Posts by Rich Lock
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That I believe is more appropriately called "abandoning ship". The whole thing was hilarious, in fact, as his criticism of Bush amounted to him saying "He did exactly what my friends and I urged him to do, and look at the consequences! That man must be stopped!" It really was quite priceless.
The fact that Francis Fukayama can walk down the street without people sniggering as he passes is confusing enough for me, let alone the fact he's still taken seriously enough to be a commentating voice.
He wrote a book called 'the end of history' whose central thesis was that there wouldn't be any more great historical upheavals, and that 'steady-as-she-goes' growth would be the order of the day for the 21st Century and beyond.
Well, it seems to me that that's kind of like putting all your chips, plus your house, shirt, pants and family on red. And then it comes up black.
Talk about overdrawn at the credibility bank.
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We lefties always think when we expose a bigot that we have won the argument. We fail to notice that opinions like Ms Lee's are heard everyday on talkback radio and are held by many ordinary people.
Tend to agree.
There's a poll on 'Stuff' at the moment - 'what do you think of Lee's comments?' or something along those lines.
Rssults when I looked were very roughly as follows (with lots of paraphrasing added by me):
1/3 were pretty horrified.
1/3 were 'yeah, she shouldn't have said it, but it was just a spur-of-the-moment blurt, so I'm not that bothered.'
1/3 were what I can only characterise as supportive.
Now, given the likely self-selecting sample and therefore validity, it doesn't really mean that much, but it does tend to support your point.
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When was the planet destroyed?
Jan 1st 2001. But everyone was too hungover to notice.
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I think we really need a good journalist to track down which business(es) benefits from the government choosing the above ground option and then to track down which politicians are close personal friends who just happen to have frequent expensive dinners with the owners of said business(es).
TLDR This stinks of corruption and I don't have the investigative skills to find it - is there a journalist in the house?
This is sort of what was in the back of my head when I asked my question, which was answered as follows:
the government's anti-debt stance is about keeping interest rates for business low - effectively subsidising their private profits by sacrificing the rest of us.
I would tend to agree that an in-depth article in, say, Metro, would be worth a read, exploring all these issues.
I would hasten to add that I am not suggesting there is corruption. I just have very little (no) faith in our glorious Mainstream Media having a snowball's of exposing it if it was there.
I found that answer pretty much satisfactory. "Where's the money?' 'Ah, here it is'.
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The UK is a slightly different situation from NZ basically because of the porous border with mainland Europe.
It is relatively easy to buy and then smuggle ex-military weapons from Eastern Europe into the UK.
In this case, NZ's geographical isolation works in it's favour. However, I do not think it would be particularly difficult to smuggle weapons from, say, SE Asia into the country.
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Gun registries won't work immediately. Over the years though, most guns will fall into the hands of people that don't want to go to jail for the sake of a bit of paperwork.
The cost of setting up and maintaining a registry was mentioned upthread. It was quite a lot of money. You haven't challenged the amount so let's assume for the sake of argument it's more or less correct.
Firstly, do you think the fairly marginal trickle-through effect of a registry, spread out over (probably) decades, justifies the cost and paperwork?
Personally, I don't.
Secondly, let's throw up a not unlikely hypothetical situation, which in my opinion is far more relevant and far more likely than any 'man goes crazy with gun he normally uses for possum shooting' example.
Let's say I'm a big ol' greasy biker and all-round generally unpleasent piece of work. I'm a member in good standing of a motorcycle 'club', such as, for example, the Hells Angels. I have several not-so-minor convictions against my name - let's say GBH, aggravated assault, possibly a couple of minor dealing charges.
Things are pretty sweet at the moment - I have my fingers in more than a few unsavoury illegal pies which are bringing in a good income. There's my various standover operations, a stolen parts operation out of my 'legal' car/bike repair business (useful for laundering money, too, that), and last but definitely not least, there's the grow operation in one of my girlfriends garages.
One of my 'brothers' in the 'club' took me aside a few days ago, and has offered me partnership in a P-manufacturing operation. I'm thinking on it.
However, what with one thing and another, things are potentially a bit hairy. There's a lot of cash and drugs floating around, and I'm getting a bit worried about getting held up by some rivals. So I want to get tooled up. Y'know, for 'protection'.
My options are:
1) apply for a firearms licence. Once it arrives (and I'm sure those convictions against my name won't be a problem. I also love having my name on formal paperwork) I'll buy all the guns I want legally!
Or
2) put the word around my buddies and street contacts that I'm after some 'protection', know what I mean?
I reckon it shouldn't be too hard. Fat Jock down at the 'club' has a contact with these triad guys who have been known to import the odd assault rifle in the shipping containers they use as part of thier cover business. He can sort me out.
So which do you think is more likely? Option 1) or option 2)?
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Oh, and Islander has aleady alluded to, if you live in a remote area, the police aren't going to be around much to check on either your car rego or your gun rego. You can probably get away with having neither registered and in frequent use for long periods of time.
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If the registry showed you had nine guns, the cops could drop by to verify they were in the locked cabinet where they were meant to be.
If they weren't and you had no reasonable excuse, you would be prosecuted. I think that just as most people rego their car, most people would register their guns. Particularly if you faced a five year sentence, as in the UK.
I don't think it's any more of an imposition for people to register guns than register cars. In much of the less civilised areas of NZ (i.e. not Wellington), a car is a neccessity, but you still need a license and rego. A gun is never a necessity in the modern world, so why shouldn't people have to go through the same process for guns as they do cars.
None of which addresses Mr Poole's well-made points upthread, unfortunately.
Most people will register guns. Criminals won't. They will find an illegal source and keep them hidden once purchased, as Matthew has already pointed out.
Your car example falls down as follows: unregistered, unlicenced cars can and do exist, but they're not much use sitting in a driveway or garage. They need to be used, and they probably will be used on public roads relatively frequently. This increases the chances of a police stop, and legal consequences (confiscation or whatever).
Illegal (unregistered) guns will only be used infrequently and probably not in full public view - Mr Crim isn't going to walk down the street to fetch a pint of milk and some fags from the dairy on a daily basis with his illegally obtained assualt rifle over his shoulder. They are instead going to be used in circumstances where the person on the wrong end will be unlikely to complain - a standover, gang war or similar.
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Someone asked an interesting question upthread along the lines of 'who benefits?', or to put it more crudely, 'where's the money?'.
Now, I'll admit I haven't been through the numbers with a fine tooth comb, but the take home message I get from them is that all the options are, in a cost sense, more or less the same, if all the relevant factors are taken into account, and the same sums are applied to each of the options (to put it in a very rough sense).
Let's assume that's correct, and that I haven't missed something vital somewhere (I haven't seen anyone seriously challenge the figures on here). Therefore, National must know that they've had to do some extremely creative accounting to make the overground option look like it costs a lot less - I find it very, very hard to believe they wouldn't.
So why are they doing it? Who benefits? Where's the money?
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Road protests were a more or less constant background hum in the UK between about 1990 and 2001 (9/11 and all that...), and certainly formed a big part of the prevailing (counter-)culture.
Hence my comment about increased costs and delays - most if not all of these big projects in the UK had to deal with organised direct action in one form or another.
Two major examples here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M11_link_road_protest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twyford_Down
There was also the Manchester aiport runway protest which made Swampy famous:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampy
I don't really know how relevant this sort of thing is within a NZ context. My recollection is that the Twyford Down protest was something of a tipping point in the UK because it exposed a lot of ordinary decent taxpaying citizens who opposed the bypass to the sort of anti-protest tactics that were rountinely depolyed against the 'dirty hippies'. A bit of an eye-opener for a lot of people.
The benefits of any of them are still debatable, but again, my recollection is that most of these things proved horrendously expensive in the end (even taking out the 'protest' cost), and of fairly marginal benefit.
But once they're there, it's a bit late.
Still, as has been mentioned, they haven't got a green light yet.