Posts by Alex Coleman
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Hard News: Circumstance and coincidence, in reply to Pete George,
but evidence proving otherwise hasn't been produced
Evidence for people's states of mind is remarkably hard to find though. All you have to go on is circumstances and likelihoods. How plausible is it that person Y wouldn't be aware of Z given A,B,C...X.
And again, this isn't a court where proof beyond reasonable doubt applies. This is about whether or not it's resonable to think the PM has lied about intelligence matters for which he is repsonsible for. It's up to him to convince he should be trusted.
The theories are that he did lie, (this is appraently a conspiracy theory on par with trutherism, according to the PM and his backers), or that he told the truth and he didn't know anything about DotCom even though there was an awful lot of stuff happening all around him for months on end.
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Hard News: Circumstance and coincidence, in reply to Russell Brown,
How on earth does he get away with this stuff?
I dunno.
But there is a weird standard of proof that in all this stuff.
Everyone has to make their own call obviously, but for me it comes down to this. We need intelligence services, and they will operate in secret to a large degree.
I'm ok with that as long as I trust the PM with it. But that trust is where it is, that's where the standard of proof lies.
I don't care if a journalist 'reaches' to make a point, I don't care if a theory doesn't have all the facts; I don't demand 'beyond reasonable doubt' that the PM lied in order to lose that trust. Once things go bad, it's his job to demonstrate to me that he deserves my trust.
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Hard News: Circumstance and coincidence, in reply to Russell Brown,
How on earth would you accidentally appoint the guy you want to another very senior role when you’ve had five freakin’ years to think about a successor?
Especially if the move away from military type experience is part of a 'growing up process'. A lot of condescension from Finny in places where argument might have served better to convince people.
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I'm guessing the Auckland support base has a strong overlap with the crowd who got really confused about why the Len Brown story turned the way it did, and why is everybody talking about Wewege?
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Those graphs on the reid site are fascinating, and I really don’t want to start up with the ‘OMG bias’ stuff again, but it’s damn shame the info in them so very rarely seems to make it into the mainstream narratives.
As an example, the big to do over Cunliffe’s ‘leafy suburbs’ comment.
Key dismissed a report on poverty, and Cunliffe said that showed how out of touch he is and that he needs to get out of his flash house more. This was presented, by everyone pretty much, as confirmation of the trend of Cunliffe being Sir Gaffe-a-lot, and a hypocrite, and so on.
But look at the numbers on “Is out of touch with ordinary people”.
Key: about 52%
Cunliffe: about 22%A thirty point gap, on the actual point Cunliffe made. Not discussed at all as far as I remember, & certainly not being brought up as an example of anything a poll is showing. And yet look, there it is.
And ‘talks down to people’. From what we hear, Cunliffe is arrogant and aloof. And yet, and yet. There is data about what the perception is. Sitting there on a website no one knew about.
I’m not alleging political bias, and I freely admit that those examples are cherry picked, but there is a lot of info that isn't getting out, some of it which is hard to reconcile with the narrative pundits tell us is derived from ‘perception being reality’.
There is something going on, not something deliberate, not something sinister. But something.
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Hard News: What Hekia Parata actually said, in reply to Tinakori,
Pretty hard to see a clear answer to the fairly direct question:
‘and tell me if I’m getting it wrong… you are talking about pegging funding to delivery progress…outcomes?’
Given she now seems to be claiming she said nothing of the sort, you'd think a 'No, I'm not saying that', would have been in order. -
Hard News: The Mayor's marginal enemies, in reply to Matthew Poole,
"How dare he cower in fear of being asked sensible questions by proper interviewers!"
On top rating stations, even.
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Jesus wept. Just saw the PM on Prime news, Soper let him get away with saying the Greens would ride over the authority of the courts and blah blah.
It's times like this when I remember how apt the description is of pol. journos as being like watching five yr olds play rugby.
Just blindly running after whoever has the ball, all in a big bunch with all of them excited but unsure of quite why except EXCITING!
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Hard News: The Uses of Dotcom, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
"The outright denial is at 2:24 in the video linked to."
Doesn't make it into the text story at the link though.
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Danielle,
I’ve not waded in on this because why be yet another bloke saying what’s already been said, but jesus.
and I think it’s pretty clear that to a lot of us it really, really is
This.
The effect of this sort of talk isn't limited to survivors. Rapists hear it as “What I do isn't rape”.
Don’t we have actual no doubt freedom of speech restrictions on speech that could encourage people to commit crimes? And people are getting up in arms about a bit of implied commercial pressure on this sort of speech?
I can only understand this if it’s because they haven’t really grokked yet that rapists hear it as ‘what I’m doing is ok’.
It’s not ok, and social pressure against saying this stuff, is very much ok.