Posts by Sara Noble
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Hells bells I've missed a lot today.
Belatedly, my take on why this was boldly leaked by mainstream media, and not the rape case evidence, is that these leaks favour the police while the other did not. The risk of costs or reprisals are therefore far lower in this instance. It also plays to the MOR readership. Even more importantly I think it represents the widespread but largely unconscious belief in the status quo and its authority structures as "right" and "normal," and anything that challenges it as inherently dangerous. Hence, despite countless incidents of the Police reverse engineering cases, so many of you still trust their judgement on this, one of the most divisive, incendiary, politicised cases for - I don't know how long.
Who knows what Rangatiratanga is and what it means that "we" guaranteed "they" could keep it? Who doesn't know but wants to? This is really the elephant in the room.
Once upon a time I was bowled up by a cub reporter in Borders on an Easter Monday and asked what I thought about the ban on holiday trading and that by being in the shop I was doing something illegal. Kindly ignoring the extraordinary bollocks of the last part of the statement, I told her that I thought it was important to guarantee the rights of workers to holidays but because we are a multi-cultural society I thought (and still think) that we should allow people to nominate the sacred or important days they could get leave for. I suggested that for that reason, and because the exceptions seemed capricious that the law was nonsense. On Tuesday (it must have been a VERY slow weekend) the lead article on the front page of the Herald started with: Borders customer, Sara Noble, says "The law is nonsense." (That was it). Yet another day my lawyer-husband thanked the goddess that I didn't take his surname.PS re tee shirts, yes please!
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C/U: "just as most people have all along agreed that crazies with guns should probably be restrained, you'd have to be crazy yourself not to concede that the police handled this like, well, crazies with guns. (And then you'd only have to be a little bit left of not-crazy to note a few things about power, history, willful ignorance, appalling arrogance, manipulation of public prejudice....)"
THANK YOU
b/m: "these 16 people have no way through the legal process to respond to the accusations against them. If they make public statements to the media they can be used against them in court. If they say nothing the public will probably assume their guilt.
"while these 16 named people have been held up as terrorists in the court of public opinion , the Solicitor General - highest legal prosecutor in the country - has concluded - after reading a great deal more than the single affidavit upon which the Dominion bases its report - decided that the evidence collected against these 16 at a cost of over $8 million (according to the police) is insufficient for them to face anything more than illegal possession of firearms charges *."
THANK YOU TOO
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I've been thinking about tee-shirts/ badges too:
Wigger Lover
I'm Not Afraid of the Dark (maybe with Maori sovereignty flag)
The serious one is:
Nga Pakeha o Aotearoa support
Rangatiratanga
Kaitiakitanga
Kotahitangaor on the other hand:
Post-Cool
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<But I do agree with you, Jimmy, that I really hope the DomPost has fairly represented a 100 page + document, and not cherry picked the really scary shit.>
Of course thats what they do. This is the popular media remember. Remember Y2K, the meteor that was going to hit earth, bird flu etc etc etc. Fear increases circulation, increased circulation brings in advertising revenue.
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Yeah my devout socialist uncle once tried to join the territorials. they wouldn't have him because he told them that his intention was to get the training then go join the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. I think the long hair was a give away. Sadly, I doubt the Sandinistas would have had much use for him either.
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Lordy, haven’t you lot been busy… Don’t you have jobs to go to?
Neil: I usually resist the temptation to respond to argumentum ad hominem but I have chosen to be flattered by you thinking I’m a recent convert(and it gives me the chance to show off). I’m glad I’m still passionate about my ideals. It’s 25 years since I was arrested protesting against the Springbok Tour. My life’s work (aside from the primary occupation of raising a happy and healthy family) is in the area of comparative culture, I teach ethnicity and identity, semiotics and post-structuralist research methodology. I have to be much more restrained and balanced in terms of my personal/political opinions in class, so it is nice to be able to rant a bit in this forum. And I totally know that there are other people with these understandings who take more moderate positions. I hope to challenge some of the complacency that moderate positions can allow to creep in. I think that radical shifts of attitude can help open doors to incremental social change.
Finn: The potential for the Northern Irish connection, or a Maori arguing pro-police was why I put the “probably” in my post. Interestingly enough many anglo-celtic settlers in NZ will also have been shoved off their ancestral lands through the enclosures or clearances in the UK in the 1800’s. The thing is that most of “us” don’t actually experience direct alienation from our culture on a daily basis. NZ’s dominant culture (legal, political, economic and education systems; housing, food, holidays, clothing, body language, as well as the most fundamental tangible aspect of culture, i.e. language) is directly related to our own cultures of origin. In effect, we’ve made it the dominant culture. My language is both emotive and accurate. I think if you can know that people – real individuals – were beaten as children for speaking their native language at school, right up until the late 1960’s, and NOT have some emotional response there is something wrong. The foundation of ethical behaviour is empathy.
As for armed political groups, well I think people have a right to defend themselves. If my homeland was overrun by outsiders and my only chance to protect my land, family and culture was by fighting I’m pretty sure that’s what I’d do, despite my intellectual attraction to pacifism. The possibility of having to defend themselves* was, at worst, what Tame Iti and his lot were working on up there in the hills. I know and trust one of the highly respected leaders of Tuhoe and I know that ATTACK is not on their agenda. I suspect that the snail savers weren’t out to hurt anyone either. As I said before, there is one egomaniac among the 17 who I’d consider dangerous with a gun, but I don’t think he has any ideology to speak of except self-promotion.
*Note: Elephant right here.Blindjackdog: The word you are looking for is “individualism.” In Ethnicity and Identity, the class I love the most is the one on the Western ideology of individualism. So many 1st years will sit there claiming that they have sprung whole and unencumbered by the fetters of family, culture, fashion or tradition (let alone subconscious representational semantics), and are then dumbstruck as I point out the uniform (of the day) they are wearing: mostly a variation on tee shirt and jeans. The very fact of our belief that we are not cultural is one of the most prominent artifacts of Western culture and the ideology of individualism masks all kinds of structural inequality.
I totally agree with your analysis of racism. I think we owe a lot to queer theory in exploring internalised oppression and revealing the psychological pervasiveness of racism, sexism, homophobia etc.
And I’m a second generation Wigger/Nigger lover. Beat that.
(ps i love you)General: Oh I’m getting tired of the back and forward about weapons, uniforms; what can be used for hunting or wilderness survival vs engendering mass panic. (See “they weren’t going to use them against us comments above”). We all see what we want to see from the same evidence.
What I want to know is:
What kind of weapons were they looking for in that 15 year old’s “cavity”?!!!! -
Hmm looks like we all watched Flight of the Concords...
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"War on Terror" is a contradiction in terms.
"Police Terror Raids" is poetic justice.
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Finn, you probably don't have to protect your right to your culture every day of your life. You probably haven't had your ancestral land stolen and been beaten for speaking your native language at school. You probably haven't even been stopped by the police and photographed illegally by your car. You probably have no deep need to ally yourself with either set of activities. These guys are quite literally struggling for survival.
If you think these things haven't happened you are in denial. They haven't happened to me either, but I've looked beyond the veneer of "We're all New Zealanders" to the structural inequities that allow Pakeha New Zealand to do violence to Maori individuals and groups in real and immediate ways every day of their lives. Call me biased, I call it realism.
And sorry, Moana Jackson isn't going to come out and say, well yeah my client did it to "balance" his discussion, and he can't give specifics yet about the police misconduct.
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Looking again Kyle is quite right that the "fallback position" statement is specifically about the inter-agency communications, not the police evidence, but the article does flick between the two and Watkins does argue that releasing the police evidence would be in the public interest.
Thanks Shep. Honest partnership is what it is all about. Unfortunately I haven't yet seen a government agency that really takes parthership seriously.
Somebody tell me how to do those fancy indent things so I at least don't LOOK like such a noob. Or tell me where the instructions are. (Yes my kids set up my phone...)