Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to BenWilson,
I’d like to hear other perspectives on his claim that Maori never speak ill of the dead. It sounds like total bullshit to me.
With a side order of "bitch, please." Then again, Harawira is very good at playing the long con where he can say kind of bullshit that flits across his head thanks to a combo of 1) media white guilt (play the racist card if they get out of line); 2) hacks whose only contact with Maori is toddling off to Ratana & Waitangi once a year and having the usual rentaquotes on speed dial; 3) the endless hunger for good inflammatory pull quotes, a minstrel show HH is perfectly happy to headline.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to DexterX,
Hone’s Hitler comments originally came in response to the Brash Orewa speech and what was widely regarded as National playing the race card for political advantage – Hone’s comments from memory were that Brash’s policies were very much like Hitler’s.
Which was bullshit then, is bullshit now and Harawira needs to stop getting a pass for trotting it out. A pass, I respectfully suggest, PASers didn’t – and shouldn’t – extend to folks who endlessly equated Helen Clark to Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe and Darth Vader. (Really.)
As I’ve said here more than once, I was broken of my cheap invocations of Stalin by a (lefty) friend who literally threw a copy of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror at my head and suggested I read it, think very carefully about whether the Labour Party was even in the same galaxy and get a grip.
Very good advice.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to DexterX,
If Hone can provide the voice for and play a part in the leadership for a grass roots Maori renascence then I am prepared to listen to what he eventually has to say.
I've got to ask this one more time: So Harawira gets a complete pass for trotting out the argumentum ad Hitlerium one more time? No, Dexter, I'm not prepared to listen to it from anyone and AFAIC it just shows how little he has to contribute to civil political discourse.
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No matter how strenuously you support the rule of law, you have to set bin Laden’s right to a trial against the safety of the people you would send to arrest him.
I’ve finally figured out what really pisses me off about that. It’s a really splendid argument for setting up sniper squads to summarily execute any alleged criminal with gang or organised crime links. After all, isn’t it a risk to arrest – let alone try – associates of criminal groups whose track record of assaulting police officers, harassment of judges and court officials, witness intimidation & jury tampering is well documented? Kill ’em all, and let Buddha, Allah, Jesus and Jehovah sort ’em outq
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Russell Brown,
Phil Goff’s rejection of Harawira and his party is starting to look quite wise now.
But still where Winston Peters is concerned... I guess all brown-necked ass-clowns are "extreme", but some brown-necked ass-clowns are more extreme than others.
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If this morning’s Harold is to be believed, Hone is now in full-on ‘I <heart> Osama’ mode….
You know something, Labour was always going to go into full-on brown-neck mode against both the Maori Party and HH but it seems faintly unsporting of Harawira to make it so damn easy.
Then again, Harawira does love trolling the honkys, and I wouldn't under-estimate Phil Goff’s perverse genius for taking aim at the side of a barn… and blowing off another toe.
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Thanks for the attempt to continually insert a straw man, Neil.
To be fair, I think Brian Edwards has burned them all.
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Elsewhere, it's a cold night so warm you hands at the blazing bonfire of straw men constructed by Brian Edwards.
I’m with the cheering crowds of New Yorkers at Ground Zero. I rejoice with them at the removal from this earth of a purely evil creature who premeditatedly planned, directed, celebrated and boasted of the long-range slaughter of thousands of civilians – men, women and children. My response, and the response of those celebrating at Ground Zero and around the world, is the entirely normal human response of the fellow citizens, families and friends of those thousands of civilians and of anyone who abhors the premeditated and careless taking of innocent lives.
So I have very little time for the intellectual delicacy, the moral refinement shown by a Russell Norman when he says, ‘It really isn’t very becoming for the greatest democracy in the world to go around assassinating people, no matter how bad they are.’
‘Unbecoming’? The term doesn’t quite seem appropriate when discussing a mass murderer whose conscience is untroubled by the recruitment of children as suicide bombers. Were the actions of the senior German officers, who in 1944 attempted to assassinate Hitler, also not very ‘becoming’? Would the German Greens, had there been German Greens, have tut-tutted about that: ‘No trial, no defence, no proof of guilt – shocking!’
Hum... perhaps a better analogy would be The Nuremberg Trials.
During the Moscow Conference in November 1943, representatives vowed that there would be punishment of the major war criminals. At the Yalta Conference (also known as the Crimea Conference), in February 1945, representatives of Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union maintained that it was their purpose to destroy German militarism and Nazism and to insure that Germany would never again be able to disturb the peace of the world. Yet there was no definitive action taken as to how this would be implemented.
There were varying responses from world leaders:
Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain during the war, felt strongly that the top Nazis should be immediately executed with no trials. He feared that a long drawn out judicial process might only bring attention and possible sympathy for the Nazi leadership.
Joseph Stalin preferred show trials such as those conducted during the Great Purge of the 1930s.
President Franklin Roosevelt Initially, Roosevelt was inclined to follow Churchill's ideas of summary justice but he eventually agreed with key advisers in his administration that emphasized the need for a judicial process and outlined how such a proceeding could be organized in an International Military Tribunal. Roosevelt and his successor, Harry S. Truman, insisted that the rule of law be observed with trials that provided for counsel for the defense as well as ample opportunity for the prosecution to present the evidence.
YMMV, but I'd trust FDR's judgement over Stalin's any day of the week. Or Churchill's come to that.
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<i>Needless to say, the Harawira-Brash interview is like a gang war – you’re not gunning for either side, but it’s fun to watch.</i>
Not really – the next time Harawira trots out the argumentum ad Hitlerium how about someone grows a pair, and asks him to point to exactly where Brash or the ACT Party is advocating anything like this.
In short, exactly how I’d expect Brash to be treated by a semi-competent journalist if he equated Harawira – and his party – to the apartheid regime in South Africa. (A rather half-witted equation Rodney Hide was all too fond of.)
If anything, I’d like to know exactly what Brash and Harawira thought they achieved. Can’t say Close Up’s passive-aggressive trolling expedition was twenty minutes that left me any the wiser about anything.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to BenWilson,
But I do think there are practicalities involved which, at least in this case, favor respecting the customs of the culture from which the dead person came. For starters, tit-for-tat is a likely outcome of disrespect.
Quite -- I believe Homer is still required reading at West Point, and there's still a nasty kick to Achillles dragging Hector's corpse behind his charriot for twelve days around the walls of Troy; the wretched humiliation visited on Priam begging for his son's body to be returned so the funeral rites can be performed. Even the Gods are disgusted by his impiety.
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