Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Russell Brown,
Again, the police didn’t just walk in and clean out the newsrooms. RNZ, TVNZ and the HoS were able to contest the warrants. They didn’t just have all kinds of stuff seized and get told to go to court to get it back.
Indeed. The TVNZ experience seemed rather less gruelling than what Hager and his family were subjected to. The level of intimidation appears to be relative to the size of the target.
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
The benefit of the doubt I’m giving they police is that they know better than we armchair critics how to manage there resources.
The issue you’re avoiding is the possibility that the police were acting as it turned out they did in the Urewera raids – i.e. according to a selective political agenda. At the time, even Martyn Bradbury initially played down that possibility while talking up the "terror threat".
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
But I don’t think we’re in any position, from hundreds of kilometres away with almost literally no information at all, to be making assertions about what the police should and should not be focusing on, or how they should be doing it.
There’s clearly no way that Rawshark (or Whaledump, or whatever) knew that he was acting in the public interest when he targeted Slater’s communications.
So the police are to be given the full benefit of the doubt while the hacker(s) receive none. This is exactly the kind of beardstroking apologist nonsense that blighted mainstream media coverage of the Urewera raids and their dismal aftermath.
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
We can’t just demand that things we don’t think are important be ignored in favour of much less evident crimes that align better with our political preference.
Presumably you're speaking for yourself and your pointscoring 'leftie friends', because that kind of condescension seems pretty superfluous around here.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to mark taslov,
Could that also have been a reluctance to flood an already saturated market?:
I guess if Miss Fisher had happened upon one of these the magazine would have already been emptied.
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to HORansome,
I’d hesitate to define a set of beliefs which range from the plausible to the implausible with reference to just one kind of conspiracy theorist.
Like, perhaps, the kind that commented on YouTube claiming that yesterday’s mass booing of Tony Abbott at the NRL Grand Final would be studiously glossed over by the Murdoch Press. They even ran the video.
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to HORansome,
Well, Mandela was an agent of terror by some definitions, but I suppose the issue is how does the common usage apply here?
In the context of which that assertion was made, the argument seemed to be that the narrow legal definition trumped the wider judgement of posterity – i.e. the popular will.
Part of the attraction of apparent conspiracy theories seems that they give an illusion of power to the powerless – the eureka moment of “I was right, everything I knew was wrong!”
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Speaker: Why we should not dismiss…, in reply to Russell Brown,
In the terms of your argument, of course, Hager is a conspiracy theorist.
Those terms of argument eh. I seem to recall Graeme Edgeler, in party-pooper mode here a while back, arguing that Nelson Mandela was in fact a terrorist.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I'm pretty sure that Stolichnaya vodka was part of the deal too, but no Kalashnikovs. Guns for butter would have been a step too far, even by the byzantine standards of those late cold war times.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Ben Austin,
I had a bit of a look around and found a Q&A that the American government agency which sold the butter produced at the time
Thanks Ben, interesting background to a weird episode. I remember spotting the Twin Flags branded butter at Foodtown Grey Lynn and thinking 'How stupid do they reckon we are?' I'm pretty sure I recall reading that a bunch of that ill-advised exercise in dumping was rendered down to butter oil and flogged to the Soviets, who would have ended up with a proportion of NZ product.
The Dairy Board was also NZ distributor for the Lada vehicles they'd traded for agricultural produce. Later in the 80s they wound up with a big unsold inventory of Lada Samara hatchbacks. Because NZers were by then spoilt for choice with Japanese imports and cheap Hyundais, those badly built Soviet versions of the early 70s VW Golf languished unsold under a buildup of seagull droppings in a holding pen at the Port of Napier.