Posts by rodgerd
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For someone professing concern with language you seem to be remarkably loose about conflating the relgious right with the neoconservative movement.
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One shouldn't hype MeFi too much, though. Some aspects of the moderation irritate me enourmously, and a lot of them come back to the benevolent dictator model: in particular, the benevolent dictator lets some "old hands" act in ways that would get newer users suspended or booted because, hey, they're old buds; the dictators can also get sand in their panties about some topics and simply block-delete them, leaving others going WTF?.
(Personally, I find MeFi to be a bit Leiberman Democrat, but perhaps that's just me)
Benevolent dictators are great when you trust their tastes, but I'm not sure that's a great model.
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you missed this, although I have no idea where to place Aum Shinriko on any spectrum, but clearly they are not Islamist.
And neither are the Tamil Tigers, who pioneered the tactic of the suicide bomb.
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Quite simply, the left refuses to accept the Heinlein-like propostion that we are locked into some kind of Darwinistic war between Arab arachnids and American humans
Leave Heinlein out of this - he's a poor standard bearer for the modern right, given that Moon as a Harsh Mistress would read as a ringing endorsement of shooting imperialists.
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Now would be a good time to observe that Greg O'Connor has been known to talk complete crap before - fairly frequently, in fact - and he's the only source for the story here.
Twenty or thirty years Mr. O'Connor would now doubt have been objecting to beefed up policing of domestic violence because of the horror of having to arrest anyone when it was claimed they'd raised a hand to their wife, no matter how trivially.
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Michael, I'm agin laws that enshrine an idea. I think they are likely to be particularly bad laws.
All laws enshrine ideas.
That may be the silliest thing I've ever heard you say.
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In those cases, surely a jury must hear about prior convictions? Doesn't it address the most important aspect of such a complaint - the character of those involved?
At which point the defence is going to argue, not unreasonably, that a proper defence will require the ability to scrutinise the character of the complainant. Which gets us into the less-than-pleasant situation of would-be rape complainants knowing that anyone with a competant defence lawyer will spend the trial digging up as much mud as possible and see what sticks.
To be honest I was stunned that the complainant was stupid enough to announce that she was determined to get Rickards and co for "poor Louise." I'm sorry, but I'd have a very hard time as a jurist convicting based on the testimony of someone who made such a statement.
The rumor I've heard is that there are additional potential prosecutions but that the tactic is to wait until Rickards no longer enjoys the benefits of being on paid leave from his six figure salary job, and is therefore less able to fund such a strong defense.
That may not be as repulsive as using your police job to find vulnerable teenagers to fuck, but if true, it's a blight on how we deal justice, frankly.
I hope, though, that Rickard's obnoxious outburst against his fellow police for having the temerity to act with some integrity and investigate the complaints against him will be adequate justification to keep him away from anything important in the poilice force ever again, convictions or no.
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I think if we had an open door policy, Auckland would outstrip Sydney in under 10 years. NZ would outstrip Oz in every way except quantity of sand within 20
So, in 10 years Aucklanders would be drinking recycled waste-water?
And the rest of us in 20?
I know people dealing in the pure realm of conomics, where one can wave away pesky resource limits with "the market will find a way", but there's only so much space and water to go around. I, for one, like the fact that New Zealand does not look like Britain or Japan, density wise.
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Surprised I've got no bites on my no-immigration-policy-policy. I wasn't kidding on that one. Can anyone who doesn't like to think of themselves as a racist give me a clear description of the kind of people we don't want in this country?
So you wouldn't check to see if someone held to ideas that genocide was acceptable, if they had criminal convictions for rape or murder?
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There's plenty of brown-necks out there, Tze Ming, who aren't going to pay the slightest attention to a parenthetical half-backtrack excluding 'Asians' from the general anathema
I do find the "we're all agin the white devils!" thinking that a few East and South Asian posters on PA espouse at once depressing and amusing - the latter because a quick glance around the rest of the Pacific would show that Melanesian and Polynesian peoples in our neck of the woods are just as, if not more, happy to scapegoat Indian or Chinese groups as they are white folks.