Hard News: The Bottom is a Magic Place
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The implication being that the person at fault here, the person who has created this conviction, is in fact the mother of the child.
A more charitable reading might be that she took the picture because it was an extreme example of something that the husband was known to be capable of, and that if the assault had been an isolated incident in a happy family then she wouldn't have gone out of the way to capture and pass on evidence. Of course, the use of the phrase "having a few difficulties" does seem to trivialise it and imply that the incident was being used as a weapon between the adults, but my interpretation of the fact that she resorted to photography was that it indicates a history of violence from the father.
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Tom, I completely agree. My issue is with what I perceive to be Dave's characterisation that the person at fault here is in fact not the only who assaulted the child, but the person who blew the whistle on it.
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Sorry that was an awfully mangled sentence, let's try again:
Tom, I completely agree. My issue is that it seems to me to be Dave's contention that the person at fault here is not the one who assaulted the child, but the person who blew the whistle on it.
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russell, Deborah, I am saying I don't know enough facts to put this sentence in perspective.
A first time offender drunk driver who runs from police but gives themselves up before they dause an accident would be extremely unlikely to get anything like 9 months supervision, to put this sentence in perspective.
If this guy is a first offender therefore I would argue that it is over the top relative to other sentences, but it is difficult to say not being totally familiar with the case.
If he was already known to the police/cyfs etc, it would seem a bit lenient and I hope 9 months "help" fixes his problem.
The sentence for this guy has a smell of politics about it but we may eventually find out more detail.
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I dont look at it in terms of "fault" But if you really want to, I would say it was the mans "fault" that he bruised the child, and his partners " fault" that he was prosecuted.
Had he not bruised the child there would have been no prosecution - which was my point. So the action of smacking is irrelevant. Had he not have smacked the child, but bruised him,and teh pic was flicked around, he would have still been convicted - so S59 has nothing to do with this case.
Thats because to bruise a kid before the S59 bill is not any more or less against the law than it is now.
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Kevin. So. The first time you bash the living daylights out of your kid you should get slapped with a wet bus ticket?
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And while you're up, Kevin, could you explain your reference to demographics, which Kyle and I both found alarming? What, for instance, does the father's employment status have to do with... anything?
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Anyone noticed that a fasces appears on either side of the American Flag behind the rostrum in the United States House of Representatives?
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Anyone noticed that a fasces appears on either side of the American Flag behind the rostrum in the United States House of Representatives?
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Not that it means anything though, or does it? da da da daaaaa!
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Heh. Reminds me of my favourite from that joke email that used to do the rounds about the best words that could be made by replacing, or adding a single letter to create a whole new meaning.
The one that I liked the best was Ignoranus (someone who is both ignorant and an a$$hole).
This reminds me of a philosophy prof I had who used to refer to the masses as "the massholes".
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Jeremy Andrew:That's perineurium, not perinium...
You got the veiled allusion then ;-)
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Oh and Kevin. Underpants go on the inside.
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Not that it means anything though, or does it? da da da daaaaa!
I love a good fnord.
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You got the veiled allusion then ;-)
I also noticed that one shouldn't check the spelling of the word perineum by typing it into Google... not since they started including image search results.
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Thats because to bruise a kid before the S59 bill is not any more or less against the law than it is now.
Dave, you know very well that's not true. Juries were known to declare assaults that left quite serious bruising "reasonable" under Section 59.
And anyway, what happened to the "loving smack"? Isn't what happened here -- parental loss of control, anger, etc, the opposite of the considered smack that good parenting was allegedly about? (And what, BTW, was your evidence for the "light" smack in the headline?)
That doesn't seem to have stopped The Section 59 Blog and Whale Oil from predictably going off the deep end. Check out the second comment at Whale Oil, contending that some people just bruise more easily than others. How creepy.
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What is your definition of a flunky?
"Word that I'll use since I have no idea what his actual job title is." er. "Person who does political party work but isn't an MP" is probably how I'd define my use of it.
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Dave, what Russell said. I was trying to come up with a way to express my horror at what you are writing on this issue, but Mr Brown has done it for me.
I sincerely hope that I get through my whole life without bruising anyone else (bar some kind of in extremis situation where I am rescuing them from a falling off a burning building into a pirahna tank of course - some bruising might be the inadvertent result of my heroic deeds in such a case).
I just cannot imagine finding myself in a situation where I am advocating for a law to be allowed to hit people, PARTICULARLY children.
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A first time offender drunk driver who runs from police but gives themselves up before they dause an accident would be extremely unlikely to get anything like 9 months supervision, to put this sentence in perspective.
I'm not sure how you compare the relativities of drink driving to assault.
But since apparently it's possible, surely the difference there is, the drunk driver hasn't hit anyone. The person committing assault has hit someone.
If the drink driver had hit someone, I suspect they would have got more than 9 months supervision.
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I agree with Kyle, and the comparision is incoherent in the first place.
Why is this hypothetical driver running from the police? What are they giving themselves up for?
Aye?No don't answer that.
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Russell, before the S59 bill people were convicted for bruising via smacking. Perhaps not all of them - a jury is only as good as the evidence - Donselaar is the case that comes to mind. So although you may say that " I know very well thats not true", then how come Donselaar got a conviction?. Because he bruised his kid - just like this latest guy did. And that is assault. Except Donselaar did it in the process of smacking - this latest guy assaulted his kid before he smacked him. So I know very well that it *is* true. I can`t help it that some juries dont apply the law as well as others - and it was law I was talking about, not the juries' interpretation of it - which is what you have twisted it to be.
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Palmer's time as PM was very much taken up with the resource management law reform and the local government administration reform. Good, solid clear-eyed infrastructural stuff. Rationalisation of truckloads of messy uncoordinated old statutes and admin systems that had growed like Topsy.
Are you all too young to remember the disappearance of sundry quangos, the rabbit boards and their ilk? I expect so.
The resource management law reform took three years and amalgamated nearly 100 statutes and their assorted regulations. Huge effort. Massive consultation. A whole new approach to land and water use. Palmer was making about three or four speeches a week on it - I know because he took against one of his speechwriters at the outset and I got landed with the writing.
Even though it was a National administration who eventually passed the Resource Management Act in 1991, it was Palmer's baby. He started it shortly after the Ministry for the Environment was established in 1987 - he was Deputy PM at the time and our first Minister for the Environment.
He was also very involved with the work on the NZ Bill of Rights (1990) and other constitutional matters, and pursued upgrading the law of the sea and fisheries quota establishment. Caused quite a to-do in the UN with his anti-driftnetting stance which later became widely upheld. A little ahead of his time in so many ways.
I think the boy did good. Probably better than a lot of other NZers have done with their "15 minutes" anyway!
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Palmer also introduced the undefined "principles of the treaty of Waitangi"...
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Oh dear insider outsider, you have just outted yourself as someone who hasn't read Mr Slack's excellent book (the name of which escapes me at this precise moment, but it starts with "Bullshit, Backlash and...").
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It's probably incompetence on my part but I can't seem to find the pages on daves blog about the Timaru woman. They are there in google but won't open, or open blank. Weird.
Anyway Dave, would you agree that this case had a good outcome, that the police the wife and the judge all acted properly and that the various people saying that it is an example of "good parents" being "victimised" are wrong?
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