Posts by Neil Morrison
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Ha ha, if everything belonged to everybody, there'd be nothing to steal.
That ignores that fact that people like owning things and stopping them doing that will take an awful lot of very nasty coercion. To that I imagine you would reply "but people only want to own things because capitalist society brainwashes them". Which is one step away from those re-education camps so favored by left wing dictatorships.
There's very good reason that people like to own things and quite frankly I'm very glad that there is a State there to stop the likes of Jamie Lockette from taking things from others.
I'm not an Anarchist but there is much to be admired about what the Spanish anarchist movement achieved in the 30s. But they actually did things like form co-operatives, they are every different from the lets play smash the state with Tame Iti crowd we have in NZ.
My view is that the government by the State is preferable to government by the Family - which is what a society defaults to when there is no central goverment. Family loyalty is immensely strong - think of the clans, mafia families, etc.
Pinker nails it. His analysis of the perils of utopian politics in The Blank Slate is by far the best.
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Maybe it's the other way around. The police cannot go public with all the information because they are on the back foot....
Well maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But on principle one would expect the police, well the prosecution actually, to wait till the trial.
But you're position is they are damned if the do and damned if they don't. Spill now, to satisfy our Democratic Right To Know, but if you do we'll be the first to accuse of perverting the course of justice.
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I don't see justice being done right now, and that tends to make me feel like it might not be.
But justice has to be seen to be done in the right place - in a court not right now in the media. The police are on the back foot in this respect because they cannot go public with all the information they have - and we should not expect them to. The publics right to know has to be tempered with the course of natural justice.
I have enough faith in our justuce system to give them the beneift of the doubt.
(I'd like to know just what it is that the Police have supposed to have "leaked" - have they been leaking or is that stuff all just media speculation?)
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If you think us taxpayers are going to pay for those dole bludging terrorists in Tuhoe to get a wireless network so they can hook up with Al Qaeda ...
A joke but is there something in this? There's always been crazy people at both ends of the polical spectrum who in the pre-internet past have been able to hook up and cause trouble but can the new social networking technology add a certain momentum to this sort of thing?
Connecting people and giving them the opportunity to share and reinforce some very weird views to the point where they may act on them whereas in the past they might not.
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First year at uni. 17 and straight from mums place in Henderson to a flat in Aro valley with little more than a black jersey, pair of Levis and a telecaster. Complete with all the social skills to be acquired from a Henderson upbringing needed to survive in the big world – some facility with motorbike mechanics and the ability to play a passable rendition of the lead break in Stairway to Heaven.
My cooking skills included the ability to open cans.
Given the intellectual and socialist tendencies of my newly acquired flatmates, cooking was organised along classic flat lines – a roster where everyone cooked at least once a week. This was all new to me.
Now I’m not saying that my cooking skills would have been greatly better had some friends and I not scored some very nice hash but looking back I don’t think it helped.
I’m still on good terms with 3 out of 4 of my flatmates but they generously overlook what must be one of the worst meals I have cooked and they have ever eaten.
Admittedly the cupboard was a bit bare. It most likely had been my turn to do some grocery shopping but for some time it had difficult to organise much because of the already mentioned purchase.
But there was rice and cabbage. Which in the hands of some one like Jamie Oliver who wasn’t stoned would have been more than enough to whip up a culinary delight.
But in my defense I did go for simplicity – boiled rice with boiled cabbage.
Funnily enough I did get to spend some time in the home of boiled food – Normandy. If the produce is fresh then a meal of boiled meat, carrots, cabbage and potatoes can be a real treat. But that cooking lesson was a bit late for a certain group of young students looking forward to a nice hot meal on one of those Wellington evenings which even though cold and windy still has a touch of magic about it.
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it's the judge who determines what can be published.
Which might mean there are good reasons for with-holding information such as not prejudicing future possible trials. That's complete speculation but it's a possible.
The HoS has a story in which Jamie Lockett claims ...
Lockett I think is the person most likely to have been doing what the police have alleged. He is a dangerous person.
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I'm not too impressed by the complete suppression of all information from the bail hearings either.
Who determines what is made public about the bail hearings? The crown, the police or the judge? They would presumably all have different motivations for not disclosing certain information. We may have unanswered questions at the moment but would this alleged secrecy have any negative or positive effect on the defense case?
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I'd like to know more about the connection between Jamie Lockett Iti.
Lockett will have some sort of fantasy about going down guns blazing in a shootout with the police, which is fine if he's the only one who dies, but put that in the context of some slightly crazed Tuhoe nation faction then it's a bit more of a problem.
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What a difference a week makes. This week I've been able to have sympathy for Bomber, agree with both Chris Trotter and Ron Mark as well as have my opinion of Pita Sharples spiral down.
I'm not sure which of all that surprises me most.
But Sharples concerns me most as he should be playing the older and wiser role, calming the hot heads.
I am genuinely concerned that this will all develop a moment of its own. There appears to be a very strong sense of aggrieved self-righteousness.
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__What amazes me is how identical the activist anti-capitalist left is to the activist libertarian right about 90% of the time.__
I don't think that's amazing at all. The continuum of political ideology isn't a straight line tending at either end towards infinity;
My partner went to a talk yesterday by a freshly minted professor, John Duckitt, the subject of which was the psychology of the conservative mind. She related this to me over a few glasses of wines so my recollection is slightly impaired but the gist of it is that (scientists have shown) that there are 2 distinct types of conservatives.
Now I can't quite remember the exact difference but along with that is that each is harmless unless majorly confronted with a different threat/stimulus. One being The Other (immigrants etc) and the other being, what could be called The Lesser - poor people, solo mums etc - people they feel superior to.
All interesting. Now, the lecture didn't talk about the psychology of teh Left and how that goes wrong from time to time such as with Indymedia. My partner had a few theories, one being that they can’t tell the two types of conservatives apart. Certainly they can’t make a distinction between Helen Clark and certain fascist leaders.