Germans insistently told us they work some eighty years ago - by swarming low-quality men and low-quality machines until the proverbial pack of hyenas has somehow managed to overwhelm the very few in number lions.

Except that's not really the case.

The (frequently encountered) German post-WWII historiography was, as others have pointed out, a rather ... self-serving situation. Part-explaining away their own shortcomings with an insistent bias (hence why the Soviets are simultaneously both overwhelming and somehow 'inferior'); part-telling their English-language (and particularly American defence establishment) audiences what they wanted to hear in relation to the then-current Soviet threat. Again, we won't go into all of that, but suffice to say a more sober analysis tended to show that the Red Army on the offensive wasn't just doing well because it had an awful lot of men and machines ... but also because these were men and machines of a rather better quality than their opponents would easily care to admit. And also capable of engaging in complex efforts of strategy and strategic deception that likewise weren't commensurate with the stereotypes their opponents insistently affixed to them. But more upon all of this some other time.

The point is - we have 'inherited' this kind of pop-pseudo-militaria analysis and run with it. And the idea is that because something is 'Russian' (or ex-Soviet), it therefore axiomatically HAS to be of inferior quality and a laughingstock.

In some cases, there may be some level of truth to this - but not in the manner one might initially think.

Soviet armour was designed in a very different way to various of its Western counterparts. The operational doctrine it was built to adhere to had different requirements. It really is one of those 'apples and oranges' situations to a certain extent.

However, it's also the case that when people start insistently comparing Russian armour losses in Ukraine to modern American military hardware to try and make out the former to be intrinsically terrible ... they're similarly being rather wildly unfair.

Why?

Because this often means discussing a tank built in the 1980s and with questionable modernization efforts in the intervening decades since - as compared to the latest, top-of-the-line ultra-modern hardware from, again, the most powerful nation upon this earth.

Of course the American vehicle is going to come out on top.

Except here's the thing.

What's destroying Russian vehicles in Ukraine? Man-portable anti-tank weapons. Modern, NATO-produced ATGMs.

Why does this matter? Because the truth is, once again, not that the experience in Ukraine around these demonstrates a 'Russian' problem - but rather, that it points toward a general problem

One that also afflicts other nations, and which cannot be easily handwaved away by declaring "oh, those are Russian tanks so they're inferior - it won't happen to us" (whomever the 'us' or 'US' / US-client in question might so happen to be).

I shall quote something brief I'd written about exactly this a few days ago:

"One significant issue is that the 'balance' between armour/maneuver (offence) and ranged-killing power (defence) has been severely disrupted. In a way, it's kinda reminiscent - to use a *very* loose example - of World War One. [and yes, i am deliberately massively oversimplifying with the labelling i'm deploying earlier in this paragraph]

Doctrine and hardware hasn't adapted to this change on one side, I mean.

So, what you're seeing is 3rd generation MBTs that were already rather outmoded in various ways - like, in service from the 1980s with various modernization efforts since ... being destroyed in significant numbers by ATGMs that are ... well, some are contemporary with their targets, others are much *much* more recent.

Now, the reason that this is worth noting is quite simple.

Turkey, as I have pointed out a few times elsewhere, managed to lose modern(ish) tanks in Syria. There's some controversy as to the purport of this, as the Turks were operating Leopard II A4s - and it hasn't been settled how much better more modern refits of the vehicle might have proven in the situations in question.

What did they lose them to? Many of the same threats that the Russians are losing hardware to in Ukraine. Indeed, not even 'the same threats' so much as older Russian / Soviet versions of such. It's not a good endorsement.

A similar situation is occurring in Yemen - wherein the Saudis are fielding (and losing) notable numbers of M1A2S American-made tanks. There's, again, something of an open question as to just how qualitatively different the M1A2S is from the M1A2 SEP when it comes to armour etc. ... but the point remains the same: it's relatively modern armour, being lost to potent anti-tank weaponry. Which is a helluvalot more concealable.

Now, none of this is presented as evidence of axiomatically 'bad' or 'weak' or 'stupid' American or German military or military design institutions. Partially because it doesn't suit a narrative to do so. And partially, to be sure, because it appears in the Saudi case in particular that poor doctrine and tactical employment - in ways that leave Western observers "wtf"ing - is responsible for placing armour in such situations in the first place.

But all up - it's long been apparent that in order to actually have armour assets playing a role on a battlefield where there's .. a profusion of these kinds of threats, it's simply not enough to have ERA bricks or even relatively advanced plating. Pending some truly revolutionary advances in the latter sphere, we're currently at a place wherein it's not easily possible for an armour platform to carry enough weight of armour on itself across enough of its body to protect against ATGM (or even, in various cases, RPG) threats.

What does this mean? Until there's broader uptake of active-protection measures - against reasonably well-equipped infantry, armour assets are 'out of balance' quite significantly.

Now, to be fair and sure - the Israelis *have* been very pointed in their exploring and deployment of exactly these kinds of countermeasures; and the Americans have been following suit. It is an interesting question whether they'd be in a similar position to the Russians currently were they faced with a similar 'hedgehog'.

While there's some debate as to how effective 'kamikaze drones' might be at getting through active protection efforts, I think it's a start."

In short - it's easy and evidently emotively satisfying to ascribe various occurrences to 'uniquely' terrible Russian hardware.

I do not dispute that equipment designed and built and haphazardly modernized over a course of several decades prior to the conflict it's being employed in is often going to encounter difficulties.

But the key thing is that many of the problems that have eventuated are decidedly not 'uniquely' Russian problems.

We are simply observing them as such because:

i) they're the ones currently putting forces into the field in an attempted invasion (and so they are occurring to them);

ii) the Ukrainian informational warfare effort has been a resounding success, and highlighted as much as possible both these difficulties and that it is Russians experiencing them.

Of course, it is certainly possible to argue that how the hardware in question has been employed has significantly contributed to these various losses. In many instances, I would not seek to disagree.

But that is quite a different argument from saying something is intrinsically shoddy simply because it is Russian.

And it also doesn't quite account for the fact that for various of these elements - even employing them at all has become significantly more hazardous than it was only a few years afore.

All things considered, whenever I see some of the more outlandish guffawing from social media (and even regular media) commentators of the sort outlined above and proffering American or NATO hardware as seemingly impervious to similar challenges ... my thoughts go to the following line - I forget where it is from, but the latin verse it is rendering is from Horace:

"The poet has Tantalus, unable to satisfy his hunger or his thirst, turning on the spectator and demanding, Quid rides? Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur: why do you laugh? Change the names and the story is about you."

Are We Heading For A "Comical Ali" Situation As Applies (Social) Media Sentiment Upon Ukraine?

 

Something which many have observed is that there is a bit of a .. dysjunction between what we might tactfully term 'enthusiasm' about Ukraine 'driving back' Russia, being able to 'win' the war, etc. etc. ... and the actual facts of the conflict as they become apparent day to day.

That is natural. People have a side that is the underdog - and everybody likes an underdog, especially if it has been attacked.

We also have a natural desire to believe 'Good News'. The Ukrainians have weaponized this (and to be sure - this is not something unique to them. Pretty much every power or group in history has done something similar even where they are winning), and put out some very, very "would make for an excellent movie" style 'information' that has later turned out to be almost unbelievable ... precisely because it actually was, as it happened, blatantly false.

Some of that may even not be deliberate - but the result of that much-invoked concept 'the fog of war'. But much of it almost certainly is, at best, 'willfully' ignorant of the actual realities being avoided in the process.

And, as I say - this is not a specific thing to the Ukrainians, it is not meant as some sui generis moral injunction against them alone. If I or anybody else was in a position of my country being invaded, and all I could do to try and keep the fire alive and enlist desperately needed foreign assistance was entirely artificially manufacture a narrative of 'we're already unbelievably winning!' - well, it is not hard to see how these things take hold.

However, as the Russian advance continues to grind from East to West, as Cities fall or are encircled in areas that were supposedly victoriously retaken by the Ukrainians - and as contemptuous remarks about Russian troops behaving like WWII Soviet Pulp depictions and/or Orcs as cannon-fodder [i.e. incapable of complex thought, tactics, and therefore victory] ... give way to what appears to be a rather impressive operational double-envelopment which cuts off Ukraine's biggest concentration of forces in the East ...

The question is left hanging: how are the people who are currently still enthusiastically cheering on Ukraine as the 'plucky little country that could!' going to react to all of this?

At present, people sharing facts about the Ukrainian military situation are easy to dismiss as 'puppets' of Putin - as Kremlin-sponsored bots, and all the rest of it. If you don't like what you hear, you simply say that it is false and malicious propaganda.

However, sooner rather than later, this conflict is going to produce its own spectacle of a 'Comical Ali' (also known as 'Baghdad Bob' - and more accurately as Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Minister of Information under Saddam Hussein in Iraq).

Apparently, many are too young to recall this person - but we remember well the circumstances in 2003, wherein this Governmental mouthpiece would give the most outlandish briefings. Boldly declaring that American troops were dying, defecting, deserting in the hundreds if not the thousands - and that they were nowhere near cities or strongpoints which had, in fact, fallen or become the subject of fierce fighting earlier in the day or week aforehand.

This reached apexes of ridicularity when he tried the *same thing* in Baghdad - continuing to insist that the city was safe and that the invaders were / had been repulsed ... even as you could begin to see American armour appearing *literally in the background* of where he was standing.

This is where we are heading with Ukraine and the 'piquant' informational picture coming out of various people speaking about it now.

Then, as now, the side getting invaded had a very ... piquant propaganda engine dedicated to convincing people they were winning.

The major difference now is that instead of Comical Ali being ridiculed every time he gets up to speak - people are enthusiastically buying into that narrative.

We are, as it were, on the 'other side of the glass' from where we used to be.

On Recent Unwarranted Excitement About Estimated Russian Losses In Ukraine

Earlier today I saw some excitement from people in response to a US DoD assessment that the Russian military in Ukraine was, and I quote, "95% still intact" as of yesterday. This was taken by some of those commenting on the article as their having suffered 5% losses - and seemingly, thousands of Russian KIAs as a result.

The inference people drew from the headline was, perhaps understandably, that the Russians were going very badly.

Except here's the thing. That's not at all what any of this indicates.

We'll start with the obvious one - the presumption that "95% still intact" means one man in every twenty that the Russians had sent in is now dead or severely wounded. That is not the case.

Measuring the combat power of formations has never simply been an exercise in calculating how many men you've got left as compared to when you started. And the increasing saliency of hardware over the millennia has added significant complexity and nuance to proceedings.

Indeed, speaking of equipment - it is not even necessary for a tank, say, to be destroyed for it to be removed from the tally of 'intact' elements. A perhaps (un)surprisingly high quotient of Allied armour in the later Second World War was rendered combat-ineffective via mechanical problems or damage to other systems such as the main gun.

This obviously meant that it would be less- or even un-able to participate in its intended role, and therefore in that sense, sure, combat power of its parent unit is degraded.

Except there is quite a difference between a tank being destroyed outright - and a tank not being present for a phase of operations due to something which is repairable and which sees it back at the front in the not-too-distant future.

So no, no 5% of Russian combat power no longer being "intact" does not mean one in twenty Russian troops deployed to Ukraine are currently dead or wounded. Although I have no doubt that in some formations there will indeed have been significant casualties.

In fact, that's one of the things which is probably distorting the overall picture people are drawing from all of this.

Russian VDV operations in the early days of the conflict saw ... very high losses of men and material - and were, as we had remarked at the time, frankly bizarre that they had been attempted in the manner involved.

The losses during the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to seize Antonov airbase (Hostomel) at the start of the invasion are unconfirmed, but near-certain to have been significant given its recapture by the Ukrainians. A similar pattern appears to have played out at Vasylkiv; and this is before we consider the Ukrainian claim of having downed two Russian Il-76 transports, at least one of which was reportedly carrying a full contingent of paratroopers.

Why I say that these may have been 'distortionary' - is because those are ... not insignificant losses, entailing several hundred men and associated equipment, suffered in the first two to three days.

Which, if you're just looking at total figures overall, may lead to unwarranted presumptions as to how things have gone subsequent to that.

Now, the other point which is vital to make is that a 5% loss of combat power over fifteen days of intensive military operations for an attacker is ... not unexpected. Particularly given many of the current battlezones are located in and around urban areas, terrain where offensive operations are notoriously costly.

Hence, of course, the frequent preference of modern militaries to engage in sustained aerial, artillery and/or missile bombardment of such places prior to - or even in lieu of - a direct ground assault.

In this regard, the Anglo-American lead Coalition's efforts during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq may prove interestingly instructive - with, at its height, an oft-quoted figure of 1,700 aerial bombing and missile strikes in a single day carried out largely against urban-proximate targets; and sustained use of both conventional and cluster munitions persisting for days after that.

Of course, the British, American, Australian, etc. actions must be contextualized - the idea having been to minimize Coalition casualties not so much through simply producing a flattened battlespace, as both breaking the Iraqi will to resist (the crux of the so-called "Shock And Awe" doctrine) and carrying out destruction of particular targets (potentially including one Al Jazeera office in Baghdad) in ways which did not therefore (at least .. in theory) necessitate the direct involvement of ground troops.

The reason that these instances are instructive, is because they represent a fundamentally different approach to what we have seen from the Russians in Ukraine - thus far.

There have most certainly been both aerial and artillery bombardments of urban areas carried out by Russian forces.

However, these have not been at the scale and scope anticipated of them for a hypothetical 'full scale' war. Which is not to suggest that these attacks are not serious nor highly destructive - only to emphasize that the Russians would doctrinally be almost expected to be far more so in these regards (particularly in terms of the usage of artillery as a primary force vector).

One explanation which has been advanced by some Western analysts is that the seeming low scale of Russian aerial bombardment sorties is due to some alleged incapacity on the part of the Russian air force to actually carry out complex and frequent combat air operations.

This is clearly incorrect, as the relatively recent Russian record in Syria (which featured in some cases over a hundred sorties a day, and an average in the 40s) amply demonstrates.

It might be tempting to presume that the smaller involvement of Russian air power in Ukraine as compared to Syria may be due to concerns about the relative strength of Ukraine's remaining anti-air capacity - however this, too, does not feel like the full answer.

Instead, I would contemplate whether the seemingly 'scaled back' deployment of Russian air power might stem from the same reason that their use of artillery has appeared likewise to be less prominent (although steadily increasing).

Namely, that their initial invasion approach was something of an opposite one to the American-led 'Shock And Awe' ethos. Albeit, it would seem, still possessing a certain element of that same "we'll be greeted as liberators" decidedly wishful thinking.

Whether due to their own observation of the fairly direct consequences of Western militaries' enthusiasm for bombardments (i.e. - a marked uptick in the ordinary people who now have a very, very good reason to choose to become insurgents, considerably frustrating a long-term occupation effort) or out of a desire to avoid the overwhelmingly negative PR which comes with utilizing highly destructive weaponry in built-up civilian-inhabited areas, the Russians appear to have 'held back' [a very, very relative term indeed] somewhat on these approaches, in favour of the direct application of ground assets.

Something which seems to have cost them a fair amount of that 5% we started out this piece discussing, partially explicating their seeming shift toward greater employment of artillery currently.

In closing, I feel it is useful to draw attention to the two tables that I've attached here as an image. They're from relatively outdated (but still useful) US Army internal documents, and as you can see they discuss anticipated losses (both combat and otherwise) in various types of engagement and over relatively short (up to five days) and longer timescales - measured in daily and monthly casualty rates respectively.




Now, 1959 (when these were published) is a long while ago, and it can be fairly argued that warfare's changed in a number of ways over that time (in particular, improvements in battlefield medicine improving survivability ... as weighed against ever more lethal weaponry).

Further, these figures were likely the result of US analysis of the then relatively recent experiences of World War Two and the Korean War - that is to say, conflicts often characterized by 'parity' or 'near-parity' opponents ... even if specific engagements within either could be decidedly otherwise.

Yet while it can definitely be asserted that at the strategic level, Ukraine and Russia are decidedly not 'parity' opponents - in terms of the forces that were sent into Ukraine, the relative disparity in various areas between them and their opponents is arguably much smaller.

I therefore suspect that, as a very rough guide, there may yet be some probative value for its utilization here.

So, assuming that the American Department of Defense is reasonably accurate in their assessment that Russia had 'only' retained approximately 95% of the combat power it has brought to bear in Ukraine ... after fifteen days of offensive operations, I am not sure that a 5% reduction in overall combat power - which, again, does not equate to a 5% figure for casualties amidst the invaders - is actually that unexpected.

Indeed, juxtaposed against the sentiment which has seemingly taken root in some areas that Ukraine might somehow actually win this war based on how things look from tiktok videos shared to social media, it may seem seriously surprising to some that the figures are not much higher.





Concordantly, given the serious scale of the Russian invasion force, some might also suggest that even 5% of that being out of the fight (one way or another) should present a truly staggering amount of manpower and material to have been lost or incapacitated over just over a two week period.

From our individual human perspective, it almost unquestionably is.

Yet that is what modern, conventional warfare regularly entails - and more.

I would say "it is well that it is so rare, then" - except given current events both there in Ukraine, as well as the numerous smaller-scale conflicts also going on elsewhere (Yemen, for example), it is worth noting that the 'rarity' is a decidedly localized phenomenon. 

On Luxon's Muscovite Specter Speech Purportedly Haunting The Nation

Like various recent National Party leaders before him, Christopher Luxon appears to have a bit of difficulty Reading The Room.

It's a remark of general application, however in this specific case the room in question is "a modest Moscow flat".

Confused? So's he. Why? Because The Numbers Don't Add Up.

Luxon found himself in that modest Moscow flat at some point after he joined Unilever, and was touring the world meeting "management" of that company as he slowly edged his way up the soapy pole. It's possible that I (and David Cormack, whom I note beat me to the idea for this piece) am in error about this, but I somehow don't think that Luxon was in Moscow during the era of anything which might feasibly be termed "Socialism".

Most likely, considering he joined the company in 1993 and spent the first few years based in Wellington (where, to be sure, he may have wandered down Cuba Street and felt a bit lost in both time and space), he probably ventured over to Moscow when he was based out of London from 2000-2003.

Now if that's the case, then I can certainly agree that he likely encountered quite the swathe of "misery" in that town - however, with somewhere between ten and thirteen years since the fall of the USSR, and up to a decade since the associated dismantling of the Soviet economic system ... is it really fair to say that the "misery" in question was "created" by "socialism"?

I'm not so sure. I suppose it comes down to how much you blame the Soviet system for existing - and therefore providing the opportunity for undoing said system in a really, really damaging way. Which, perhaps not uncoincidentally, also saw a fairly massive-scale transfer of wealth from the state to a very small number of private citizens - whilst for ordinary Russians life got significantly worse. A bit of an interesting thing given Luxon's major theme in yesterday's speech was the apparent 'necessity' of several billion dollars of tax cuts which will only benefit the wealthy (that is - the top 3% of income earners), and which we can fairly assume to be accompanied by constraints in state support and spending.

In the five years from 1989 to 1994, average Russian life expectancy went backwards by nearly five years - that is to say, Russians died, on average, five years earlier under that phase of the Market's unfurling as compared to under the previous Soviet system. Life expectancy wouldn't recover to pre-1990 levels in Russia until 2011 - almost a full generation after the Market began to be rolled out in earnest. This compares rather unfavourably, it must be said, with the situation of the USSR from, say, 1950 to 1965 - where life expectancy relatively shot up from just over 50 through to just under 68 ... and, I suppose, comparing either of those numbers to the average pre Soviet Union, which appears to have never made it past the early 30s.

We often do not quite adequately appreciate that for all its (numerous) faults, the USSR did manage to take an expanse of what would barely be Third World conditions today, and not only put a man in space less than 40 years later but also manage to make meaningful improvements in quality of life for its citizenry as well. We often fall into something of a trap of choosing to measure Soviet (and Russian) achievements in these spheres relative to a yardstick derived from the (theoretically) most materially abundant society on the planet - America; rather than appreciating just what kind of a 'dirt floor' the USSR built itself up from. In fact, not just a 'dirt floor' - but a floor on fire, when the immense devastation of the Second World War is taken into consideration.

The point is, by the late 1990s, it had become abundantly clear that the Market had not brought the fabled prosperity promised by the modern Western economics textbook. For many it was quite the opposite. Shortly before Luxon likely arrived in Moscow, for instance, unemployment was in double-digit figures - around 13% in 1999. Going back a bit further, we'll just quote this paper from the British Medical Journal verbatim:

"The report Transition 1999 stated that suicide rates have climbed steeply too, by 60% in Russia, 80% in Lithuania, and 95% in Latvia since 1989.

But behind the self destructive behaviour, the authors say, are economic factors, including rising poverty rates, unemployment, financial insecurity, and corruption. Whereas only 4% of the population of the region had incomes equivalent to $4 (£2.50) a day or less in 1988, that figure had climbed to 32% by 1994. In addition, the transition to a market economy has been accompanied by lower living standards (including poorer diets), a deterioration in social services, and major cutbacks in health spending.

“What we are arguing,” said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report’s contributors, “is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars. The sudden shock and what it did to the system … has effectively meant that five million [Russian men’s] lives have been lost in the 1990s.” Using Britain and Japan with their ratio of 96 men to every 100 women as the base population, the report’s authors have calculated that there are now some 9.6 million “missing men” in the former communist bloc. “The typical patterns are that a man loses his job and develops a drinking problem,” said Mr Noman. “The women then leave and the men die, first emotionally and then physically.”

So that's what Luxon was in amidst when he "[remembers] sitting in a modest Moscow flat with a couple in their late 40s on a dark and snowy afternoon."

Sure sounds like "actually created misery" - although other than the weather (it's probably a bit hard to be cheery on a "dark and snowy afternoon"), there seems a curious lack of any mention for any then-contemporary causations for the malaise Luxon observed there at the time. Probably because it wouldn't fit his narrative today.

What's that narrative? A proverbial red flag. That Labour, having steered us remarkably well (if not, it must be said, always perfectly - they are human, as are we) through a global pandemic (which we are still traversing) through the judicious use of the powers of state effectively unprecedented in peace-time ... are somehow "Socialists". In fact, more than that ... Soviet Socialists. Via inferency, aligned to "Moscow" - which, given events of this past week and a half, is a toponym which carries quite some additional 'dark' (and perhaps 'snowy') connotations to it.

Perhaps he wants to pick up from his previous big speech (curiously enough, also on the 'state of the nation') - the one in which he set out his belief that we ought to "sympathise with some of the issues being raised by protesters on Parliament's grounds without being framed as condoning illegal behaviour or siding with anti-science conspiracy theorists." I'm sure he could borrow a "Cindy Stalin" hammer-and-sickle adorned placard from some of his friends-of-friends from the fringier bits of Groundswell if he gets sick of trying to do the subtle thing with his rhetoric.

In any case, Luxon ought be careful about basing his 'reckons' for Middle New Zealand off one conversation in a Moscow flat. Polling has fairly consistently shown that a majority of Russians ... actually think the Soviet system being dismantled was a bad thing. This isn't some heavily manipulated and unreliable propaganda survey, either - other than the Levada annual polling on the question, you've also got the well-regarded Pew Research Center findings. In fact, especially according to the latter, the number of Russians who view the transition to the market system as being a good thing has been steadily declining year upon year - hitting about 38% in 2019 per Pew. Of additional interest is another pattern in the figures - it's the people who actually grew up and lived under the Soviet system that are chiefly driving the numbers there. The young generation who had no experience of the Soviet system are the ones that are most likely to say they think the new market economy was a good move - as they've never known anything else.

But we are not here to make the case for (or, for that matter, against) the Soviet Union. It was a faraway country, with a culture and a system that bore little resemblance to anything we might find here in New Zealand - even the famed 'Dancing Cossacks' of a previous National election campaign are simply a two dimensional caricature. Much like Luxon's rhetoric here, and no doubt pertaining to a great many things.

The point is a simple one. If Luxon wants to audition for the role of Prime Minister of New Zealand, he'd do a better job if the concerns he sought to represent were those of regular New Zealanders. Not 40something Muscovites some twenty-ish years ago who, as it turns out, may not have been all that representative of ordinary Russians even then.

There is a certain segment of the New Zealand body-politic - the armpit of democracy, we may perhaps call them, after the sounds they seem to make for jocularity-value upon talkback radio for puerile self-amusement purposes - who probably do, either genuinely or reasonably enthusiastically facetiously, believe that New Zealand 'runs the risk' of becoming some sort of "Communist" state. Or that there's some meaningful coterminity to be evinced between Putin rolling armoured vehicles into Ukraine and the NZ Police deploying riot shields and a fire-hose against a protest featuring a literal dumpster fire last week.

Some of those were the sort of people so unduly concerned about "Communism" here in New Zealand and a creeping surveillance state with Orwellian characteristics, that they immediately chose to go and set themselves up a commune, in public view and with extensive round-the-clock live-streaming of their every move whilst attempting to redefine reality to fit on an hourly if not minute-by-minute basis. Often whilst boldly declaring their vigorous intent to defend our democracy ... by 'temporarily' overthrowing it and potentially holding some very Soviet-Stalinist seeming Show-Trials into the bargain.

Luxon was quite rightly pilloried not all that long ago for attempting to wade into that particular 'debate' and designating 'Well Both Sides Have A Point' as an attempted 'wedge politics' against not only our Government, but also the broad majority of the people of New Zealand heartily unimpressed with that sad opposition-for-opposition's-sake spectacle recently occuring in Wellington (I mean the protest-camp here, not the National Party for a change).

He's probably - or, rather, his focus-groupers - identified a bit of a seam of disgruntlement out there in the electorate, one which is currently extant effectively as a few embers, but which his handlers hope could be blown upon to get it to grow and inflame into a more American-style political combustion with enough effort and spurious soundbitery. Something somewhat availed, for rhetorical-symbological purposes by the fact that the past week and a half's developments in geopolitics appear to have put us squarely back in the 80s in various regards.

Expect, over the next year and a half, Luxon to continue to needle along exactly these lines in various subtle (or not-so-subtle) hues.

How effective will it be?

Well, that's over to you. 

On Coster's Covid Convoy Strategy

Over the weekend, I tapped out the following:

"In what's going to be my most controversial take this month ... I actually think that Police Commissioner Andrew Coster's apparent strategy of "this'll go down easier if we just let the whole thing implode of its own accord rather than go in swinging" might be entirely (if painfully - for Wellington) correct."

At the time, it seemed a statement against the grain. Hashtags demanding Coster's resignation were trending on Twitter. Wellingtonians (even the ones not on Twitter) seemed almost as aggrieved at the police for a lack of action against the protest as they were against the protest itself. The sentiments advanced by some of the commentariat in the Sunday (and Saturday) papers seemed to suggest they weren't alone in this - except, of course, for the curious fact that various of those media mouthpieces seemed to be sotto-voce cheering on the protest specifically because it was causing optics difficulty for the Government and our Covid-19 public health response. 

However, I had cautious cause for optimism on Coster's behalf. Saturday had seen a rather dramatic occurrence - the revelation that some ... unthinking protester had chosen to turn the nation's Cenotaph into an impromptu ablution block for the protest campsite. This was received in pretty much all quarters about as well as one might expect - as if there is one thing pretty much every New Zealander not of some sort of Anarchist proclivity tends to agree upon, it's the sacrosanct status of the ANZAC legacy. 

I sensed, therefore, that this was likely a bit of a turning point in terms of the 'momentum' (in)surging into the mainstream of the protest narrative. 

And also noted that it seemed plausible Coster's strategy had been drawn from that of Napoleon - who famously remarked one should "never interrupt your opponent when he's in the middle of making a mistake." 

Subsequent developments seem to have confirmed this - with news stories out about the same time discussing how a citizen-media team who'd gone to visit and film the protest in order to show them to be non-violent ... had been assaulted and "beaten to a pulp"; whilst the next day brought an extended press release from the groups at the center of the Convoy effectively stating that they had little actual control over the protest (to the point that they couldn't even ensure access for trucks to service the portaloos at the site), and that movements toward 'negotiation' were a "deflection". 

Monday continued this trend, with the 'moral high ground' almost certainly not being held by the side throwing its own excrement about the place. 

However, while it's certainly one thing to observe the 'momentum' of the movement seemingly fizzle in the harsh glare of public scrutiny of what they're actually about and like (at least, on the 'fringes') - this isn't quite the same thing as doing something meaningful about the escalating sprawl of tents, cars, and placards which have been steadily encircling further and further around both Parliament and Wellington's key central city governmental locations. Particularly in light of the shuffling around of cars and other potential obstacles which had been taking place toward the end of last week by the protesters in order to entrench themselves further against anticipated towing action.

That, instead, was provided via the rollout of a series of concrete barricades pre-Dawn on Monday Morning. 

Which we may surmise to be a rather interesting development for the 'Non-Violent Enforcement' approach. One of simply giving the protesters what they want.

"We've barricaded ourselves in!"

"Yes. You're barricaded in."

"HEY! YOU CAN'T JUST BARRICADE US IN LIKE THAT!"

"You barricaded yourselves in - we're just agreeing with you."

As it happens, this concords rather well with something I'd been thinking about a few days earlier - namely, what one does when one finds one's self having to raise a siege in more conventional conflict terms. 

I'll spare you the extended military history discursions that conjured in my mind about this point and just skip straight to the answer I'd arrived at - you place the siege, itself, under siege. 

Now at this point, we are going to sidestep for a moment into discussing just how this whole 'Protest' ethos appears to have come into being. Via a handy metaphor provisioned for us through the realms of physics. Which, yes, also helps to explain what's going to happen next and why Coster's strategy is likely to work. 

My general typology for what's been going on both politically and physically is ... a gas. Now, gas differs from liquids and solids, insofar as it can be compressed into a smaller area - which raises pressure as the molecules go pinging bouncing off the walls faster.

The situation we've witnessed in NZ politics over the past year and a half - has seen the 'space' various people or political forces feel they occupy .. reduced quite markedly. Because Labour and Labour-support(ish) has expanded so massively - along with a seriously impressive degree of support for the accompanying Covid-19 public health measures they've presided over. 

While some have adapted to this by effectively 'splitting the difference' and attempting to co-occupy (er..poor choice of words) space Labour is perceived to hold - others have adapted to a self-perceived shrinking habitat by going gas - and pinging off walls with escalating speed. 

A good example of this is probably to be found by looking at the National Party from time to time. After a number of 'false starts', they realized that attempting to carve meaningful votes off Labour by pushing for 'business as usual' to resume as swiftly as possible, or for that matter, by heading into conspiratorial territory ... was not really a good starter. And so they instead shifted to a general attack strategy (as exemplified by Chris Bishop) of taking something the Government was going to do eventually, and complaining that it hadn't been done faster or better in some fashion. 

That's that 'splitting the difference' and 'co-occupying space' approach. 

The other avenue, however, is exemplified by former National MP Matt King, who's effectively become a billboard for 'the path not taken' by going from overtly opposing in both social media post and deed, the personal distancing rules that were in place in 2020 while he was still a Member of Parliament ... through to quitting National in order to return to Parliament in a decidedly other capacity a few days ago as a would-be leader of the Convoy movement, following a rather piquant interview with the NZ Herald about some of his more curious beliefs in related areas. 

Phrased another way and more succinctly - a lot of these guys feel like they're increasingly marginalized, and so they're 'acting out' precisely because of it.

Now all of that's utterly uncontroversial in the political sense .. but it gets interesting in the physical sense.

Because at present, there's apparently 30+ groups involved in this thing, plus a lot of people who aren't part of one. I have no idea how many 'factions' there might be, but we do know various of these don't like each other & have confronted each other from time to time.

Provided the protest had significant space it could 'move into' and expand, that presented less of an issue. You could set up another semi-hub for your particular crew of people just by pitching a tent somewhere less congested or parking up down the road.

However, by significantly restricting the available area for this kind of activity to, effectively, that which has already been claimed ... it introduces a resourcing constraint (one of several if doughnut-trucks can't get in, figuratively speaking) for an already overpopulated habitat. 

What does overpopulation in a resource / territory constrained zone produce? Conflict.

What was there already? Conflict.

What has the revelation one protest-leader (former NewCons leader Leighton Baker) was aware of and engaged with by the police about the barricades going in ahead of time contributed to? Conflict.

What will likely cause protesters to feel 'it isn't fun' and pack up? Conflict.

Internal conflict. Replacing that joyous sense that you're all part of some big movement swimming in the same direction, with the sense that instead you've somehow found yourself in amidst three-to-three-dozen mistrustful camps that spend almost as much time sniping at each other as they do at the Government. 

So, to quote me some Sun Tzu - "Your opponent is Choleric - Irritate Him".

Or, with these guys "Your opponent is likely really keen on Conspiracy Theorizing. Give him a reason to distrust the hell out of his neighbour / establishing leadership".

The concrete barricades are also good for another purpose. 

The protest-groups' press-release on Sunday indicated they were already having notable difficulty ensuring that vehicles were able to come and go to carry out essential things like servicing the portaloos. The rather radical solution of physically disposing of the human waste in question by flinging it at Her Majesty's Constabulary evidently proving inadequate to the task of shoveling sufficient quotients for the hundreds of people on site. 

Vehicles looking to get in to the Convoy's occupation space are now no longer going to be able to come-and-go as convenient. The police control the access-points in. Those are their barricades. As an associate observed - that means they now have 'Leverage'. 

Up to the Weekend, Coster's strategy was what appeared to be a valiant (if flawed) effort at what I call the coke-bottle analogy. 

You know the one.

When confronted with a coke bottle that's been shaken up, there are two ways of handling the problem. 

You can twist off the lid completely - resulting in a sticky mess everywhere. All the pressure that's built up explodes outward all at once. Or - you twist off the cap a bit at a time - allowing pressure to come out gradually.

Coster had resiled from the level of force required to twist the cap off all at once, quite understandably, because apart from the possible question as to whether he had sufficient resources in place to actually forcibly evict the occupation once it got past the first day or two ... such a spectacle would almost certainly just have lead to a bigger problem elsewhere or elsewhen. The protesters themselves overtly pointed to the 120+ arrests on the Thursday (the 10th of February) as an effective 'galvanizer' of their own internal cohesion and a useful recruitment tool through footage of same going up online. 

In other words - their 'narrative' had found its ogre, its antagonist ... and continuing to play that role would be continuing to play into both their hands and that narrative position, strengthening same. 

His preference, it would seem, when it became clear how well the previous approach was going (i.e. insufficient force being deployed to clear the protest, very sufficient force being deployed to look antagonistic in so doing) - was to go for the latter option. The gentle and delayed release of pressure through smaller cap-twists. 

Except it ran into the obvious issue that pressure wasn't actually being decreased. People continued to arrive at the protest, and as mentioned above, it would seem that a semi-deliberate strategy of moving to encircle Parliament and various important sites in the area had gotten well underway. 

To return to our metaphor - it does little good to gently twist the cap of the coke-bottle part-way around if somebody is still shaking the coke bottle the whole time and somehow adding more coke into the mix as well. 

The barricades - those of the Police rather than those of the protesters - are, therefore, a welcome 'breathing room'.

They are not, in and of themselves, a full-scale solution. However they do facilitate a gradual de-escalation by hopefully helping to constrain the mean level of 'new coke' flowing in; whilst also creating internal conditions that will potentially encourage some people inside to start flowing back out at their own pace. 

And whilst it's very easy to cast a baton-equipped police officer as an 'antagonist' in one's own preferred flavouring of post-modern morality play ... it's a lot harder to vent the same kind of animus toward an inanimate cement block. 

At every stage of this pandemic, New Zealand has somehow managed to come out the 'least-worst' (indeed, in various cases, actually rather well - our life expectancy going up, for one example; unemployment hitting an absolute historic low, another) of much of the world with what we've attempted and accomplished. 

It hasn't been through luck (although yes, most certainly, that's helped in places and in parts), but rather through the people making decisions making decent and well-informed ones. Eventually, in some cases, but eventually nonetheless. 

Andrew Coster came to national prominence not for being appointed Police Commissioner - but rather, for being attacked by the Opposition as some sort of 'Wokester' and adhering to a doctrine (apparently known in the Anglosphere and practiced in various forms since the 1800s, not that you'd know it) known as 'policing by consent'. 

For the longest time, it had seemed that he was a man whose prevailing principles had seemed prospectively ill-fitting for the circumstances he had found himself in. Or maybe that's just what the media-political spin sought to suggest. 

Yet Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Man - it may just be that he and his approach might prove the unexpected exact right instrument for handling this current Covid Convoy quagmire. 

He would appear to have already headed off the kinds of escalation which some overseas countries have experienced with their own local 'Convoy' occurrences (or other anti-Governmental pseudo-uprisings) - and for that, I think we should be grateful. 

Will he be the man to preside over what brings about the Convoy's further withering into wittering obscurity and eventual disapparation? 

Well, we'll just have to wait and see what tomorrow (and the next day) brings.

On The Impending Media Push To Present Parliamentary Protesters As Ordinary

The excerpt in the image below comes from part of the lead story in the weekend's Sunday Star Times.

It paints a picture of the protesters currently occupying Parliament's lawn in decidedly more nuanced terms than the protestors often seem to believe the media interested in doing. 




Now, the reason that I find this interesting is because of the context of this presentation. Both in terms of where it was in that day's newspaper, but also how it represents a bit of a 'crystalization' of a trend for media portrayal of the protest. 

What do I mean by this? 

Well, we'll start with the second point first. Over the past few days there's been a definite emphasis on the part of some commentators to push the line that the protesters, while they might appear to be a rambunctious rabble of general conspiracy-theory toting ne'er-do-wells ... "actually have a point". 

Just what that "point" is may vary somewhat from mouthpiece to mouthpiece, but effectively seems to boil down to "the Government's done the wrong thing", with a specific flavouring of "vaccine mandates, Traffic Light Settings, and other Omicron-era control measures are too restrictive / actively harmful", and a side-order of "time to start Learning To Live With The Virus". 

Except, of course, not 'learning to live with the virus' in the way that we'd been intending to, nor in the way that Singapore et co are attempting to manage it. You get the idea. 

Now how much of said 'flavouring' depends quite strongly upon the individual columnist or commentator. Some basically just want to go for the 'lightly seasoned' option of presenting it as being a Government comms issue that's 'legitimate' to voice opposition to - others want to go rather further.

This brings us to my second point - the first one I'd mentioned, around where this charming excerpt was to be found within the context of Sunday's Star Times. 

Elsewhere on the page was a story about how, surprise surprise, the Government's Covid-control measures had allegedly 'gone too far' and were now actively 'counterproductive'. 

The 'meat' of this piece was provided via perspectives from two people representing rather different groups: somebody from the hospitality sector, lamenting the manner in which 'fear' was contributing to people not patronizing restaurants and the like; and a doctor, talking about how understandable caution from people about going out into the community with Omicron circulating had lead to a rather significant reduction in the number of people making appointments to see their GP. 

Predictably, the front page highlight talking about the article lead with the picture and soundbite from the doctor - a public health perspective, and a not unwarranted one. And then spent only a smaller portion toward the end of the actual article itself on what he had to say - instead giving over its mainstay to the unrelated commentary around the retail sector suffering due to people not wanting to go out and socialize in the midst of a pandemic. A classic bait-and-switch - and attempt to conflate a commercial issue with a public health one (because yes, people not engaging with primary healthcare providers can contribute to rather more important problems than a bar being underpatronized). 

Now, we've been down these styles of cycleway many, many times before over the course of the pandemic. 

This is partially why we so frequently find heads of business associations, and prominent figures of the hospitality industry given such prominence in media pieces talking about the pandemic response. Because it's one of the areas where you can actually point to and say "see all this saving lives? It's got a Cost Attached." 

Various media have also been very keen to try and present the situation in more 'popular' terms - not as something between small and sectorally interested groups against the dominant public will, but rather as the general public being divided in amidst itself. 

You can see this in the reporting in the Herald from 2020, for example, discussing our then second lockdown. They'd declared Auckland to be seriously "divided" over the decision to extend the Level 3 phase. 

Except when you looked closer at it ..., and as I said about the time - 

"You might be forgiven for thinking that this meant somewhere around a fifty fifty split of opinion on the matter.

Here’s the actual split:

75% of Aucklanders thought that the extension of lockdown was “appropriate”. This was made up of 56% who were simply fine with the extension – and a further 19% who wanted the lockdown to go longer.

Meanwhile, that 25% of opponents was made up of 14% for a shorter lockdown, and 9% for the lockdown shouldn’t have been initiated at all.

That’s three-to-one support for the lockdown. And yet somehow this is a serious degree of “division”.

Meanwhile, New Zealanders overall supported the most recent Lockdown by a ratio of more than four to one – 62% in favour of the lockdown we had, 19% in favour of an even further extended lockdown, 10% for a shorter lockdown, and only 6% for no lockdown at all.

Technically a 3-1 majority for Lockdown means “divided” , sure – as does a 4-1 majority.

But it sure does sound rather different when you phrase it like that, frame it like that, rather than OVERWHELMING MAJORITY SUPPORTS THE GOVERNMENT’S COVID-19 MANAGEMENT”.

So how does all of that pertain to this description of the protestors on Parliament's front lawn?

Simple. 

At the moment, the protestors are a very vocal 'battering ram'. They won't, by themselves, force the Government to abandon sensible Covid-19 control measures. What they can be 'weaponized' to do is exactly the same thing that the Brian Tamaki MC'd 'freedom rally' shenanigans of a few months ago can be co-opted for - attempting to make very strident opposition to said "let's actually live like we're in a pandemic" measures seem like something that's an ordinary person perspective. Not one that's effectively relegated to a few hundred people on a patch of grass who are outnumbered by an order of magnitude every day by the number of Kiwis choosing to get a Booster. 

Why? 

Because, as the Sunday Star itself  told you on the very same page - New Zealanders continuing to take the virus seriously is imposing an economic cost on some business owners. 

It's also continuing to considerably buoy the Labour party's popularity - and keep National down in the low 30% range. People remember. 

So, if you want to 'circuit-break' Labour seeming a champion of ordinary New Zealanders, our health and welfare ... presenting some very ordinary New Zealanders in amidst the very-hard-to-ignore decidedly abnormal ones at the Parliament protest is an ideal way to do this.

The mind extrapolates on its own, and places things in their own kind of order - conveying a sense that there's some broad 'consensus' of both ordinary people and ordinary business-owners gradually coalescing in unity against the Ardern-led Government, mask requirements and vaccination mandates and a 'climate of fear' about going out for dinner etc.

It doesn't have to be true. It just has to look like it might be plausible. And then the hope is that events start taking on the characteristics plotted out for them all of their own accord. 

Because the previous approach, of media and media-platformed talking heads, basically shrilly scolding the general public for taking the pandemic too seriously and being too keen on Labour in significant consequence of that, has not worked. 

And in the absence of a genuine mass movement to overturn the Government or its Covid-control measures ... you make do with what you've got instead.

A few hundred people who've managed to 'Annoy Wellington', most definitely ... and suitably 'airbrushed' to highlight the less odious elements within the general protestor milieu. 

Will it work?

That remains to be seen. 

However, even though it is situated in amidst nearly half a dozen more 'actively empathizable' vox-pops, the guy claiming that Covid-19 was some sort of "worldwide scam directed by the United Nations" does somewhat undercut the notion that "we're not crazies", as another protestor tearfully sought to emphasize. 

But I would cautiously suspect that over the next few weeks, and one hopes that won't be how long the occupation of Parliament's lawn drags on for, we'll see an escalating tide of media and commentariat 'contributions' which seek to equivocate the other side of the protest (you know, the ones intimidating and even egging schoolgirls in masks and spitting at bus-drivers) in favour of claiming it's 'ordinary New Zealanders' just seeking to do entirely ordinary things. And who have a 'right to be heard'. 

A right to eat out at hospitality venues, too, one presumes. 

Or maybe that's going to become presented as more of a 'duty' - something mandatory for the rest of us, whether we feel particularly comfortable going out at this time or not.