So bloated-up happy I could throw things around me.

We won. Section 59 will be repealed. Yay us.

Well no, not really that yay. We hardly won the debate. The child beating lobby massed the forces of the fearful and indignant. They framed this issue, which concerns how we treat our children, as one of unwarranted intrusion by the nanny state in the lives of ordinary kiwi battlers, or something like that. They had resources, they had Talkback on their side. The voices of those who care for children and those who have expertise in this area were seldom heard.

As usual the media took an insular approach and barely considered how other modern democracies view the corporal punishment of children. The only time they took note of the rest of the world was when that ridiculous woman was flown over from Sweden to tell us how wretched life was in one of the World's most prosperous and peaceful nations. Then of course there was Professor Larzelere, who turned out to be much more reasonable than the child batterers would have wished.

Perhaps it was the involvement of Bishop Brian that made National come to its senses and support the Bill. That odious mixture of hate, greed and bad taste has become useful for progressive causes. The sight of Brian's army of Real Men marching down Queen Street turned a lot of opinion towards Civil Unions and doubtless he would have done the same for s59. National could be forgiven for being nervous: the party has caused itself enough problems by hanging out with religious nuts already.

I think National's concern about the Bill was all a stunt: a case of manufacturing dissent, as it were. John Key wanted to put some blue water between him and the Government, to create the impression that he was principled and policied. What better issue for this purpose than a private members bill from a member who is not part of the Government but who is associated with the far left, at least by those whose knees were made for jerking? The Government could not control Sue Bradford but also could not distance themselves from her. Perfect. Unfortunately for Key, the Government gave the Bill some breathing space which was filled by responsible and informed opinion: the very organisations that care for children. This made the Bill's opponents look increasingly silly, which they were. Key could have supported the Bill then and kept some credibility, particularly as there was genuine division within his Caucus. Instead he persisted with the Chester Borrows amendment [note to National's brand mangers: you must change that man's name] and with the strangely ethereal Compromise, which no-one could quite define.

In the end, National's Caucus was shown to have all the integrity of a used-car salesmen's convention when the Bill's supporters (all except the magnificent Katherine Rich, who should be leading the party) rushed to the other side in the face of determined opinion polls. Key kept up the pretence of principled concern, to his detriment: he now looks insincere and indecisive. He changed his mind at the last minute, making him look like either a mountebank or a wobbler, possibly both. He got noting except a silly and irrelevant note in the Bill, saying the Police should not use their powers frivolously. Woo Hoo.

I would imagine that a lot of National's supporters, particularly in the Rightosphere, must be feeling betrayed. After all, they put heart and soul into this issue, blogging day and night to protest the injustice of it all. Then their Leader pulls the rug from under their indignation.

Oh well, that's their problem. What matters is that it will no longer possible to defend beating your children with a riding crop or similar instrument. What needs to be done now is to create a culture where such barbaric practices will be unthinkable. That may take a little time and a lot of consensus.

Anyway, here's Martin:

Start

Today is the first day of New Zealand Music Month, so here is Collapsing Cities:

Searching for clues

1. I saw a man wearing a shirt that said: Find It, Fuck it, Forget it
   
2. Burger King uses women in bikinis to advertise its chicken burger
   
3. Women are organising to take back the blog
   
4. In today's Guardian, Kira Cochrane discusses Torture Porn
   

Perhaps these are connected.

Wild about nothing

I wrote this piece for the current issue of Craccum, which is all about religion. It was written hastily and despite a bout of food poisoning, so it is a bit rough.


Dear Matty,

A few days ago, you called me and asked me to write about Atheism for this edition of Craccum. Since then I have done a lot of research and a lot of thinking and I have come to this conclusion:

Atheists do not believe in gods

Will that do? I guess not. I think you said something about wanting two pages. I suppose you could make the typeface really large but the readers might feel cheated. Or you could leave the rest of the space blank to symbolise the absence of belief and the emptiness of life; but that would be a little bit Elam. Then again, you could fill the empty space with pictures you have found on Internet.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking this just is not good enough. You have asked someone who describes himself as an Atheist to talk about Atheism and all he can come up with is a six-word statement of the bleeding obvious: Atheists do not believe in gods. The trouble is, there really is not much more to Atheism than that. It hardlydeserves that capital A; in fact, Atheism is not really an ism at all.

At this point, I could resort to the last refuge of a journalist in need of a story: Google. I could tell you that a search of the word Atheism produces 1,700,000 pages, which is a very large number. I could read some of these pages and tell you what other people think about Atheism. I could quote from Wikipedia, which says there are varieties of Atheism: Strong and Weak, Positive and Negative, Implicit and Explicit. But I think that would confuse matters. Whatever the nuances, Atheism comes down to an absence of a belief.

Now, I find this a relatively simple matter. Some people believe in a god, others believe in many gods, Atheists believe in none. But it seems to cause a lot of confusion, even amongst Atheists. Apparently,Strong Atheists believe in the non-existence of gods while Weak Atheists reject belief in gods. But that is not a very helpful distinction, if it is a distinction at all, which I doubt.

It causes even more confusion amongst believers. I have had so many long, tedious conversations with people who believe so strongly in a god (usually God with a capital G) that they cannot conceive of anybody not believing in any god. They are far happier, on the whole, with people who believe in a different god; these people are just plain wrong, but at least they believe in something. People like me are baffling. The believers usually make things worse for themselves by taking it personally - they assume it is their god with a capital G which I don't believe in and convince themselves that they can persuade me to believe in Him with a capital H if only they try hard enough. But it is not that simple, because I do not have an opposing belief. I have none.

I can see this is not really helping. I'm sorry. Belief is a very difficult subject. Unbelief ought to be a very simple matter but it is complicated by people taking it to be a form of belief.

Myself, I blame the Rationalists and Humanists. As you know, I used to be the Spokesman for the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists (Inc) but I am not blaming them specifically. My problem is with Atheists attaching other names to themselves to qualify their unbelief. They do it all the time and they come up with far too many names. There are Rationalists, Humanists, Freethinkers, Non-theists, Anti-theists, Naturalists, Brights and so on and so on. And don't get me started on the Agnostics.

Ignoring all the others, Rationalists bother me because they seem determined to prove that there are no gods. They go on about religion all the time, pointing out errors in the Bible, arguing how God is philosophically impossible. Say what you like about them, but at least they take religion seriously. Far too seriously, in my  opinion. Their error is a tactical one: they are fighting on their opponents ground.
Believers love this sort of argument, because they have been trained in arguing the case for their beliefs. Long, tedious conversations are the inevitable result.

And then there are the Humanists. Now, don't get me wrong; most humanists are thoroughly nice people. Some however, are authoritarian prigs. One such is Dr Bill Cooke, Vice-President of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists (Inc). For him, mere Atheism is a bit vulgar. In his long incoherent essays he often expounds the superiority of Humanists like him over us simple Atheists. Here's an example, from one of his editorials in the Open Society, the journal of the Rationalists and Humanists:

Atheism is only about what I don't believe...you can't build a way of life entirely on what you don't believe. The next step of determining our way of life is much more interesting and rewarding. My humanism is about what I do believe and my rationalism is about how I believe it.

What Dr Cooke's Humanism is all about is a bit of a mystery, even though he talks about it all the time. It seems to involve something called Eupraxsophy and the novels of Iris Murdoch. I think it is all a load of pseudo-academic wank, but that is just my opinion.

What it comes down to is that Dr Cooke has a world view: "What label we use to describe the positive world view we build on the foundation of atheism is neither here nor there. I call it humanism. But that such a construction must be built is imperative. There is so much more to being non-religious than simply being an atheist."

No there is not. Simply being an Atheist is quite enough.  Religious people have world views, through which they filter all their responses to the world. Most Atheists do not have a world view. We have opinions about lots of things. Our opinions differ, often. They have precious little to do with our Atheism, which is simply an absence of belief.

I could go on but I would be repeating myself. As I said, it is a difficult matter talking about unbelief. It is much easier to writeCanada News. All I need to do is read Canadian newspapers on Internet and write something about Hockey games and Avril Lavigne. I think Craccum can be proud of its distinction as the only New Zealand student newspaper to feature news from Canada regularly. This Atheism business is a bit more tricky.

Perhaps you should fill up the rest of the space with pictures. But what pictures could you use? It is not as if Atheism has symbols like crosses and crescents or cathedrals or men in funny clothes performing strange rituals. I don't want to tell you how to do your job but maybe you could download some pictures of cute kittens. People like kittens. You will find lots of pictures of kittens on Internet.

Yours faithlessly,

Paul

Swedish experts talk about their lives

Here are more things you need to know about Section 59 repeal.

The child beaters have made much of Sweden. They claimed that the experience of 'banning smacking' in Sweden had disastrous consequences. Save the Children have done some research. Sweden abolished this form of child abuse fifty years ago and it has not led to riots in the streets by rebellious schoolchildren.

But who cares about the Swedes with their social democracy, their welfare state and their high quality wooden furniture in stylish modern designs? Beating up your kids must be OK, because a former All Black says so. Bull Allen, described as "iconic," has given his support to the Family Values campaign run by "Bishop" Brian Tamaki, Pastor Peter Mortlock and the Reverend Mike Weitenberg. I know almost nothing about Bull Allen, so I cannot comment, but I suspect he knows almost nothing about the issue.

Bishop Tamaki and friends will be having a peaceful mass-gathering on Wednesday 2nd May at Parliament: 'You are invited to join with thousands of other ordinary kiwi’s that want to send a clear message to government – leave our families alone' and who don't care about mangling grammar in the process. Please Note: This is not a pro-smacking event, in case you were wondering.You should go; after all, you are helping pay for it - the Bishop and his pals enjoy generous tax breaks for their churches. We can only hope that the Bishop's intervention will do for the child abusers' cause what it did for the campaign against Civil Unions. An alternative Christian response will be made at the Anglican Cathedral.

Webweaver has a list of the organisations supporting repeal.

The list does not include the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists (Inc). One would have thought that our leading Atheist organisation would have something to say about a campaign led by Christian fundamentalists. In fact, they held a very useful debate between Craig Smith of Family Integrity and Ian Hassell, former Children's Commissioner. Then they asked their membership for opinions about the matter. Some members, we don't know how many, were against change, so the Council decided to ignore the issue. Once again, the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists (Inc) has done sod all.

John Key favours compromise but, as Span points out, the compromise has been made already. Experts have suggested that John Key would not recognise a principle if he found one in his breakfast cereal and observe that he was quite happy to hang out with the Exclusive Brethren for as long as the public didn't know about it.

Not given lightly

So far, I have not made much of a contribution to the child-battering debate. I think you can take it as read that I do not think there should be a keep-out-of-jail card in the Crimes Act for people who assault their children with weapons. If you assume that I have a particular animus against those who claim the authority of the Holy Bible for their attacks on their children, you assume rightly. It is one thing to beat up your kids but to claim that Yahweh made you do it is another matter and not a pleasant one. It troubles me that really creepy, weird people who have ideas about child-rearing which chill the blood (you see, children are born evil and you have to beat that evil out of them) should be representing themselves as ordinary New Zealanders, concerned parents, good citizens.

It concerns me that this debate has been framed by these people. The very fact that it is called the anti-smacking bill shows that this issue has been captured by the opponents of reform. Why not call it the spanking debate? I'll tell you why; because the word spanking has connotations of eroticism, of ritualistic beating for sexual pleasure. For the proponents of child-beating, the world of kinky sex is uncomfortably close.

When one reads the guides to disciplining children produced by the churches and pastors who advocate child abuse as a way of life, you see how close their worldview is to those of de Sade and Sacher-Masoch. The ritual is crucially important. The child must be told the nature of her sin; she must be shown the weapon of her punishment; some advocate having the weapon on permanent display in the family living room, as a constant reminder of the dangers of transgression. This weapon will have been chosen carefully, to provide just the right amount of flexibility and to avoid bruising (for if the punishment left scars, they might be discovered by the Others: the schoolteachers, social workers, the authorities, the World). The punishment must be administered without anger; this is a ritual, not a release. When it is complete, parent and child should pray together.

It is not easy for the Christian Right to defend their practices. There was a time when beating your children was quite acceptable; but this was also a time when it was acceptable to beat up homosexuals just for being what they were. It was a time when violence was seen as a solution to many problems. We have moved on, most of us, and the fundies find themselves like the White Rhodesians: left behind, struggling to defend what was normalcy so little time ago but is now unacceptable; struggling, as well, to comprehend what happened.

Faced with the obvious peculiarity of their beliefs and the threat from outside to their way of life, the fundies are looking for secular support. Family First, a coalition of various strains of intolerance, has found it in Robert E. Larzelere, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Oklahoma. Professor Larzelere is well known for his defence of corporal punishment. It is not as if he or his university are particularly distinguished; but a little secular, academic, support goes a long way in the world of the fundies. They might claim the sole authority of the Bible in all matters, but the support of a real, live Psychologist from the USofA is worth much more than a host of pleading pastors.

Family First have brought Professor Larzelere to New Zealand; is it just me, or is there a huge cultural cringe reflected in the way these organisations always have to go overseas for their support and in the way that local media gives the visitors such credence? Family First have given him a whirlwind tour of the local media. You might have heard him on Leighton Smith's show (I did not: Leighton's broadcasts for the dead make me want to vomit) or with John Tamihere (likewise). You can see him tonight debating the Children's Commissioner on Campbell Live.

In case you do not have time to catch up with the professor, this is what he advocates for children from 2 to 6 years: 2 open-handed swats to the buttocks, leaving no bruise. It will be interesting to see if he advocates the sort of punishment recommended for children by Craig Smith of Family Integrity in his pamphlet, The Christian Foundations of the Institution of Corporal Correction:

Go to a private place, collect the smacking rod, then fully discuss the crime...child. Their admission of guilt, their agreement that a smack is necessary and the need to master selfdiscipline together make it important that the child voluntarily submits to the discipline of smacking.

Notice that this punishment is for children from the age of 18 months. Think about that. Craig Smith does not have the sort of learning that the Professor will doubtless bring to this debate. So why does he do it? He doesn't know:

I freely admit that I do not understand the connection between a physical smack on the bottom and a rebellious spiritual condition of the heart, nor how the first drives out the latter. But the Scripture declares it is so, therefore I am obliged to believe and practice it.

I am sure that having a real life American academic to support their cause will hearten Family First. Before they get too excited, let's burst their balloon. Here is a media release from the American Psychological Association. It is fair and balanced, giving space both to Larzelere and to more mainstream opinion. It is worth reading, especially the quotation with which it ends:

Until researchers, clinicians, and parents can definitively demonstrate the presence of positive effects of corporal punishment, including effectiveness in halting future misbehaviour, not just the absence of negative effects, we as psychologists can not responsibly recommend its use

Enough. To end, I found this extraordinary footage in the course of my research:

Some links

There is no link between abortion and breast cancer.

Lesbians can cause boys to have sleepless nights.

Another surprise: porn movies have scriptwriters.

This is not a porn movie: Cheerleaders go wild.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the bees are disappearing.

Penguins, however, are just confusing.

American children are getting fat and Mother Jones discovers why.

The future is grim, according to the British Ministry of Defence.

David Halberstam is dead.

C4: an Enquiry into Morals

I am sorry I have not been blogging recently but I have been watching television. Last night on C4, after the Daily Show, they did one of their top ten lists. This one was "top ten most shocking videos" At Number Ten was Robbie Williams' Rock DJ.
At number nine was Tatu's All the Things She Said .

So, let me get this right. A video showing two schoolgirls snogging in the rain is more shocking than a video in which a man rips off his own flesh. Am I missing something here?

I would have continued this study of the mores of pop culture by watching more filthy videos but Number 7, which featured 50 Cent and some pneumatically enhanced women, was too much for my flatmate. It was nearly time for Letterman anyway, which has much better Top Ten lists.

To mix up this ethical stew further, immediately before the C4 show, they broadcast the video for Dizzee Rascal's Sirens, which is shocking in a quite different way, and brilliant.

Here is something from my mispent youth which I hope is suitable for the office: Not the Nine O'Clock News:

Landscape with Exclusive Brethren

In the interests of fairness and accuracy, the Fundy Post wants you to know that the seven men without ties who appeared to be representing the Exclusive Brethren at the last General Election were acting on their own behalf. They were merely a group of concerned businessmen, family men, taxpayers. I am sure none of you will have any difficulty believing this fact, unlike that curmudgeonly David Farrar.

In the interests of Art, I must plead with Mr Farrar not to call this bunch the Group of Seven. Apart from being the name given to some meeting of world leaders, the Group of Seven was a circle of Canadian artists, rather good ones at that; Please, David, these things matter to me.

Pictured above is A Y Jackson's The Red Maple, which is much prettier than the Exclusive Brethren

Guns don't kill people; Darwin kills people

It is difficult to keep up with all the contemptible nonsense being spoken about Virginia Tech. However, one commentator stands out - Ken Ham:

We live in an era when public high schools and colleges have all but banned God from science classes. In these classrooms, students are taught that the whole universe, including plants and animals—and humans—arose by natural processes. Naturalism (in essence, atheism) has become the religion of the day and has become the foundation of the education system (and Western culture as a whole). The more such a philosophy permeates the culture, the more we would expect to see a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness that pervades people’s thinking. In fact, the more a culture allows the killing of the unborn, the more we will see people treating life in general as “cheap.”

I’m not at all saying that the person who committed these murders at Virginia Tech was driven by a belief in millions of years or evolution. I don’t know why this person did what he did, except the obvious: that it was a result of sin. However, when we see such death and violence, it is a reminder to us that without God’s Word (and the literal history in Genesis 1–11), people will not understand why such things happen

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars