Who Sank the Boat?
Parents of a certain age who read bedtime stories to their children might recall Who Sank the Boat? by Pamela Allen. Not being considered a thought crime, it has probably escaped the modern, woke publisher’s scalpel. Maybe there was some implied fattism, but it generally passed muster.
In Allen’s brief tale, the lesson is about the unexpected and about cumulative causation, to borrow a term from urban economics. A small, wobbly, barely seaworthy craft admits one animal passenger at a time, including some fairly corpulent creatures, and, in the end, it is a tiny mouse that tips the scales and sinks the boat.
All this came to mind this week as New Zealand lost one of its naval vessels in a non-confrontational incident. I remember when working in Napier, the capital of Hawkes Bay on the North Island, that we received a visit from one third of the NZ navy. Three vessels, I seem to recall. Three vessels of the nine now are idle due to “personnel shortages”. It is lucky that no one wants to invade the Shaky Isles. Too far to go, I suppose. Hardly a strategy location. In any case, with the Chinese buying up much of the country, what need is there to invade? The last war-like invasion occurred many hundreds of years ago. That was the Maori. The rugby haka reminds us all of their intent.
What happened last week? Who sank the boat? Well, it hit a reef off Samoa. According to one report:
All 75 people on board evacuated to safety with only minor injuries after the vessel ran aground on the reef it was surveying about a mile off the coast of Upolu, Samoa's most populous island. The cause of the disaster is not known.
The sinking prompted fears of a major fuel spill. On Thursday, officials in Samoa said while the vessel was leaking oil from three places, the amount was reducing each day and was dissipating quickly due to strong winds in the area.
Not an iceberg in sight, though. It was the first NZ naval loss since World War Two. It is a big story.
Be careful what you say about this. What with the Ministry of Truth coming our way.
New Zealand’s Defense Minister Judith Collins [a bruiser if ever there was one] has decried what she called misogynistic online comments about the woman commander of a navy ship which ran aground, caught fire and sank off the coast of Samoa on Sunday.
One of the comments was worthy of the minister’s attention:
One of the posters was a truck driver from Melbourne, Australia, she added.
That is a bit truckist, and carries the unmistakable Kiwi obsession with all things Australian. Casual anti-Australian racism, I wouldn’t wonder.
It wasn’t an Australian trucker who drew the ship captain’s personal identity to the world, though. It was The Gulf Insider, which headlined:
$100 Million Naval Ship Under Command Of Lesbian Captain Runs Aground, Catches Fire, And Sinks.
https://www.gulf-insider.com/100m-nz-naval-ship-sinks-captain-criticized/
A Brit, even. Not even a Kiwi. But, the report suggested, let us put in the headlights the private life of the unfortunate commander. Has the modern practice of woke recruitment run aground?
Critics on social media immediately noted that Captain Gray had no ship command experience on her resume and had previously admitted that she had ulterior motives to seeking the command of the naval ship. In a 2022 interview with New Zealand’s Navy Today magazine, Gray said she and her wife schemed to move to New Zealand after falling in love with the country on a campervan holiday.
“How do we get to live here, we asked ourselves,” she said, then added, “The most obvious thing was to apply to join the Royal New Zealand Navy.”
… Some speculated that the commander had been hired to satisfy diversity concerns despite her lack of experience.
“You don’t cut your teeth on $100m ships,” responded one critic.
Oh dear.
Naval disasters are not new, of course. The Voyager disaster in the 1960s, Australia’s worst peacetime naval catastrophe, threatened the Holt Government. It took two Royal Commissions to get at the truth. To find who sank the boat. Two Aussie naval vessels off the south coast of New South Wales conspired to have a prang, during manouevres. Many died. One of the captains was vilified. He wasn’t a lesbian. But then it emerged that the other captain may have had “issues”. It was suggested the other captain was drunk. Where Fate Calls by Tom Frame is one of the definite accounts.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Where-Fate-Calls-HMAS-Voyager/dp/0340549688
Separating truth from fiction is a messy business. But there are systemic issues in play, too.
It was another Judith, by the name of Sloan, who once opined, when my former employer, RMIT University, dropped the ATAR (University entrance score) for engineering from 80 to 60, that she would rather be driving across a bridge designed by someone with an ATAR of 80 than one with 60.
What Judith Sloan is, in effect, defending is meritocracy. Excellence. Standards. The best ship’s captain for the job. The least of Judith’s concerns would have been the sexuality of the engineers. Of course, many in the woke brigade believe that “objective” standards are a social construct.
This was one of the big advances of the Enlightenment project, which, in elevating reason above what it regarded as superstition, sought to base human decision making on the “rational choice” model and unmooring it from religion, the divine right of kings and the rest.
We have turned our backs on the Enlightenment, in this regard. Modern practice is based on ideology, not reason. It is, ironically, based on “faith”. The enemy of the Enlightenment. But it is faith unmoored from reason. The Christian world view was always based on both, working in tandem. How this has all worked out is another story.
The HR driven woke revolution in employment practice that has occurred since the 1970s has consequences. The Australian Defence Force prides itself (pun intended) on its “modern” recruitment practices. Our soldiers spend as much time attending unconscious bias training sessions as they do preparing for the next war. Which may not be that far off. That is when they are not fighting war crimes allegations incurred in foreign adventures that we cannot win and which are riddled with opportunities for such allegations to be made.
The Brits, whose political class is actively willing a war with Russia, cannot raise recruits to fight such a war. They are talking conscription. The Australian Government is training its deep state activities on people, well, like those who question our strategic capacity and who voice doubts about the same deep state.
The clueless goons who run our country and our allies haven’t figured out how all the bits link up. It is a comfortable, emerging narrative that the questioning of the “pilot’s error” is mere alt-right trolling. It begets the question, though, who sank the boat?
Paul Collits
11 October 2024
Will there be 2 kiwi royal commissions to work out what a truck driver implied?