Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The twilight state of the…, in reply to ,
My thinking on this is that the legal high industrie didn’t address the underlying public health proplems any better than the local mongrel mob did.
Not sure about that. People have actually died from bad illegal drugs sourced in that way. Nothing was ever offered as a legal high that had the strength of crystal meth or the lethality of heroin. The dope trade is pretty benign, sure, since it's a highly recognizable plant in the first place, but various powders and pills made by people who might have no real knowledge of chemistry, and for whom the supply of the base materials is highly uncertain, purchased in illegal and highly paranoia inducing ways, backed up by actual gangsters, is quite a different level of unhealthy.
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Legal Beagle: A rather incomplete…, in reply to NSA,
That Dominique Prieur and Commander Alain Mafart were only captured with the assistance of a Neighbourhood Watch group is damning evidence that the SIS were well out of their depth when it comes to that which they’re mandated to actually handle.
I see it as evidence that the main way to deal with terrorism is to not treat it as exceptional in the first place, but as criminal activity which is caught out by good police work. At the government spook level there's no way I'd expect our SIS to go toe-to-toe with the French intelligence services.
As for going toe-to-toe with crazy fundamentalist terrorists, the fact that the USA with all it's disgustingly large power has singularly failed to prevent endless terrorism within their supposed domain of control, leads me to think it's a stupid, stupid game to even play. We should be having nothing whatsoever to do with it.
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Legal Beagle: A rather incomplete…, in reply to FletcherB,
Yes, I think I'm wrong about there never being any terrorist stuff, depending what you mean. There was also a suicide bombing of the Whanganui police computer in '82, and a bridge blown up in 1951, probably over industrial dispute. But it's been 30 years since any of those things.
ETA: And apart from the Rainbow Warrior, none of them involved foreign powers or organizations, which is what all the current bollocks is trying to make us all scared of.
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Legal Beagle: A rather incomplete…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Yes, that was what I was referring to. It's as close as we've ever got. It's an astonishing sham that we could be cramming through legislation over something for which there isn't even one single incident in our entire nation's history to justify these powers. We have never been attacked by terrorists. We've never intercepted any to foil an impending attack by them. We've got as much justification to do this as we have to start passing special laws to deal with our serial killer problem. Surely that's about as urgent, given zero incidents, zero evidence of any at work here.
Now I feel a little worried to have even suggested that, might give them ideas that we need new laws that everyone should have to give over DNA samples and fingerprints as a matter of course. There are, after all, serial killers in other countries.
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It would be nice to hear from the PM why Terrorism became so urgent, when it wasn't even on the radar as an issue for the election that we just had, and we haven't had an actual terrorist attack since the 1980s, our sole data point of evidence of any terrorist threat in this country.
There's no justification for the legislation, and certainly no justification for urgency. There's barely even been a discussion of what is quite a big change in our human rights.
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Legal Beagle: A rather incomplete…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Key and co are just using fear to dragoon the country into more draconian control, and I'd warrant at the instigation of others beyond our shores (or at least to curry favour with same).
But can one put that in a submission? Essentially my main problem with it is the whole idea of it, not the technical details of how it will be implemented. But given that it will be implemented, then I guess we squeeze out what sanity we can. I guess that's why they're called submissions. We're already beaten, so haggling over the number of strokes from the cane is all we have. I'm being facetious, of course, before someone goes looking the word up in a dictionary.
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Someone tell that man that brown isn't one of the six thinking hats, although it can be what you get when mixing the red, green and blue ones too often.
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to Bart Janssen,
and I have somewhat mixed feelings about it
That's the bit I want to hear about. The rest I believe, from what you and others have said. Is it for better, or worse? Because large slices of self-belief and ego could possibly NOT stand in the way of most of the human population engaging in the sciences, maybe?
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Hard News: Incomplete, inaccurate and misleading, in reply to Katharine Moody,
However he said he was “fundamentally not” in contact with Slater.
Love it. "Fundamentally" as the new tool of evasion. Something's not true unless it's fundamentally true, rather than superficially technically true. I think that if that's not very probably bullshit, then it's very actually bullshit.
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Hard News: Incomplete, inaccurate and misleading, in reply to Kim_Wright,
It’s like every scooby doo episode I ever watched. How many masks will we have to pull off before the the slightly left of centre blogger is revaled to be Rush Limbugh?
Indeed. It's a trail so obvious, you could put a tail on it and call it an elephant.
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