Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Russell Brown,
What I said was that the Prime Minister and a crowd of National activists seem to have been aware of the contents of the statement for a lot longer than the rest of us.
There's no law against being politically savvy enough to save up any dirt until the most opportune time to use it, though?
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I wish I could organize some way to get alerted as to when the news gets back to the differences between the parties that might affect NZers.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Caleb D'Anvers,
Attack your enemy’s strengths, and where possible, engage in tu quoque arguments and false equivalences to drown out your opponent’s signal.
Yes, this is why negative campaigning doesn't really work. However much gains Labour made from the mud sticking to Collins, Williamson, etc, there's very little chance of staying clean in a mud-fight. And when it comes to "wrongdoing", there is always very little genuine perspective. Partisans from each side will point out the horrible enormity of whatever happened, and people come away with a "well OK multiple murder is certainly worse than a single one, but they're still both murderers" kind of reasoning.
Of course you have to do the mudslinging, but it should not be your strength. It's usually going to end up a tie. But when it comes to comparing policy, people really can make a clear distinction in their minds of which one they prefer. That should be the "strength". And if you get attacked on it, you defend it, and attack theirs. In that battle, the stronger one does actually look stronger.
Put another way, if the difference between National and Labour comes down to which one is less crooked regarding donations from Chinese businessmen, then I don't want either one of them.
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Hard News: Sectarian Bloodlust 2.0, in reply to Ross Mason,
The rhetoric at the time always played fast and loose with what a WMD actually is. Chemical weapons aren't really very effective except against unsuspecting civilians (and ALL weapons are good for that purpose). They talked up that there were actual nukular weapons, because of intel (which the agent involved subsequent went public on, pointing out that it was all total bs).
So I think the spin will now be that chemical weapons aren't much of a concern anyway. Unless we want to blow something up, then of course chemical weapons are back at the top of the Most Evil And Scary Things list.
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Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Aha! Cheers – you only quoted a small snippet of the subsection of the Act, I’d been presuming it was all of it. I finally see your problem, I think, why you went to all this trouble.
Most interesting that they can only release info if it’s not compromising of public safety. It’s hard to think of circumstances where it would endanger public safety to give details about a suicide. A murder, definitely, particularly a political one. Supporters could go ape-shit about that. But I’d almost think it would be compellingly in the interests of public safety to convince the public that a suicide had happened, if there were doubts and wide speculation of a murder.
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Hard News: Meanwhile back at the polls, in reply to David Hood,
Yes, what's it at now? 49.5% Nat, 28% Lab? But the buzz has shifted to the Stuff poll putting the Nats on 56% and Labour on 23%. To get a discrepancy of 6.5% in two polls around the same period tells me that they either aren't using anywhere near the same methodology, or something very unlikely randomly happened. I guess the former is more likely.
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Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
The problem is that that guidance makes it look like you can’t even ask for permission until after the decision is made (ie it looks like the pre-decision ban is total).
OK. Whereas that's not what the law says in any detail? It says you have to have the coroner's authority. But presumably the coroner is totally free to set their own policy around what they will actually give permission for, if their authority is absolute on it up until that point.
So it's not incorrect to say that they won't let you say more than that x person died. That might very well be their policy, and a sensible one too. They are not, themselves, necessarily sure until that point. Digging deeper, they may make a discovery that throws doubt onto it being a suicide. Perhaps they don't find powder residue on the hand of the person who is believed to have shot themselves. Or maybe the angle of entry needs a lot more examination before they can be sure it even could be done alone. Perhaps they need to check the ballistics report to make sure the bullet even came from the gun in the deceased's hand. Lots of care needed.
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Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Right. But do you really need permission to state more? After the inquiry into the death is completed, it seems that s71 doesn't apply any more because s71(c) no longer holds. Does the guide have the force of law behind it in that case? Which law?
It would seem pretty odd if permission was needed in perpetuity. So odd that I'm not surprised at the observation that no one has asked permission of the Chief coroner in 30 years, and he's never taken anyone to task for that.
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Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Now I'm even more confused.
I am confident you need permission to report the particulars of a self-inflicted death before the Coroner has made a decision.
Check! That looks what what both the Act and the guide says.
The problem with the guidance is that it doesn't even look like you need permission.
You lost me there. The guidance is:
Only the name and age of the deceased may be made public before the publication of a coroner’s finding. After a coroner’s finding (if any) has been released, only the name, address and occupation of the person concerned and the fact that the coroner found the death to be a suicide can be made public without a coroner’s permission.
That's saying you must not say anything more than that the person aged x died, before the finding. Pretty clear that you need permission to go further (although I can't tell if even that is possible). Afterwards you can say it was a suicide without the coroner's permission. That's what I'm reading. You appear to need permission to say more than the very basic facts, though.
The problem with the law is that you do need permission.
Beforehand, yes. Afterward, it doesn't seem to say anything, by which I presume the standard interpretation is that it's permitted. What is not prohibited is allowed. So I see the guide claiming more restriction than what the law seems to actually say. It seems to say that you can't talk about how they killed themselves, without permission, even though the report presumably lays that out in detail.
But again, IANAL. Just proficient in English.
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Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
From that snippet it looks that way. But the Act trumps the guidance, doesn't it? Newspapers have surely hit this hundreds of times, got their lawyers to look at the law, and then realized that it's clear enough in the Act itself that the highly counter-intuitive idea that coroners have a perpetual right to deny freedom of reporting of any suicide is counter-intuitive because it's false.
In other words, they got the guide wrong. They should fix it. But they don't seem to be ruthlessly applying it anyway (because they couldn't).
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