Barend Vlaardingerbroek: What does it mean to be a ‘conservative’?

After the Soviet Union had imploded back in the early ‘90s, BBC reporters started referring to the communists as ‘conservatives’. This usage initially took me by surprise (as I am sure it did many people). Blimey, ‘conservative’ is the polar opposite of ‘communist’, isn’t it?

Let’s turn to the on-line Oxford. ‘Conservative’ as an adjective or a noun alludes to an aversion to change or innovation and holding traditional values. Thus we see as similar words ‘traditionalist’, ‘orthodox’ and ‘conventional’. So there is no reason why a communist can’t be a ‘conservative’ in a country where communism ruled the roost for three quarters of a century. (Teaser: what about calls for the restoration of the monarchy? I recall some BBC reporters applying the term ‘traditionalist’ to those!)

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Looking at education as an investment rather than a social welfare expenditure

Education pays off: mean incomes rise with educational level.

‘Education is the greatest investment we can make in our future’, says the National Party on its website.

What, exactly, is an investment? The Oxford on-line dictionary isn’t much use on this score for the word ‘investment’ other than to say it involves people investing (gasp). But then look up ‘invest’ and we see the words “in the hope of making a profit”. Now we’re in business literally as well as figuratively.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Do I have a right to my own money or not?

I never thought the day would come – BV having a cell phone.

Over the years I have said lots of nasty things, some of them recorded in these annals, about androids glued to their little plastic-and-silicon control boxes. Admittedly that has mostly been with so-called smart phones in mind, but I am only marginally more favourably inclined towards cell phones. Alright, some people need them for their work – medics, for instance – but most of us don’t. I am one of those who don’t – or thought I was. 

Now, beside the tele, there lies a little plastic bag containing BV’s cell phone and a little pad in which I have written instructions to myself on what buttons to press and when. History has been made. What has brought about this momentous turn-around?

Answer: my bank in NZ. 

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Musings from Beirut 3 – growing weariness with the next lockdown/next surge cycle

Ask half a dozen Beirutis when the current lockdown is supposed to end or be modified and you’ll likely get half a dozen different answers.

The lockdown pattern here sees a lockdown (full or partial) being vigorously enforced for a few days and then a slacking off until you begin to wonder “What lockdown?”. Except for cafés and restaurants, everything seems to be working again.

The [near]-full lockdown of a couple of months back initially saw people having to flash a downloaded permit to get into the supermarkets on their phones before being allowed in. We were short of supplies that the smaller stores don’t stock, such as fresh meat and frozen chicken pieces, so I went to a large supermarket I often frequent. I don’t have one of those accursed ‘phone’ things so I asked to see a member of the managerial team whom I told that he was discriminating against me because I am a human being and not an android controlled by a little plastic and silicon box. He laughed and told me to wait a few minutes because there was a policeman hanging around ensuring that the rules were being observed, but once he was gone I would be OK to come in. “Ten minutes, alright?” Sure, mate. Half an hour later, loaded up with goodies…

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The Princess Latifa bint al-Maktoum case – was the UNHRC’s kneejerk response justified?

Mid-last month, Princess Latifa bint al-Maktoum, daughter of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai, hit our screens telling us that she was being held hostage by her family and that she was in danger.

My first thought was that there was no way she could be a hostage as that is someone who is being held by a person or persons using the hostage as a bargaining chip in an attempt to extort money or concessions from a person or group with whom the hostage has close ties, such as a family or a government. The family in this instance are not holding her for ransom or the extraction of concessions from anyone else; therefore, she is not a hostage.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: ‘Ethics’ strangle social science research

The field of Education is an eclectic one encompassing not only teacher training and in-service provision but also interdisciplinary research which places it within the social sciences.

Since entering tertiary education over 30 years ago, I have been active in both, but have veered more towards the latter activity, as a glance at the Publications section of my CV bears witness to.  

My approach to research stresses the ‘science’ in ‘social science’: I treat social science research as an exercise in applied science – scientific methodology applied to social issues. This involves the collection of ‘hard’ quantitative data mostly directly from research subjects and processing it using analytical statistics.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Half a century on from ‘The Lotus Eaters’

Lotus-eater: someone who has a very comfortable, lazy life and does not worry about anything - Cambridge Online

Xmas is approaching, and the perennial question of what to get for whom is becoming more pressing by the day – a fairly simple one to answer for the youngsters, often not so for the oldies on one’s prezzy list.

DVDs of quality television series make good Chrissy prezzies. By ‘quality’ I tend to mean old (mostly 35-50+ years) British ones – just the thing for rellies drawing the old-age pension. Now let me see, we want something not too lengthy and commensurately expensive… I’ve got it – give serious consideration to buying them ‘The Lotus Eaters’, a 14-episode series from the early 1970s set in Crete.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: An open challenge to the New Conservative party regarding its stance on constitutional law

From the New Conservative website:

New Zealand’s Parliament has the power to make any legislation governing our country…

This has given rise to laws that breach individual or community rights without any recourse to New Zealanders other than repeal by Parliament, as the New Zealand Courts have already ruled that Parliament is supreme.

The Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1688 enshrine individual and community rights and are New Zealand legislation that is routinely ignored by our Parliament.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Do candidates’ religious beliefs matter when appointing senior public figures?

Readers will recall the vigorous discussions centred on Mitt Romney’s religious affiliation back in 2012 – opinion was divided about whether his being a practising Mormon should count or not when casting a vote.

No, of course not, tends to be the standard liberal democratic response. Religion is a private matter. It has nothing to do with whether someone can do the job or not, and that is all that should count.

Richard Dawkins was not so accommodating when he threw in his sixpence worth:

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Science, pseudoscience and ethnoscience

Bob Edlin’s article “Biodiversity, science and a Maori world view” (Breaking Views 14 Aug - see HERE) reminded me what an imprecise entity ‘science’ is in comparative linguistic and cultural contexts.

Those of you who remember your high school French may already realise that the word ‘science’ means something rather different in that language from what it means in modern English. French universities have departments devoted to the ‘Science of the Humanities’. To anyone acquainted with only English, this comes across as silly. I mean, ‘science’ is physics, chemistry, geology and all that stuff – nothing to do with literature, history, philosophy and all that stuff….. isn’t that right?

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Musings from Beirut – paying $35 for a pound of butter

The catastrophic loss of the value of a currency is not an unknown phenomenon in world history.

The Chinese experienced a period of hyperinflation when they first started printing money. People taking bag-fulls of near-worthless money to buy essential groceries in 1920s Germany is legendary. The Zimbabwe Dollar went the same way many years later – the Reserve Bank stopped calculating the inflation rate once it topped 250 million percent.

The Lebanese Lira, or Lebanese Pound (international code ‘LBP’, local abbreviation ‘LL’) first ran into big trouble during the civil war when it plummeted from LL4 to the US dollar to, eventually, around LL4,000. Colleagues here have told me how they literally saw 99.9% of their savings being wiped out. It explains why so many of them stayed on after retirement age.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: My reluctant induction into the brave new world of e-learning

After the bumpy ride we had endured towards the end of last year (see my article “What’s been up in Lebanon?”, Breaking Views 7 Jan), we had been hoping for a return to normality in the spring semester of this year – but, after the first few weeks, COVID-19 struck and emptied the place again.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: COVID-19 as a candidate for conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theory – the theory that an event or phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties; spec. a belief that some covert but influential agency … is responsible for an unexplained event. - Oxford English Dictionary

In a Sydney pub one day in 1983 I was engaged in conversation by an elderly man who informed me that the minerals supposedly exported by Australia to Japan actually originate in Japan from where they are transferred through submarine pipes to Aussie only to be sent back, the purpose of the deception being to create the impression of two-way trade to ensure Japanese domination in the Australian consumer market in vehicles and electronics.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Are the days of the internal combustion engine drawing to a close?

Once upon a time, if you wanted to go for a drive in your motorcar in some English towns, you were limited to a speed of 4 miles/hour and you had to have a guy running before you waving a red flag. 

Those very early contraptions were ungainly, smelly, noisy things that constantly broke down. Before Henry Ford and mass production, they cost a bomb too. 

But the love affair between the motorcar and humans was underway and it would take more than a century before the passion began to cool.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: ‘The Exorcist’ – would a producer get away with it today?

Max von Sydow died last month at the age of 90. The BBC tribute to him showed him as he appeared in several major productions over the course of a long and distinguished acting career, including the 1973 film ‘The Exorcist’ in which he played the role of a Jesuit priest brought in to cast a demon out of a young possessed girl.

That clip of a few seconds brought back some memories. I was an avid movie-goer as a young guy but grew out of the habit by my mid-20s – the last time I went to the flics was in 1982 when I took a bunch of students to Jackson’s Drive-In Theatre in Port Moresby. However, there were films that stayed with me and that I caught up with when I discovered internet websites that run old movies a few years ago. I had truly outgrown the fantasy world of the silver screen and did not bother seeing most of them through. ‘The Exorcist’ was one of two exceptions (the other being ‘The Wicker Man’ of the same year), which I first saw – cut and dubbed – in Auckland in 1974.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The start of a new era in the Middle East?

2019 has been a good year for Vladimir Putin with Donald Trump effectively handing over the reins as chief powerbroker in the Middle East, or at least a substantial part thereof, to him.

Putin did not need any further prompting once the US army units began their withdrawal from northern Syria. Within a fortnight he was in direct talks with Erdogan and a ceasefire was put in place. Days later, Turkey announced that it had ended its military operation against the Kurds. Russian and Turkish units began to patrol the 20-mile strip of land adjoining the Turkish border. (Trump claimed a great American diplomatic victory – he had threatened to annihilate the Turkish economy should they try to wipe out the Kurds. A BBC news report fittingly showed a line of Russian armoured vehicles on patrol as they presented this dubious announcement.)

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Meddling in other countries’ internal affairs – when do two wrongs make a right?

The doctrine of sovereign nation-state equality underpins international law. A corollary of this maxim is that thou shalt not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations.

National sovereignty means that we run our own show and do not stick our noses into the internal affairs of other sovereign nations. This maxim should only be deviated from in extreme circumstances, such as when a government is involved in genocide.

Interfering in the affairs of other nation-states can take very direct forms or subtler ones. The most direct form is military intervention in order to effect a change in the target country’s government or its policies. The Opium Wars were a classic example of the latter kind, while the NATO action against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999 provides a more recent instance. Tanzania’s military intervention in Uganda, and Vietnam’s in Cambodia in 1979, exemplify interventions aimed at regime change. (So was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but that was under the pretext of Iraq presenting an imminent military threat, thereby invoking the right to pre-emptive self-defence.)

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Reining in the blustering Beijing bully

Most of us don’t like bullies. We all have memories of them from our childhood, when we were most vulnerable to their thuggery in the school playground, or locations outside school where they would accost and terrorise other kids.

To be a bully, one has to be totally self-centred and commensurately dismissive of the feelings and rights of others. Bullies seek psychological and material gratification through intimidation and violence. Popular wisdom has it that they are cowards at heart, and accordingly ensure that their quarry is comparatively powerless by virtue of physical prowess or being outnumbered.

Bullying is a reality on the international stage too, where the big and powerful coerce weaker countries into making concessions to their own detriment. The price of noncompliance – economic or military action against them – leaves them little choice.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Manipulating the refugee system

Typical refugee/asylum seeker?
No – quite the opposite, in fact – but she knew how to manipulate the system and within days was being welcomed at Toronto Airport by the Canadian Foreign Minister.

You’ve got to hand it to Rahaf al-Qunun. One day, she’s just a Saudi teenager without any claim to distinction holidaying overseas with her family. A few days later, she’s winging her way to a Western country (Canada) where she’s been accepted as a ‘refugee’ and will receive every assistance in settling into that country.

It sure beats hazardous trips across the Mediterranean or through Eastern Europe and waiting for yonks for asylum applications to be processed, not to mention the risk of failure in that endeavour.

How did she do it? It was all quite simple, really. She absconded from her family while on holiday in Kuwait and boarded a plane bound for Thailand. 

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: ‘Affirmative action’ – an obstacle for some ‘minorities’

Donald Trump is in trouble again with the PC crowd for fingering affirmative action (AA) as his next target. The more I see of this guy, the more I like him!

AA is both sex-based and race-based. 

The former is not the issue it was a few years back, although it remains a thorn in the side for many a man sidelined for appointment or promotion because he had the misfortune to be up against a woman and thus the cards were stacked against him whatever his credentials. But it is race-based AA that is under the spotlight not because it has trodden on the toes of any nebulous ‘majority’ but rather those of some ‘minorities’.