New Zealand MPs who performed haka in parliament given unprecedented punishment
New Zealand MPs who performed haka in parliament given unprecedented punishment
That was pretty badass.
Agreed. If that had been targeted at me, I would have crapped my pants.
The Speaker sure looked like he wanted to.
Wider angle video showing the whole scope of it plus his reaction, which was priceless.
I think maybe he actually did.
The haka happened last November. They haven't been punished until now. You'd think if it was that severe they wouldn't wait 5 months to punish them for it.
I wonder how close they anticipate that vote being.
My bet is those 3 votes would have made a difference.
A dance is not equate to a gun, this is not some magical world where people cast spell by dancing 🤦
Dance like these is as intimidating as getting booed, they should quit their leadership position if they feel physically threatened by it. It's a dance, hon, not waving gun or sword around.
Nah, we’re just not bigots like you.
You can fuck allll the way off.
And after you’re done fucking off, please go right ahead and keep fucking off until you reach the sun
Wait, if we could harness that level of fuck off power, we could transition to renewable energy much sooner.
So don’t delay, fuck now, supplies are fucking out
Fuck now, if you’re still alive, six to eight fucks to arrive
And if you fuck more, there may be a tomorrow
But if the offer’s fucked
You might as well be fuckin’ on the sun
So can you really!? Not helpful discourse at all.
I dunno, trying to educate shit people has gotten us nowhere either. Might as well just tell em to fuck off.
A ritual dance is physical intimidation? I suppose you'd say having aggressive body language (looking angry) is physical intimidation too.
We should put all government officials on valium so they don't accidentally get too emotionally invested in what they're discussing, lest they accidentally physically intimidate someone with an angry face.
Obviously ministers with resting-bitch-face will have to be permanently barred from attending parliament, for the safety of their colleagues. We wouldn't want such blatant physical intimidation on the day to day after all.
The point being, if you think a native ritual dance is the same as being physically intimidated, rather than seeing it as their culture's way of expressing their feelings on some important matters, then you're entirely missing the point and showing a lack of understanding of your own nation's culture at a basic level, and probably shouldn't be representing those same citizens at the government level.
I imagine politicians that clueless would just say "Oh my, the natives have gone feral! Look at that display of raw physical intimidation! Jeeves, fetch my musket and don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes!"
If you feel physically intimidated by what is essentially some well known and well respected people in a debating hall being angry about the current topic of discussion and telling you they're angry in a recognised and common cultural manner, then I can't help you.
You seem very uninformed about the history of the Haka.
There are many different ones, but the most common one, Ka Mate, is usually performed by sports teams before a game, and is meant to be intimidating.
They were historically performed by a tribe's mightiest warriors when other chiefs came to visit, as one example. They're often a war dance, a show of power.
The audience is supposed to be intimidated
Of course intimidation is the point -- psychological/political intimidation, not physical. Context matters. Don't try to pretend that the other MPs were scared they were gonna charge at them with taiahas or something, because that's bullshit and you know it.
I don't know about other commenters, but I'm absolutely not uninformed, and this was in no way out of line given the context.
Hakas have evolved from traditional war dances and are often performed at sports events, that's true, but the Ka Mate is also performed in many other contexts (including at funerals and after separation of families) and should not be boiled down to simple intimidation – it's more a show of resolve. Do you think groups of people meeting after a long absence are trying to threaten one another or that mourners are trying to intimidate the deceased? The meaning has nuance and is not a simple threat; it's about the will to overcome adversity, and is basically the national anthem of the Maori's iwi, which was fought for in this very Parliament, and which resulted in the Haka (Ka Mate) Attribution Act after colonisation. I honestly cannot think of a more fitting place to perform it than in this context.
If you've only seen it in a sports context, I can see how you might think it's simply a modernised war dance meant to intimidate an opposing group, but that's a very reductionist view of it.
From newzealand.com:
Ka Mate is the haka often performed by the All Blacks. It begins with ‘Ka mate, ka mate, ka ora, ka ora’, which translates to ‘I die, I die, I live, I live.’
One can only imagine how Ngati Toa Chief Te Rauparaha felt when he first chanted these words 200 years ago. He had just evaded capture by a rival iwi (tribe) and was given shelter by another iwi, who hid him underground in a kūmara (sweet potato) pit. Ka mate tells this story, describing how Te Rauparaha shook off adversity to emerge from the darkness of the kūmara pit into the light.
Te Rauparaha went on to evade capture a few more times and to become a great Māori chief and warrior, helping to expand Ngāti Toa's territory across the lower North Island.
You can read the origin of the Ka Mate from New Zealand Geographic – this is not a story of war and intimidation, but of perseverence and the will to overcome.
And here's a fantastic breakdown on the meaning and how to perform it from the Australian International School (AIS).
Ka Mate shouldn't be viewed as an intimidation tactic that's morphed from war to sports, but as a deeply cultural story that absolutely has a place in New Zealand Parliament, and some overstuffed colonists being offended is disdainful at best.
Actually, I don't think one of the Maori party MPs throwing hands is particularly far fetched.
A ritual dance is physical intimidation?
Yes
I suppose you'd say having aggressive body language (looking angry) is physical intimidation too.
Yes (but just looking angry is not body language. It's a facial expression. Screaming at someone with your arms flailing is aggressive body language)
Do you even know the history of the Haka? It's a warrior's dance to intimidate their foes. Modern haka can have many meanings, but that's it's root.
Its root is in physical intimidation before battle yes, but on the floor of parliament it's clearly intended as an act of cultural display of resistance, not one of "do as we say or we will hurt you".
The modern suit comes from military uniforms. Hell, they have a guy with a mace when parliament is in session. This military imagery has come to the authority of the democratic process and appears at least throughout the anglosphere, but it's using military imagery to do so.
Just as the colonizer uses military imagery to represent the authority and tradition of institutions, the colonized may use their own military imagery to represent opposition to colonial acts.
Yes there's lots of ceremonial aspects to parliament and if they wanted to include more maori tradition into it, I'd be all in favour.
This is akin to randomly bellowing out the national anthem in the middle of a voting session but with more bite. I'd expect somebody doing that to be sanctioned too.
This is akin to randomly bellowing out the national anthem in the middle of a voting session but with more bite. I'd expect somebody doing that to be sanctioned too.
With the harshest punishment ever given within their government?
Hey hey now, what's with this intimidating post? Sounds like I may need my gun.
Did you see the video? The arm stuff looks like jazz hands.
When the threats come from governaments you suddenly stop caring i bet
Ah, at more or less frequent time spans I end up searching the internet for all these amazing ritual performances (forgive my ignorance, I am from North Europe so don’t really know what it is exactly or what it should be called) of the Māori.
I get so captured and enchanted by them, it’s so powerful but often also beautiful and somehow extremely sorrowful or whatever emotion the display is intended to signal (or at least ends up signaling to me as a complete ignorant foreigner), I always end up wondering that had Christianity not crusaded our lands and bloodily murdered and genocided our cultures, might we have something equally powerful and captivating to preserve? It’s not a far fetch because we do have a lot of remnants and first party findings on the old Norwegian and Danish and Swedish cultures of around the Northern European Iron Age for example, that had similar sort of rituals or even just musical tastes and conventions. Our peoples neighbored those, though were distinct and entirely different on most fronts, though a lot of people today fancy conflating us with the “Vikings”. We were their looting ground for the most part and any influence from their culture on ours would’ve been likely equally bloodily brought. But I digress.
Had the southerners not crusaded and killed most of us off, snuffed out the light of our culture, forced everyone brutally to follow whatever flavor of Christ each crusade was bringing, maybe I shouldn’t feel so amazed by the amazing cultures far away. But maybe we didn’t have anything as powerful in the first place, who knows at this point…
But these shows of force and unity are always so captivating, I end up bingeing videos of them for hours on end, even if I don’t really know what they are about and what each of them mean.
I love this. It’s so close to my heart somehow, feels so close to home, yet it’s a faraway thing.
I totally get where you're coming from, and I agree Christianity did snuff out a lot of that, but not necessarily the way you may be thinking of it. Christianity was a face, tool, and motivation of empire, and empire seeks to standardize culture for the sake of stability. Christianity has deeply powerful cultural performances too. There are traditional catholic rituals that by their nature as a force of colonizing power and as part of globally dominant cultures (and as part of our own cultures) we see differently from this.
This haka was powerful and beautiful, and part of that is by its own merit, but part is that it is people and culture resisting colonial power.
Also, the modern era has been immensely destructive to culture and ritual except where it is intentionally preserved. While it would be easy to pin it on Christianity and the protestant reformation, the reality is that it's also caused by the formation of nations (the unification of Italy for example created a shared culture between Venice and Rome for the first time since the fall of the western empire), the advent of mass travel and communication, the rise of industrialized lifestyles, and the shift from generation after generation living in the same spot to the normalization of living somewhat far from your family, all of which combined to more or less radically weaken local cultures.
You make sense, it’s easy to reduce these things into a couple of easy “villains” to point my finger at, but in reality things are always much, much more complex.
For whatever reason, it’s a touchy topic for me and often takes a few steps taken back to see it straight so to say.
Thanks for the perspective!
might we have something equally powerful and captivating to preserve?
...no. As in: That's not the kind of cultural practice Christianisation wiped out or we wouldn't be burning stuff come spring, dance around maypoles, and whatnot. The Faroese are still into singing sagas as an actual community practice. Missionaries back then weren't trying to regiment people into factory workers, make them sit still on chairs and such.
It's kind of a grass is greener on the other side kind of situation. There's a good reason stuff like Heilung is captivating, but that's because they're modern-day shamans speaking to instincts buried by modernity, not because they'd be historical in their music or practices. Norse folk music indeed sounded pretty much like Norse folk music does today.
I get your sentiment, but I’m talking about Finnic heritage and culture, we have some stuff preserved, though a lot of it warped by Christian stuff bleeding into them, but no real knowledge of what the music around here was like. From the Scandinavians, we have even primary sources and good findings, but I am fairly certain what we had here was much different, just not preserved. A lot of the crusades were from the Scandinavians, former “Vikings”, which means we do have some amount of warped cultural traditions similar to theirs, but that is most likely a result and the outcome of hundred years of crusades, annexation, occupation and conquest. So in a sense it’s true Christianity alone didn’t result in our lost cultural traditions, it was the more powerful cousins we have from the West as well.
But I do not agree that it’s entirely just “grass is greener” kind of situation and that the influence and violence from the faiths and the peoples from the South and the West (and the East!) played no critical part in silencing whatever we used to have around here. If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too. But everything, the entirely different language origins, the cultural merging more with the Siberian and Sami peoples on top of our own original foreigness among these Scandinavian neighbors, everything points to it being unlikely our customs were the same. Our religion was entirely different to those of our Western cousins. You would assume the customs, traditions, rites, the music and all, would’ve been entirely different as well, since most of them leaned into those two things: the language (as in the preservation of:) and the all-encompassing nature of faiths of that time as sort of the merged “science”, culture and religion.
But I was vague in my original comment, which probably lead to this tangent. While I’m not an academic in the histories of our culture, I have been interested in it and consuming all kinds of content regarding it (the little we have…) all my life. I feel like I am in line with the current consensus. But maybe not. Take it as you will.
If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too.
I guess what I want to say overall is that you shouldn't confuse the impact of Christianisation with the impact of being neighbours for millennia. Of course you both have Saunas, why wouldn't they copy you, long before the crusades. There's indubitably lots of influence in areas such as administration, but folk dances, music? Which tax collector has ever cared about that, that kind of thing travels from village to neighbouring village, the occasional travelling musician, not via state structures.
The Catholic Church definitely had influence on music as they had their stuff standardised but then not every village had a church much less a choir much less organ, nor would you want to dance to their chants. They didn't unify Europe musically, why would they care to. What they did do is popularise polyphony.
On the flipside: Tradition is not praying to the ashes, but passing on the fire. If there's some specifically Finnish spark that makes you produce the amount and quality of metal that you do then, by all means, do blaze on. Why go backwards, how would that be more authentic.
Fair enough, those are good points.
I might have gotten a little defensive there for no real reason. It’s a thin line to walk, and unfortunately I find myself often approaching the forbidden (and rightly so) lands of some variation or cultural exceptionalism, and even worse, based on nothing actual or concrete, just vague “what-if”s and imagination.
Sorry about all that
Is it wrong that I found that pretty hot?
EDIT: Answer: Yes. Yes, it is.
Woman: exists
Gooner: is for me?
The word "gooner" has been diluted so much it's not being used to describe basic words of attraction...
The point being it’s obnoxious that discussions of any female politician at some point have to bring up their attractiveness. It’s completely irrelevant to the work they do. I can’t think of male politicians getting the same treatment.
Buddy we have women "gooning" over Luigi Mangione, not a politician but his attractiveness is definitely not why he's making rounds in the news
The point being it’s obnoxious that discussions of any female politician at some point have to bring up their attractiveness.
Her badassery was brought up. Yes, badass women are attractive, deal with it.
