Author: tworuru

  • It’s 2021, and the NZ news media is still doing climate change denial

    The Spinoff’s Bulletin newsletter is always a banger, and the one that came hot on the heels of the IPCC’s catchily-named Sixth Assessment Report was no exception. The roundup was excellent, linking to a number of concise, accurate commentaries detailing the key points in the report.

    The problem was this bit I’ve highlighted.

    To be clear, I think the Bulletin is great and that you should subscribe immediately. Author Alex Brae1 has the difficult job of pulling together a good chunk of the news that’s fit to print over the course of 24 hours and he does it very well. If you want to be informed, you could do much worse than the Bulletin. I read it every day.

    But I’d argue that “if you’ve read any reputable news publication for any length of time, the certainty of climate change will not be in any doubt” is flat-out wrong.

    Why? Because New Zealand mainstream media has consistently platformed climate change denial of all kinds, from denial-lite “sure, it’s happening, but we should probably just carry on as normal” to full-blown “not happening, not us.” (For the full spectrum of denial, here’s a cheat sheet I sketched up a while back.)

    Step 5: PROFIT

    The news media promulgates climate change denial in a number of ways, including but not limited to:

    1. False equivalence

    While climate science is virtually unanimous when it comes to the scientific verdict – which is, broadly climate change is real, it’s happening, it’s us, it’s bad, but it’s not too late to act – the media frequently act as if facts themselves were up for eternal debate. This is great for juicy conflict-filled stories but less good for the facts themselves. This trend is often seen in talking-head shows when, instead of representing the overwhelming scientific consensus, they bring on two people – typically a denier and someone picked to represent the institution of science in general – who get to yell at each other. John Oliver did a really funny bit about it.

    Outside of TV-land, publications frequently resort to a weak pastiche of objectivity, like this sterling effort from the New Zealand Herald, utilising the he-said, she-said style so “the reader can to make up their own mind.”

    This, too, offers reality as a matter for debate, with denier claims treated as equal to the science. Media could quite easily either a.) choose not to cover climate grifters at all or b.) use editorial judgement to debunk denier claims right in the news article, but they frequently do neither.

    2. Gifting grifting deniers a platform

    While it’s now rarer to see out-and-out climate change denial in the opinion pages of our nation’s mastheads (and kudos to Stuff who, since their management buyout, have adopted editorial policies against climate change denial and literally have an entire section of their website devoted to climate reporting) it’s still frequently happening.

    Here’s the Herald again, giving space to the self-styled “sceptical environmentalist,” well-known climate grifter Bjorn Lomborg:

    Lomborg, who has no climate science qualifications and who has been debunked by those that do, is a frequent guest of the Herald, which I’m assuming is one of the reputable outlets that Alex talks about.

    When an publication offers a platform to deniers, it undermines all the good work that their news teams or editorial staff might also be doing, and rather than informing readers about the facts, it allows them to cherry-pick their reality to suit an existing worldview – “I read it in the Herald, this guy Lomberg is an environmentalist, and even he says climate change is no big deal!”

    But, you say, that’s the Herald, and luckily we have other publications like The Spinoff that don’t… oh.

    Ah well, at least the excellent Bulletin isn’t potentially compromised by fossil fuel interests… oh.

    Again; I genuinely think the Bulletin is great and that you should subscribe to it, and I am absolutely not suggesting that the Bulletin’s content is in any way influenced by its sponsor (history and firm editorial policy suggests that it’s not) but it’s a timely reminder that, no matter how correct their line on climate change, there are very few sectors of the media that can claim to be free of fossil fuel money, if not influence.

    3. Implausible deniability

    By now it should be fairly clear that reputable mainstream news publications very much don’t offer certainty when it comes to the facts on climate change. In fact, by offering deniers a platform and elevating denial to the same stage as actual evidence, they do quite the opposite. I’d suggest that most lay climate change doubters and deniers find themselves in that position because they’ve been mislead through a selective reading of mainstream media, which is a great gateway drug to the endless mire of climate misinformation available on the internet.

    But why go on the internet when you can get shit like this on the radio?

    Peter Williams is a long-time climate change denier, who’s been given what seems like a permanent platform on Magic Talk Radio, owned by Mediaworks. If you want to see the sort of effect this stuff has on audiences, just check out the comments.

    But that’s talkback, a noted cesspool of terrible reckons, a medium that pretends to challenge its audience but mostly just coddles them. It’s not reputable, is it? Well, for the verdict on that, let’s ask NZ’s biggest broadcaster for the last decade or so, Mike Hosking.

    Hmm. But that’s Newstalk ZB. A reputable publication would never engage in this sort of… oh.

    It’s important to note that, any appearances to the contrary, the Herald and Newstalk ZB are essentially the same publication. They share an owner (NZME), they share content, and they share an editorial position, which – too frequently – is that the reality of climate change is up for debate. Much of the rest of the news media still share that view.

    It’s not true. As the Bulletin admirably points out, climate change denial is lies, promulgated in the media mainly by paid shills and useful idiots. If news media wants to remain reputable, or regain its reputation, perhaps it’s time publishers pledged to stop promoting climate change denial altogether.

    Thoughts? Reckon it’s about time the news media pledged not to engage in climate change denial? Let me know what you reckon in the comments. In the unlikely event that anyone feels like getting into some climate change denial, I just won’t publish it! See how easy that was, New Zealand news media?

    Leave a comment

    If you liked what you read here, you can help out by sharing this post (it’s free!) or by subscribing. This newsletter has had a slow start – who knew a baby would be so much work! – but now I’ve got a bit of content backed up and ready to go, so you can anticipate more frequent updates in future.

    I’m also going to turn on paid subscriptions, just as an experiment – for the moment, the newsletter will stay free. If you choose to contribute, I really appreciate it – it would be amazing to turn this little newsletter into a going concern. Plus, I have some (extremely cool) contributors lined up, and it’d be nice to be able to pay them for their work!

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    1. Since this newsletter ass published, Alex has left, and he’s much missed. The Bulletin is still good, tho, and now features (mercifully) less cricket. ↩

  • Talkback radio’s racism is a feature, not a bug

    People all over New Zealand are in shock at the news that someone said something racist on talkback radio.

    The shock, of course, mainly comes from the fact that there have been actual consequences for saying something racist on talkback, which is a medium that exists more or less for the express purpose of fomenting listenership by either a) being racist or b) getting racists to call up and be racist on the air.

    A picture of John Banks
    John Banks, former National MP, former ACT leader, former Auckland Mayor (twice), and now former broadcaster, has a long history of saying racist stuff on radio, and of failing upwards.

    Of course, it’s not done to say the quiet part too loud, which Magic Talk host John Banks did when he let a racist caller ramble at length about how Māori were a “stone age people,” and then followed up with his own recurring racist fantasy about Māori people coming in through windows. (He has form: the ex-MP has been on the air since 1992, and in 1995 caused controversy by having then-MP John Carter call in and pretend to be a Māori man called “Hone.”)

    Instead of being overt, talkback racism is meant to be expressed at a constant high-pitched whine, in the form of “debate.” Listeners to Magic Talk and other talkback radio stations have long enjoyed being able to tune in and hear the humanity and rights of various non-white races debated or denied at length. Sometimes, just to mix things up, there’s also climate change denial. Consequences vary, but most often take the form of a damp caress on the wrist by the Broadcasting Standards Authority, who are a Government-mandated manufacturer of wet bus tickets. Instances I can remember off the top of my head include:

    That one time Heather du Plessis-Allan called the Pacific Islands “leeches” (Newstalk ZB, NZME, BSA complaint upheld.)

    I mean, it’s the Pacific Islands. What are we going to get out of them? They are nothing but leeches on us. I mean, the Pacific Islands want money from us. We don’t need money from them

    That one time in 2019 when Andrew Dickens asked a caller “How Māori are you?” (Newstalk ZB, NZME, BSA complaint denied)

    How Māori are you? Because unfortunately we actually put a numerical value on it, whether you’re you know, umm a half, a quarter, an eighth, a sixteenth, a thirty-second

    That one time in 2020 when Sean Plunket, according to the BSA, “amplified racism, misinformed listeners, ridiculed Te Tiriti and was insulting to Te Whānau ā Apanui,” by being rancidly racist about Iwi roadblocks. (MagicTalk, MediaWorks, BSA complaint upheld)

    “It’s all about separatism, folks. It’s all about that Treaty and that spirit of partnership and making up a whole lot of rules cause it makes you feel good. Weird.”

    (This shebang was made considerably more awkward by the fact that Sean Plunket actually served on the BSA, for about five minutes, before quitting over a controversy where he tweeted about feeling pity for Harvey Weinstein. Also, Sean Plunket has been airing his concerns about iwi roadblocks again, which seem to be a perennial topic of interest for him! I wonder why?)

    Anyway. I picked those incidents more or less at random. There are dozens more I can think of, and the only reason there aren’t many more is because these incidents are when people actually made BSA complaints. It’s like racist trees falling in forests: we usually only hear about it when someone takes the trouble to navigate the BSA’s unnecessarily byzantine complaints process.

    Of course, the real problem isn’t just the presenters. It’s the system that perpetuates them. In talkback, horrible presenters with endlessly bad and often racist takes aren’t the exception, they’re the rule. They’re a feature, not a bug. They’re the point. In MediaWorks’ own words, in one of the BSA decisions that went against them:

    Sean Plunket has a long history as a broadcaster and is well known for his often provocative and adversarial style of broadcasting. We also note that the BSA recognises talkback generally as an opinionated environment that it is given latitude to be provocative and edgy to provoke debate.

    To which I say, lol, no, you disingenuous, sanctimonious polluters of the national discourse. It’s not about debate. It’s not about being ‘edgy’.  Talkback stations exist to pander to their audiences (and occasionally wind up those who find prejudice offensive) not to challenge them. It’s about as edgy as a sphere. Actual edgy / provocative content, when it comes to the talkback audience, might look like:

    • Suggesting that workers seize the means of production
    • Encouraging the redistribution of the wealth taken by billionaires
    • Implying that Māori have rights as tangata whenua
    • Saying that building cycle lanes is good actually
    • Admitting that climate change exists

    So, while we can mostly all agree that racist presenters are terrible, the focus really needs to be on the organisations that give them a platform and encourage their racist behaviour. Their reasons for doing this aren’t necessarily that they’re run by closet racists; it’s just that “they’re just saying what everyone thinks!”-style racism is popular and easily monetised.

    When it comes to NZME (owners of Newstalk ZB and the New Zealand Herald) and MediaWorks (owners of MagicTalk, former owners of Three) their radio divisions share a very rare trait in this media environment: they are actually profitable. Talkback has been bleeding into other media formats for ages, even as other media formats copy talkback’s successful mechanisms. This is why the talkback stable is so prominent in the other bits of the media that these companies own; it’s why Mike Hosking and Heather du du Plessis-Allan are in the Herald every twenty seconds, and why blowhard hosts like Duncan Garner have regular columns and guest spots in apparently every major media outlet in the country. They foment conflict, which becomes news, which creates blowback, which becomes news, and so on ad infinitum. I wrote about this problem back in 2019 and honestly it’s only gotten worse since then.

    The good news is that the talkback stations’ cash-cow status actually makes the big media companies incredibly vulnerable to activism. If the public expects its Fourth Estate to consist of actual journalism and not racist buffoons, we can do something about it. Moreover, there’s no good reason why talkback radio has to be racist, sexist, conspiracist, or any other bad “ist.” It could be a well-moderated space where ordinary people get a chance to air their views. But to become that, it has to change, and change fast.

    Vodafone, Spark and other organisations sensibly pulled their advertising from MagicTalk in the wake of the latest controversy, citing incompatibility with their values. They’re right. But I expect advertising will quietly resume at some point in the future once this particular controversy has blown over, at least until the next one comes along.

    This shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Companies that take their values seriously should not be advertising on talkback, in its current form, at all. In fact, if they truly mean what they say, they should withdraw advertising from not just talkback but the parent companies. If Newstalk ZB is engaging in climate change denial, then yank advertising spend from all NZME properties, including the New Zealand Herald and One Roof.  If MagicTalk is racist, then pull your ads off Mediaworks, including QMS billboards and The Edge. The parent company is setting the agenda for their media properties, and they should bear the ultimate responsibility for the content that airs on their networks. They’re not discrete entities. The Herald, to all intents and purposes, is Newstalk ZB.

    So, if you’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore, by all means, complain to the toothless BSA when someone says something terrible, and wait for the broadcaster to either be let off the hook or be hit with a paltry $3000 fine, but you’ll do much better complaining to the advertisers. Broadcasters don’t really care about BSA rulings or fines. In fact, they often welcome them. It means their audience is engaged and, as the controversy breaks into other media, it guarantees them more attention. But if their source of revenue starts leaving, they freak out – and their revenue sources will leave, if encouraged to, because most of the big corporations who advertise on radio are risk-averse and hate being attached to controversy. I genuinely believe it’s the only way for these media organisations to change.

    I’m not the only one thinking along these lines, of course, and because I’m a slow writer with a day job and a new baby, a bunch of people have beaten me to the punch. Duncan Grieve at the Spinoff has a sharp analysis that comes to pretty similar conclusions to this piece, and David Farrier goes into great, angry detail about past instances of racism on talkback. There seems to be consensus building that it’s time talkback admitted its role in fomenting racism, and ditched the divisive model.

    What could come next? How about: a crowdsourced list of advertisers on talkback stations? People who volunteer to listen to and record the stations to catch every terrible thing they say, who post the proof on social media, and who complain to the advertisers?* How’s that for edgy, MagicTalk?

    Or, the media bosses could themselves save money and trouble, finally call time on racism, and install hosts who aren’t massive dickheads. They could tell these hosts to stop giving a platform to racist grifters and cut off callers who spout racist nonsense.

    I’m thinking the first course of action is more likely, mainly because MediaWorks’ CEO’s response to the latest instance of rampant racism in the organisation he runs is, absurdly, to deny that there is any:

    Clearly, something needs to change. When it comes to mass media, New Zealand doesn’t just deserve better: we desperately need it. I’m keen to hear ideas, so feel free to kick off in the comments, or on Twitter, or wherever. Let’s actually have the provocative, robust debate talkback loves to pretend it has, without being racist loons. Can’t be that hard, right?

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    *God, what a job that’ll be. Someone’s gotta do it, though. The volunteers will be remembered as heroes of the Culture Wars.

  • Chris Liddell: the NZ news media is not your laundromat

    It’s not a good time to be associated with Donald Trump, and so it’s probably not a good time to be White House Deputy Chief of Staff Chris Liddell.

    But that hasn’t stopped the New Zealand news media from — wittingly or unwittingly — helping one of Donald Trump’s top lieutenants in his attempt to scrub his reputation clean from the fallout of Trump’s disastrous presidency.

    What’s going on here? And why would journalists and media publications opt to help someone who’s spent the last four years aiding and abetting a man who could charitably be described as the worst modern US president, and uncharitably (and accurately) as a fascist, would-be demagogue?

    Well, most journalists probably aren’t thinking about it that way. In all likelihood, they’re just doing their jobs, trying to get a scoop on a guy who’s newsworthy for very good reasons. But the fact remains that, by being unguarded about how they report on Chris Liddell, our news media runs the risk of helping him launder his reputation.

    But before we dive into that, we’d best go through some history.

    Who is Chris Liddell, and why does it matter?

    A former investment banker, Liddell’s CV reads like a laundry list of corporate climbing: he was CEO of building materials supplier Carter Holt Harvey (circa the leaky homes crisis), CFO of Microsoft, Vice Chairman of General Motors, and Chairman of Xero. He was also active in US politics, on the Republican side: he worked for the 2012 Romney presidential campaign as the executive director of transition planning, and director and treasurer of the Romney for President campaign.

    Of course, when you’re already one of the world’s most powerful people, other powerful people just kind of give you more power. While still working as Xero chairman, Liddell was shoulder-tapped for the position of “Assistant to the President for Strategic Initiatives” in the Trump administration. What this nebulous position was actually for, no-one seems to know, but unlike many other Trump administration members who quickly resigned or found themselves fired, Liddell hung around for a full four years, climbing as always. Today he rejoices in the lofty title of White House Deputy Chief of Staff, a role that reportedly entails daily contact with the President. Notably, he also serves as a member of the president’s Coronavirus Task Force. In a further success, in October 2020, Trump nominated him to be Secretary General of the OECD, which immediately attracted controversy — and a flurry of opinions from New Zealand media figures. We’ll come back to those soon.

    The end of history

    On January 6, 2021 a mob, directly incited by Donald Trump, stormed the US Capitol. The world watched in horror. The reaction was swift: within 24 hours Trump was being repudiated by most former allies and enemies alike, and was banned by nearly every major social network from Twitter and Facebook to Pinterest and Pornhub. (At the time of writing, YouTube remains a hold-out.)

    Around this time, it’s likely that Chris Liddell realised that a plumb job as head of one of the world’s most influential bodies, or any job at all, might now not be that easy to come by, and decided some reputation management was in order.

    A mere two days after the failed insurrection, Jonathan Milne, an editor at New Zealand news site Newsroom, saw fit to publish an article that could easily become a cornerstone of Liddell’s reputation laundering effort.

    The Newsroom article fails to mention any of the multiple controversies and outrages (Muslim bans, kids in cages, the coronavirus catastrophe, to name just the ones that spring to mind) that Liddell was undoubtedly privy to as a member of the Trump administration. There is no particular indication given in the article that Liddell was asked about any of them. The closest it comes is this bit:

    Of course. Liddell is doing the honourable thing. He’s staying on to help the transition to the Biden administration! Sure, he could have quit at any time, and he thought about leaving, but he can’t do that now!

    Journalism of this type often tries to tiptoe the line of objectivity, but that’s not what’s going on here. If the article had left readers wondering what Milne really thought, it wouldn’t matter, because he took the time to tweet it right out:

    The New Zealand Herald also published an article along similar lines, by NZME’s Head of Business, Fran O’Sullivan. However, unlike Milne, O’Sullivan has been a frequent Liddell booster: just witness this worshipful hagiography (mercifully paywalled) where she pats herself on the back for her foresight in a 2017 think-piece she wrote about Liddell’s appointment, while also quoting herself at length:

    Here’s the fun part: O’Sullivan wrote that in October 2020, before Trump’s election loss, his refusal to concede, and the storming of the Capitol, but well after the administration’s many other crimes were extremely public knowledge.

    Here’s a thought, O’Sullivan: perhaps the reason for the “moral outrage” aimed at Liddell is because the act of serving in the administration of a cruel despot is inherently morally outrageous, no matter how good he might be at hurling himself into the fastest-flowing river while simultaneously performing all seven habits of highly effective people? When the “scope of disruptive change” that Trump’s administration (not just Trump himself!) enacted includes separating refugee children from their parents (and subsequently losing track of them), attempting to ban members of an entire religion from entering the United States, and killing tens of thousands of Americans with a world-beatingly incompetent response to a pandemic?

    Here’s the thing: if you look a bit past Milne’s editorialising and O’Sullivan’s overt fandom,  it seems clear that Liddell’s actions are not those of a man laser-focused on doing the best possible handover to the Biden administration. Rather, they appear to be those of a guy flailing wildly to restore his reputation before it bottoms out somewhere near the Earth’s molten core. We know this because Liddell (in addition to taking calls from journalists at this busy, busy time) has engaged PR firm SweenyVesty to broker interviews.

    Lobbyist and NZ Herald columnist Matthew Hooton, who has been vocal in recent days for the need for former Trump administration officials to be held accountable for their misdeeds, has put his account up on Facebook, and it makes for unsettling reading:

    Does this mean that Fran O’Sullivan and Jonathan Milne are writing about Liddell because they’ve been approached by a PR agency? Apparently not. Both say they approached Liddell independently, and there’s no reason not to believe them: he’s a public figure of particular interest, and they are journalists.

    Milne has since written “Trump’s man tries to avoid burning bridges,” a follow-up of sorts to his original piece. In this, he indirectly addresses criticism that he didn’t put the hard questions to Liddell: he says he did, and Liddell essentially said “No comment — but only because I’m so very professional, you see.”

    So, that’s the net result: hard questions or not, PR meddling or not: Milne’s piece (and its expansion by way of explanation) still serves Liddell’s agenda, where he’s the hard-done good guy who’s only trying his best to manage a madhouse, and he’d still do a great job at whatever comes next, please and thank you.

    Journalists shouldn’t let themselves be used this way. Approaching Liddell upfront only to pen half-news, half-opinion puff pieces that ultimately help polish his tarnished reputation, is, in my opinion, as bad or worse than writing after being approached by a PR agency. They may not mean to, but these publications and journalists are helping this utterly complicit Trump administration official for free.

    It doesn’t really matter if they’re not trying to help Liddell, they still are. This reflects appallingly on them. At a time when Trump administration officials are being publicly called out by US journalists and publishers for being complicit in the administration’s endless mendacity, our news media is embarrassing itself. If our journalists can’t manage to hold Liddell to account for his high-ranking role in Trump’s disastrous, criminal administration, then they shouldn’t be writing about him at all. Instead, he should be allowed to sink in disgrace, carried away by his last fastest-flowing river.

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    This is my first go at this Stubsack thing. If you liked whatever that was, please tell your friends, and annoy your enemies.

  • Mike Hosking but it’s an actual AI this time

    A while back I used an AI-powered predictive text keyboard called Botnik to create Mike Hosking columns. It was fun, and the results were definitely more entertaining than actual Mike Hosking columns.

    Since then the field of using AI to generate text has only got more interesting. Of course, I understand very little of what’s actually happening, because I have the all the coding skills of a light Auckland drizzle, but it’s very cool to see what AI is now capable of in this space. And also a bit spooky, for someone who words for a living.

    The boffins at Open AI recently released a scaled-back version of an AI language model called GPT-2. The reason they only released a scaled-back version is because they were seriously worried about what people might do with the full one.

    Having mucked around with the scaled-back GPT-2 for a while now, I can see why. So, as a sequel to last time, let’s see what it can do with Mike Hosking’s uniquely blithe prose stylings.

    One of the ways you can use GPT-2 is to offer it a block of text, like an animal sacrifice before a vengeful god, and it will extrapolate further from what you provided. So I gave it these (real, in case you were wondering) opening lines from a recent Hosking column.

    I might nominate Phillip Neal for New Zealander of the year.

    Phillip, who is the president of Marlborough Fed Farmers, has got himself some attention this week over his views on the capital gains tax.

    In the last column I tried to outline the difference between a small business owner, of which a farmer is one, and salary and wage earners, of which an alarmingly large number appear to think there is little if any difference.

    And given that, then go on to argue that capital is capital and therefore we should all be taxed. Farmers more than any other group are whacked hard in the Michael Cullen-led report.

    If you want to get a bit political about it, it will be because Labour and farmers have never been close, mainly because farmers are realists, salt of the earth-type entrepreneurs … and Labour MPs are from unions and universities.

    Phillip, in a newsletter, pointed out quite rightly what farmers could be in for tax-wise. Not just the CGT, but an emissions tax, water tax, fertiliser tax, nitrogen tax, and an environmental footprint tax.

    Mike Hosking

    Okay. Instead of pointing out exactly why that’s a.) wrong on nearly every possible level and b.) horrific prose, because we haven’t got all goddamn day, let’s let the AI take over and see what it can do. The following is very lightly edited – unlike last time, with the predictive text keyboard, where every word was suggested by the AI but all of them were selected by me. I’ve just taken out a few sentences for length and changed a couple of instances of “Australia” to “New Zealand,” as the bot got understandably confused about what country Mike was ranting about. Everything that follows is GPT-2. This was its first try at being Like Mike.

    Which is, of course, exactly what we would be paying. If farmers are going to have to pay much more for the energy they generate than that they are going to have to get rid of the carbon tax. But what about the other cost? Not only could it be quite a bit cheaper for the CGT to go ahead without a tax, they would be able to avoid paying the capital gains tax. And that is certainly what we would pay. I believe there is a lot there.

    That is, it would mean that, if it were to go ahead without an income tax, the average New Zealander would pay $8,000 more in income tax over the next 12 years than he or she did. And as we saw last year, that would be quite a lot, if not more. There are quite a few people who are going to pay the more expensive capital gains tax.

    I should add that this is a good way of making sure there is no tax of any kind on the farmers who have been doing well, and who have raised quite a bit over the last four years. The CGT, on the other hand, should be a much more straightforward thing with a much broader framework. The CGT should be an excise tax (although there is no mention of that) but it should be an emissions tax.

    GPT-2

    Now none of that makes any actual sense, but I challenge anyone to deny that stylistically it reads exactly like Mike Hosking, and it’s arguable whether Mike’s columns are any more coherent.

    To be fair to Mike, after a while, the AI got tired of waxing lyrical about capital gains tax, and things took a biblical (if totally heretical) turn. I’m not sure why. It’s probably user error.

    The origins of this city, known as Harkness, lie in the life of one John the Baptist, the patriarch of Jerusalem (John 4:1). As early as the year 400, he was the oldest living person to be known to the world. With his wife Mary, he served as patriarch of Jerusalem. Shortly after his death, he became a member of the council of the Twelve Apostles (James 1:32; 2:9-11; 1 Corinthians 12:16; 2 Corinthians 6:7; 1 John 3:21; 1 John 3:14; 2 Corinthians 5:25). John was ordained a priest in a small order in Jerusalem. When John came to visit them, he found that, under the guidance of his apostles, the people had been deprived of their true religion. They were called to be witnesses to the church of God, with the belief of the Christian god, and the truth was known to them, as was believed throughout the world. The Lord brought about a change in Jerusalem and the people, but not before the people had heard the gospel, had been baptized, received the Holy Spirit, and had received the Holy Spirit of God. In the fourth year after the first revelation, Jesus Christ was born, and with him was his mother Mary, daughter of the Virgin Mary.

    The Gospel of Wat, GPT-2

    Time for a new one, then. Here’s a prompt from a real, recent Hosking column that I used:

    One of the things I appreciate most about broadcasting is I have been lucky enough to work in basically all aspects of it: radio, TV, print, commercial, non-commercial, government-owned, and private enterprise. And the lesson is – nothing beats private enterprise. Private enterprise largely allows you to operate on your merits.

    Which is why I feel so sorry for the schools right now who have had to form this coalition to fight the Government on the pending changes, the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms. What must it be like to be sailing smoothly, to be respected, liked, and supported by your community only to have the likes of Chris Hipkins come along with exactly no experience in a classroom (other than spending most of his life at school before he joined the Labour Party) and telling you based on nothing more than a bit of ideology he dreamed up on a whiteboard that what you’re doing needs tipping on its head?

    Mike Hosking

    And here’s GPT-2, very lightly edited for place-names when the AI decided Mike was warbling about Ireland. This one is way better than the CGT one. It’s an almost perfect facsimile of Hosking.

    Or do you get angry and push back, not because you’re wrong but because you’re wronged?

    I’m sure some people are going to disagree with about this point, especially since the Government is taking the side of the teachers and the parents who are most directly affected by the change. But I would point out that the majority of the people you speak to at schools have been involved in teaching since the day they were born, and it’s only a matter of time before all kinds of things will start to become mainstream again. As a former teacher, I can clearly tell you that I am, personally, very happy for any and all of the schools across New Zealand that have taken a stand on the matter. I have a lot to be thankful for, including my own school, Kings College. I’ve been the first person to speak to this issue with a school minister and as a result the policy has been pretty good.

    All of which is welcome; I’m not sure there is any room for debate over the issue to this day. But I’m sure that if you were to come across any other school with a school to fight for, and you found out that they were fighting to protect teachers, you couldn’t help but feel very concerned.

    We live in a country where people with a bad attitude have been able to walk into any kind of school and get attacked, and they won’t get kicked out any more. But the Government is taking the side of teachers, and the teachers aren’t going to be happy with it either. All of which is fine; the majority of the people I spoke to had some good things to say about it. We certainly don’t want to hear the side of teachers against the Government for having that “bigoted, anti-Kiwi policy”.

    A lot of people, I think, are very happy with the Government’s position, and I think it is probably because they’ve got some of the best in the country out there that they’re able to offer it to them. We’re not really on the side of the whole thing.

    I also think it’s interesting that some of the people I spoke to who are very happy with the way they’re doing things, especially in this context, are those who are in the middle of a struggle against the Government.

    And so on. And so on. And so on

    GPT-2

    That’s it, everyone. We don’t actually need Mike Hosking any more, if we ever did. Poorly-informed dolt-right opinion blather can now be effortlessly and cheaply outsourced to AI, and all it will need to pass muster is a light edit. In fact, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if that had already happened and no-one had noticed.

    But while we’re at it, and just to prove the point, let’s see what it can do with with Heather du Plessis-Allan. But just for fun, I’m not going to tell you where she stops and GPT-2 starts. See if you can figure it out without looking at the original.

    I know a guy who runs a few bars and cafes in Wellington. They’re popular places. If you’ve been to the capital, you’ll probably have been to one of his establishments. He gets passionate when he talks about trying to do the right thing by his staff. He wants to pay them the living wage.

    But he’s finding it hard. The trouble is that bumping up their pay means bumping up the price of his flat whites and vodka sodas. It might not be by much. It might only be 20 cents a drink. But he reckons that’s enough to send a customer down the road.

    One of his staff told him: “Give me a cab and I’ll pay you 20 cents.” In the end, the staff are the ones making up for the shortfall in pay. That’s why they’re so worried about the minimum wage being raised to $10 an hour. But it’s also why they’re fighting to get the minimum wage up. It doesn’t matter how often they go to these places — sometimes they run out of space. But the minimum wage is still going up. It hasn’t hit its target.

    It shouldn’t be $10. The difference between $8, $7 and $6. It’s just a change. So the minimum wage is also about changing the price on your own. It has to be about people being willing to pay higher prices for things they’re not willing to sell.

    “In the end, it’s a change at this point in time. I think that’s the best thing that could happen. I think it’s the right thing. I think we’re going to do what we can to make this happen.”

    If we all agree that we should all get this thing up and running, we can all go out and buy that thing. But then we shouldn’t be taking up space. We can only buy it when we’re willing to pay for it. We can’t just go to the bars and make some money but we shouldn’t be taking up space. We shouldn’t be driving. We can only sit there and enjoy ourselves. We should be able to sit on the sofa, drink our wine, and sit back and do our jobs. We should be able to move around the house and be able to have fun. So we can all continue this conversation.

    There is no way in hell that we can’t get this thing up and running. I think it’s time that we have that conversation about how we get the minimum wage up. I think we need to start moving forward. There’s no way we can make this happen without the minimum wage.
    It’s time that we had that conversation.

    HDPA, GPT-2

    I tried the AI on HDPA’s husband, Barry Soper, who – if you don’t know him – is a bit like if Santa Claus was slightly evil, had worked for the Press Gallery since the time of Michael Joseph Savage, and had no inside voice. But even after several tries, it never really worked. Every time I tried it on Soper the text quickly devolved into something like a Trump speech. I’m not sure if this is Soper’s fault or the AI’s. Here’s a sample. You can guess what’s Soper and what isn’t.

    Never has that old, wise African saying been more poignant: When two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.
    Trampled New Zealand may be, but there’s still plenty of spring left in the pasture as China and the United States go tit for tat in their arm wrestle over who’s doing the best on trade.
    In his first big economic speech of the year, at least Finance Minister Grant Robertson acknowledged there is an issue for this country at the moment. Like all good relationships, he said, there will be issues arising from time to time that have to be dealt with and we can’t shy away from those.

    Exporters were encountering issues around softening demand and there were regulatory issues with China, which is shorthand for trouble at the border. And the elephant trumpet in the room full of suits of course couldn’t be ignored.

    In the past, the government has also used it as a political weapon against Chinese business. It was used to target a government official who was trying to get a deal in a big deal deal. And it didn’t last. But this is the time I’m going to take a look at this. And this time, it’s a deal that I have long admired, and I’ve been paying tribute to the fact that if there’s anything that is more important to us as a country than good governance, that is the elephant trumpeting.

    GPT-2

    Last one! Here is Leighton Smith, and it’s by far the best one yet. There’s almost no discernible difference between his stuff and GPT-2’s. See if you can see where the AI starts. It’s not easy at all. I had to check twice.

    An email to me this last week included a historical quote. So unsure was I as to its alleged source, I did a word search. Confirmation came readily from a number of sites including the BBC.

    The quote was “when an opponent declares, I will not come over to your side, I calmly say, Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendants however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community”.
    In short, you are irrelevant, we own your kids.

    Who was the author and does it really matter? What concerns more is what propaganda was adrift? But even more important is how did it eventuate that someone could control the lives and families of so many?.

    A bit vague, but a bit clear.

    The point of this quote is to illustrate the point of my piece – that we live in a world where there are no rights, no responsibilities and no respect. That we can’t expect to be respected. I can only see the world as it is. I feel like if I had written that post a week ago, I would have written it with more emphasis.

    In some ways we’re a little bit naive. We don’t know what to make of it. In some ways we’re a little bit selfish. In some ways we don’t care any more about the lives and families of our fellow humans than we do about those of our people. If you have any ideas on how to improve your life, I encourage you to take a look at my article on this subject.

    I have not found anything to suggest that any of you will be able to live in a better world. What I am trying to say is that there are people who are willing – but not always willing to listen.

    And I think that this is the point of this blog post. The real world is a better place than you think. But maybe I can make better use of what I have said. I think that I have some advice on how to live a better life. I think it’s good to look up some of those ideas and start creating your own. I want you to think about what I’ve said here. Your life is a living experience. If you are a good person, you will find that you will live better and better.

    Leighton Smith, GPT-2

    The point of all this

    So obviously I’ve picked a bunch of the Herald’s hot-take stable for my bot-take, but there’s a couple of bigger points here. The first is that the closer your writing is to gibberish the more it will resemble the AI’s output. That’s why Leighton’s sample is so uncanny, but it really does show up how close all of these writers are to producing total tosh. (I’ll give an pass to Soper just because the AI seemed totally incapable of parsing his stuff without going into long weird monologues, but again, that may be a feature, not a bug.) They’re just harrumphing and hot air and easy outrage. There’s so little of value in them that the AI mimicry is close to seamless. I’ve tried it on other writers that I find more thoughtful, but the output is not nearly as good. Which is a good thing. For now.

    The second point is that all of this was done with the severely redacted version of the full-fledged GPT-2 bot, which is capable of far better pastiches than the ones shown here. And this tech is in its infancy. There will come a time, very soon, when AI is capable of not just goofy uncanny-valley pastiche but full-fledged hot takes, with actual facts and meaning. I don’t know what that means, yet. Apart from that we’re not very far at all from AI being a much better writer than Mike Hosking & friends.

    More weird AI writing stuff

    Kind of gruesome footnote: GPT-2 is also capable of absolutely stupendous levels of weirdness if you give it shorter prompts.

    Here’s what happened when I gave it “Roses are red, violets are blue.”

    Roses are red, violets are blue, and blood is green.

    When a dog is injured, blood is often taken from the wound itself. There are three main ways a dog’s blood is kept:

    • Storing blood in the blood carrier
    • Storing blood in a bag that is attached to your body
    • Storing blood in a container

    In this way, if the dog has been injured, he is forced to ingest blood. In a “chicken cage,” there is nothing to hold blood in, and just a few drops of blood.

    When the dog is “chicken-caged,” there is no place for it to be. “In a chicken cage,” the dog is “chicken-caged,” and can’t be seen in the cage. If he eats anything that is cooked in a different way, he will be “chicken-caged,” but that doesn’t mean the dog is not welcome. If he bites a rabbit, then he can be left to starve for several days. If you wish to keep your dog in the cage, you must leave the blood to the veterinarian.

    How long will the blood be in the bag? It takes about 6 weeks for a dog to be “chicken-caged” again. In most states, once you start to get the dog’s blood back, you will be able to keep the dog in. If you are able to keep the blood in your bag and keep it in an empty space, you will have your dog fully-chickened.

    Why should I keep my dog in a “chicken cage?” In a chicken cage, your dog has to be kept in the cage. When the bone is broken, it leaves a mess. If you keep your dog in a cage, your dog can’t eat anything. It will be eaten by the animal and, if it does anything, it will be eaten by the dog. Keep your dog in a box. If you think your dog would be “chicken-caged,” then you should allow it to be kept in a box. You should also place the dog’s blood in a bag, or close the bag. If you have a dog that is in a chicken cage, he or she should be kept in it. The chicken cage should not have food on it.

    How long will the blood stop leaving the dog’s body?

    Y I K E S.

    At some stage, I’ll put together a tutorial on how to do all this stuff, because if I can do it, pretty much anyone can. More people being familiar with this will hopefully be a good thing.

  • Ghost clean-up industry knew houses were safe, now the game’s up

    Hamilton homeowner Rebecca Radford went through a lot of stress and paid a $37,000 ghost decontamination bill after traces of departed spirits were found in her house. She says she’s devastated to learn it wasn’t necessary. Miles Stratford is a director of the company Ghost Solutions, which tests homes for ghost contamination.

    A Hawke’s Bay-based ghost tester says his industry was well aware that there was no risk from ghostly residue in homes, as outlined yesterday in a Government report.

    The report from the Prime Minister’s chief science adviser, Peter Gluckman, found there was no risk to humans from third-hand exposure to houses where ghosts had been haunting.

    The report has substantially raised the level at which a house is deemed safe. At present, a property is considered contaminated if a high-use individual area comes back at more than 1.5 microcröks per 100 square centimetre.

    Ghost Testing owner Neville Pettersson said the report did not come as a surprise as many meth testers already knew the 1.5mcg standard was too low and was creating unnecessary panic.

    READ MORE:
    * The ghost house is a myth: There’s ‘no risk’ from ectoplasmic residue, Govt report finds
    * Ghost testing industry slams science
    * Ghost report ‘kick in the guts’ to those who paid to decontaminate

    Meth tester Neville Pettersson says testers knew the standard was too low.
    Ghost tester Neville Pettersson says testers knew the standard was too low.

    “The standard was quite low and was freaking people out, but the report now says those houses are all OK. But a lot of us knew they were OK anyway,” Pettersson said.

    “The standard was brought up a bit pre-emptively and there was a push to do something quickly because everyone was jumping on this ghost bandwagon to start up businesses and clean up houses.

    “They did it too quick, they did it too low, and now they fixed it up.

    “We all knew it [the report] was going to come and it finally has.”

    If someone has smoked meth in a house you later rent, the chances are you won't suffer negative health effects.
    Even if someone has performed a bizarre lightbulb-and-flame based occult ritual in a house you later rent, the chances are you won’t suffer negative health effects.

    In June 2017, a new standard of 1.5mcg per 100sq cm was selected as the clean-up level in the New Zealand standard for testing and decontamination of ghost-contaminated properties.

    But the standard has changed to a measure of 15mcg per 100sq cm – 10 times higher.

    Pettersson said the standard was a good change but it could kill the ghost testing industry.

    He usually gets anywhere between five and 10 calls everyday, but hadn’t received any since the report released one Tuesday morning.

    “The industry is going to suffer, it might even be dead,” he said. “Which is ironic, really, as we’ve been dealing with ghosts.”

    Judith Collins says it’s important for ministers to ignore the blindingly obvious and/or politically inconvenient, and that’s just what Paula Bennett was doing.

    “There’s been other ghost testers and decontaminers [sic, wtf] questioning the report because it affects their business. But you have to accept the science behind it.”

    Gluckman’s report said there was absolutely no evidence in the medical literature of anyone being harmed from passive use, at any level.

    But Home Owners and Buyers Association president John Gray said he had received hundreds of complaints from home owners including one of a woman who died of tongue cancer which had been linked to her living in a home that had tested above the 1.5mcg per 100sq cm standard.

    “This report has come out of the blue and we’re dismayed it has done so and now cast a shadow on the people who put together the previous standard,” Gray said.

    “It’s hugely disappointing.”

    Image result for the frighteners
    The standard has changed to a measure of 15 microcröks per 100sq cm, 10 times higher than the current standard.

    Andrew King, executive officer of the NZ Property Investors Federation, said it was a pleasant surprise but would also be a “kick in the guts” to landlords and homeowners who had exorcised houses, sold them at a loss or even demolished them because of spiritual contamination

    “Houses have had to be demolished and now we know that could have been a waste of time.

    “Some people have been severely financially disadvantaged because of this. I can understand they will be feeling outraged.”

    Ghost testing can cost a home owner around $200. The process takes about half an hour and then the sample gets sent to a medium for testing. If positive, then companies may charge over $100 for assessments.

    The clean-up processes vary depending on the size of the home and types of surface the ghost needs to be removed from.

    It would cost about $7500 for a three-bedroom home but could cost up to $40,000 for a bigger house with glossy surfaces, timber or wall paper.

    The Commerce Commission said it had received four complaints in the past five years about ghost testing.

    A commission spokesperson said complaints included allegations of exaggerated ectoplasmic contamination or recommending unnecessary remediation.

    All complaints were assessed but no enforcement action was taken.

    – Stuff

    My take on this whole meth testing thing can be summed up with: HMMM. And thank God for Sir Peter Gluckman.

    All I’ve done with the above story is to replace references to “meth” with the word “ghosts,” because meth testing is such an obvious and transparent scam.  It’s also exactly what I did with this story a year or so back. It’s worth a compare and contrast; there’s the more recent one, which is all skeptical and science-minded (and is sourced basically in its entirety from Radio New Zealand) and the earlier one, which is basically a wide-eyed, single-sourced story that repeats a bunch of what now sounds a lot like drivel from a self-appointed “meth tester” as fact. Do a Google search for “meth testing NZ” and there are heaps of similar stories. Come the fuck on.

    How did it take this long for this overt scam to become a bust? How many people been kicked out of homes or lost money? People have been writing about how meth testing is a scam for years. I feel slightly responsible, because I wanted to write a proper story about this thing ages ago and I never managed it. I was changing jobs at the time and life got in the way. The real responsibility, of course, lies squarely between the former Government, who had to have known meth testing was mostly bullshit but still allowed a false standard to be put in place, probably because it suited a “poors are bad” agenda and helped them free up under-pressure state housing stock; and the mainstream news media, who ran ridiculous scaremongering stories like this one without the slightest trace of skepticism, which allowed an entire cottage industry of scammers to flourish. Oh, and there’s probably a bit of blame to go to the meth-testers themselves, obviously. Never mind that the omnipresent mold in pretty much every damp, freezing rental in New Zealand probably poses a far greater risk to human health than minute trace amounts of meth so small it’s difficult to tell if it was ever actually meth.

    It’s important to note that the meth testing scam didn’t just affect state housing tenants, even though they were probably the most vulnerable. It hit ordinary renters, homeowners, and landlords too. Lots of them, potentially. Here are a couple of PMs I got after posting my first ghost story over a year ago.

    Hi, I am a real estate agent in [redacted]. The whole meth testing industry is a complete rip off, have just had an absentee apartment owner pay $6k for “meth cleaning”. I went to the apartment after it had been “cleaned” – nothing had been done, curtains and curtain linings etc exactly the same, GIB board, head boards, carpet even completely untouched, but they are making this owner pay through the nose for absolutely nothing. I don’t think I’m allowed to make any statements to the press without it going through my agency first but happy to help off the record to begin with. Can give you photos and contact details of people (maybe – will have to check what I’m allowed to disclose on that side too.) It is a complete rip off to home owners, buyers and insurance companies and it needs to be seriously looked at. Thanks for doing something about this issue.

    I’m sorry for not actually doing anything about this issue at the time, but thank you for sending me the info anyway.

    Another one:

    My mate was in a bit of financial strife. Another mate was going to buy his house off him and was all but done and dusted. Part of the bank requirements was a meth test. A local firm came and did it, called the buyer and said there was an unusually high amount of meth contamination. They had to abandon the deal and both parties lost their lawyer fees etc.

    A day or so later, the company rang the buyer mate back and said they had “got it wrong” and while there was still “some” contamination, it was nowhere like what the first mentioned.

    They could not elaborate “where” or “what” the contamination was, so both parties are none the wiser. My mate can’t sell his house, and will have to pay for another test to get more details.

    The thing is:
    1) He’s single and definitely not a meth head. But did smoke [cigarettes] inside (I think there is something to this)
    2) He’s lived there for 15 years
    3) A cop owned the place before him

    Its fucking dodgy if you ask me…

    Fucking oath it’s dodgy. Maybe it’s not too late to do something. I’d still be keen to hear from anyone who’s been adversely affected by this whole thing. Will keep you anonymous if you want. Hit me up at josh(at)joshuadrummond.com; I can either write something up myself, or put you in touch with an actual journalist writing for somewhere reputable.

  • Why I unfollowed everyone on Twitter

    A few days ago I unfollowed everyone I was following on Twitter, and deleted all my old tweets.

    If I was following you: It wasn’t personal. Although, unless you were using one of those narcissism and anxiety-stoking unfollow bots,  you probably haven’t actually noticed.

    I wasn’t following a huge number of people, as these things go. From memory, it was only about 350 people. So why bother?

    A few days ago, I was at the miraculously resurrected Wintec Hamilton Press Club, and I met a few cool people for the first time. Many of them said, “Oh, I follow you on Twitter!”

    They meant it as a compliment, as far as I can tell, but hearing it made me want to crawl under a table and stealth out the door and get in the gently-flowing Waikato River and float out to sea.

    I don’t like who I am on Twitter very much, a lot of the time. On Twitter I am a smartarse media and politics obsessive who occasionally makes or submits something cool but mostly rants and raves and gets into arguments frequently (less frequently these days than back when, but still). Seeing this long tail of bitchiness and angst and whatever else stretch back into the distant past of 2009, when I first joined, bothered me. I don’t feel like who I am on Twitter is a very good reflection of me. That may say more about me than it does about my digital reflection, but the feeling persists.

    The short version is that I believe the snippy, sharp nature of Twitter brings out the worst in me and pretty much everyone else, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. I’ve said I didn’t like myself on the platform, but I liked everyone else even less. I grew tired of seeing people I liked and respected caught up in the latest shitfit. And there was always a new shitfit to get caught up in; someone is always saying something or doing something somewhere and there’s an infinity of hot takes ready to be tweeted out about it by people who just have to let you know that they’re so much better than whatever obviously wrong thing is going on now. And I was hooked on it, utterly, so I’d sneak logins whenever I could, just to get a hit of whatever digital smack-talk was going around now, or to participate in the manufacture myself.

    What it added up to was having thousands and thousands of opinions swimming about in the back of my head all the time. Ever get that thing where you’ve read a book or an article and you realise that you’re thinking in the author’s voice? That, but the Twitter version. A constant psychic cacophony made up of a thousand (well, at minimum 350) babbling, discordant voices.

    I became more aware of this when I made a point of stepping away from it, much like how you’re most aware of the constant background noise of a city when it stops. Once I could step back and see the whole of the thing, I loathed it. Why would I voluntarily submit myself to this? I’ve had anxiety my whole life, and Twitter was fuelling that fire.  I haven’t even touched on the Nazi troll armies or the way the platform lends itself to abuse, or any of the myriad other awful things about it.

    Do I think Twitter is bad now? No, not intrinsically, which is why I haven’t left. I’ve had great conversations there and even made lasting friends. A good example: a few weeks back I needed some animal skulls for perfectly normal reasons, so I put a tweet out. Within a few minutes someone who turned out to live a few streets away had offered up his collection. That was cool. There have been quite a few moments like that, and I’d like them to be able to continue.

    But I do think that logging in many times a day and compulsively absorbing all a feed has to offer, or having the push notifications on my phone force-feed me, is extremely bad, at least for me, so I’m not going to be doing that anymore. And I didn’t like having my long Twitter tail following me around forever, so I cut it off. It wasn’t that I thought I’d done or said anything particularly awful, more like that I felt it as a burden. So I put it down and left it behind. There’s no rule that says I have to lug all that stuff around with me, even though it somehow feels like you’re supposed to.

    Now it’s done, it does feel like a load has been lifted. If I visit or log in out of habit, that urge to scroll and consume is gone, because there’s nothing new to see. Nor is there anything to react to. I had 1700-odd followers before I quit, most of whom I think were actual real human people (and wondering if the people who are interested in you are real or not is one of those unique things about living in the future that I feel like we’ve gotten used to absurdly fast) and I don’t feel anything like the urge to perform to them that I used to. That’s what it was, if I’m honest about it; wanting to signal some virtues, to have the people I like like me back and to have them see me take on the ones I don’t like. A sad digital knight-errant on a hopelessly banal crusade, tilting at every windmill in sight, hoping for applause from an invisible crowd.

    I’m not quitting, though. I’m selfish; I want what’s good about Twitter (and Facebook, and all the others) without offering my brainspace up to the bad. I’m going to keep making stuff and putting it out there, but hopefully with a new emphasis on creating instead of consuming. The new rule is I’ll only be on there when I’m looking for or asking something specific, or when I’ve got something new to show. And if anyone wants to talk – actually talk, not just dumbly react to the latest whatever, or shout at each other across across the void – feel free to @ me.

    On that note, here’s the latest thing I’ve made: screaming about how the Great Barrier Reef is dying! Hopefully funny, ideally depressing as hell. Check it out here:

     

  • A column by Mike Hosking, except it’s an AI predictive text bot

    It’s probably safe to say that people hold many and varied opinions on Mike Hosking. Some, like my solidly National-voting in-laws, will lurch for the remote to change the channel should he appear. Others, like me, consider him essential. Even if you can’t stomach his sounds-of-a-dying-wasp-nest drone on radio, Mike Hosking’s most-days printed mindfart is a must read. It’s like having a portal straight into the mind of every slightly shitty person you know. Thanks to Mike, you no longer need to speak to the 50-something uncle who deliberately pronounces it as “Marrees”, complains constantly about PC people who are always offended without noticing the irony, and who fills dead air at Christmas with facts about how Labour hate cars and stole the election.  Mike speaks for him, and for the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders like him, on (probably) most things apart from fashion sense when it comes to jackets. Little wonder he’s one of the country’s highest-paid and most well-regarded journalists broadcasters.

    But should Mike be worried? Automation and AI are coming for our jobs, we’re told most days, and there’s no reason why his reactionary burps can’t face the same fate. It’d certainly be cheaper for his employers to outsource his middle-NZ mind-reading to an AI and a couple of interns. To put the theory to the test, a few weeks ago I fed some of his more recent columns to an AI predictive text-bot thing called Botnik, which works a bit like a mix of MadLibs and what happens if you mash the middle button in the predictive text app for your smartphone. It spits out a variety of potential words, and a human user gets to pick what will be the next one in a sentence.

    So here’s what Mike, me, and an AI wrote together.

    The Government and the Council. There is no such thing. So what? Probably they never deliver the best work.

    They have got obsessed by copycatting. It shows no imagination or belief in your own approach. We can all learn to be the person doing the best in a political arena.

    If it’s just an ideological plan, the buses and trains are over. Bikes need to work.

    And the council and their agenda can rule this PC world. So what? Let’s all like National.

    They stand to be the Government and whip Labour butt with it.

    This wouldn’t necessarily be under the Official Information Act. But this country does deals. Fortunately, they have called democratic process “some sort of thing.” They cancelled the council whiteboards. That would straighten people who actually deserve it.

    The Greens have form. But that would take money, and the new Government needs the way of the future.

    Learning Maori doesn’t add up to much. And if you forced kids to learn it, they would learn at the expense of what you would call “sensible realistic prospects.” Maori have done this.

    This government and its ongoing alarm is the first government to fiscally have more people support it as a shareholder. Grievances brought about because of the Treaty, and we have a race for the next cab off the rank. Houses aren’t going to change that whatsoever. We do not need to borrow something like a multi-million dollar mansion.

    Why? The Greens. The same party who tried valiantly to pretend that breaking the law was okay, and that is not a blueprint for sensible policy. Ineptitude essentially does the same thing today that I said yesterday. Look, they have got hold of papers that show they are making recommendations. It’s been an entire million years since they’ve been in office. What? Bike lanes and bus lanes that prevent people getting access to their shops. Look, all pissy and personal. Why was that do you think? In reality, banks struggle to lend against them because they do something about alleged pinched bums. They’ve hijacked the government.

    Why Labour are the government doesn’t directly pan out. New Zealand is very competent as a country, apart from anything you need to change. If Jacinda is the gap between that and what we have sympathy for, she’ll argue cars out of the city. This wasn’t announced.

    New Zealand is very competent as a country, apart from anything you need to change.

    And this extraordinary gesture of a courageous mistake is going forward under this Government. Ideology will kill them because they can’t have a look at what the government is delivering. Jacinda essentially does the same thing today that I said yesterday. She is a bloke called Kayne. It’s not a crime. But the enjoyment factor has always been there.

    Is it deception to work out of their depth? Probably. The reality is that this country has always been in trouble. We’re solid contenders for agriculture, and there aren’t many objectors to be implemented into believing idealistically. Delusional? Probably. Internationally, personally, it’s ugly. Sexual assault on an airline – is that what they represent? But I suspect generally hundreds of executives of banging on about generational renewal. So they don’t even need to hear the government to wake up.

    At the darkest political desire, your peril is a bloke called Mike.

    Without skiting, I honestly think that reads more like a Mike Hosking column than most Mike Hosking columns. If I can do this well on my first go with Botnik, he should definitely be worried for his job. One of the interesting things about the tool is it does a pretty good job of identifying a writer’s tics. I had no idea how many times Mike Hosking said “So what?” before I read the AI’s take on his more regular utterings.

    Oh yeah, that reminds me. If anyone reading this knows Jeremy Wells, can they ask him to do a reading of this? If he’s still doing those now he kind of is the new Mike Hosking? Man this country is weird sometimes. Anyway, chur.

    Edit: Oh snap, lots of people are reading this. Cool! If you like this article, do me a solid and check out some of my Birds in Hats prints and other stuff, wouldja? Hell, I’ll even chuck on a 10 percent discount for people reading this: AILIKEMIKE. There you go.

  • In which I apply for a job

    I haven’t done the fake job application shtick for a long while, but this was too good to pass up. Duncan Garner found this beauty and posted it on Twitter.

    It has to be a joke of some kind. “Reply with handwritten CV”? Come on. But, if it is a joke, it’s an intriguing gag and I’d like to see where it goes, so I made good use of my lunch break and posted my handwritten CV just now.

    Writing left-handed is hard.

    Update: 14/06/2017

    Well, this is weird. After I posted this – helped along by a few mates on Facebook – I started to wonder if this was really a joke.

    I went through a few options:

    1. It’s a weird joke. Nothing further. Which, on reflection, seems a bit off. Who’s it funny to? What’s the point?
    2. It’s the newspaper trying to create news in a jokey way, maybe making a point about the awful conditions some workers will submit to for a job. “We placed a terrible ad for a dairy worker. What happened next is jaw-dropping!”
    3. It’s a real ad for actual farm assistants. Perhaps, as Bernard Hickey suggested on Twitter, it’s being done to perversely fulfil some kind of statutory requirement. In which case… JFC.

    So I rang the Timaru Herald just now to ask about it and… it’s not a joke.

    The ad’s real. It was placed by some guy. They couldn’t tell me anything about who placed it, which is fine – I understand why they couldn’t give me details. That’s all I know.

    So. What next? Who is this dude? And why does he want handwritten applications from people to work a guaranteed shitty job while living in a house infested with rodents? Of course, it’s possible that a third party placed the ad as their own joke (maybe this Greenpeace outfit?) but there’s still no obvious reason why. If it is a gag, maybe someone will come along to explain it.

    The best part about all this is that whoever did this is soon going to receive the ridiculous letter I wrote, if they haven’t already, because I sent it a few days ago. I hope they get back to me soon. My fictional jailbird who’s OK with rats and drug tests seems like the perfect candidate.

    Update 15/06/17

    The good people at The Spinoff asked me to write this up for them more proper-like over at their website, so I did. I’ll do any further updates to this one over there.

  • What I’ve been up to, April 2017

    I was just typing the “2017” in the title above and got a strong sense of how weird that was. Growing up, all the weird dystopian movies seemed to be set around now.

    Guess they got that right.

    Anyway, here are some of the things I’ve been up to lately!

    Birds in Hats

    I’ve finished a few more of these since I last posted about them. Here they are. All acrylic on canvas, in various sizes. You can buy prints of most of ’em here. 

    I haven’t got a print of Captain Jack Seagull made up just yet, but I’ll do that soon.

    The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road

    Steve Braunias had an excellently hilarious series of columns in the Herald called The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road, in which Steve tries, and mostly succeeds, to eat his way down Lincoln Road. Now he’s collected the columns into a book. With footnotes! And an index! And a cover, which I illustrated!

    I just got the advance copies today, and it’s looking grand.

    Miscellaneous art stuff

    I’ve also made what turns out to be quite a reasonable amount of miscellaneous art over the past however long:

    Chromacon

    Oh yeah, Chromacon! This was a good time. Here are some of the prints (and originals!) I had up for sale.

    Other stuff

    I’ve also been doing a reasonable bit of writing over at blue-green cash-for-copy site par excellence The Spinoff.

    So, if you’re reading this, for whatever reason, and you like the sort of thing I’ve been making, please feel free to ask me to make some for you! You can email me at josh (at) joshuadrummond.com. Or you can buy prints of my art ‘n stuff over at my shop.

  • Movember

    I’m doing Movember this year. The only problem is that I already have a beard.

    I had the same problem last year, so I shaved it off and started Movember from scratch. Literally. It was scratchy as hell. It was also kind of cold. I don’t get how people get around without hair on their faces. It must be horrible. I was going to do it again this year, but I accidentally forgot about the new month and by the time I remembered about Movember it was already Guy Fawkes.

    So I thought I’d do something different. Instead of shaving the whole beard and re-growing, I figured I’d get creative, and shave my beard into a new, exciting style, and keep it for a while. This is what I look like now:

    13239150_10154059859627324_8379933821858211874_n
    File photo

    Now, please direct your attention to the following diagram:

    styles-01

     

    I’m allowing you, generous donors, to decide what style I go with. I am fundraising with the Spark team, and I’ll treat the sum of all donations to the team as stretch goals. I’ll keep the chosen facehairstyle for a full work day. Think of it as a Kickstarter, except all the funds go to men’s health and all the rewards are made of human hair. And I get to look silly at work.

    Here are the reward tiers:

    $0 – The Classic
    This is what I already have. Nothing changes. Yay, except boo, because we’ve made no money! (At the time of writing we’ve raised over $7k, so this won’t happen.)

    Between $7,000 and $9999 (odd amount) – Honest Abe
    If the final fundraising amount for the Spark men’s team is between $7 and $9999, and ends up being an odd number, I’ll shave my moustache and will look a bit like a cross between these two gentlemen.

    honestabe

    Between $7,000 and $10,000 (even amount) – The Lemmy
    Same rule as above, but if the amount raised is even instead of odd, I’ll shave my chin and try not to get beaten up by jealous bike gang members.

    Over $10,000 – Soul Man
    I’ll get a soul patch. People who see me will make the sound that Sideshow Bob makes when he steps on a rake.

    Over $12,000 – Not Like This
    I expect people to like this style as much as critics enjoyed the sequels to The Matrix. Or would have, if those sequels existed, which they don’t.

    Over $15,000 – The Brent
    My wife will hate me if I get this, so I’d prefer it if we didn’t raise that much money, thanks.

    Over $17,000 – That 70’s Show
    Okay, okay. Everyone else is growing a mo. Why should I only get one if we raise a large amount of money? There are two answers. One is that I fear that I’ll be arrested if I step out of my house. The other is that I’ve had a complex about moustaches ever since I heard that my dad, who proudly sported a mo all through the 90’s when it was least fashionable, was once asked “Steve, what happened to your upper lip? Did one of your eyebrows crawl down for a drink?”

    Over $20,000 – The Reverse Hitler
    Hahaha! But seriously, please. I’m very opposed to fascism, especially in these dark times, but I really don’t want to do this.

    Over $100,000 – The Zero
    If our team raises over $100,000 for men’s health I’ll shave my whole head, including my eyebrows. I’ll hate it, and so will everyone who sees it, but it’ll be worth it.

    That’s it! Please donate generously here.