You know the US tech giants have way too much power, unencumbered by their own government and their own country’s laws, when they think they can strong-arm another nation. From Reuter:
Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Friday it would block its search engine in Australia if the government proceeds with a new code that would force it and Facebook Inc to pay media companies for the right to use their content.
Fine, then piss off. If Australia wants to enact laws that you can’t operate with, because you’re used to getting your own way and don’t like sharing the US$40,000 million you’ve made each year off the backs of others’ hard work, then just go. I’ve always said people would find alternatives to Google services in less than 24 hours, and while I appreciate its index is larger and it handles search terms well, the spying and the monopolistic tactics are not a worthwhile trade-off.
I know Google supporters are saying that the Australian policy favours the Murdoch Press, and I agree that the bar that the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) has set for what qualifies as a media business (revenues of over A$150,000 per annum) is too high. So it isn’t perfect.
The fact Google has made a deal in France suggests it is possible, when the giant doesn’t whine so damned much.
Plus, Google and Facebook have been dangerous to democracy, and should have done more for years to address these issues. They’ve allowed a power imbalance for the sake of their own profits, so paying for news—effectively a licensing payment that the rest of us would have to fork out—at least puts a value on it, given how it benefits the two sites. No search? Fine, let’s have more ethical actors reap the rewards of fairer, “unbubbled” searches, because at least there would be a societal benefit from it, and since they aren’t cashing in on the media’s work, I’m happy for them to get a free licence to republish. Right now I don’t believe the likes of Duck Duck Go are dominant enough (far from it) to raise the attention of Australian regulators.
Facebook’s reaction has been similar: they would block Australians from sharing links to news. Again, not a bad idea; maybe people will stop using a platform used to incite hate and violence to get their bubbled news items. Facebook, please go ahead and carry out your threat. If it cuts down on people using your site—or, indeed, returns them to using it for the original purpose most of us signed up for, which was to keep in touch with friends—then we all win. (Not that I’d be back for anything but the limited set of activities I do today. Zuck’s rich enough.)
A statement provided to me and other members of the media from the Open Markets Institute’s executive director Barry Lynn reads:
Today Google and Facebook proved in dramatic fashion that they pose existential threats to the world’s democracies. The two corporations are exploiting their monopoly control over essential communications to extort, bully, and cow a free people. In doing so, Google and Facebook are acting similarly to China, which in recent months has used trade embargoes to punish Australians for standing up for democratic values and open fact-based debate. These autocratic actions show why Americans across the political spectrum must work together to break the power that Google, Facebook, and Amazon wield over our news and communications, and over our political debate. They show why citizens of all democracies must work together to build a communications infrastructure safe for all democracies in the 21st Century.
Considering Google had worked on a search engine that would comply with Communist Chinese censorship, and Facebook has been a tool to incite genocide, then the comparison to a non-democratic country is valid.
So, I say to these Big Tech players, pull out. This is the best tech “disruption” we can hope for. You’re both heading into irrelevance, and Australia has had the balls to do what your home country—from which you offshore a great deal of your money—cannot, for all the lobbyists you employ. You favour big firms over independents, and the once level playing field that existed on the internet has been worsened by you. The Silicon Valley spirit, of entrepreneurship, born of the counterculture, needs to return, and right now you’re both standing in the way: you are “the man”, suppressing entrepreneurial activity, reducing employment, and splitting people apart—just what dictatorial régimes do.
As an aside, the EU is also cracking down on Big Tech as it invites the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) to a February 1 hearing. They’ve bled people for long enough and it’s time for some pushback.
As I begin this blog post, Autocade has just crossed the 22 million page-view barrier, at 22,000,040. I had estimated we would get there on Sunday, and as it’s just ticked over here in New Zealand, I was right.
We have 4,379 models in the database, with the Bestune B70, in its third generation, the most recent model added. I’m grateful it’s a regular car—not yet another crossover, which has been the usual story of 2020 whenever I added new models to the site.
As crossovers and SUVs were once regarded as niche models, historical ones weren’t put up in any great haste, so I can’t always escape them just by putting up models from the past. However, there are countless sports and supercars to go up, so maybe I’ll need to add them in amongst the SUVs to maintain my sanity and happiness. These high-riding two-box vehicles are incredibly boring subjects stylistically.
It’s a stroke of luck, then, to have the B70: Bestune’s sole saloon offering now in amongst an entire range of crossovers. The saloons are the niche vehicles of 2020–1. It’s a stylish motor, too: Cadillac looks for a middle-class price. Admittedly, such close inspirations haven’t deserted China altogether, but this is, in my mind, no worse than Ford pretending its 1975 US Granada was a Mercedes-Benz for the masses. It’s not going to get GM’s lawyers upset. And unlike the Granada, the B70 is actually a fairly advanced car, with refinement now on par with a lot of joint-venture models coming out of China.
You know the drill to track Autocade’s growth:
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million)
April 2020: 19,000,000 (just over three months for 19th million)
July 2020: 20,000,000 (just over three-and-a-half months for 20th million)
October 2020: 21,000,000 (three months for 21st million)
January 2021: 22,000,000 (three months for 22nd million)
Not a huge change in the rate, then: for the past year we can expect roughly a million page views every three months. The database has increased by 96 model entries, versus 40 when I last posted about the million milestones.
In other publishing news, Jody Miller has managed to get an interview with Rachel Hunter. Her story is on Lucire today, and I’m expecting a more in-depth one will appear in print later in 2021. It’s taken us 23 years (not that we were actively pursuing): it’s just one of those things where it took that long for our paths to cross. Both Rachel and Lucire are Kiwi names that are arguably more noticed abroad than in our countries of birth, and I suppose it’s like two compatriots who travel to different countries. You don’t always bump into one another.
I end this blog post with Autocade’s views at 22,000,302.
I have to say I’m impressed with NewTumbl as they responded to my Tweets about potential censorship and post moderation.
I think they will allow me to share a few points.
First, they took me seriously. The fact they even bothered to look into it is well beyond what Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook and Google would normally do, and I’m talking about Yahoo in 1999. They also answered every point I made, rather than gloss over or ignore some. Out of their thousands or myriads of users, they were actually good enough to deal with me one on one.
Secondly, they assure me there’s no censorship of the kind I suspected but think a temporary bug could have been behind Mbii’s inability to see my posts. They will delete illegal content, and that is the extent of it.
Thirdly, if I may be so bold as to say this one, my understanding of the posts’ levels is correct and those moderators who objected to my content are incorrect.
I won’t reveal more than that as some of the content refers to future actions.
I’ve said I could put a toe in the water again over at NewTumbl, and, ‘I really appreciate you taking this seriously and certainly it all helps encourage me to return.’
Being honest and up front really helps.
The one thing preventing me from heading back in a flash is I’ve become rather used to adding to the gallery here. We’ll see: I felt it was ‘No way, José’ a month ago (although I always maintained a “never say never” position—I mean, it’s not Google Plus) and now it’s more ‘The jury is out.’ At the least I might pop by more regularly to see what’s in my feed.
One thing about not posting to NewTumbl is I’ve nowhere convenient to put quotations I’ve found. Maybe they have to go here as well. Back when I started this blog in 2006—15 years ago, since it was in January—I did make some very short posts, so it’s not out of keeping. (I realize the timestamp is in GMT, but it’s coming up to midday on January 1, 2021 here.)
Here’s one from Robert Reich, and I think for the most part US readers will agree, regardless of their political stripes.
In 2008, Wall Street nearly destroyed the economy. The Street got bailed out while millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and homes. Yet not no major Wall Street executive ever went to jail.
In more recent years, top executives of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, along with the Sackler family, knew the dangers of OxyContin but did nothing. Executives at Wells Fargo Bank pushed bank employees to defraud customers. Executives at Boeing hid the results of tests showing its 737 Max Jetliner was unsafe. Police chiefs across America looked the other way as police under their command repeatedly killed innocent Black Americans.
Yet here, too, those responsible have got away with it.
I did offer these quotations with little or no commentary at NewTumbl and Tumblr.
What came up with the above was a Twitter exchange with a netizen in the US, and how some places still touted three- to four-day shipping times when I argued that it was obvious—especially if you had been looking at the COVID positivity rates that their government officials relied on—that these were BS. And that Amazon (revenue exceeding US$100 milliard in the fourth quarter of 2020) and Apple (profit at c. US$100 milliard for the 12 months ending September 30) might just be rich enough to hire an employee to do the calculations and correlate them with delays—we are not talking particularly complicated maths here, and we have had a lot of 2020 data to go on. But they would rather save a few bob and lie to consumers: it’s a choice they have made.
The conclusion I sadly had to draw was that businesses there can lie with impunity, because they’ve observed that there are no real consequences. The famous examples are all too clear from Reich’s quotation, where the people get a raw deal—even losing their lives.
This final podcast of 2020 is an unusual one. First, it’s really directed a family I’ve never met: the Lais, who are leaving Hong Kong for Glasgow after the passing of the national security law in the Chinese city, as reported by Reuter. They may never even hear it. But it’s a from-the-heart piece recounting my experiences as a émigré myself, whose parents wanted to get out of Hong Kong because they feared what the communists would do after 1997. Imagine heading to a country with more COVID-19 infections and lockdowns and feeling that represented more freedom than what the Chinese Communist Party bestows on your home town.
Secondly, it’s in Cantonese. The intro is in English but if you’re doing something from the heart to people from your own home town, it’s in your mother tongue. It seemed more genuine that way. Therefore, I don’t expect this podcast episode to have many listeners since I suspect the majority of you won’t know what I’m saying. They are themes I’ve tackled before, so you could probably guess and have a good chance of getting it right.
If you know the Lais, feel free to share this link with them.
I was led by this Tweet to have a peek at the Draft EU–UK Trade Cooperation Agreement and can confirm that on p. 931 (not p. 921), under ‘Protocols and Standards to be used for encryption mechanism: s/MIME and related packages’, there is this:
The text:
The underlying certificate used by the s/MIME mechanism has to be in compliance with X.509 standard. In order to ensure common standards and procedures with other Prüm applications, the processing rules for s/MIME encryption operations or to be applied under various Commercial Product of the Shelves (COTS) environments, are as follows:
– the sequence of the operations is: first encryption and then signing,
– the encryption algorithm AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with 256 bit key length and RSA with 1024 bit key length shall be applied for symmetric and asymmetric encryption respectively,
– the hash algorithm SHA-1 shall be applied.
s/MIME functionality is built into the vast majority of modern e-mail software packages including Outlook, Mozilla Mail as well as Netscape Communicator 4.x and inter-operates among all major email software packages.
Two things have always puzzled me about the UK’s approach to getting some sort of a deal with the EU.
There are two Davids, Davis and Frost, no relation to the TV producer and TV host. As far as I can tell, despite knowing that the transition period would end on January 1, 2021, failed to do anything toward advancing a deal with the EU, so that the British people know there are new rules, but not what they are. The British taxpayer would be right to question just what their pounds have been doing.
If I may use an analogy: there’s an exam and the set date was given but no one has done any swotting. Messrs Davis and Frost haven’t even done the coursework and sat in the lectures and tutorials blankly.
The person who has done the least is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the British prime minister, who stumbled in to the exam room at the last minute without knowing the subject.
But never mind, sneaked into the room with his clobber is an earlier graduate’s paper! Surely he can plagiarize some of the answers out of that should the same questions arise!
I don’t know much about SHA-1 hash algorithms but the original Tweeter informs us that this had been ‘deprecated in 2011’ as insecure. However, I can cast my mind back to when ‘Netscape Communicator 4.x’ was my browser of choice, and that was 1998–2001. (I stuck with Netscape 4·7 for a long time, as 6 was too buggy, and in 2001 a friend gave me a copy of Internet Explorer 5, which I then used in Windows. This pre-dates this blog, hence Netscape is not even a tag here.)
This is a comedy–tragedy from the land of Shakespeare, and I wonder if it means that the British government is expecting things to get so bad that they will have to wind up using computer software from 20 years ago.
Or they just couldn’t be arsed over the last four years (yes, count ’em!) to do any real work, and hoped that no one would read the 1,259 pp. to find the mistakes.
To conclude, another bad analogy: it’s not really oven-ready despite all this time baking. However, it appears the ingredients aren’t as fresh as we were led to believe. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
Either something is interfering with Mediawiki or I’ve reached the limit with the software after 4,300-odd entries on Autocade. Which is highly unlikely as the same software runs Wikipedia.
For the first time ever I noticed this in the footer:
This is how a page with no views looks. Once it nets a few views, a count appears (‘1 view’). Except for the first time in 12 years, this page, which has been viewed multiple times—including by me as I reloaded it to see if I could get the count started—will not show a count.
This is only happening, as far as I can tell, on the newest page, though the counts on other pages have stayed static despite reloads (including leaving the page and returning).
The statistics’ page on Autocade doesn’t always update when I reload pages, either, which makes me wonder if the count to the next million is going to be accurate.
Anyone else come across this error?
It’s funny that software that has run for 12 years one way decides not to do so any more, without any change in the back end.
I have noticed, however, that Disqus is doing some odd things, with the ‘Also on Autocade’ box showing ‘View source’ links that the general public is not permitted to see. Which means it’s following me. Is that altering how the pages behave? It’s the first time that that’s happened, too.
And something is making sure the ads don’t show up, and it’s not me, since I never use an ad blocker, and Privacy Badger is turned off on my own sites. The browser has updated, but I’ve checked and the in-built ad blocker is switched off.
Postscript: Alex, who maintains three spaces on NewTumbl, can still see my “missing” five posts. In addition, NewTumbl has responded and it’s believed there was a bug. More on that here.
This is interesting: talking to Bii on Twitter, who is also a NewTumbl user, I discovered that he can’t see my last five posts on NewTumbl.
I sent him a permalink (using the recommended NewTumbl method) to my last post there, but he gets a 404.
In fact, the newest post he can see is my sixth-to-last. And it’s interesting to me that of the last five, three were critical of NewTumbl’s moderation system.
Hmm, that link 404s for me. 😕 What is its datestamp? The last post that I can see from you on there is "A coupé that’s almost a van" from Nov 24. pic.twitter.com/v8LzPooJOF
This reminds me of Google Plus, which used to hide my posts that were regularly critical of Google.
Bii would kindly prefer to give NewTumbl the benefit of the doubt though my thoughts jumped immediately to censorship. The last five posts are all public.
Top: The way my NewTumbl blog is supposed to look, in its top left-hand corner. Above: What Bii sees, with the last five posts hidden. Coincidentally three of them are critical of NewTumbl.
Like I say, my blog posts here have a pretty good audience, and the first one on NewTumbl comes up very high when one searches for that site. You do not want to be playing these games.
To think, I was so supportive of that place.
For the sake of completeness, then, here are the three critical posts, which have been excerpted before.
November 27, 2020 Do the mods here know their own rules?
Had a couple of modelling shots marked M by the moderators here and I cannot understand why. I had them marked O.
There’s no nudity (M) but they contain sexy or sultry imagery (O). Do the mods here know their own rules?
See for yourself: this was the latest. As this is a US site, maybe I should use The Handmaid’s Tale for guidance? I hear it’s a big hit over there. This is after a post with the word w*nk (literally written like that, with an asterisk) got marked as M.
November 28, 2020 Simple rules
I have some pretty simple rules in life. If you are a professional and I am an amateur, I will defer to you in almost all cases in your specialist area, unless you make a call that is so outrageously stupid and beyond reason. And when it comes to the use of the English language, I am a professional, and can say with some authority over what is and isn’t permissible. If an amateur makes a call contrary to my expectations in areas I know about, then they had better back it up. I am referring to the moderation here.
This is the problem with Wikipedia: a place where actual expertise is hated and seen as élitist. It’s why I tend not to use the site, where a few have scammed their way to the top, and, if you criticize them, you get five days of abuse from a senior editor directed at you. If this is the culture that is being instilled at NewTumbl by people not educated enough to make certain calls, then it’s a real shame. Read the guidelines.
I was on Tumblr for over a decade before the censorship got crazy, and they supported the two-speed internet advocated by big firms. It would be a real shame if I were to cut my stay short here after only a couple of years. The difference is I own a lot of sites and have plenty of creative outlets. So, rather than help Dean and his friends make a few bob, I can happily put that same energy into my spaces.
This seemed like a fun site but if a professional has to make his case in a post like this against the decision(s) of amateurs (which is the case with Wikipedia: look at the talk pages!), then that just gets tiresome: it’s not a great use of my time. If you don’t know the culture of the majority of countries in which the English language is used and somehow think 1950s white-bread America is the yardstick, then you’re already not on my level. It’s not terribly hard to put together an image-bank site where I share those ‘irrelevant’ thoughts, as I call them here. I don’t have Dean’s skill in making it a site for all, but my aims are completely selfish, so I don’t have to.
After all, Autocade began because I was fed up with how poor the quality was for motoring entries in Wikipedia (indeed, to the point of fiction) and sought to do something I wanted. Now it nets 1,000,000 page views every three months and Wikipedia links to it: there’s real satisfaction in that.
There has to be a simple image plug-in out there for WordPress and I’ll just add that to my blog. which runs that CMS. We all win: the holier-than-Mary-Whitehouse types who see their job as puritanically patrolling posts here won’t have me to deal with, and I get more hits to my own space, on which I will sell ads. We’ll see. Hunting for that plug-in might be my task tonight. Or I might hang about here and post more stuff that by any measure is O, and gather up a few more examples from Angry Ward Cleaver out there.
November 29, 2020 See you at my blog gallery
That was pretty simple. I’ve put the New Image Gallery plug-in from A WP Life on to my main blog. And since that blog gets an average of 700 views per post (and the viral ones getting six figures), I’m betting that whatever I put there will get more eyeballs than here. For those interested, it’s at jackyan.com/blog/2020/11/november-2020-miscellaneous-images/. [Postscript: the galleries can be found at jackyan.com/blog/category/gallery/.] New entries will be added on a monthly basis. It’s not as cool as NewTumbl but I’m going to be interested to see if it’s as enjoyable as what I’ve been doing here.
I wanted in all sincerity to see NewTumbl grow but as @alex99a-three and others have seen, some moderating decisions have been questionable. I know first-hand that Wikipedia is a place where true expertise, that of professionals, is not welcome—founder Larry Sanger has said as much, which is why he left. The late Aaron Swartz echoed those comments. And here, if professionals are being overruled by people who are not at the same level, then I’m not sure what the point is. I feel Wikipedia has no point, and my own dissatisfaction with it led me to create Autocade, and there’s a sense that, in its very real wish to make sure it could keep up with its growth, NewTumbl is heading down the same path.
I don’t begrudge this site’s founders for adopting the approach they did in post moderation. In fact, I think it was very clever and it’s a great way for NewTumbl to punch above its weight. However, in practice the absence of an appeals’ system doesn’t work for me any more. I totally get that they haven’t the resources. So maybe I will return when they do.
As @constantpriaprism pointed out, Dean is not really present these days, either, so one big drawcard to NewTumbl—its transparency—is now also missing.
And it’s those of us in the F and O spaces—people that NewTumbl said they wanted to encourage—who seem to be bearing the brunt of puritanical moderating. I’m guessing we are being sidelined by people who don’t have the context (e.g. Alex has posted some really innocent stuff) or knowledge outside their countries. Both Alex and I (if I may be so bold as to guess his intent) have been marking as F or O things that were safe for us on prime-time TV when we were younger. I use the same standard with imagery and language.
To confirm this lack of knowledge, I read one comment which absolutely highlighted that one moderator had no idea what they were doing, advancing what I felt was a particularly weak argument. In that case, a newspaper front page was taken down and marked as M. You have to ask yourself: if a word appears (censored) on a newspaper front page, then it’s probably not M; and if a word is used on prime-time television without bleeping, then it’s also probably not M. There are other words which may be adult in nature but are commonly used that even Mary Whitehouse would be fine with, but you just know that with the lack of knowledge that some display here, you’re going to have it taken off the site and marked out of range.
I’ve done my share of rating posts here and I like to think I’ve taken an even-handed, free-speech approach based on decades of experience and life in different countries.
If this is to be an adult site—and I know the majority of posts lean that way—then good luck to it. I will be back as @vergangene-automarken has some excellent stuff, as do the regulars whom I follow, but for now I really want to see what it’s like doing the same thing in my own space. See you there.
Buzzfeed’s article, on departing Facebook staff who write ‘badge posts’, wasn’t a surprise; what was a greater surprise was just how long it took for such news to surface.
Badge posts are traditional farewell notes at Facebook, and not everyone has had rosy things to say. One wrote, ‘With so many internal forces propping up the production of hateful and violent content, the task of stopping hate and violence on Facebook starts to feel even more sisyphean than it already is … It also makes it embarrassing to work here’ (original emphasis). Buzzfeed noted, ‘More stunning, they estimated using the company’s own figures that, even with artificial intelligence and third-party moderators, the company was “deleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook,”’ a claim that Facebook disputes, despite its points having already been addressed in the badge post:
Thanks for the response. The data scientist's analysis took this difference between views and content into account and argued that their methodology was still sound. I've typed out the full part of their badge post detailing this for you and our readers. Any thoughts? pic.twitter.com/VvgxBYi8fC
The rest is worth reading here.
Meanwhile, this Twitter thread from Cory Doctorow, sums up a lot of my feelings and has supporting links, and it is where I found the above. Highlights:
The ones that joined to fix Facebook from the inside have overwhelming evidence that Facebook doesn't actually want to fix its problems, particularly disinformation.
Reality has a leftist bias, so any crackdown on disinformation will disproportionately affect conservatives.
When that happens, Ted Cruz gets angry at Zuck and drags him into the Senate. Plus, Zuck really enjoys the company of far right assholes, and his version of "listening to both sides" boils down to "I meet with Stormfront AND the RNC."https://t.co/7M4UWd0V95
I realize US conservatives feel they are hard done by with Facebook, but I know plenty of liberals who feel the same, and who’ve had posts censored. Even if Silicon Valley leans left, Facebook’s management doesn’t, so I’d go so far as to say right-wing views get more airtime there than left-wing (actually, also right-wing by anyone else’s standards) ones. On Facebook itself, during the few times I visit, I actually see very few conservatives who have complained of having their posts deleted or censored.
That isn’t a reason to shut it down or to break it up, but misinformation, regardless of whom it supports is. Inciting genocide is. Allowing posts to remain that influence someone to commit murder is. Facebook has proved over 15 years-plus that it has no desire to do the right thing, in which case it may well be time for others to step in to do it for them.
The below is excerpted from an email sent to the Race Relations’ Commissioner, Meng Foon, sent yesterday, in light of this Tweet (and the thread that follows):
Me and my friend just wrote a letter to NCEA about the inclusion of a Lionel Terry poem in the History exam 💅😘
The New Zealand Qualifications’ Authority responded to Cadence:
Okkk so the response to our email…basically they said Terry was a 'little-known white supremacist' and that 'information was included to put his poem in context'. This info literally just said he murdered Joe Kum Yung, and that 'He was known for his views on race.'
I find it totally bizarre and inexplicable in the wake of the March 15 mosque terror attacks that someone would have thought it appropriate to include a poem by Terry in such a context, which in my view affords a murderer, racist, and white supremacist undeserved sympathy, and treats the murder of Joe Kum Yung as a side note.
I dare say the equivalent would be quoting from the manifesto of the Christchurch terrorist.
I would have no issue if Terry had been discussed in the context of the xenophobia (even the sinophobia) and racism of the era, with students asked to analyse that critically.
Looking at the Level 2 history exam paper in full, I question whether the poem’s inclusion is even that relevant to the question, more so when compared to the other sources given by the examiner.
Cadence Chung, the student who brought this to the attention of a number of people on Twitter, said she received a response from NZQA suggesting that sufficient context had been given. This I feel dismisses the seriousness of the hate crime perpetrated on Joe Kum Yung and, by extension, on our community, and is yet another example of the ongoing racism that surfaces from time to time.
One is used to it coming from certain quarters but from an official government body?
It does not reflect where New Zealanders stand today and NZQA should both explain and apologize for its inclusion.
Indeed, right now, an analysis of why NZQA felt its actions appropriate in 2020 would make a suitable question in a future exam.
If only I had read Tina Ngata’s Tweet on the subject first, as it is far more to the point:
It was the 1st *recorded* race based murder in NZ (bc govt doesn't count colonizers killing Māori as race based).
Not "little known" to our NZ Chinese community & not to those who study NZ racism.
Try NOT to erase whole ethnic communuties when defending yourself against racism. https://t.co/zakPRKkcLR
One hundred and fifteen years on since the racially motivated murder of Joe Kum Yung, we still have people who give this little regard to our various communities. My tale about being denied service at a Wellington supermarket in 1993 on racial grounds doesn’t seem that far-fetched, to be frank.
