Posts by BenWilson
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Old, gothic, more numerous than you might imagine, oh, and quite sprightly today.
You have a double? Or more? Be careful with that, what if it turns on you?
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Seriously, there's something disturbingly cultic about people who let ideology act as a substitute for thought; who neatly divide the world into True Believers, Infidels and Heretics; and feel a deep and abiding contempt for the world most of us just try and muddle through, in all it's daunting complexity and frustrations.
I'd wholeheartedly agree except for this one little conundrum. You've neatly divided the world into the extreme and the moderate. I hope this isn't also a substitute for thought. It is just possible that extreme views are actually sometimes right. Minto has been trading on this for years.
The paradox of relativism. I am also a relativist, but I'm not that absolute about it.
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Says Minto. I don't know how he knows everything the 17 and their lawyers have sighted. Nor how he knows who the leak was from.
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Classic from the Dom Post:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10475961&pnum=2
"We believe we are acting within the law, we also believe we are acting in the public interest."
I believe they also believed they would sell plenty of copies.
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Um, Te Kooti would probably count
All right, then. One example from about 140 years ago. Any others to add to the growing trend of homegrown terrorism? Might as well complete the list.
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The shit-talking is not in itself any kind of crime. It is at best circumstantial evidence that might make you think a crime is likely to be committed. Police action in such circumstances is a damned good idea. It's like telling a drunk to calm down, or putting him in a cell to sober up, if his conduct is 'disorderly'.
This kind of action can be abused. The same drunk could be constantly picked out of a crowd of indistinguishable drunks on account of the copper not liking him. That would be persecution. Or the drunk could be strip searched, accused of crimes he hadn't committed and dragged through the criminal system. That would be heavy handed, particularly if that drunk had never actually committed any crime, ever.
So far we don't have enough evidence to know whether it was a damned good idea, persecution, or heavy handedness. Nor can we know. With drunks in NZ there's a well established pattern that they get out of hand and cause all sorts of damage, and police are allowed to and should exercise discretion over how they deal with it. With domestic terrorists we don't have one single example. No one has ever actually done it. There is no established pattern of behaviour. There is no way to objectively evaluate the harm they are likely to cause.
Which means we fall back on preexisting opinions in a highly theoretical way. Those who believe strongly in rights and freedoms go for the idea that this is overkill. Those who believe strongly in protecting society from all harm go the other way. And I can only see this particular issue staying that way, since I really don't think we'll ever have a domestic terror attack in NZ. If we do, it will be an isolated case, there will hardly be a scientific trend to examine. So there will continue to be much ado about nothing.
Being in the rights and freedoms camp, I have no compunction for thinking we really actually need to have a terror attack in NZ before we do anything about it. Call me a fuxor, I really don't care. I don't think terrorism is the end of the world anyway, even in places where it actually does happen. It's a very minor concern, and usually it's happening for a very good reason. The random acts of nutters is not a trend, it's not a pattern, it's not the death of civil society as we know it. It's just one of those things you send cops after if it becomes a problem. Until then you're chasing ghosts, and that has literally no end to it. Do we really need to waste time and money on something that's statistically likelihood is so far zero?
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What I wonder is at what point do the law-enforcement authorities do the shift from doing the arrests etc through the normal legal processes to calling this a 'war on terrorism' and sending in the SAS or the like and not ask questions. Would it take an actual terrorist-like action to make this shift?
How would we ever know? Can we really be sure that this stuff isn't already happening?
Seems unlikely to me, but when there really is major violence, then, as we've already seen in the US, strong civil institutions are no match for powerful people acting outside of the law, with plenty of willing followers. Yet. NZ doesn't even have particularly strong civil institutions on paper, but practically it has worked so far, mainly because as a society we are so unaccustomed to armed violence that the boundaries are maintained by common sense. Much though I'd love stronger paper institutions, the fact that we haven't needed them is actually the strongest defence of the rule of law.
Then again, I'm not poor and Maori, so wtf would I know about institutionalized oppression?
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I guess I must be a terrorist, cause I've heard shit like this many time in person. I await a round of condemnation for the horrifying company I keep, and how it's my job to patronize people about what they're allowed to talk about in private.
The training and preparation for war these guys got up to sounds softcore in the extreme compared to being in the army. Which is probably why these guys are not in the army. They could not handle it. Becoming a killing machine is hard work, and usually involves total abdication of all rights to moral decision making.
Real paramilitary training does not involve intellectualizing your reasons for fighting. Far from it, you want people to think as little as possible about the context of what they are going to do. Only people who really have nothing to lose or have personally suffered shocking grievances can mix both of these incompatible activities. The more you intellectualize fighting the more stupid an idea it seems.
There never is and never will be any way to be sure whether people would have committed a crime. That is why conspiracy to commit a crime is so hard to prove. And it is why it should be so hard to prove. You can't start busting people on statistical probabilities that they will commit a crime. That's far more dangerous than letting the crimes happen.
Instead, you bust them for crimes they have actually committed. This doesn't mean waiting for the terrorist act itself. You can bust people for having an illegal firearm. Or possessing or making explosives. Or illegally discharging a firearm. Or stealing a car to get to the scene. Or carrying a concealed weapon. Or assault, if they actually threaten anyone. Or theft, or criminal damage etc etc etc.
Which is what has happened. It's disappointing to many, I'm sure, that these guys will only get fairly minor charges. To me it's excellent news, since this was a major police operation and that's all the shit they came up with. Which suggests to me that these 'terrorists' are mostly dickhead dreamers who should have joined the army when they were younger and found out firsthand what's fucked up about violence. They will receive punishment fitting to the crime and some of them will probably change their ways. Others will not and will forever be under police surveillance, rendering them almost useless as terrorists, basically defanging any chances they had of building their secret cell. Which IS stopping the crime before it happens. Waaay waaaay before, IMHO, but you can never know for sure.
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I'll say this in the Herald's defence. Most days in NZ it's "All the news worth reading". Which is kind of a rag on NZ, unless, like me, you subscribe to "No news is good news".
Wow so we had our first 'terrorist raids'. As predicted, some guys are going to get some firearms and drugs charges, and Bomber knew some people who knew some people who said some stuff that might make soccer mums really angry. Meanwhile Democracy is Under Attack because there will be spending caps on advertising. In other big news a rusty Ford Falcon was stolen in my area today.
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I wonder when they'll ask people to send in their Democracy Under Attack stories to share. Of course they'd print all the same authors as in their "Send us your P story".
It's like those mouth-watering pictures outside bland fast food joints.
Yup or "Jen's Desperate Rage", to describe an article whose substance is that someone took a picture of Jennifer Aniston looking frumpy, and she got pissed off about it.
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