Hard News: The March for Democracy
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Fair enough call, Gio -- but I still wonder whether Radio New Zealand's flagship magazine show would have felt obliged to "engage" Gage if he was "just asking questions" about whether the Holocaust had been exaggerated by "the Israel lobby,"
The very question I asked at the end of my post, and we'd do well to ask ourselves how the Truthers have managed to market themselves as inquisitve minds, people who ask honest questions. But once the cat is out of the bag - and here I agree with Deborah Lipstadt - even Holocaust Deniers must be engaged with. Here I think Te Papa made the first move, but I'm in fact about to write to Mark Cubey and confirm the timing.
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@Andrew Clive - why do issues like raising children have to be a "right wing/left wing" thing? Although I don't agree with the assessment, I would be considered by most to be "right wing" but since 1999 when I wrote a feature on the death of James Whakaruru I have advocated repealing S59 of the Crimes Act. I appeared before the Select Committee in support of Sue Bradford's Bill. I wrote a piece for the "Vote Yes" website. I do not support Sensible Sentencing's vigilante cries for "having a crack" at offenders in court via victim impact statements. Evidence coming out of America shows increased use of prison sentences, and harsher prisons, actually contributes to higher crime rates - in other words,if we treat people like scum, they behave like scum. Yet a decade ago I put out the Sex Offender Indexes and I was the pinup girl of the likes of those people marching on Saturday. What happened? I read all the time. I listen to different people Andrew. I try not to stay stuck in the blinkers, that's why I left the Act Party and its narrow focus - can you imagine me and David Garrett surviving for more than two minutes in caucus? Shivers, we couldn't even survive in the green room before a tv programme - as soon as I walked in before we'd even been introduced he said he hated me, or his brother hated me or something. It's this polarisation that drives me nuts in NZ and it's why it's so difficult to make progress, and why I got out of politics. At least with the Maori Party and John Key that polarisation seems to be dissipating somewhat, and we do seem to have some progress, and that I find encouraging, and thanks to Key, when he was in Opposition, he made a move to allow Bradford's Bill to pass. But those marchers on Saturday, polarisation is their raison d'etre.
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I say three cheers to her for not allowing the rediculous post-modernist idea that every opinion is as valid as the next one as long as it is sincerely held act
A) It is not a postmodernist idea and B) there is nothing "postmodern" about the Truthers' approach to knowledge, quite the contrary. Here in fact I disagree with Lipstadt and with Messrs. Milkman and Rosenberg, but the threadjack would assume epic proportions so I'm just going to leave it there.
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- Not Kim Hill's finest moment... in fact she was damn rude... I haven't given up on her completely yet, but I'm damn close...
I thought maybe she'd read one too many books the night before and drunk a squidgeon too much coffee.
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nice (fast) edit Craig :- |
...really not liking the tone
around here today...call me sensitive,
I think I'm real
good and gone
this time. -
I thought maybe she'd read one too many books the night before
Preparing for an interview? That crazy bitch... :)
and drunk a squidgeon too much coffee.
If that's all the liquid fortification she required to get through that horror show without strangling someone with a mic cord, she's a better woman that me.
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she's a better woman that I am.
Probably no doubt on that one, Craig.
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Craig, why did you turn 'I am' into 'me'?
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Violent crime in Counties Manukau increased 69 per cent between 2004 and last year.
My fault, partly.
But seriously, the figure is for recorded crime, and since the likes of the "It's Not OK" campaign and changes in police policy, a lot more family violence is being reported in that district. The proportion of violent offences that take place in homes, between people who know each other, is a significant one.
It's not the whole story, certainly, but it does help make sense of that figure.
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Hmm. Andrew Clive, the same guy who wrote...
flying nun & chris knox are responsible for some of the most under produced crappy sounding music in the history of new zealand music..
production wise, defunct!Chris Knox never invested in good sound production all the bands on the flying nun label suffered meteorically because of this..And...
21 Feb 08. To "Russell Brown" & others who dont support democracy , shame on you, 83% dont agree with your opinion ! The "silent majority" are standing up & being counted
And count them we did, not many. I would like to remind the likes of Mr Clive and Mr Craig (what is it with people with first names as their family name?) that a majority requires over 50% and bandying about percentages of percentages is about as good as "Making Shit UP"
Like you said Mr Clive...5 Mar 08. ....you could argue all sorts of erroneous facts to support anything u wanted these days ..the newspapers are full of it...veryday i read some silly report coming out that "vexes" me , like 1 i read the other day that said doing stretching exercises before a workout has no benefit at all..
Mr Clive seems to be a little Vexed a lot of the time, too many smacks perhaps.
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I would guess that the firm compassion of the "It's Not OK" campaign has probably done far, far more good in this country than the anger and indignation expressed by the McVicars and McCroskies of the world.
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I would guess that the firm compassion of the "It's Not OK" campaign has probably done far, far more good in this country than the anger and indignation expressed by the McVicars and McCroskies of the world.
I think you're right. I'm proud to have played a small part in it.
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What happened? I read all the time. I listen to different people Andrew.
Deborah, I make it a policy not to like people who were in Act, even a little bit, but you're making it difficult.
If the next answers out of your mouth, no matter what the question, could be "less taxes", and "three strikes, throw away the key", that'd be great, thanks.
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would be considered by most to be "right wing" but since 1999 when I wrote a feature on the death of James Whakaruru I have advocated repealing S59 of the Crimes Act. I appeared before the Select Committee in support of Sue Bradford's Bill. I wrote a piece for the "Vote Yes" website. I do not support Sensible Sentencing's vigilante cries for "having a crack" at offenders in court via victim impact statements.
Deborah, it shouldn't be the case, and I applaud you for engaging with these issues thoughtfully.
The right has traditionally placed much stronger emphasis on personal responsibility, in accord with the idea that people are responsible for their own destinies, whereas the left has placed greater emphasis on a person's place within a community. The right is also traditionally more comfortable with the idea of authority, and strong ideas about right and wrong. I generalise grossly here. I'm sure you know this. It translates into crime policy in that people think that individual responsibility means that people should feel the full force of their actions, and the best way to do this is lock them up for longer.
You can be in jail for ten days and realise your responsibility for your acts. You can be in jail for ten years and avoid it. What really pisses me off is that the tougher sentencing crowd completely ignore this problem. The correlation between longer behind bars and realising the implications of your actions is a weak one. We need programs that make offenders face up to their acts. Such programs are successful, but they're seen as namby-pamby liberal nonsense by McVicar and Garrett and the hang-em-high crowd. There isn't the money for them, despite there being money for ever more prisons.
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call me sensitive,
I think I'm real
good and gone
this time.I'll call you
fair
and good but not gone
forever I hope
I understand. -
Craig, why did you turn 'I am' into 'me'?
I try to save iambic pentameter for my really bad poetry which nobody is ever going to see.
I generalise grossly here.
That you do, George. I don't think we have a particularly strong tradition of anarchism in New Zealand politics.
nice (fast) edit Craig :- |
...really not liking the tone
around here today...Whatever you think of George Bush, I don't really like people who claim that he (and the thousands of others who must have been in on it to make the "controlled detonation" theory work) were complicit in mass murder. And if you're going to go there, I expect some evidence. I expect a LOT of evidence that doesn't tell objective reality to go get fucked. That's a tone that really gets my hackles up -- pissing on people's graves always does.
And like Gio, I really really resent people like Gage being given respectability by an institution that not only receives massive state and local government funding, but is supposed to be a place where scholarship and a respect for historical and scientific truth are paramount. Not "truthiness". Not reality as an optional extra. TRUTH.
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A wee notette on 'majorities', which may be rather appropriate when the likes of Messers Craig, Clive - and Gage - turn up and use opinion polls as props for truthiness: as Anatole France once observed, 'When forty million people say a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing.'
Actually, as an adjunct, I'd love to have Kim Hill invite a scientist on to her show simply to talk about the scientific method for the benefit of her audience. I was somewhat, ah, irritated to hear the 911 loon claiming to be 'scientific' when in fact he was not in the least - where was the falsifiability, for example?
While people in this thread have been criticising postmodernism for justifying the belief that truth is arbitrary, in fact the best (and there are many bad) postmodernists attacked not the search for a description of reality, but the presentation of spurious overarching narratives that are constructions as if they were empirically true. A fine but crucial difference: the alarm bells are supposed to ring when someone says that something they say is true because it's 'scientific' when they are not a scientist (and a real scientist would never make any statement with absolute certainty).
It's been made apparent several times on this thread that mere statistics can be used to justify the most absurd claims - crime is 'up'... but because more people report it, for example.
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If the next answers out of your mouth, no matter what the question, could be "less taxes", and "three strikes, throw away the key", that'd be great, thanks.
Yeah, dammit, Deborah is being way too reasonable. I think she needs to talk adoringly about Ayn Rand for me to get re-rarked up.
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I try to save iambic pentameter for my really bad poetry which nobody is ever going to see.
Oooh, I'm impressed! (and tossing away dactyls today)
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I thought Craig wanted to avoid saying "... a better woman than I am" because life is hard enough without becoming an inadvertent transsexual as well.
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I thought Craig wanted to avoid saying "... a better woman than I am" because life is hard enough without becoming an inadvertent transsexual as well.
I'd rather have people think I'm a she-male (not the worse of associations, in my experience) than an crap prose poet. :)
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Missed the edit deadline:
"It's been made apparent several times on this thread that mere statistics can be used to justify the most absurd claims - demagogues claim crime is 'up'... but when you examine the facts, you realise it's because more people report it, for example."
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Anyone listening to that interview would have known where Kim Hill stood on the of the idea of a 9/11 conspiracy. Any sane and intelligent person would agree with her.
Ok then, explain to me exactly what happened that day. Not easy, as most of the evidence was carted away before you could even say Conspiracy. There are plenty of questions that should be asked if you wish to discover what happened, the Official story does not add up and apart from those that died and their families, some pretty powerful people got exactly what they wanted. Larry Silverstein got his double whammy payout on the Insurance and went on to sue the security company he hired for the buildings, Securacom of which George W. Bush's other brother, Marvin, was a director, small world eh?. Oh yes, and Mr Cheney got his war.
Talk about Bush getting stoned with two birds and killing them with one hand.
OOOH, I love the smell of mixed metaphors in the morning. -
Ahem.... I don't have a monopoly on the name "Deborah" and it's an awfully common name among women in their forties and fifties, but seeing as I've been around here since the beginning, using "Deborah" as my handle, I wonder, please, when people are addressing comments back to other Deborahs, could you please take a little care to distinguish them from me? Please. Say like, "Deborah C" for Deborah Coddington.
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Steve B: on the war thing, if you were faking up a casus belli, wouldn't you, minimally, try and make it point to the right country? And how does Silverstein's insurance payout provide evidence of anything? Apparently when your house gets burned down Steve, that will make you an arsonist. Or perhaps not -- I'm just asking the question.
This is just bullshit, frankly.
PS: I just looked at the "information liberation" site. What a nest of kookery. If I read there that the sky was blue, I'd look outside to check. If you take the dreck there seriously, what won't you believe?
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