Posts by Russell Brown
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Feed: Grandpa's Kitchen, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
well food quite literally makes us what we are
So it's a metaphor that's literally true! I love that kind.
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Matthew Poole,
And paw widdle Cwaigy was picked on by the nasty lawyers because they got his name out of a phone book? Fuck off. You pissed off the lawyers’ clients (nice work, by the way, whatever it was you wrote), and that is why the lawyers’ toolbox got opened.
Get a grip, Matthew. I think the legal profession can survive a little bad feeling. You might care to reflect on how vile being exposed to action from a well-heeled litigant is for a journalist, especially one without an employer to protect them.
I was singled out and threatened with defamation action last year and it was absolutely my opinion that the lawyer who wrote the letters did not do so in a detached and dispassionate fashion. The fact that he bragged about it in a pub didn’t help either.
Fortunately, I was able to rely on the pro bono assistance of a partner of a major law firm, who was great.
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Feed: Grandpa's Kitchen, in reply to JacksonP,
Can we assume you’ll be following more modern standards of hygiene?
Please. Clean underpants, obviously.
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Um, guys. You know what I did? I forgot I had a separate food blog and just put the post in Hard News. And then I went out and couldn't do anything about it for hours.
So can you help me out and re-publish your excellent comments in over on yer actual Feed? That is, here:
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
True and on Native affairs last night , this press release received ( which I cant find anywhere else) and read by Mihingarangi Forbes was given by Te Kotahitanga o Mataatua Tauranga Moana
It’s about 15 secs in if anyone is interested.That was interesting. If true, the hui was definitely not as satisfying for everyone as the statements at the press conference suggested.
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Yet people feel quite entitled to talk down their noses about a profession that has both a statutory obligation to the law and to their clients, as well as a professional obligation to same. How’s that work? What makes y’all so high and mighty and moral that you get to preach about lawyers?
I’d be interested to know exactly what the advice to the KRNT board was in both the cases we’re discussing here, because the upshot of both was unhappy for the client.
The defamation action backfired because tangatawhenua.com didn’t cave, and the claims and the letter are there for anyone to read. At the least, the damage is reputational. I’m not sure who the website went to for advice, but in the end it’s pretty clear that the last thing the trust board wanted was to endure discovery in a defamation case against a well-liked small publisher.
And the injunction against Native Affairs was really disastrous, in that it merely served up affidavits that Native Affairs was able to use to bolster its reports.
So there are those things to consider.
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Ah. It wasn't Mai Chen herself -- Potaura seems to have used her name interchangeably with that of Chen Palmer itself.
The letter actually came from Chen Palmer principal Nicholas Palmer, as is clear from the full copy here.
The end of the letter is just out-and-out bullying. Disgraceful.
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Matthew Poole,
but within the bounds imposed by that duty their highest obligation is to do all within their competence to represent their client’s interests.
In the case of the injunction against Native Affairs, the client's interests were badly damaged by the action, because the required affidavits contained information that added to and supported Native Affairs' report.
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Ewan Morris,
The question I’d like someone in the media to ask is why the Kohanga Reo National Trust even has a commercial subsidiary company.
It's not entirely unusual to have a wholly-owned delivery arm. But if you were a government agency it would be considered a controlled entity and be subject to much greater accountability. The other question is why TPO has charitable status if it's a commercial provider.
(Incidentally, it’s called Te Pataka Ohanga – not Patanga.)
Bugger, and right you are. I should have known that as I've written it previously, but a Radio NZ story and a TV3 story both had “Patanga”.
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Hard News: The perilous birth of the…, in reply to debunk,
consuming psychotropic drugs in a social environment enhances effects
I can personally vouch for this.
they run around more and can get so overactive they die. Party drug effect?
In the case of MDMA, the primary cause of death is heatstroke, followed by water intoxication (both of which should be preventable) and the others a long way behind. Its annual deaths per user are about 25 times lower than alcohol and it's actually years since there was an Ecstasy death in New Zealand. Unfortunately, we're seeing some significant harms from other chemicals which have replaced MDMA in the market since MDMA got harder to manufacture.