Posts by Matthew Poole
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Envirologue: Fool me Once: Lessons on…, in reply to TracyMac,
Turns out Democrats are far cheaper to purchase
FTFY :P
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Hard News: The epitome of reason, in reply to Russell Brown,
the Democrats didn’t have to contend with a centre-right party claiming the centre.
That'd be because the Democrats are the "centre-right" party in US politics. There is no left, just "right" and "much, much further right".
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Envirologue: Fool me Once: Lessons on…, in reply to TracyMac,
The last Labour govt was negotiating quite happily for this. Let's not subscribe to the fallacy this was invented by National. Maybe Labour was negotiating a more limited scope, but who knows?
Started in 2005, the TPP was NZ negotiating with Chile, Brunei and Singapore; the original four countries. It was a very limited scope. The US didn't come aboard until February 2008, at which point it would've been their one set of national economic interests against the other four countries and could probably have been managed.
The right conveniently talks up how Labour thought the TPP was a grand idea because it was commenced under Labour, which is true, but the huge expansion of both the parties and the scope has only happened since National came to power. Every additional negotiating party after the US has come in since after the 2008 election, and at every point since then National has been the one that's kept us in the deal. By the time it became apparent that the US was pushing the trans-national corporations' barrow to the exclusion of all else, Labour was well and truly gone.[citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership]
ETA: We can tell the original scope would have been limited because we have seen what is in other completed trade deals to which the original countries are parties. Look at the NZ-China deal, for example. We don't need to have texts from the early negotiations to have a pretty good idea of what would have been on the table. And what's on the table now is perfectly in line with the US history of *cough*trade*cough* deals.
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Hard News: Behind Baltimore, in reply to Howard Edwards,
There was an article in the NZ Herald recently (which I can't find online - searching for "police" or "US police" produces 100s of results) which made this point.
There are over 80 thousand statutory governance entities in the US, most of which are municipality or county structures that maintain or contract law enforcement services. I learned this wee fact when examining the background to why emergency services cooperation across jurisdictions was historically a total cluster in the US.
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Legal Beagle: Somewhere* it's National…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
No information resources should be excluded from libraries because of the opinions they express.
"Beating children is good for them" is an opinion.
"Beat your child using xyz implement when they do abc" is not an opinion, it's an instruction. There's a difference. -
Legal Beagle: Somewhere* it's National…, in reply to Pete Sime,
The Anarchist Cookbook was banned by the Office of Film and Literature Classification as unconditionally indecent in 1994.
Interesting. It's apparently also available through UBS. I'm concerned that such a major outlet apparently carries a banned book.
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Do the Auckland Libraries hold a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook? If not, why not? It doesn't appear to be an "illegal" book in this country (you can buy it off Fish Pond), and it has the arguable benefit of historical value as well as being an instruction manual.
To Train up a Child is advocating illegal activity. It instructs the reader to assault their children, which is explicitly against NZ law.
I don't want the book banned, or censored, but I definitely question whether an instruction manual on how to get convicted for child assault belongs within the public library system. By all means house it amongst other sociology books within a tertiary library system, but there's something that makes me twitch about it being "endorsed" by ratepayers; and don't try to tell me that nobody considers the presence of a book within a library system to be an endorsement of the book.
For all the high-minded ideals of open information, there comes a point where telling people to break the law (not just how to) enters into very murky territory.
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Hard News: An unacceptable failure of care, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
interview Hales and see what he said to his son about this criminal behaviour
You're assuming he knew. It's a matter of record that none of the boys or their parents were spoken to by the investigators. It's likely he knew, but far from certain. He definitely knows now, but whether he knew while the investigation was underway is not at all a given.
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Hard News: An unacceptable failure of care, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Do we know if any of these police have children themselves?
Why yes we do ,one Police Officer has a boy. His name is Beraiah Hales. He is one of the twits involved.
Unless I missed something I think you're conflating two separate things. Yes, the father of Hales is a police officer. However I suspect Ian was meaning any of the investigating officers and as far as we know Hales' father had nothing to do with the investigation.
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Legal Beagle: The Northland by-election;…, in reply to sean mahoney,
I don’t think they need to stand 130 candidates or even that the greens need to stand any. I think the Greens in 2002 and 2005 only ran candidates to ensure there was momentum to get the vote out ..they don’t try and “win"them so to speak..
Of course they need 130-ish candidates if dual candidacy (list and electorate) is forbidden, so that they can contest every electorate and also fill their party list. Those are the rules you want. Not contesting a seat is pretty much unthinkable for the two big parties, both for appearance's sake and also so that new candidates can get the experience of contesting an election in an unwinnable seat; character-building for them, and also useful for the party apparatus to judge the candidate's mettle before potentially standing them in a more-winnable seat.
As for the Greens, they stand electorate candidates every time but only ever pitch for the party vote. They put them up in key seats, mostly, for party profile and also so they can try and swing the vote away from (lately) National; Epsom, Ohariu, etc. That's been their habit for at least the last five elections.