Posts by Chris Waugh
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Aiya. Just did the annual pre-summer cleaning of the fans.... Disassembly of the fans and cleaning of the parts left me, as usual, with a tub full of jet black "water" and fingers covered in thick, black "grease", and not from anything that should be in the fans, but from what they remove from the air as they blow it around. I guess running the fans is a cheap way of both keeping cool and filtering the air. I should do the aircon filters, too, and that'll be just as depressing, but the weather's too hot right now, they can wait till tomorrow. Wife's visa application is in, immigration service permitting, we'll be out of here soon...
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This is what afternoon skies are supposed to look like.
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to "chris",
Or been Shanghaied.
Huh, yeah. I'm not being entirely facetious when I say: Oh, you lot want to know what it feels like to live under the kind of regime this government is proposing? Just come spend a few months in China VPN-free.
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to Ross Mason,
Oh, you mean this?
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to "chris",
I've been resisting the urge to bring in the China comparison, but now that it's here.... What disturbs me is the two distinct ways in which the freedom/security balance is being renegotiated in China and "the West". In China it's more the people, in particular the nascent civil society among the urban middle classes and the frequent open rebellion against local government/Party abuses in the rural areas, forcing the government/Party to relax and open up more space and more freedom. In "the West", including New Zealand, it looks a lot like the ruling classes using the threat of terrorism and more generally instability, insecurity and mayhem to bully the people into accepting ever tighter restrictions on civil liberties. One of those two renegotiations strikes me as being the right way to go, the other strikes me as being definitely wrong and something we must resist. I think I've made it clear enough which, in my view, is which, and I think it's pretty clear we agree.
And you just reminded me of how us foreign teachers at my school in Changsha back in '99-2000 would sit in one of our apartments of a Friday evening with a few brews bellowing "Mao was a sheep shagging peasant!" on the assumption, and almost in the hope, that our apartments were bugged. If anybody was listening, they either didn't understand, didn't care, or agreed - and I remember people down there being very happy to say out loud in public that they hated Mao.
By the way, by "those jails", do you mean 劳改/reform through labour or the black jails? Cos if you mean the black jails, I was quite surprised when I had to go to the labour bureau 10 days ago - the labour bureau handing foreign experts and employees in Beijing happens to be right next door to the State Letters and Visits Bureau, and so the street outside is lined with unhappy people trying to right whatever wrong done to them back home, and every previous time I've been down that way, there have also been plenty of police, procuratorate, judiciary and other obviously official vehicles with non-Beijing licence plates - it used to be a pretty good place to check your knowledge of the abbreviations of the provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities - but this time there was not one single out of town vehicle visible.
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to "chris",
Beagle says [roughly] “and your hypothesis would be that the GSCB can’t stop that or hadn’t stopped that in the past?”
And a very good point that is, too.
I find that governments are using the threat of terrorism to massively expand their authority and erode our freedom which seems to have put us onto a path towards a kind of "fascism by stealth". We need to stop that, and the politicians need to be reminded of Mr Beagle's point every time they start muttering about terrorism and new laws and new powers needed to stop it. I mean, last I heard, blowing people up and killing them is murder, and it's always been the job of the police to stop it happening if they can, and when they can't, prosecute the murderers, and they've always done a fairly good job of that since long before the GCSB even existed...
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by which I mean my daughter's outside with her grandmother, and it looks like a huge storms is about to hit, so gotta run,
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I stand corrected and I thank you for that. Gotta run....
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Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to Aidan,
Surely easier to subscribe to his twitter account?
I'm sure you're right. But my WTF?! is two-fold: What is a US Embassy employee doing taking photos of Kim Dotcom at a select committee hearing? And why are we expected to believe he was there in a private capacity? After all, as you point out, it's not difficult to get pictures of Dotcom... But also, the US powers that be have a pretty huge interest in him... So would the US Embassy care to tell the truth, or at least come up with a more credible lie?
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Tangentially related, but:
A member of the US Embassy media team, Sean Gillespie, was at the hearing taking photographs of Mr Dotcom. He said later that he was there in a private capacity.
WTF?!
