Hard News: Dirty Politics
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Keir Leslie, in reply to
Exactly! It's not like Hager's hard to find --- people with incriminating emails seem to do it all the time.
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nzlemming, in reply to
Isn’t she known as Cactus Kate because she is surrounded by pricks?.
roflnui, to quote a certain Sacha
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
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Alfie, in reply to
Not just China, but also Israel, America, Russia, Britain...
The Israeli one is interesting... the Jewish Internet Defense Force. Is it possible that our Cam has popped over there for some training?
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stephen clover, in reply to
...shoot that’s probably not allowed...
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The guy who runs the Ruminator blog says that when he was a civil servant he was pressured to respond to Slater's OIO request ASAP
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Richard Aston, in reply to
Richard, yes my moral compass points to having a free and healthy fourth estate. if the PM is pre determining his response to a unknown written critique rather than a thoughtful and balanced response to the actual information, we do have a disconnect in this vital process.
William you are a gentleman and a scholar .
I may have been tempted to use much dirtier language to describe the circus of political manipulations before us but that would be to join them. -
Andre Alessi, in reply to
The guy who runs the Ruminator blog says that when he was a civil servant he was pressured to respond to Slater’s OIO request ASAP
I'm disturbed but not surprised by that. Government departments game the OIA process all the time, and it's clearly not something being driven by the overworked and underpaid public servants who put their names to the emails.
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HORansome, in reply to
Remember how Watergate went down, it wasn’t the break in that brought Nixon down, it was the cover up …… watch very carefully when Key’s lips move, what comes out and who’s pulling the strings, it’s what he does over the next few weeks that will damn him or let him go free
I've bene thinking that myself: I think people often forget that the initial reports by Woodward and Bernstein were pooh-poohed by the major newspapers and TV news networks at the time. It took time before the claim of conspiracy was vindicated and become commonly acknowledged as being the best explanation of the event.
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
There's a more subtle and insidious trick though than just hiring trolls and hackers. It was used by the CIA with Encounter magazine in the 50s - you just find a publication/blog/politician that broadly supports your approach and feed them money. They need not even know about it - it could be a semi-fake coffee roaster or internet business that suddenly wants to buy lots of advertising space.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
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I’ve been having an exchange with Fonterra on their facebook page asking about Hager’s allegations about their possible involvement with Carrick Graham, and pro-formula posts on Whaleoil. They’ve finally responded saying their head of communications has gone on record… behind the paywall at NBR. Does anyone here have a subscription and want to give a precis of whether or not they were involved with Graham?
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Sacha, in reply to
hey, the word is community property
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Sacha, in reply to
he has also heard from other public servants. This sort of pressure seems something relatively new.
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I'm delighted when agencies respond to OIA requests promptly but I'd rather it wasn't only the ones selected by their Minister for non-transparent reasons.
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Aidan, in reply to
I’ve bene thinking that myself: I think people often forget that the initial reports by Woodward and Bernstein were pooh-poohed by the major newspapers and TV news networks at the time. It took time before the claim of conspiracy was vindicated and become commonly acknowledged as being the best explanation of the event.
This is Robert Redford’s take on Watergate.
https://soundcloud.com/aidanh-1/robert-redford-on-watergate
Same old same old – cynical “in” journos who are are just too smart for their own goddamn good.
Woodward and Bernstein were the outliers, the ones prepared to really take it to the powerful. Rest too scared, too "savvy", as Jay Rosen might say.
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Michael Homer, in reply to
However, Fonterra’s group director of communications Kerry Underhill says the dairy cooperative has never, directly or indirectly, requested or paid for posts on the Whale Oil blog and has never discussed the matter with Carrick Graham.
... He says Fonterra hasn't worked with that public relations agency since he has been with the company [since August 2013], and that to his knowledge Fonterra has never worked with the agency or ever requested or paid for posts on any blogs, either in New Zealand or overseas.
... “These things can take on a life of their own, and this is absolutely without any truth or foundation.”
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Yeah I think the Law Society needs to ask serious questions about her behaviour there.
Note that Jordan Williams is also a lawyer. In New Zealand.
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since August 2013 is only last year, so that's not really very long; and saying it's "never discussed the matter with Carrick Graham" is still not the categorical denial I'm looking for. It would be very easy to say "please manage our social media presence however you think best" without discussing how that was going to be achieved. Most importantly, they haven't offered any explanation for why Carrick Graham was tweeting positive statements about them, which I somehow don't think he'd just do out of the goodness of his heart. (He works for Big Tobacco, therefore he has no heart, let alone one with any goodness in it).
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
Seriously, do you realise how laughably bizarro-world implausible that is? It couldn't get any nuttier if you introduced the Illuminati or TEH MOLE MEN.
Sometimes the truth can kick people in the balls. Denial is the last refuge of the red-handed.
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For the Watergate comparisons to work, we'll need ...
- a newspaper proprietor and a strong editor who are committed to investigative journalism
- members of the governing party who see what is wrong and break ranks to speak out
- independent legal authorities who put the law above politics, even if it means getting fired by political masters
We certainly don't have the first two (yet), the third remains to be seen.
And Nixon got 61% of the vote after Watergate.
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pohutukawa tree, in reply to
When you have a low-traffic website on shared hosting ...
Slater strikes me as a technological novice, which leads to a whole range of other possibilities:
- he inadvertently revealed his Gmail password to somebody
- somebody bought his old computer with the data just "deleted" (not wiped)
- somebody socially engineered their way into his computer(s)
- he lost his Time Machine backup drive, or sold it without having wiped it properly
- he inadvertently made his dropbox/google drive publicly available
- his IT support are convincing actors with some sense of fairness/moral fibre
- (millions of other possibilities here) -
- his password was "whaileoil" or "IloveJudith"
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Danyl has been polarised by reading Dirty Politics.
There’s no one comparable to Slater on the left of politics, or blogging. He is a phenomenon unique to the National Party. Key can insist that this is all just a lie, just a conspiracy story, but people who read the book know that this is simply documentation from Slater’s emails and that the Prime Minister is lying to their faces.
...Whatever the wider implications, the book has had a profound effect on me, personally. Something that doesn’t come across in the news coverage about Dirty Politics, and Cameron Slater, Jason Ede, Jordan Williams, Simon Lusk et al is just how fucking awful these people are. They spend their lives trying to poison and contaminate our politics. They enjoy seeing people suffer. They get excited by the idea of breaking up the marriages of their political enemies and ruining their lives. And John Key stands up and bleats about how everything they do is fine, and the people on the left are the nasty ones. Fuck him.
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pohutukawa tree, in reply to
- his password was "whaileoil" or "IloveJudith"
This is probable more likely than people would believe.
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