Posts by Graeme Edgeler
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Does he think that now? No.
Um ... yes he does. Via the DomPost:
Mr Broad said the incident reflected another time in police culture. If it happened today, he said he would expect it to be discussed with the officer's supervisor and "some internal action taken".
I hope the DomPost hasn't stooped to Herald on Sunday quotation standards.
Amusingly, many of the same blogland dwellers who accused Helen Clark of conducting a PC vendetta against individual police officers with the Bazley report are now screaming for heads to roll in this case.
One major difference might be that one involves allegations of criminal misconduct, the other (group sex etc.) did not.
'Though, to be honest, I'm not actually sure what offences the Cinematograph Films Act 1976 actually contained. Maybe viewing was one. Or owning premises in which they were shown? Or maybe no-one committed an offence.
Eh?
My Abu Ghraib comparison was a little abstruse. Those who were held accountable were for the most part junior. However, there were other junior personnel who were ragged on by many (specifically or in general) who didn't take part, but did know and did nothing.
I would now note, however, that in the DomPost article to which I link above, Broad does say:
I complained about it afterwards.
-
The other way of looking at it is that there were far more senior policemen than him there, who may actually have seen the video. I think it would have been more incumbent on them to take action than a 23 year-old constable.
Perhaps, those same people aren't the now Police Commissioner who thinks criminal offending of this nature is best dealt with through "internal action", however.
And arguments of this nature didn't seem to work in the eyes of most over the Abu Gahraib guards who didn't blow the whistle:
I'm only a private, my sergeant knew what was going on so I said nothing. That's okay isn't it?
-
After all, can anyone over the age of twelve categorically state that they've never been to a party at which objectionable material MIGHT have been present?
Objectionable in the legal sense. I think so. Oh wait, a copy of 2005's Critic 23 may have been present at one. Damn.
The differences with Broad of course are that:
1. It was his house and he DID know - not might have known
2. He's a cop, and I prefer than cops don't ignore the law -
To quote some body whose name I can’t remember, “All politics is local”
Former Speaker of the US House of Representatives Tip O'Neill.
-
OTOH, the Privy Council did us no favours at all in the Clear vs Telecom interconnection dispute. It overruled our Court of Appeal and gave Telecom what amounted to a monopolist's charter. That decision hurt New Zealand.
But upheld the rule of law.
I don't remember a lot about the case, but believe, whilst a decision the other way might have been objectively better, it would also have ignored the law.
-
Back to Graeme, Andrew was equating Gore to Durkin and as I recall, you were taking up the mantle on his behalf.
Perhaps. I was mostly just responding to your request for an example of a lie told by Gore some time in An Inconvenient Truth.
I came up with one that struck me immediately, at which most people who were viewing the film with me laughed immediately upon hearing.
"All" may be an overstatement. But "have had to" and "will have to" are vastly different.
And "New Zealand" is different from "Vanuatu". Etc.
Perhaps it wasn't a deliberate lie, but stating that something has happened when it is instead merely predicted to happen shows a callous disregard for the truth.
-
And there was me think Gore and Clinton were quite different people - it's just that Gore doesn't know what the definition of "all" is.
Or the definition of "evacuated".
I'm not equating Gore with Durkin. I'm equating a single clanger of Gore's (sorry if howler was OTT :-P ) with the concept of mistruth.
And then concluding. Well, Gore, through dishonesty (i.e. lying) or recklessness (i.e. failing to have anyone check and not giving a stuff whether it's true) or ignorance (actually thinking it's true and checking, but completely getting it wrong somehow), has made one clanger - I don't have the information personally to know whether there are others, but, given this outlandish statement, think it reasonable to conclude that there might well be others.
What evidence do I want? The name of a single island from which a single person has been "evacuated" because of rising seas.
As for your point that Gore names no PI nations. If my memory serves, he was standing in front of a map of the Pacific on which a number of islands were highlighted.
And as it happens, I'm not criticising any of Gore's science. A claim that people have been evacuated due to rising oceans is not a scientific one.
-
it's only a lie if there is knowledge of the falseness of the claim (ie intent to decieve)
Quite right.
I note that above I did make the distinction:
[the statement] is a lie, or is so reckless and ignorant that it's hard to tell the difference when one is talking about someone with the intellect and knowledge of climate change as Al Gore.
From where can Gore have obtained this factoid? Has anyone else actually claimed that entire Pacific Nations have been evacuated to New Zealand? Certainly Gore should know that he can't back the statement up (as he can with many of his other statements). In a documentary such as his, being so reckless as to whether something is true, not bothering to have someone check for accuracy etc. is pretty dishonest.
-
Don - you challenged Andrew to back up his claim that Al Gore had lied, he didn't want to play, so I chimed in with the one thing in the documentary that struck me, as a New Zealander, as unfounded.
I have not disputed claims that the sea level is rising; I have not disputed claims that Pacific Islanders are worried about rising oceans or climate change generally. I was taking issue with the single statement in the film that I personally have enough information to know is wrong. Not a claim that climate change is a consideration for emigrating Pacific Islanders (for how would I know?) but a claim I knew was flat out false.
This claim (from a transcript of An Inconvenient Truth - I quote the entire section, to provide context):
This brings me to the second canary in the coal mine, Antarctica, the largest mass of ice on the planet by far. A friend of mine said in 1978, “If you see the break up of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula, watch out, because that should be seen as an alarm bell for global warming. If you look at the peninsula up close, every place where you see one of these green blotches is an ice shelf larger than the state of Rhode Island that has broken up in just the last 15 to 20 years. I want to focus on just one of them called Larsen B. I want you to look at these black pools here. It makes it seem almost as if we are looking through the ice to the ocean beneath. But that’s an illusion. This is melting water that forms this pool. If you were flying over it in a helicopter, you’d see it 700 feet tall. They are so majestic, so massive. In the distance are the mountains, and just before the mountains is the shelf of the continent. This is floating ice, and there is land based ice on the down-slope of those mountains. From here to the mountains is about 20 to 25 miles. They thought this would be stable for about a hundred years, even with global warming. The scientists who study these ice shelves were absolutely astonished when they were looking at these images. Starting in January 31, 2002, in a period of 35 days, this ice shelf completely disappeared. They could not figure out how in the world this happened so rapidly. They went back to figure out where they had gone wrong. That’s when they focused on those pools of melting water. Even before they could figure out what had happened there, something else started going wrong. When the floating sea-based ice cracked up, it no longer held back the ice on the land. The land-based ice then started falling into the ocean. It was like letting the cork out of a bottle. There’s a difference between floating ice and land-based ice. It’s like the difference between an ice cube floating in a glass of water, which when it melts doesn’t raise the level of water in the glass, and a cube sitting atop a stack of ice cubes, which melts and flows over the edge. That’s why the citizens of these pacific nations had all had to evacuate to New Zealand.
(**__emphasis__** added).
You've asked me to do a few things, perhaps you could name two Pacific Nations whose entire populations have "had to evacuate to New Zealand".
Or even one.
Or a single island.
Or village? Or family? Or person?
People have left. People are worried about rising sea levels. Perhaps climate change has screwed ecosystems such that people want to leave. But not a single person has been evacuated to New Zealand let alone for the reason Gore asserts, and to claim otherwise is a LIE.
-
Greame seems to apply a legalistic interpretation to scientific investigation and analysis...if there is scientific uncertainty then any conclusion drawn must be lies?
There is not scientific uncertainty - 100% of scientists everywhere with any knowledge of the situation know that the populations of entire South Pacific Islands have not fled to New Zealand as climate change refugees.
A statement that they may have to leave, or will have to leave if climate change goes unchecked I would not term a lie. A statement that they have left for New Zealand is a lie, or is so reckless and ignorant that it's hard to tell the difference when one is talking about someone with the intellect and knowledge of climate change as Al Gore.