Posts by Finn Higgins
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By that I assume you mean Disneyland-esque anti-capitalist theme restaurant feel?
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Kracklite, thanks for all that. There's a lot to cover and I don't think I can go into detail on everything without starting to post things pages long, so I'll stick to a couple of points.
The first point I would make is that the SG didn't specifically absolve anybody of any particular wrongdoing - he just said that the TSA wasn't applicable, and specifically criticised the law as being completely unusable in the context of domestic groups. I'm happy enough about that, I don't really want NZ to have domestic anti-terror laws; but as with the point you made about Rickards earlier, just because something doesn't meet a legal test for a particular criminal charge doesn't mean you'd want to invite the people involved over for dinner.
Moving on to the hunting point... it's entirely possible that's all that was going on. But there are some pretty substantial questions surrounding that - some of the weapons discussed in the affidavit aren't particularly suited to hunting activities, and if the defendants were actually just hunting then I don't see how them all standing up and saying "we were just going hunting" would be harmful to their defense, unless it was proved to be patently untrue. But the thrust of my prior post was that we can't really talk meaningfully about whether the heavily armed police response was appropriate or not without discussing the details of what was happening in the Ureweras. There are plenty on the far left wanting to separate these two issues, that I'd have to say seem rather inseparable to me.
Now for the PCA and activist distrust of it. This is where I would have to ask a pretty fundamental question: if you don't believe you can effect meaningful change in society, why be an activist? If you do not believe you can ever use systems created as a result of your protests, why protest? As a result of a number of cases that many of the same activists have been involved in the PCA has seen a number of increases in its powers of inquiry, and indeed I believe some of them (along with a name change) became effective today. It is the body that exists to police the police in NZ. If it is not doing its job then protests about this can be addressed to government, who have been at least somewhat responsive to them. But it's hard to expect government to respond to complaints about a system that has been ignored.
I'm not going to claim the system is perfect; but I have had some positive response in reporting dubious police behavior to the PCA myself, so just ignoring the body that exists for the purpose of pursuing complaints about the cops seems utterly self-defeating. The new PCA and its new powers should be tested, not dismissed. It's in the interests of us all that we have an effective means of policing our police force, so if people believe they have genuine complaints then I'd like to see them pursued through the channels in society that exist for that purpose. If the system doesn't work we need to fix it ASAP, and it can't be easily fixed without good examples of it failing.
This is getting awful long, so I'll stick with a short coda too...
You are assuming, I think, more foresight and co-ordination, and more uniformity of initial premises than is actually the case.
I'm not assuming foresight and co-ordination, I'm decrying the lack of it. I'd really like to see the activist communities whose mailers keep landing up in my inbox go back to first principles and discuss how the campaigns they're involved in at present are going to help them achieve their actual goals. My argument is that they're shooting themselves in the feet repeatedly at the moment by throwing all their weight behind a bunch of people who may very possibly have been doing some really stupid things that run counter to much of what these groups purport to believe in. It's hard to see a worse alliance than peace activists allied with people who believe peace to be bullshit, after all.
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I googled "15 year old girl cavity search" and came up with nothing. Got any more info on this? A link? <quote>Just while we're on the topic of "quoting out of context", this one's a cracker. I/O, you dirty, dirty man... ;)
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Thanks Kracklite, I think that's some progress in that we've got a lot to agree on now.
The problem that many of us are having with the response of the activist community is less the lack of willingness to talk as the unshakable willingness to talk about the evils of others while remaining silent about the culpability of those they're defending. There are two sides to every argument, and contributing causes for every event. If you're saying that you are legally disadvantaged by discussing the actions of one side it would be a good idea to stop publically damning the other side with such force. As an example, the assertions that the Armed Offenders Squad should not have been used in the Ruatoki raids. It's impossible to have this discussion without actually talking about what the defendants were doing in the Ureweras with weapons and live ammunition, particularly those targeted by the Ruatoki raid. If what they were doing was insubstantial and non-threatening then an AOS call out should be considered a gross blunder. If what they were doing was deliberately trying to clone overseas models of training for civil unrest while talking specifically about killing police officers then I'd think an AOS call-out is the only likely or reasonable end-result, no? So are we talking about this issue or not? You can't just expect to talk about one side of the argument without people perceiving you as unreasonably one-sided. The comparative absence of people shouting one-note recitals of their own political viewpoint is one of the things about politics in NZ that redeems it considerably over, for example, the USA. I quite like that, so I'm quite keen on asking people to at least try to see both sides of the argument.
I'm willing. If anybody has some substantial evidence of police wrongdoing then I want to hear it, I want to see it reported to the Police Complaints Authority and I want to hear their response. But trying to claim wrongdoing just because the arresting officers came dressed in black with guns is a bit off when you're totally refusing to discuss circumstances supporting why they might have come equipped like this. The context of what happened in the Ureweras is critical to judging the actions of the police, but nobody making criticisms seemingly wants to talk about that too much. And when the people making those criticisms just increase in volume every week (I think Sara's argument-free assertion of "very real ATROCITIES" is a new low for reasoned discussion in this thread) the likelihood of public opinion turning against their entire position increases.
If you genuinely believe there are civil liberties issues to discuss then surely trying to avoid having your entire side of the debate discredited by unsupported, one-sided ranting would be a great starting point, no? I do think there are real civil liberties issues surrounding the present international environment. I don't like terrorism legislation, I'm glad to see that no terror charges have been brought in NZ yet. I don't want to see crap legislation from overseas imported here. But why is it that parliament found it so acceptable to basically laugh in Keith Locke's face when he made arguments against the TSA amendment? I can't help but keep hearing The Boy Who Cried Wolf throughout this entire debate, and parliament's response to Keith Locke was sadly like watching the little boy crying out about the real wolf while everybody laughed him off.
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Kracklite, you're attacking me for failing to argue your points and then utterly ignoring mine. Pick your standard and live by it, please.
Of course people are judged on their associations. That's exactly what happens in normal human society on a day to day basis. It's one of the most normal ways that human societies enforce their accepted range of behavior. I provided a couple of profile examples of people being judged on associations, but I could just as easily have used any number of everyday situations. Drawing a line of argument between yourself and the behavior or others is a huge part of politics of any description. How else do we oppose organisations like the National Front? With guns? I would most certainly judge somebody with connections to Kyle Chapman for refusing to condemn his activities, wouldn't you? Honestly?
As for the "everything before but is bullshit" glib throwaway, feel free to address the point anytime. All you're doing is ignoring my point based on a grammatical construction; are you really going to make me go back and restructure my sentence to not include "but" before you answer the point contained within? If so you're being rather petty. I made a very specific statement that I do have an interest in the civil liberties issues raised. I also think that those making them are destroying their chance of their arguments succeeding by being completely blind to any possibility of wrongdoing by those they are vocally supporting. If you want to claim that is bullshit because you don't like my grammar then there's little point talking to you, because you're not arguing with anything resembling good faith.
Next up, inadmissibility. That is a legal point, and an extremely valid one in giving people a fair trial on criminal charges with state-enforced consequences. When it comes to forming an opinion on whether you wish to support people's actions legal admissibility doesn't really come into it - you just consider the evidence and the rationale behind its inadmissability together in making your own judgments.
To get back to a rather related point given many of the parties involved, let's try mentioning everybody's friend Clint Rickards again. Found not guilty. Still happy to associate himself with convicted rapists. By your argument, we've no right to judge him - legally speaking he's as innocent as he's going to be, and we can't judge people by their choice of people to associate with. Am I on the right track, or did I miss your argument?
As for cherry picking... sure, I was making a pretty cheap point. I'll take that on the nose, I've got the 'flu at the minute and I'm grumpy. Now I've answered your points do you want to take a crack at the substance of mine?
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And that's just a cherry picking and bloody snide. Care to make any other insinuations?
I was making an insinuation? Sorry, I must have missed it. I just saw you bringing out the "you're with us or against us" thing and went "hey, I said just that to somebody else recently..."
You're right, with-us-or-against-us arguments are bollocks. But I don't see anybody making them here, which was more my point. I just provided you with a better example of somebody doing it.
I repeat, I should not be required in a democratic society to disavow any sympathies with anyone to prove my good character and fitness.
Bollocks. Much was made of Margaret Thatcher's lack of good character and fitness in her blindness to the dubious activities her good friend August Pinochet was involved in. There are certainly circumstances where refusal to disavow somebody's actions does reflect on your own character and fitness, just as John Howard's refusal to apologise for (and thusly disavow) Australia's treatment of its aboriginal population reflected on his.
That's not to say that people can't raise genuine concerns about civil liberties surrounding the recent arrests, or that they can't remain silent and be treated with respect. But there have been a lot of people making very aggressive accusations against the police on incredibly scant evidence while crying out about "political prisoners" and the "criminalisation of dissent" because of people being arrested on the basis of quite specific evidence that they were preparing for violence. This is neither taking a balanced position or staying silent, so I think it's a pretty reasonable target for derision.
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No, I will NOT give her name, nor will I demand a public pledge of loyalty to the state from her because her associates are accused of terroism. Really, what the hell are people thinking if they demand loyalty pledges?
Perhaps you could ask Asher that.
That seems much more like what you're objecting to than the examples you're citing, no?
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It is exactly that kind of bullshit escalation that gets us into more and more trouble.
You mean the kind of bullshit escalation that reads "Cavity search" when "intimate body search" is printed, and translates "alleged actions" into fact when they're based on individual statements while translating them into fiction when they're based on 150+ pages of extremely detailed evidence and argument?
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Indeed, it seems to me that the entire paradigm of software sharing libraries is totally flawed. Whatever minuscule and totally unimportant gain there is in library disk space and supposed instant access to improvements across different software is totally overshadowed by the instability introduced by the different pieces of software requiring different versions of the libraries due to having been developed at different times and possibly not kept up to date. I dread every single Windows Update, because it always kills something.
That's where you need to get into proper management of shared dependencies, something Windows has never even come close to doing right. Linux sort-of gets there sometimes with apt-get and so forth - it's certainly a lot cleaner than Windows, although it still fouls up nicely at times. That said, the let's-just-static-link-everything approach falls down too, when you get things like mod_php5 and mod_python cheerfully crashing Apache when used in tandem because they both statically link different-and-incompatible versions of the same piece of compression code. Software sucks ;)
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Ben, you should try it in Safari on Windows. Then it doesn't just crash, it freezes and allocates about 5x as much RAM as you have in the machine...