I received a well-written
but anonymous letter recently from, judging by the butterfly sticker attached
to the address label and the concern and sympathy shown by the writer for conditions
suffered by Nelson’s poorer residents, a woman.
Apologies if I’ve got it wrong, but I’ll stick with that assumption in
the meantime.
AA hopes, in the
absence of my recent posts, that I’ve not given up the fight or been ill, and I
can reply no to both. However, as someone
who spends far too much time thinking and far too little on writing the
resulting ideas down, I’m finding they become too complex, too diverse, to
encapsulate in something readable, and I’m too lazy to write them out in
full. Then the U.K.’s Chief Rabbi
Jonathan Sacks comes along and says similar things so much clearer and simpler
but reaching the same conclusion, that I wonder why I would bother writing, or why
anyone would bother reading, my poor efforts.1
In case AA uses the
YourNZ site, I can point out that having the moderator censor a post of mine on
the grounds that it was too long (shorter than others), looked boiler-plated
(written in full just before posting), was polemic (not in the least – I’ve
never written in that style), and was not relevant (it gave what I considered a
necessary precursor narrative to the subject’s main point, written for people
like the moderator who had an extremely poor grasp of the issues involved), led
me to think that I was wasting my time writing for it.
AA’s concerns refer
principally to the local Nelson issue of MP Nick Smith’s “obsessive
determination to force a motorway through the heart of Victory [Square]”. While I can understand AA’s feelings, such as
the effect that the dead hand of development has on peripheral areas, the
consequent depreciation of property values, and winter’s atmospheric
conditions, it is beyond my personally-imposed brief. She is concerned about the quality of
accommodation given to Muslim refugees, but what this raises in my mind has
less to do with the available housing stock and much more to do with ideological
neo-liberal constraints imposed on national and local governments’ attitudes to
providing adequate standards and controls on rental properties, and to them providing
housing as an agency responsible for one of society’s basic needs.
I’m afraid I take very
little interest in local and national issues.
This country is reasonably well-run, has few insoluble issues, and is
subject to the provisions of liberal democracy.
Compared with most other places in the world, I think New Zealand really
is a paradise on Earth, albeit a little chilly, but with luck global warming
will take care even of that.
My thanks to AA for going
to the significant trouble of writing to me.
I do hope she reads this, and furthermore, replies on this website to
which I will respond with the greatest respect.
I’ve moved on from (though not left) concerns I have about Islamic conquest
of the West as I consider it a fait accompli, to those of the West’s ideologies
that facilitate it – much more insidious and, in consequence, just as
dangerous.
