The Speaker of the House tried to force Rawiri Waititi (Māori party co-leader) to wear a tie but had to back down after commentary including Waititi calling a tie a ‘colonial noose’. Cultures and times change…there’s a related challenge in the Māori community over the rights of wahine Māori to speak on marae.
Science delivers many great new ideas, including COVID vaccines and chilli concoctions to prevent cramp.
What leads people to believe in conspiracy theories? Three components are being individualists, seeing patterns in random designs, like Jackson Pollock paintings, and not being interested in investigating the patterns once they have seen them.
Humans use dichotomies as an easy heuristic to know how to react. Ferrets are bad. Rabbits are bad. But ferrets kill rabbits. Does that make a team of tame, neutered, rabbit-killing ferrets good? Or still bad?
For any sort of normal to reappear in the world, we need the vaccines that have now been developed to be rolled out to achieve herd immunity. For New Zealand, it looks like that won’t happen until 2022 given we don’t yet have vaccines in the country. That’s a long time staying home…
Crevasses in glacier ice often remain invisible until you fall into them. To stay safe you need to be roped to your friends. The world currently feels like unexpected gulfs are opening up between people, like about vaccination. How do we prevent these differences from dividing us?
Whanau – a Māori word now in common general usage. To me it has connotations of a broad concept of family, beyond the sense of a traditional western nuclear approach.
Christmas and primary school folk dancing are intertwined in my head as occasions where it is required to have fun. Being required to have fun is no fun at all. Why can’t I just relax and enjoy the season?
Rising house prices and unaffordable housing – a decadal problem in New Zealand (and much of the world) that appears intractable to the economic policy approaches governments use to solve it.
Problem solving can require a different view, like on a recent mountain bike ride. I’d tackled the same rock the same wrong way, year after year. It took someone else with a new method to show me what was possible.
