Holy-christ-on-a-stick. #Listening to the Northland candidates debate is like being one of the few people at the dance party who aren't tripping balls:
With notable exceptions, it's truly depressing that so many of the people campaigning for public office live in fantasy worlds of their own creation.
It's an excellent argument for either replacing candidate self-selection with a random selection, like we do for jury duty. Or making heavy use of citizen's assemblies, with governments binding themselves to follow their recommendations.
Especially in areas like climate change, where we face an existential threat that requires urgent action.
"The polls in the final fortnight [of the 2020 NZ election] were overestimating National by an average of 5.8 percentage points. They were underestimating Labour by 3.7 points. The Green and Māori parties were also underestimated (1.1 and 0.7 points, respectively).
There were even bigger failures in polls showing Green candidate Chlöe Swarbrick running third in Auckland Central with about 25% of the vote. Instead, she got 35% and won the seat."
"When party-vote percentages get converted into numbers of seats, journalists are reading tea leaves and not reporting news. Meanwhile, the market research firms are getting massive publicity."
How do we connect with rural communities, and help our fellow kiwis pull themselves out of the extreme right-wing rabbitholes they've been pulled down?
@strypey I don't think it's a feature of rural communities.
It's a canker that is promulgated by the powerful to enrage people and so get them to ignore the grift of the billionaires and their flunky political parties. (NACT)
@strypey it's a standard ploy of right wing parties, play on people's prejudices and inflame them, so they ignore they are being shafted.
I live in a small rural town and everytime I hear this it just seems to me to be a function of the fact that people in cities tend to live more siloed ives. And therefore perceive that it's worse in rural communities.
@Chrisod
> people in cities tend to live more siloed lives
Can you expand on this? On the face of it, it seems wrong.
> And therefore perceive that it's worse in rural communities
I have family who are farmers, so I've been spending time in rural areas since I was a child. As an adult, I've spent most of my summers in rural areas; visiting family, going to festivals and visiting intentional communities. I also hitchhike to get to them.
My comments are based on decades of direct observation.
@strypey I'll split my reply.
People who live in cities live in suburbs and groupings of similar people.
Small towns are all mixed together. There's no escaping the poor or the wealthy. The left or the right.
Whereas in cities you lump all the similar people in a geographic area
@strypey so what. I dispute that.
Yes the landed gentry are all full of bullshit conspiracy theories, but they've been on that path since people asked them to please not destroy our rivers.
The people who live in rural towns are no more brainwashed than any city dwellers.
OK. Link me to the peer-reviewed research you are basing your comments on, and I'll do the reading.
Or... are you also basing them on anecdata? If so, is it based on observing a range of rural communities in both islands, over decades of repeat visits?
@strypey I have lived in small rural towns and intentional communities the majority of my adult life.
I still live in one.
But that said I don't care for a contest.
I just will continue to build community wherever I am.
@Chrisod
> I have lived in small rural towns and intentional communities the majority of my adult life
So you must have seen the same increase in targeted propaganda I have, and its affects on rural communities. What do you think can be done to counter that? How can urban people support that effort, given we're the vast majority of the population, but we depend on the health of your communities to keep eating.
@strypey and I've seen the same in the cities. The landed gentry think they are serving their own self interest. They need convincing that they are sabotaging their own future.
However I reject your theory that rural people in particular are taken in by this...
@Chrisod
> I reject your theory that rural people in particular are taken in by this...
Your theory about my theory. Not my theory, as I've made clear a number of times. I think we're spinning our wheels here, but thanks for jumping in and all the best.
@Chrisod
> And people in cities love to think we need saving
Listen to the election debate linked in the OP, the nonsense most of the candidates spout, and the wild applause of their supporters.
To be clear I'm not saying urban communities are not being pushed down rabbitholes by targeted corporatist propaganda. We are. But it works differently, and different responses are required. There are lots of people working in this, because there are lots more of us (about 85% of the population).
Over the past few years, our rural communities have been subject to targeted media manipulation. A small wave within a tsunami of right-wing propaganda across the anglophone world. Some coordinated by state actors (particularly US, China, and Russia), but most of it coming from the think-tank-industrial-complex, funded by US billionaires like the Koch Brothers (well, the surviving one):
The main vectors for this media manipulation are DataFarming platforms like FarceBook. But I've also seen ideologically slanted articles and paid features in rural papers. Rural communities have little natural immunity to these media viruses.
Our urban communities have been targeted too, of course. But they benefit from a wider range of overlapping, in-person social networks, independent media projects, etc, that make it harder to completely flood urban mediaspheres with one set of ideas
How can the left build links with workers and activists in rural areas? How can we help them diversify their mediasphere, and get more information about the real world experiences of their fellow kiwis - both rural and urban - to balance out the billionaire-funded agitprop targeting them?
The difference between myths and legends is that myths are pure fiction, while legends are based on grains of historical truth. In other words, they're both narratives, but legends are evidence-based narratives.
Listening what candidates for public office are saying during election debates, I can't help but notice that a lot of it is mythology. They've crafted narratives they think will attract votes, and they're sticking to them, facts be damned.
One example is the myth that the current rising cost of living is due to the current spike in inflation, driven by government overspending. I've posted links to numerous articles and podcasts where economists present the evidence that it's actually price-gouging by corporate monopolies and monopsonies that are driving up the cost of living.
While governments accused of overspending, are actually funding changes that will improve working people's lives and save the public money in the long run. A classic example is removing posts on prescription charges, a short term spend, which peer-reviewed evidence shows will drastically reduce hospitalisations, saving the public coffers far more than the $5 charge can bring in.
The problem is most citizens are unlikely to know about that peer-reviewed evidence. Unless it's presented to us as part of a narrative we can easily absorb, while struggling to keep up with our obligations to family, community, workplace, and so on. In other words, a legend.
Our election campaign needs storytellers who can craft and spread compelling legends - based on careful review of the available evidence - that can counter the myth-mongering of cynical populists.
@kaffiene
> I think they're far more interested in creating conflict than educating people
From what I hear of legacy news media people talking about the business they're in, they're mainly interested in survival.
AFAICT they're a spent force. We need to develop new forms of sense-making, and institutional models that allow the specialists needed to make a living. That includes news gatherers and investigate journalists, but ideally not advertising.
"... that's exactly why [Prosperity church] works. It works because it doesn't deliver on its promises. Just like gambling doesn't deliver on its promises.
It gets you addicted to the 'surplus enjoyment' of having a fantasy of what will overcome your alienation, and not giving you it. So that you can maintain a certain struggle in your life."
"... [Camus] says the conservatives, they're not happy until they get back to some golden age, and he says the revolutionaries aren't happy until they get to some utopia... then he said, but the rebel; the rebel is the one who enjoys the struggle itself, and who doesn't sacrifice people on the alter of the past or the future. But sees in the action of emancipatory struggle, liberation itself."
Another example of people living in their own fantasy worlds is a letter to the editor of the #HamiltonPress, by one Malcolm Campbell of Waihi. In this impressively creative effort, Campbell claims that;
decades ago "wildlife was thriving" thanks to the dumping of piggery effluent in waterways, "much of it fed the eels and trout"
because of reduced water pollution, "much of that wildlife has now disappeared"
because effluent from farming is "completely biodegradable" (true), it's sensible to dump it in waterways, rather than compost it onsite to create fertilizer
and my favourite piece of anti-environmentalist mythology has got to be "fish can actually live in raw sewage..." but "...there must be sufficient dissolved oxygen"
Campbell think it's "weird" that regional council "prosecution is authorised by the staff, not the councillors". Councillors are elected to oversee the way council staff operate, plan and budget for future needs, and other such governance jobs. Why he thinks it would be normal for councillors to spend their time micro-managing the prosecutions of people polluting the local environment, instead of doing their own jobs, is beyond me.
He also seems to think council staff should have "turned up at the piggery and offered to assist", instead of prosecuting them for their pollution. Why he thinks publicly-funded regional council staff time should be spent doing free eco-consultancy work for a private business is also beyond me.
Not everything Campbell says is cut from whole cloth. For example, I have no trouble believing that there were a lot more piggeries in Aotearoa 60 or more years ago.
He's quite right that NZ is an importer of pork, and that does seem a bit weird. Surely if people can't be convinced not to eat pigs, a lot less carbon world be emitted raising them in the same islands where they're eaten, rather than shipping them miles across the ocean in refrigerator ships.
I also have no trouble believing that farmers routinely dumped effluent in waterways. Campbell is right that chlorine in waterways is bad for fish, as are many chemicals that aren't naturally found there. He's also right that rainfall in Waikato has been unusually heavy, and that this can overwhelm fragile effluent management systems, resulting in pollution.
I agree that regional councils need to educate people about eco-friendly farming practices. They're in a good position to collect robust data about what works in their bioregion, and present it in ways that are digestible by people managing land there. In fact, part of their statutory role is to do just that.
AFAIK they tend to give farmers warnings about pollution before bringing the hammer down. But if a farmer refuses to stop shitting in the river, what's left to do but prosecute?
I wish folks could focus on the farmers doing all the right things. Also, maybe we need to highlight the other small businesses who have shitty work practices.
@jonoabroad
> I wish folks could focus on the farmers doing all the right things
It's not an either/or. It's not good support for them, when the ones who aren't don't get held accountable.
> maybe we need to highlight the other small businesses who have shitty work practices
When any small business flaunts the law as repeatedly and flagrantly as the few farms whose prosecutions are widely reported, they certainly make the news too.
No worries. The background temperature here seems to be rising. Maybe it's just the imminence of the election. Can't wait for the whole dog and pony show to be over really.
US and UK media also seem to be in campaign mode, even though the US isn't until next year, and the UK not until 2025 (if the current government doesn't implode under the weight of its own incompetence before then).
@strypey Years ago I talked with a local council person in Miyazaki -ken's Nichinan city and his big problem was helping pig farmers deal with their effluent before they felt forced to sneak it through rivers during heavy rains. He said people in Japan don't use the liquied fertilizer that results from BioMass electricity.
@strypey Carbon from transport is often a tiny component of emissions from animal food production. I'm not sure how pork production compares but NZ lamb has a far lower emissions profile in the UK compared to UK lamb, even including transport.
I think the majority of our imported pork comes from Spain.
Add comment