Posts by Keir Leslie
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If both the police and the courts had right to decide upon the inconsequentiallity, that would also alleviate this state of affairs.
This is nonsense; the court has the right to find that no assault occurred. It can't find that no assault occurred by virtue of parental correction, but that's no different were I to be hauled before a court on charges of assault against you.
Also, not a lawyer, but I have read a few books on the institution of the prosecution (admittedly they tended to be focussed on that institution in the late Victorian era, so). In New Zealand, prosecution is in the name of the Crown, but anyone* can bring a prosecution. Generally it's someone paid to do so by the government, but they are in principle exercising the rights of any citizen. (Following the English practice; in Scotland prosecution has always been the privilege of the Procurator Fiscal et al.) I don't think you'd call prosecution a Royal Prerogative.
That's not a lawyer, that's someone who knows this stuff through (a) reading books about law and order in the late Victorian period and (b) seeing references to private prosecutions in the newspapers, so don't take it too seriously.
*Don't know anyone, 'cause there's probably rules, but roughly speaking. And you probably have to hire a lawyer to do the actual arguing. And it's often used by cranks.
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I'd put it in the same place as worrying about a Ceres-sized asteroid crashing into the planet - could happen, maybe even will happen but a) we don't have the faintest idea of how to definitively stop it and b) there are a number of much more immediate dangers which need to be addressed first.
Niven and Pournelle lied to me about the need for space exploration to avoid asteroid strikes? Lucy, you're destroying all my childhood beliefs.
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You did say:
They've got as much cause to complain as the Liberal Democrats
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They hardly have cause to complain --- they support the current system, and have done since forever, and don't even pay lip service to reform.
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O yes, there's nothing really wrong with unprincipled deals done to get the electorate onside, but you can hardly be the party of no on electoral reform for two centuries and then expect sympathy when the arcane system bites back.
(I mean, the Lords, ffs, if we're going to have `unfairness' competitions.)
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So, you seriously want to tell me Labour isn't a big a beneficiary of the status quo as the Tories ever were? Or that they might have an equally large dollop of self-interest in maintaining the status quo?
Nope, what we want to tell you is that if the Tories suddenly discover the joys of electoral reform now, we'll all know damn fine it's utterly unprincipled.
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Er, not really, the Tories have never supported reform, unlike the Lib Dems.
(And, yes, it is unfair; the Tories weren't complaining when they were getting the rub of it, were they?)
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He's not a very good thinker outside quite a limited domain, is he? He doesn't seem to have much ability to step outside his own head and into a Maori activist's, and he's far too willing to use dodgy bourgeois concepts that really aren't very coherent by the rest of his standards. (Violence --- but what about the violence cough inherent in the system eh?) And ouch he does do mean things to historical materialism, if that is what it is. It looks painful.
(And by the way, the Tories can hardly complain if they get fucked over by the electoral system in the UK, given that the Tories have historically been really quite keen to keep things just the way they were in Grandpa's time.)
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Asking what Labour stand for seems a bit daft -- it's for centre-left gradualist social democracy based on broad support like most other labour/socialist parties in the high-income nations. It stands for improving things one step at a time, which, in fact, the Clark government really did do.
I mean, I think Goff's fucked up here, and he's basically running a rather stupid campaign where he drags Labour to the right* and gives up correct positions for incorrect ones, but if you don't know what Labour are for in general terms you aren't paying attention.
And of course I don't think Goff is doing the right things by those values, but that only works because I think there are values Labour stand for.
* And I think Trotter et al are kidding themselves if they think Labour's going to swerve economically left at the same time, it's the sort of wishful thinking you always hear at this time.
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To a first approximation it is the Big Tobacco people.
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But where is the bloody class warfare?
If Labour become the party of militant class activism, well done, that's the point of the whole thing. Except I'm really not seeing any militant class activism out of Goff.
I don't think putting militant class activism as opposed to gay rights is at all sensible. It's the worst kind of identity politics, and empirically speaking there doesn't seem to be much of a negative correlation at all.
(Trotter's got a bit of the Orwell problem, doesn't he, except without the saving brilliance.)