Posts by BenWilson
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Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I’m confused by the same thing. To me the Act pretty much gives a precondition of the coroner’s permission being required, which is finished as soon as an “inquiry into the death has been completed”. It’s written as a backwards “if”, which is often confusing. It might have been clearer if it said:
“If (a) and (b) and (c), then (1)”.I’m interested in the views of non-lawyer readers, but if that was all I had to go on, I think I would conclude that permission to report on further details about a death believed to be self-inflicted was something that could only be sought after an inquest had finished.
As a non-lawyer reader, I can say that my conclusion would have been that it didn’t need to be sought after that point. Perhaps that explains why it never has been sought from Chief Coroner Neil MacLean.
ETA: Soz, you meant if the "chapter headed “Courts with special media provisions” were all we had to go on. Yes, I'd read it the way you said, then. But reading the Act itself, I would think that chapter is contradicting the Act somewhat.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to izogi,
I think you're on the money. It would be great if we actually did longitudinal studies to be able to say where the votes come from or go to. But we don't. And it seems more likely to me that people swing in and out of not-voting more easily than they swing to other parties. The undecided numbers are really high. I'm there myself at the moment, considering switching from Green to Mana/IP. But I can't fully commit to that yet, so when polled the other night, I had to just say "undecided". Which probably looks bad for the Left, but consider that there are more genuine parties on the Left, and thus more holes between them for undecideds to fall into if that is a common way to move around.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Meanwhile everyone loses sight of the bigger picture.
Hopefully that might be an outcome of this, that it becomes less about anti-Chinese sentiment and more about genuine political difference. I was pretty bloody bored of the whole attack line on National, TBH. I really don't actually care that much who they have lunch with, when the governance of the entire country, and policy in every area is at stake. None of that was giving me a strong positive reason to vote Labour.
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Hard News: Sectarian Bloodlust 2.0, in reply to TracyMac,
I wracked my brains to find a way to say that which didn't come across as hassling Bart, which is not my intention.
I'd agree that it's dismaying that technology is used to do stupid, evil things, but that's pretty much half the story of technology, since we first picked up sticks to bash things with. In Iraq, I'd say that the lion's share of considerably higher technology than Twitter has been used to harm the Iraqi people for decades now. We've watched an entire generation of technologies get tested on them, from the early 90s right through until now. No destruction of humans has ever been so gloriously covered, in real time.
I had a similar disgusted feeling several years ago seeing a video of American soldiers hoovering up humans with remote drone strikes at the click of a mouse. They were playing with little white dots, and yelling "Bam!" every time. One particularly troublesome dot ran an erratic path, lasted a good 40 seconds, before they just overkilled, clicking in a circle around him/her, and the Bam Bam Bam, some unknown human incinerated in a huge halo of explosions. I had a sick horror at the incredible level of sophistication in all of the parts that had to be coordinated so that some bastard could kill unknown people like they're ants on a table.
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Hard News: Sectarian Bloodlust 2.0, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
We got over it.
Well, sort of. The Thirty years war ended. But that was not the end of sectarian violence in Europe, not by a long shot. I don't think I'd look to Europe as the centerfold of peace on earth.
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Hard News: Practically jokers, in reply to Russell Brown,
Sun Flares are coming back, man.
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Hard News: Practically jokers, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
There is a golden thread in conservative law and order, that the main purpose of sentencing is for revenge on the wrongdoer.
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I do have a disabled child, and I don't love him any the less for it, but I do most certainly wish it had never happened.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Danielle,
Doesn’t it make the question of whether any individual woman is appropriately questioning her own level of acculturation rather… insulting?
I mostly agree with you, but blindjackdog seemed to be more taking exception to the question of whether choice should extend as far as making particular choices about the nature of the child - disabled or not, boy or girl etc.
I think this question muddies the water somewhat and should be treated separately. We could think abortion is OK, while thinking abortion to avoid a Downs child isn't. I personally don't think that, but the comments blindjackdog is making are in that context.
I'd agree the point could have been made in a way that seems less offensive, but this is a debate in which offense is pretty common at every step. There is a case to answer about why making a choice not to have a particular kind of child should be allowed. But equally there's a case to answer about why it shouldn't. I'd like to hear both cases. Hilary seems to have feelings about that which are hard to express.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to blindjackdog,
It may be a woman’s choice, but in making that choice, she’s making a choice about what the species should look like. Or she’s choosing to act on someone else’s, or her society’s, choice about what the species should look like.
This is true. It's also true when they choose who to have sex with in the first place. And it always has been something that's a choice, but in the case of sexual selection, it was often not up to the woman. And in many places it still is not.
I don't think it's neoliberalism to strongly believe in choice. It's classical liberalism. The kind that first believed that all people had rights, and then got around to extending those to women and people of different races.
This choice gets extended further when a procedure that was not really practical in the 19th Century is now quite routine. Women can now not only choose who they get pregnant to with some reliability, but they can also choose when. It's a step further that they could choose amongst some properties of the future child that they are particularly keen on, like it being not disabled, or being of a particular sex. Is it a step too far? Perhaps. But if so, it's not permanently coupled with whether abortion itself should be allowed. That particular step could be banned, the testing for those characteristics.
I don't think it should be. Harsh though it is, I think we already select against traits we do not desire. We have done this since the dawn of time, with ruthlessness. And for any choices, random or otherwise that got made and were suboptimal survival wise, the outcome was usually extremely harsh. For a lot of conditions they are still incredibly harsh. There's nothing good about incurable disease in a child.
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