New Zealand Conservative

Teachers attacked by the hundred Hundreds of teachers have been receiving ACC-funded treatment after being assaulted at school. Principals are shocked by the figure and are demanding immediate action to make schools safer. ~ Front page, Dominion Post, Monday 8 March, 2010 Over the past few decades, New Zealand has been experimenting with a "non-violent" approach to disciplining children. Apparently children can be reasoned with and punishment of the physical sort should never be needed. First the schools were constrained with physical discipline being made illegal in the 80's and then a couple of years back, parents have been likewise constrained in reining in their unruly children. And now principals are shocked that so many teachers are being assaulted in schools. Why should they be shocked? Is not this just the natural consequence of removing punishment? Now it's the teachers bearing the brunt of increasing violence from children, next it'll be m...

Christopher Hitchens has, that's who. In it he says that when he was a trotskyite student at Oxford he had affairs with two men who would later become Cabinet Ministers in Margaret Thatchers government. That little revelation should help boost his sales.

Richard Dawkins will be speaking in Wellington on March 10 th . That should be fun. There are some choice quotes in the NZPA release announcing this "All educated religious people accept the fact of evolution," Richard Dawkins says matter-of-factly. That statement should offend only "uneducated religious people", the evolutionary biologist and critic of creationism says. Evolution is not a "fact" it is a theory and as such no matter how good a fit it may or may not be with what actually occurred and is occurring in the natural world it will be modified and adjusted in years to come. It is almost certain "evolution" as preached 100 years hence will not be anything like the version espoused by Richard Dawkins and his disciples today. At the end of the piece Mr Dawkins alludes to the real issues that his philosophical outlook raises "[Because] there's no ultimate point to your existence, that doesn't mean that you should r...

The Iraq war should be a dead issue, last week they hanged Chemical Ali , an event that went virtually unnoticed in the wider world. And yet he was a monster who amongst his other crimes gassed 5000 people in the town of Halabja . Virtually nobody mourns his passing. Meanwhile in London Tony Blair is being grilled by yet another inquiry into his role in the events that saw Chemical Ali, and his Cousin Saddam Hussein bought to justice. Its a circus outside of course - the usual suspects accusing Tony Blair of being a war criminal whilst seemingly oblivious of the crimes against humanity committed by the regime he help to overthrow and the war criminals he helped bring to justice. The BBC begins its reportage Tony Blair's appearance in front of the Iraq inquiry was marked by his determination to justify his decision to take Britain into the war on Iraq in 2003. There was no mea culpa moment and no apology. He made a brief admission about being "sorry" about the d...

This is great -Tim Tebow is a top quarterback who has set college football alight. The thing is when his mother was carrying him she became very ill and was advised to have an abortion - obviously she didn't take that advice and equally obviously Tim Tebow is glad she didn't. And now he is to appear in a pro life advertisement to be played during the super bowl. And boy oh boy has that got some people into a tizz. Get this from a Washington Post opinion writer . Abortion rights groups are angry that CBS will run a pro-life ad during the Super Bowl from the rabidly homophobic and anti-abortion group Focus on the Family. Few have actually seen the 30-second spot. But we know that it will feature football phenom Tim Tebow, whose mother chose to ignore her doctor's advice to terminate her pregnancy. Did you catch that? Ms. Tebow was presented with a choice. She was a missionary in the Philippines when she was stricken with amoebic dysentery. Doctors feared for he...

A good friend of mine said recently that he didn't want to be convinced of belief, as you can be convinced of anything, even things that are not true or right in hindsight, therefore he doesn't trust being convinced. Hopefully I've got the essence of that right, for I think he is being very wise as he carefully tries to get to the truth. Truth is something human beings are wired for, however, our ability to discern truth or to desire to recognise truth is flawed, due to our flawed nature. It takes a desire for truth above a desire to believe in a certain way to get closer to the truth. In other words, careful deconstruction of ones desires and motives, which (I think) is really only possible with divine help. Otherwise, it's easy to get tangled up and seriously lost. One incorrect assumption can lead a person away from what is true. Which leads me to why I've made the above reflection. I've been reading up on "annihilationism". It's a belief...

Yep, Hone is at it again as a news story on Stuff reports on remarks he made this weekend - Hone Harawira says white New Zealanders reacted badly to his controversial "white mother....ers" remark because they don't like "looking at themselves in the mirror". "Last year I made the statement that white so-and-sos have been raping our lands and ripping us off and everyone hated me. All I was doing was holding up a mirror to New Zealand." When are the Maori party going to do something about this guy? Surely they can't let him keep spouting off this racist nonsense. I know they censured him for the end of last year, but he's started off the New Year with the same old rubbish!

The Atheist Bus Campaign is amusing. In the competition for ideas, they present theirs for due consideration in a respectful way. The follow up campaign is far more sinister and deviates from this position. We know that the UK Humanist organisation behind this campaign openly attacks religion, and it's primary benefactor, Richard Dawkins, wants to see it stamped out. Apparently, there's no need to make any discernment on "good" religious values or "bad" religious values, such is the depth of rational thinking from the self-professed rationalists. The latest move is to imply that parents who pass on their values, if derived in any way from their faith, are child abusers. What's their solution? Well, there's what they say, and then there's where the bus is heading. It's heading to hell, good intentions or not. --ZenTiger The topic continues here: Atheists still want your children

A high profile current MP has taken the extraordinary step of gaining name suppression for himself and his entire party. Whilst we are not able to tell you his name, or the name of his party, we can confirm he is currently serving as Prime Minister of a small South Pacific country off the eastern coast of Australia. Said the current MP and Prime Minister: "We are about to make major changes to the tax system which could have a negative impact on our popularity should these policies be linked to our party. People will unfairly speculate that we are guilty of the worst possible crimes and may also accuse us of assets sales and other offenses against socialism. Therefore we have requested name suppression to minimize any unfair damage to our reputation and the harm and embarrassment that our families may suffer."

The Wikipedia is great for background material, but the more contentious the issue the more we need to be suspicious of it. This latest scandal is a little like ClimateGate, but with the assumed power of community collaboration taken for a ride. This becomes another example [and here's another and another ] of why it's becoming increasingly harder to label AGW skeptics "deniers". [ Hattip: CR ] U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley would take on particularly crucial duties. Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known - Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia's articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to ...

Twice this week I've seen the comment "The age of consent in the Vatican City is 12, it's the lowest in the world". It's always dropped as a factoid that supposedly confirms the sexual depravity of the Catholic Church. It's a bit of a nonsense really, on several counts, so I thought I'd document these reasons in a post to save myself from repeating this in future comments. How big is the Vatican City? The Vatican City is an area within the city of Rome, Italy. It can be described as a City-State. It is around 110 acres in area (approx 0.44 square kilometres) and has a population of around 800, making it the smallest country in the world in terms of land size and population. No schools. No families. No children. The Vatican is not a traditional "country" with families and schools and children growing up. It's a small area of land not even half a square kilometer serving as the central government of the Catholic Church, with tou...

Sue agrees : While it is true that [the] use of force for correction will technically be an offence, this does not mean that our already very stretched police force will be taking this kind of action. Any kind of force is illegal, but says Sue, the Police are overstretched and too busy to enforce it. John Key doesn't seem to care that smacking IS ILLEGAL. Furthermore, the referendum asked the question: SHOULD A SMACK BE A CRIMINAL OFFENCE? 87.6% of the million plus responses indicate most strongly that the only way of fixing the problem is to make this legal.

Provocation is all the rage at the moment. Admittedly, it's seen as a Clayton's excuse, but if I've seen it once, I must have seen it 216 times. The person that provoked this provocation was not actually Weatherston, although he did take a stab at it. It was some other dude that wasn't too happy with a come-on from a gay person, and felt sufficiently provoked to kill him, and justify this as a backdoor defence against murder. To complicate matters, what appears to be an over-reaction may have been provoked by some date rape drugs. If that rumour is true, then provoked he was. Then the Greens and Labour maintain they were provoked into running an official non-binding ad-hoc meeting in Bellamy's to discuss their bank fees. Apparently, National weren't suitably provoked into investigating the Banks declining profits, and Labour are now running with scissors to prove just how wild and dangerous they can become when callously provoked by being ignored. The comi...

In a stunning blow for human rights, a gay man has been forced to become straight. "This is an abuse of my human rights" said Nigel Ipswitch as the court ordered he engage in marital sex with the women he was forced to marry, Susan Gladbottom. It all started when Susan met Nigel at a party, and a strong friendship developed. "We had so many shared interests, and Nigel was very attentive to my thoughts and feelings. One thing led to another, and love developed. I asked him if feelings were shared, and he said yes, absolutely. He then explained that we could never be anything more than friends, because he was gay." "Well, I wasn't prepared to take no for an answer, so I checked gay lobby groups and asked if people were allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex, and they said absolutely not. It was clear that the ONLY reason Nigel could come up with for not marrying me was that I wasn't male." "They built an entire legal case around disc...

I was going to speak of Humanism, and how religion is automatically rejected as providing any basis for claiming authority, requiring reason alone. I was also going to discuss Catholic thought, that speaks of the role of both faith AND reason. Topics too big for a single post, so I'll simply make this a part of the whole. So I'll begin this post with some of the problems Humanists have to grapple with, by quoting Clive James (Cultural Amnesia, 2007). He sees the power of reason, and wonders how we can make civilisation more civilised. If humanists have faith, it is in reason. Why are people then, so unreasonable? It was terrible, that age...The full facts about Nazi Germany came out quite quickly, and were more than enough to induce despair. The full facts about the Soviet Union were slower to become generally appreciated, but when they at last were, the despair was compounded. The full facts about Mao's China left that compounded despair looking like an inadequate r...

Last year, for Easter, I did a post about public holidays; Freedom To Shop . This year I regurgitate the same post, partly to see if the comments will change, and partly because the post was on sale at half price, and I couldn't resist a bargain. Freedom To Shop (2008) Over at Kiwiblog, David fights gamely to assure all freedom can be defined by how many days a year a society can shop. He assumes of course that asking people on low incomes to work at time and a half is really an honour that would not be refused. This is all before we consider the Helen Clark factor. Dear Helen turned lower and middle class New Zealand into welfare beneficiaries. Working for Families (WFF) does actually encourage workers to stay at home with their family on a public holiday. Helen deserves full credit for the first accidentally family friendly policy that Labour has introduced. You see, the moment a worker gets paid overtime rates, their income go up, which raises their tax rate and reduces th...

And the ideological lines get moved back in the sand just a little bit further with the not unexpected announcement that ANY discipline amounts to a breach of children's rights. The authority for such pronouncements are made citing the bible of the the left, the "United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child". Supported by the "NZ National Curriculum", for the slam dunk. And super-nanny, the new age reality parenting program comes under fire for being effective. Recall from the s59 debates that a smack equates to child abuse, and now we are told that putting a child in a "time-out" chair for hitting other children amounts to this horrendous word called "punishment." Note the preference for the word "punishment" over "discipline". Discipline is verboten in these conversations. The article goes on to say that the way to handle kids hitting other kids is not to "punish" them, but to "communicate...

The Children's Commissioner, Dr Cindy Kiro, spoke out today on violence against children. The prompting was on the guilty verdict of those that murdered 3 year old Nia Glassie, with tales of cruelty and mistreatment that shocked New Zealand to its core. So this is what she said: “New Zealand has a high tolerance to violence and much of the violence towards children is perpetrated in the name of discipline. There are no acceptable ways of hitting children. I have several problems with her statement. Firstly, this case wasn't about hitting. It was about kicking and beating. Dropping and throwing. Spinning and Tossing. It was about a lack of empathy and love. It was about stupidity and ignorance. It was about immorality. This didn't start with a smack meant in discipline, and it didn't end in a smack for the sake of discipline. A 34 year old mother had shacked up with a 17 year old boy (age 15 when the relationship started), and the Children's Commissioner did...

Appallingly, Che Guevara has been moving through recent history from revolutionary thug to iconic freedom fighter and recently, an iconic poster boy for too many socialists and the ardent left wing. He has also become somewhat iconic to the gay lobby - strange when he was also happy to put gay men up against his bloodstained revolutionary wall. The internet remains divided on his status with wishy-washy liberal justifications such as : This is a really controversial topic that has no true answer to. Evil is based on whether or not the person nows [sic] truly that there [sic] actions harm others. Che fought for the poor and in his mind any actions taken to bring about socialism was justifiable. and from some-one known, perhaps not surprisingly as Trotskyi : He was a man who stood up for what he believed in and that was the equality of all people. He worked to put an end to capitalist and imperialist systems that degraded humanity. He was also a loving father, who cared very deeply for...

The chief censor banned a T-Shirt with offensive language on it. It also put the boot into Jesus and depicts a near naked nun masturbating. This is really a litmus test of the sentiment “with freedom comes responsibility”. If some freedom loving individual thinks it’s their right to walk down the street with “Jesus is a c*nt” on their T-Shirt with aforementioned graphic picture of a nun, for all and sundry to see, including children, then they demonstrate they don’t actually possess the requisite responsibility and therefore the censor bans the T-Shirt as an instructive way of helping idiots find their limits. People go on about the need to be free to say and do whatever you wish, but are those people also arguing that children should be exposed to any and all of this? I suspect they are too self-centred to even understand the concept. If you are going to be given freedom, prove you can act responsibly. That's the deal. This particular T-Shirt crosses the line, because it wasn...