This is topical as the hospital RMOs are on strike for better terms and conditions on call but when one becomes a GP (at least in Whanganui) the local PHO seems less supportive of General Medical Practitioners with worse terms and conditions for the "independent contractors" than they pay their employee doctors.
Bill Douglas, Whanganui
The admirable 'deplorables'
I stand with all those millions of so called "deplorables" who voted for Donald Trump in the American elections.
And I must say that Mr Frank Greenall's Bastia Bulletin truly is bordering on the ridiculous; he and all the other Kiwis, who are experiencing a Trumpfunk.
This would include, to name a couple, a so-called cartoonist by the name of Hubbard and an ex-Prime Minister who was once a part of the Washington swamp, which was bailed out by Obama and is at present being drained by President Trump.
They all seem to have forgotten that the gap between the wealthy and poor here in Aotearoa New Zealand is widening.
The greatest irony of all is that Mr Greenall's line, "If we want it we take it for free" can be applied right here in New Zealand.
And ethnic cleansing is still Government policy, as demonstrated by the fact that a little bit of land that I inherited from my Maori ancestors was up until quite recently classified as being held by myself under absolute ownership. But now its under something called fee simple.
Did I not have the right to be consulted on this?
Is this the modern manifestation of ethnic cleansing? So let's leave Americans to sort out their own destiny.
And ask Muslims why they have left home instead of sorting out those radicals in their own countries?
Many Maori people died in defence of freedom during the Land Wars here and others in places like El Alamein in WWII. But our lands are still confiscated.
Potonga Neilson, Castlecliff
'Mystical mumbo'
Mr Haakma responds in part to my January 21 letter, "[T]here is more logic in creation by a supreme being who is not bound up in or subject to matter than there is in the 'unscientific' fantasy that stuff made itself out of nothing."
There is nothing logical about this statement: it is mystical mumbo with a seriously ignorant and biased attack on science tacked on.
As the philosopher A.J. Ayers put it, "The mystic does not give us any information about the external world; he merely gives us indirect information about the condition of his own mind."
The verbal dance between bias and faith in his second paragraph is laughable. Religious faith is the adherence to a series of statements of belief and doctrine with no necessary foundation in fact or evidence.
Indeed, confronted with evidence that is accepted in forums founded on reason (e.g. US Supreme Court) the faithful simply shout the old assertions more loudly. That is why Mr Haakma's faith bias has him refusing to address biblical evidence, and adhering to his own misreading of scripture.
Again, get it straight: faith is fact denying bias at its most extreme.
Let us be clear that the Old Testament stories of God's instructing the Israelites to clear out non-Hebraic tribes (Hittites, Ammonites, Amalakites, Canaanites, etc) are absolutely clear evidence, if accepted as true, of God's being a prime mover in ethnic cleansing, just as the (Babylonian) story of the Great Flood is proof of Yahweh's genocidal intent.
Mr Haakma sees my use of this biblical material as "atheistic antipathy". Hey, I didn't invent this stuff. It is there. In Scripture. In terms of modern morality - civil, political, individual - it is utterly unacceptable, certainly to me, maybe not to Mr Haakma.
To clarify, my "antipathy" is to the scripturally stated instructions of God to his chosen people, and the resultant actions; which is not (necessarily) to deny the existence of God, though it is to question, if he does exist, whether we should want to know him?
Cuddle up, Mr Haakma.
Russ Hay, Whanganui
