Posts by Samuel Buckman
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Just to put this in context though, a woman whose alleged attacker has been allowed to flee the country by government minsters is attacked FOR BEING CRITICAL OF THE GOVERNMENT?...The victim’s political views really have no relevance here, while the government has a case to answer.
I'm not sure what you think I was saying, but I definitely agree with you.
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Hard News: A wretched editorial, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Why do people talk about political affiliations the same way we would talk about financial conflicts of interest?
Broadly speaking, they should be – and for much the same reasons.
Okay, I think maybe the issue is partially how we treat any sort of conflict of interest. A conflict of interest is a motive to act in a biased manner, in the case of speech to use incorrect facts or invalid arguments, or to ignore facts and arguments that support the other side. It does not mean that you will, merely that you are more likely to do so. So in your hypothetical situation:
If Helen Kelly wrote an op-ed about how John Key eats babies and anyone who isn’t a total monster should vote Labour, then I think it would it would perfectly relevant to note that many (but not all) of the CTU’s members are formally affiliated to Labour.
The affiliation should be an indicator that we should take a close look at the facts, whereupon we discover that John Key does not, in fact, eat babies. But it seems that it is common for people to use the affiliation itself as a justification for dismissing the opinion, which is absurd.
But I do still think it is even more absurd with a political interest than a financial one. There is a big difference between 'X is only attacking John Key because it is to their advantage to do so' which implies that if they were being impartial, they would not have a negative opinion of John Key, and 'X is only attacking John Key because they are a member of the Labour Party', which means 'X only has a negative opinion of John Key because X has such a strong negative opinion of John Key that they joined the Labour Party'.
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such as whether she had any political affiliations
Why do people talk about political affiliations the same way we would talk about financial conflicts of interest?
Firstly, it get the causation the wrong way round - it implies that one's political affiliations are influencing one's opinions. Hmm.
Secondly, even if that were, very weirdly, the case, why would it be something to be ashamed of? Unlike a financial interest, the purpose of a political interest is to make the world a better place. People might disagree about the means of achieving this, and what 'a better place' might look like, but I don't think many people disagree about the the actual objective. -
Hard News: A law gone awry, in reply to "chris",
I stand corrected.
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Hard News: A law gone awry, in reply to Dastardly Bounder,
justify changing this law in the name of addiction prevention or any effort to reduce harm when they continue to allow alcohol, tobacco and codeine to be freely available.
Why do you need to ban everything at the same time? Alcohol and tobacco may have just as bad/worse physiological effects as cannabiniods, but they have also been around a lot longer. As such, they have a greater social significance, and that makes them much harder to ban. It seems logical to start (and possibly finish) with the easier target, does it not?
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, the Psychoactive Substances Act means that companies must prove that their drug meets safety standards before it can go on to the market.
To do that, they must do clinical trials in which they expose the participants to harm, in a trial which is not expected to produce results that will be of significance to medical practice.
Surely then, these trials should not be able to receive ethics committee approval.
So doesn't the Act effectively ban all new psychoactive substances?