Posts by Russell Brown
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Well, I was thinking more about why I tend to avoid American political blogs of all stripes nowadays. But don't get me started about Kiwiblog, where one of the excitable left-wingnuts accused me of giving 'support' to a 'pedophile' recently.
DPF's lefty trolls really need to learn when to leave it alone. But they did have a point about Cameron Slater (aka Whale Oil) photoshopping the head of a 15 year-old boy onto a porn pic of a man masturbating, because the boy had annoyed him. That was truly creepy.
But that's way OT ...
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The most surprising thing about this, is that Tuhoe aren't the only Maori to have been royally shafted by the state, and arguably they've had a pretty good go at getting state funding, yet they seem to have some sort of belief that they've been harder done by than anyone else.
I think it's a mistake to think that these guys represented Tuhoe. This story from The Press got a bit lost as the "state terror" narrative about the raids took over:
Tuhoe Waikaremoana Trust manager Tama Nikora said his people had been struggling for years to have their voices heard.
The tribe had a strong sense of cultural identity, but for the 19 per cent of members who still lived on their traditional lands there was little work and many people were beneficiaries.
Nikora said the trust was trying to create some work in forestry, but their efforts were being thwarted by tribe radicals.
"What they really want is work. If they were busy in employment they wouldn't be doing what they are doing," he said.
Nikora believed there was some truth in the reports of military training and guerilla-style camps.
He said for some Tuhoe there was no law but their law. "There's only a few actually living out there trying to hold the rest of the tribe to ransom," he said.
"The older people are worried, they don't like what's going on. They don't think the police have over-reacted."
He said young people out of work were easily led astray by more radical older members."People need to answer the question, `do they subscribe to the treaty or not'," he said. "Because in Article Three, the right was given to the government to pass laws."
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Well, got to agree with you there and I'm not entirely playing the devil's advocate in saying that I've read some much scarier wing-nutty stuff on various blogs.
Really? I found the stuff about killing people for practice deeply horrible.
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I'm curious to know about the involvement of the pakeha activists and whether they were arrested as part of the round-up-the-usual-suspects routine as initially seemed likely, or if they were actively involved in the camps, which now seems very hard for a bunch of pacifists to justify.
At least some of the activists attended the camps -- the friend of the guy arrested in Christchurch told The Press his mate had attended only once after being "overwhelmed and freaked out" by the experience.
All the people bailed last week, including Emily Bailey and Valerie Morse, had bail conditions forbidding them to go to Ruatoki, if that means anything.
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Kitchin's story makes reference a claim that the National Party website was hacked by someone calling themselves Bl@ckmask in 2004.
It would seem to have been this one.
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I've set up a new thread to discuss the Dom Post stories. Y'all might want to pop over there.
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Well, the Dominion Post has done it: published some, but by no means all, of the police evidence presented in support of Terrorism Suppression Act charges, drawn from the 156-page affadavit presented to court. And it's fairly shocking.
There's the intercept and surveillance evidence, a timeline to the charges, a description of the police operation, Phil Kitchin's summary and the paper's editorial justifying its decision to publish.
So what do we all think?
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I'm also interested in the way the narrative that the Oct 15 raid was an attack on all of Tuhoe has developed. That wasn't necessarily a feature of the early reaction as this Press story two days later noted:
Tuhoe Waikaremoana Trust manager Tama Nikora said his people had been struggling for years to have their voices heard.
The tribe had a strong sense of cultural identity, but for the 19 per cent of members who still lived on their traditional lands there was little work and many people were beneficiaries.
Nikora said the trust was trying to create some work in forestry, but their efforts were being thwarted by tribe radicals.
"What they really want is work. If they were busy in employment they wouldn't be doing what they are doing," he said.
Nikora believed there was some truth in the reports of military training and guerilla-style camps.
He said for some Tuhoe there was no law but their law. "There's only a few actually living out there trying to hold the rest of the tribe to ransom," he said.
"The older people are worried, they don't like what's going on. They don't think the police have over-reacted."
He said young people out of work were easily led astray by more radical older members.I guess what bugs me is the reflexive reaction that if these people aren't terrorists, they're heroes and freedom fighters. I suspect that if I could see all the evidence, I might not think they were terrorists, but I certainly wouldn't think they were heroes.
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And I'm not judging them in relation to Fairfax papers - I'm saying that 'neutrally' observing that competitors aren't toeing the corporate line, and especially insinuating that this is a bad thing, is real schoolyard stuff.
I think all that carry-on doesn't really tally with the gravity they're ascribing to their claims, and makes it seems more like a promotional campaign. Woo! Check out our page views!
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You're printing your announcements on puppies now?
All the kids are doing it. Writing messages on puppies (or "pmail") is totally the new Facebook.
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