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Scoop
5 days ago
- Politics
- Scoop
Representation Versus Reality; Reaching A Low Point
Have you noticed how, in New Zealand news items and weather reports, Nelson and Marlborough are called the "top" of the South Island rather than the 'north' of that island. We also get phrases such as the "lower North Island" and the "upper North Island". And New Zealand's narrators regularly refer to New Zealand as being at the "bottom of the world". These phrases reference the (conventionally portrayed) map of the world, not the world itself. Rotate the map 180°. Nelson-Marlborough will still be the north of the South Island. But they will now be at the bottom of the top island! (And noting that the Roof of the World is the Tibetan Himalayas, not the North Pole. The South Island is at a higher latitude than the North Island; eg 44°S rather than 38°S. And Upper Egypt is south of – lower than? – Lower Egypt.) Another really annoying aspect of a similar problem – in this case, the problem of colloquial jargon – is the propensity of financial journalists to refer to 'up' as 'north', as in "the stockmarket is heading north". An even more egregious example I heard on RNZ on 29 May (Reserve Bank cuts OCR 25 basis points) was the Acting Reserve Bank Governor (Christian Hawkesby) referring to the 'North Star' as the 'target' of arcane monetary policy. Especially problematic was when he said "if you knew your North Star was much further south". A bit 'woo woo' new age, if you get my meaning. Is the Reserve Bank trying to navigate the stormy seas where myth and reality meet, as in the search for Moby Dick? (Irish navigators 4,000 years ago could always return from a trip to Spain by following the North Star. Being in the 'lower world', Maui and Kupe faced more complex problems.) Does the Reserve Bank make policy decisions based on Tarot Cards? Indeed, astrology did guide policy formation for most of human history. The lesser problem is that 'bottom' has a pejorative meaning; a meaning that has been transferred to the word 'south' (which means 'poor' in the label 'Global South'). The more substantive problem is the diminishing ability of 'modern man' (or at least homo sapiens in the Global North) to think abstractly. A diminishing abstract capacity allows us to conflate the reality of the planet Earth with its representation in the form of a map. And once too many of us see the representation as the same thing as the reality, the ongoing repetition of that framed construct self-reinforces; we give in to the narrative for the sake of mental peace and quiet. The imputed 'reality' of the conventional map becomes hard-wired; the map becomes reality, hardware rather than software. Other examples of incongruent representation follow. Knowledge Rich 'Knowledge rich' is a label that doesn't match the package; refer Govt's curriculum changes come under fire RNZ 22 July 2025. The phrase 'knowledge rich' appears to be an example of vacuous bureaucratic weasel words, to use a bit of idiomatic anti-jargon; a label useless except for obfuscation purposes. We would expect that the term 'knowledge rich' would mean something like 'emphasising the acquisition of knowledge'; ie the more understanding of reality the better. When asked to define 'knowledge rich', the senior bureaucrat interviewee said in that RNZ interview: "really well-structured, clear content, the things that we want young people to know [my emphasis] and the things [skills?] that we want them to know how to do; we want them to learn … in nice sequential and … coherent learning pathway… structured ways … and that teachers need clarity on what needs to be taught and what students should be learning at any particular point on the pathway". That's actually reasonably clear for a bureaucrat put on the spot, but it's not in any way the meaning of 'knowledge rich'. This definition is about structure and constrained knowledge acquisition; it's about young people learning what the state wants them to learn, only what the state wants them to learn, and in the ways the state wants them to learn. The label contradicts the reality, possibly with political intent. A Humanitarian City The Israeli government has rightly been described as 'Machiavellian' (refer Machiavelli) when it represents its planned concentration zone in Rafah (Southern Gaza) as a 'Humanitarian City'. (Refer 'Humanitarian city' would be concentration camp for Palestinians, says former Israeli PM, The Guardian, 13 July 2025; and Israel turning Gaza into 'graveyard of children and starving': UNRWA chief, Al Jazeera News, 11 July 2025. And the new Israeli-American terror unit operating in Gaza is masquerading as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation; refer What is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and why has it been criticised? Al Jazeera explainer, 20 May 2025. It is clear that the Israeli government is exploiting the increased naivete of the western news audience; a state of entrenched naivety that – as noted above – has become hard-wired in too many of our brains, thanks to the ongoing use of language which presents representation as reality. We should also note that, in Germany in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler was able to gain a groundswell of popular support through his representation of Jews as cunning and Machiavellian disrupters; it does not serve Israel well for their present-day leaders to give any semblance of support to Hitler's portrayal. Holocaust Through a relentless multi-decade campaign, it has become hard-wired into too many western brains that there was little more to World War Two than The Holocaust; ie that WW2 was essentially a battle between 'Hitler' and 'The Jews', and that it was resolved by white knights in the form of Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman coming to the rescue – albeit too late – by dealing to Hitler and giving (as compensation) Palestine to The Jews. In the process, most other narratives in that war are by now largely forgotten. World War Two was of course far more complex. Further, the label Holocaust is an inaccurate portrayal of those catastrophic events. One strength of the English language is its capacity to borrow from other languages. The correct label for this greatest of catastrophes should be that from the victims' own language; their label, the Shoah. The word holocaust, correctly used, has connotations of fire and brimstone (especially raining from the sky); the best-known biblical example being the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah 'documented' in Genesis. We may note that part of the divine and the diabolical intents of both the biblical holocaust and of the Shoah was to eradicate homosexuals. World War Two has a number of ready-made examples of true holocausts; many perpetrated by the Allies, starting with Operation Gomorrah which incinerated Hamburg in 1943, and ending with the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. The Holocaust obscures the holocausts, and much else. Inadequate representation indeed misrepresents the Shoah as a biblical spectacle, whereas it was really a coldly cynical mix of operations conducted in the then shadows. Was the Shoah a bigger catastrophe than Gomorrah? Probably yes. Genocide and Terrorism Earlier in the 2020s, people such as Paula Penfold and Liz Truss tried to represent the Chinese government's persecution of the East Turkestan (aka Xinjiang) Uyghurs as "genocide". They were 'weaponising' the g-word, part of a wider cross-partisan opportunity to demonise China during the Covid19 pandemic. In the light of recent events in the Levant, an obvious and unmistakeable genocide which too many people refrain from calling a 'genocide', those anti-China representations look rather silly. It is perfectly possible that people using the same identity label can be both victims of genocide and perpetrators of genocide; most likely at different places in different times. Most petty of all, this 'is it a genocide?' has become an elitist word-game. Anyone who thinks that if what is happening in Palestine does not meet some English-language definition of 'genocide' is morally bound to come up with an alternative word or phrase – presumably a somethingelse-icide – that more accurately conveys their assessment. Myself, I think that these events may be even more than a genocide; such as philosopher historian AC Grayling's term culturicide (from Among the Dead Cities) which expresses what – for example, the Morgenthau Plan – looked to impose on post-war Germany (seeking to reduce Germany, with a pre-war population of 80 million to an impoverished 'pastoral' nation of 30 million). Cultural erasure is more than genocide. Genocide is an unfortunate reality, a human propensity which has occurred in the past, is occurring in the present, and will occur periodically (unless finished by the 'final genocide', or biocide) in the future. Trying to weasel our way around it through an absence of language is a trait which has hard-wired itself, through denial and distractive fig-leaves, into elite cultures of complicity and impunity. Another such word is 'terrorism'. Winston Churchill and his bomber commander Arthur Harris had no doubt about the meaning of that word. So did the victims of their fiery terror, in Hamburg and many other cities. Now the representation of 'terror' through this word is restricted to a selected subset of resistance organisations. Winston Churchill understood that meaning of 'terrorism', too. His friend – Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne – was assassinated in Cairo by fascist Lehi terrorists. (Re Lehi, see Stern: The Man, the Gang and the State, Al Jazeera 13 Aug 2024.) Appeasement This word may be used improperly, as a damaging misrepresentation of a political opponent, or avoided when it is most needed. (Grayling, in Among the Dead Cities, concludes that the Churchill/Harris holocausts on German cities, were in large part an ineffective appeasement of Josef Stalin.) Here's a correct recent use of the a-word: "With such uncontrolled power and aggressive posture, it seems Israel is seeking submission [in Syria and the rest of the 'Middle East' region]. The Trump administration's approach of solving crises by appeasing Israel will entrench this doctrine and push the region into further instability." (Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman in lieu of Al Jazeera ban by Israel, Al Jazeera News, about 8:05am NZ time, 20 July 2025. She 'hit the nail on the head'.) Could someone who has been represented as an 'appeaser' ever be a justifiable winner of a Nobel Peace Prize? I think the answer is a 'qualified yes'; just as good fishers sometimes have to appease their quarry before reeling them in. But, I think, neither an appeaser of Netanyahu nor Stalin could qualify for that prize. In reality, appeasement has to be done sometimes. New Zealand dairy owners have been routinely asked to appease violent robbers. And, in the movies, when someone points a gun at someone and says "hands up", the victim almost always appeases the gunner, regardless of their moral position. 'Appeasement' is a representation that's both underused and overused; a representation designed to construct a deception. If we cannot distinguish between representation and reality, label and labelled, then we stand to become victims to all kinds of mischievous narratives. Cost of Living The Government and the Opposition both frame the alleged "cost of living crisis" as a problem of inflation rather than deflation. Indeed, the linguistic minefield around economic policy is so problematic that a whole separate article is required to examine it. The key issue for us here is that the 'cost-of-living' framing – ie representation – in government circles is that the economy must be in an inflationary phase and therefore a deflationary policy is required. However, when the New Zealand public complain about the 'cost-of-living' they are saying that prices are too high compared to their incomes; it's an 'affordability crisis', not an inflationary crisis. And clearly the deflationary retrenchment policies – meaning policies to slow the economy down, to instigate a recession – pursued by the government are a critical part of the problem. The government's solution is to represent its actual class-war anti-growth policies as 'pro-growth' policies. And the Labour Opposition completely falls for the way the government frames New Zealand's structural recession as a 'cost-of-living' crisis. At present, New Zealand has near-record-high (north!?) 'terms of trade', only slightly below the record highs of 2022. New Zealand's terms of trade are now 50% higher than they were in 2000, and nearly 100% higher than the dramatic lows of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. As when Brian Easton wrote In Stormy Seas: The Post-War New Zealand Economy in 1997, the terms of trade represented the stormy waves, some bigger than others; and the favourable crests of those waves were when New Zealand expected (and generally got) economic good times. The troughs during the Muldoon years – not Robert Muldoon's fault; he never had the power to shift the tides of a stormy world – were very difficult times for Aotearoa New Zealand. In these terms the twenty-first century has been the 'best of times' for New Zealand, and the 2020s the 'very best of times'. Yet they are also the 'worst of times', to reference Charles Dickens. (Many of our most potent truths come from literature.) New Zealand, like other countries, has experienced economic cycles and economic shocks. Through my lifetime one consistent cycle has been the short 'trade-cycle', on average about 32 months. We are near the crest of that cycle now. The last quarterly growth peak, September 2022, led to an annual growth peak of 4% in the year-to June 2023. Based on the usual timing of the trade cycle, June 2025 will be the next quarterly peak. It will not be pretty, if that will be the best GDP data that we get on this government's watch. Any positivity when the next GDP figures are released in September, in colloquial jargon, may be characterised as a 'dead-cat bounce'. The government is undertaking structural retrenchment under the cover of a 'cost-of-living crisis' that means very different things to different people. Insinuating that New Zealand has a crisis of inflation – taken as a synonym for 'overspending' – when it has a very real crisis of structural recession and growing unemployment, is a particularly cynical misrepresentation of reality. Conclusion We too easily fall for these misrepresentations of reality; for representations that, in our minds, become a reality like treacle; sets of overlayed representations which play tricks on our minds. That makes us, and our political Opposition parties, quite unable to form coherent critiques of the too many misrepresented and problematic things that are happening to us. In New Zealand, although we are allegedly at the 'bottom of the world', in the Far Southeast (fortunately not in the incorrectly named 'Middle East'!). We also pride ourselves as being in the West and in the Global North. What is genuinely true is that Aotearoa New Zealand is geographically very far from most of the rest of humanity. We could use that birds-eye bottom-of-the-world detached perspective to see past the labels, the frames, the self-serving narratives. We don't have to play 'silly buggers' when the rest of the world is so-doing; we can cut through the 'bullshit', to use some more colloquial jargon. We can be the North Star of the South. PS. With escalating geopolitical wars, and plenty of undertested nuclear weapons in the hands of numerous political sociopaths, being at 'the bottom of the world' may not be such a great place to be. All of us of a certain age remember British, American, and French nuclear testing in Oceania. Some, a bit older, remember nuclear testing in Japan. ------------- Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Keith Rankin Political Economist, Scoop Columnist Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s. Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like. Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.
Wall Street Journal
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Face With Tears of Joy' Review: Smartphone Hieroglyphics
'Emoji Dick,' a line-by-line translation into emoji of Herman Melville's 1851 novel, 'Moby-Dick,' was published in 2010. Five years later, the Oxford English Dictionary chose the 'face with tears of joy' emoji as its word of the year. Today there are north of 3,500 accepted emoji characters, many of which have become inescapable in digital communication. Is this increasingly widespread visual lexicon a language of its own? Linguists and language pedants generally say no. In 'Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji,' Keith Houston, weighing the evidence, concurs. He asserts, however, that there is 'a richness of emoji usage that rivals any language.' That, too, might rankle the pedants, but the author, an emoji aficionado, mounts an energetic case. Mr. Houston opens with a brisk history that identifies distant ancestors of the emojis you find on your phone, forebears that can include symbols found on ancient scrolls and 18th-century Buddhist texts. The term 'emoji' derives from combining the Japanese words for 'picture' and 'written character.' Shigetaka Kurita, a software engineer, is often credited with creating the first set of emojis, which the Japanese cellular provider Docomo launched in 1999, but researchers have found emoji-like characters, including precursors to today's familiar smiley faces and hearts, on Japanese word processors dating back to the 1980s. An emoji relative, the emoticon, which combines keyboard characters to make simple pictorial symbols, first appeared in 1982: A Carnegie Mellon computer scientist proposed to colleagues on an electronic bulletin board that they type three punctuation marks in sequence— ':-)'—to indicate when they were being facetious. Google and Apple helped the system go global with smartphone operating systems that used emojis liberally. Doing so required the support of the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization that ensures that digitized characters and symbols are compatible across networks and devices.
New York Post
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Call Me Izzy' review: Jean Smart's good, but this Broadway play is a hack job
Theater review CALL ME IZZY 85 minutes with no intermission. At Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St. Jean Smart is at the height of her career. She's won three Emmy Awards in the last four years for her widely acclaimed performance as stand-up comic Deborah Vance on 'Hacks.' The wonderful actress with a newfound prestige following could have her pick of plays, you would think. So, why, why, why has she chosen to return to Broadway in the anemic, copy-and-paste 'Call Me Izzy,' a star vehicle fit for the junkyard? Smart is funnier, deeper and, well, smarter than anything in playwright Jamie Wax's mummified one-woman show that opened Thursday night at Studio 54. Yet she's relegated to cracking 'Moby Dick' jokes next to a toilet. This Wax work, a musty quilt of cliches, is about a Louisiana woman who lives in a trailer with her abusive, deadbeat, hard-drinking husband. Essentially alone, Izzy writes poetry on two-ply as an escape. She then hides it away in a Tampax box that no one dare open. How old is Izzy? At what point in her life is she recalling this traumatic past? Who knows? Wax has a poetic license to kill. Izzy begins, with Sunday mass somberness, by pretentiously describing the dissolving bowl tablet she's just dropped in the John: 'Blue, azure, sapphire, cerulean!' And then, channeling the worst solo show tendencies, she adds: 'My husband, Ferd, he hates the blue cleaner I put in the toilet almost as much as he hates my writin'.' Unlike the tank after a flush, the material of 'Call Me Izzy' stays right at that same eye-rolling level for the entire 85 minutes. 3 Jean Smart stars in 'Call Me Izzy' on Broadway. Emilio Madrid The play is dull and unchallenging. Outside of a surprise run-in with a professor — the show's one hearty laugh that then gets overused — the story unfurls in the most obvious, stay-on-the-runner way possible. Wouldn't you know Izzy's poems are discovered by tastemakers in New York, and that puts a scary wedge between her and Ferd. Her mind quickly wanders north. It's like 'Waitress' without the songs, set at a coffee shop's open-mic night. Much of 'Call Me Izzy' relies on old southern stereotypes. She's the sole educated, sensitive woman in a sea of boors; a trailer is a hotbed of drunkenness and abuse; everybody speaks colorfully like they're on a porch rocking chair. There's a mocking tone to it all. Later, in an attempt to course-correct, Wax has a wealthy New York philanthropist couple come to visit Izzy and Ferd. It turns out city folk can have the same dark marital problems. The scene makes the ideas of 'Call Me Izzy' no less hackneyed or rudimentary. 3 The story of 'Izzy' is cliched, but Jean Smart is a pleasure to watch. Emilio Madrid At least there's Smart. She doesn't pop in and out of distinct characters like Sarah Snook is in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' or Jodie Comer did in 'Prima Facie.' Rather she regales the crowd in the way a person does at a dinner table. The actress is a pleasure to watch, as ever. A best friend, a cool aunt. 'Designing Women' fans will especially enjoy the return of her Southern lilt after her last few years of Las Vegas and LA attitude. Smart's Izzy is alive with openness and joy, in spite of the pain, although she occasionally swallows her words TV-style. 3 Much of the play takes place in a bathroom. Emilio Madrid Dead on arrival is Sarna Lapine's in-the-toilet direction. 'Hacks' is a great word to describe her butchered scenic transitions. We spend most of the play staring at a bathroom, even when the characters aren't in it. Even the most basic staging that this sort of show requires is bungled. Back in the first scene, Izzy, talking to herself, says, 'Call me Isabelle! Call me Ishmael! Well that's not terribly original.' True. Nothing here is.
Economist
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Economist
Xiaolu Guo on love, art and how the Chinese psyche has changed
One of the Chinese diaspora's most celebrated artists grew up poor but surrounded by literature and art. After a string of books in her native language Xiaolu Guo found her creativity constrained. In London she began writing and making films in English —most recently a reworking of 'Moby Dick'. After half a life inside China and half outside, she has illuminating views on art, love, youth and womanhood. Rosie Blau, a former China correspondent for The Economist and a co-host of 'The Intelligence', our daily news podcast, visits Ms Guo at her home. They explore the author's formative years, her bewildering move to the West and her thoughts on Chinese art and society today.
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
50th anniversary of 'Jaws': How the film impacted public perception of sharks
A theme song consisting of a simple two-note motif has kept swimmers terrified of open water for decades. John Williams' iconic score for the movie "Jaws," which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its release later this month, is instantly recognizable -- the sound of which is enough to prompt people to look around for a monster of the sea to emerge from the surface, even if they are no where near the ocean, shark experts told ABC News. The movie, one of the first feature films directed by Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg and based on the book of the same name by Peter Benchley, shifted the collective consciousness surrounding sharks and the danger they present for the past 50 years, some experts said. Based in a coastal town in New England, residents are terrified after a woman is killed by a great white shark that seems to want to continue raising its number of human kills as it stalks boats and swimmers. "Jaws" is almost synonymous with the American summer -- similar to Fourth of July and apple pie, Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University Long Beach, told ABC News. The film tapped into humans' primal fear and became a social phenomenon in the U.S. and abroad, grossing over $470 million at the box office, adjusted for inflation. Shot at water level, which is where humans see the water, "Jaws" instilled a fear of the unknown -- which is why it is still relevant today, Ross Williams, founder of The Daily Jaws, an online community dedicated to celebrating the movie, told ABC News. "It villainized sharks and people became absolutely terrified of any species that was in the ocean," James Wilkowski, director of the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station at Oregon State University, told ABC News. 'Jaws' transformed sharks into the new marine villain When "Jaws" was released on June 20, 1975, it transformed the apex predator into an underwater villain whose presence made water unsafe, Wilkowski said. Whales were the most feared marine animal in the generations before "Jaws," said Lowe, who grew up in Martha's Vineyard, where the movie was shot. Lowe's grandfather was a commercial fisherman, and his grandfather's uncles were commercial whalers, who passed down the terror of whales to the subsequent generations, Lowe said. The fear was based on stories of sailors coming back from whaling expeditions where friends and family had died, Lowe added. "Moby Dick," the 1851 novel by Herman Melville about a whaling ship captain named Ahab and his quest to get revenged on the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg, likely contributed to the trepidation as well, Lowe said. But the anti-shark propaganda had been brewing long before the movie was released, Williams said. Horror stories published during World War II and films that preceded "Jaws" did not paint sharks in a nice light, Williams said. Chapple, who started his career in Cape Cod, knew people who saw the movie as a kid and still refused to enter ocean waters as an adult. "It was really in the psyche of the community," he said. Misconceptions about sharks due to 'Jaws' Like many fictional films, there were several exaggerations or dramatizations about sharks included in "Jaws" for cinematic effect. The most glaring inaccuracy is that sharks want to attack or eat people, the experts said. The notion that sharks are some "mindless killer" that are going to kill anyone who is swimming in the water or on a boat is inaccurate to the nature of the predator, Taylor Chapel, co-lead of Oregon State University's Big Fish Lab, told ABC News. "We're not on a shark's menu," Wilkowski said. "They don't want to eat us, and if they did, we'd be easy pickings. It'd be a buffet." Shark research began in the 1970s, so at the time, scientists -- and especially the public -- didn't know a lot about them, Chapple said. There are also anatomical inaccuracies in the shark animatronic itself -- including bigger teeth, larger "dark, black" eyes and an unrealistic 25-foot body, Wilkowski said. Technology at the time made it difficult for the filmmakers to get actual footage of the sharks, so there are barely any glimpses of real sharks in the movie and filmmakers largely relied on the animatronic as well, Lowe said. "When the movie came out, it was probably the most deceptively but brilliantly marketed movie ever," Williams said. The biggest misconception that still reverberates among public fear is that a shark sighting is a "bad thing." But the presence of sharks is actually a sign of a healthy ecosystem, Wilkowski said. "To see sharks in an environment is a good thing," he said. "...we just have to learn how to coexist with them." After the movie was released and permeated society's awareness of the dangers that lurk beneath the surface of the water, there was a direct correlation of shark population declines due to trophy hunting, Wilkowski said. "Because people's perceptions of sharks were negative, it made it easier for them to allow and justify overfishing of sharks, regardless of the species," Lowe said. Both Spielberg and Benchley have expressed regret in the past over how "Jaws" impacted the public perception of sharks. But Chapple has noticed a shift in the past two decades, where sharks have transformed from a "terrifying" creature to one people are fascinated by, instead, he said. "The fascination has outlasted and outpaced the fear," Williams said. Humans are actually a much bigger threat to sharks, killing up to 100 million sharks per year as a result of overfishing, according to the Shark Research Institute. Climate change and shifting food sources are also causing species-wide population declines, the experts said. Sharks are crucial for a healthy ocean ecosystem. The apex predators maintain balance in the food web and control prey populations. "If we lost sharks, our marine ecosystem would collapse," Wilkowski said.
