Posts by Moz
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Hard News: The Big Chill, in reply to Josie McNaught,
set up an offshore Trust (Bahamas? Vanuatu?) to publish the book and sign over ownership of all the material contained there in
Wouldn't it be easier and possibly more secure to sign the material over to the people it came from? That way the PTB are left saying "person X told you, but you gave the records back to person X, so.... get them back and give them to us", and you can just say "you wanna know, ask person X".
You could actually do this using multipart keys and encrypted material, so that any given encrypted file needs both the book author and the source to decrypt it. Sure, the PTB can play their "keys or jail" card, but I'm really fuzzy on the situations where they can do that but not just compel testimony directly.
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Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to william blake,
nice to believe that people doing horrific things hold belittling character flaws, but it’s not true. ... aka gutless arsehole.
I'd describe that as a character flaw, personally.
I think the underlying problem is a desire to believe that normal people don't commit crimes. Unfortunately we have very good evidence that that is wrong. Crimes like rape and domestic violence are distressingly common, rather than being shocking merely by who in particular has been pilloried or defended in the media most recently. The shock is "famous person does X" rather than "someone does X", whether X is "nosepicking" or "rape".
There's also the slow social shift that follows many law changes, like the changes in recreational drug use that often lag law changes by a significant period. Or the persistent problem with sposual rape even after it's been made illegal.
Suicide is IMO part of that shift. Euthenasia is a perfectly reasonable thing to discuss, and can IMO have positive outcomes (and be a perfectly sane thing to want/attempt)
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Hard News: The Big Chill, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Remove the stick to a jurisdiction safely outside of 5 Eyes and destroy all copies of the material in NZ.
I can imagine the courts being very unhappy about that. Saying "unfortunately to retrieve those records I need to convince the person holding them that I am not going to allow a government to obtain them and that I am not under duress" would no doubt trigger the "get him, lads" reflex that Kim Dotcom has so thoroughly experienced. If only we were all multi-millionaires able to defend ourselves as expensively as he has.
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Hard News: The Big Chill, in reply to Juha Saarinen,
Destroying notes is a silly suggestion, for a raft of reasons.
Can you please explain why for the benefit of dummies like me?
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Hard News: The Big Chill, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Or would its later publication mean that the same material suddenly stopped being journalism?
I expect the judge would argue that the material in the blog is still protected, but the material in the book is not and can therefore be queried. The law commonly makes such distinctions without a difference.
What I like are offenses like "bringing parliament into disrepute" or likewise the law, but which judges and politicians seem to be exempt from. It does not matter how badly they behave, they are somehow not the ones making the hind end of a horse look like the smart one in the picture.
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Also, from Shahzad Ghahreman:
I think we should fight hard to keep our cultural values in New Zealand. Just because Australia does certain things, or Europe, or the United States - perhaps bending the rules on human rights a little - it doesn't mean that we should blindly follow. They can have their way of life, and we should keep ours. If I have learned anything in my life - it's that integrity is a valuable commodity. It's not something you should give away easily or willingly.
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Even the "detention centres" in cities are quite nasty. I'm told they're not as bad as prison, but having visited one once, I can't bring myself to go back. The combination of it being a lot like prison and the dreadfully unhappy people inside was more than I can bear.
I think its awful that we say to people "oh, you appear to have risked life and limb to get there and you have nothing but the clothes on your back ... best clap you in prison indefinitely just in case you're willing to do that for trivial reasons"... {in my best Emma voice} Really?! That's really all you can come up with, Australia?
"not as bad as prison" is not the bar I want to set for our treatment of refugees.
I was very happy when NZ agreed to take a bunch of refugees that Australia had refused. It's one of the things making me want to move back to NZ (which unfortunately is off the table until I break up with my partner... and I don't want that to happen).
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Apparently some arguments are "too stupid" to rebut, or possibly require careful reading to distinguish from "we should require abortion because...". But hey, what's obvious to some people is usually extremely complex and subtle to others.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Russell Brown,
dreading the arrival of a pre-natal test for ASD
It seems increasingly likely that people can be moved around on the ASD spectrum, by for instance killing off chunks of their microbiome to push them further out on it. The possibility of a conclusive genetic test done around the time of conception is seeming less likely the more I learn about it.
I actually wonder about the social implications of some of the dietary issues. Being a "fussy eater" has social implications, and in retrospect I can see that some of my social issues came down simply to spending a lot of time either hungry and irritable, or sick and not very sociable. The bonus issues of many "treat" foods being unpalatable just served to push me further out (why work hard for something that will make me feel sick, or that I will have to work to conceal my non-consumption of?)
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Sacha,
it might be interesting to compare responses if you asked people with neural tube defects and people with Down syndrome whether they would miss seeing other people like them in society.
And it might also be worth asking all people whether they'd miss seeing wild birds or other native animals in the world. To me, one argument for absolutely unconditional access to contraception and abortion is that we have rather a surfiet of humans and anything that allows people to choose not to reproduce should be encouraged. It's all very well to talk about whether bringing people with presumed low quality of life into the world, when every single person we bring in lowers the quality of life for everyone else. Experiencing a population reduction programme of the sort we're currently all working towards is not likely to be fun, put it that way.
As Sacha says,
There are some great ethical minefields about using the food supply to fix what we don't like.
Or, very likely, the lack of food supply.