Posts by chris
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Yeah, Stanley’s comment itself on the radionz site is not much to go on. Hopefully anyone who attended the weekend’s protests might have observations to share.
-
Polity: Too much to swallow on the TPP, in reply to Rob Stowell,
To be fair, when you've got more people turning up to march against the TPPA than the 'Leader of the Hoposition' has twitter followers it makes total sense that he'd just knuckle down and watch the sports.
-
I found this comment below the story dispiriting:
stanley 12 Aug
RNZ – if taking more photos could you try to include the multitude of nondescript men taking photographs of all the protesters? This is with digital SLRs as well as Go-Pros. They’re not part of the protest and are there because somebody (who?) wants a record of the identity of every protester there. Why is this, and who wants to know? This behaviour should be arousing suspicion from the rest of NZ why people at a peaceful protest are being monitored in this way.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/political/281171/tpp-protesters-descend-on-parliament
-
-
“I’m unable to comment on operational matters”
7 simple words that could make a difference in terms of curtailing the terror felt by ordinary New Zealanders. 7 words that could undermine attempts to terrorise the population. 7 words that seem to be missing from Rebecca Kitteridge’s vocabulary. I have no doubt that Rebecca Kitteridge is intelligent enough to successfully assess the affect the words she chooses instead, as a public servant I’m certain she would have dotted all her Is and crossed all her Ts to get to the prominent position she is now in. The nature of the organisation’s work does not require a spokesman to provide regular updates, the real proof of that a security agency is achieving its mandate – succeeding in undermining terror – should be its invisibility. Yet they’ve now pushed themselves to the forefront of the national consciousness.
I’ll admit to be somewhat paranoid, I’m not alone, many in our community are, many in our community suffer from the types of mental dispositions and illnesses that magnify anxiety levels, that magnify terror felt – the Government even spends money in attempts to alleviate these types of personal circumstances. So why is that of all the people employed by this country’s Government, the single individual I feel most terrorised by is the head of the Security Intelligence Service. I can not for the life of me fathom her attempts to raise her own profile to a pseudo celebrity status, I can not understand why she alone has assisted with the issuance of more PR pieces and conducted more media interviews than every other head of our security agencies combined, if you’re doing that job correctly we never have to here from you at all.
Though she actively engages in promoting ISIS’s terror campaign via repeated admissions about the nature of her organisation’s work, I don’t believe she would see herself as a terrorist and yet after every interview she gives, and after every statement she makes, I feel more afraid, more anxious and more terrorised than before:
Kitteridge said the rise of IS, along with other geopolitical tensions in Russia and the South China sea, had created a sense of instability that seemed unprecedented.
[…]
“There are people who are drawn to that because it is brutal and sickening…there are people watching it, getting excited saying what they would do.
[…]
“There are people who would be looking at this saying ’this is great, and let’s see what we could do that would be similar’…”
[…]
“it’s absolutely true that there are people who discuss this”.
Either Rebecca Kitteridge is desensitised to the extent that she doesn’t realise she is actively acting as an unwitting conduit for the terror that ISIS wish to spread, or she knows exactly the effect it would have on more vulnerable members of society.
she talks about “crowd-sourced terrorism”, a new term to describe lone-wolf acts of terrorism conducted by people who show no intent, after exhortation by Isis on the internet.
[…]
"That is the explicit message and it is to attack the West."
If an attack is carried out on New Zealand soil the first question I will have is whether it could have been prevented and whether the head of SIS’s time wasted playing celebrity book club and national scaremongerer - and all the preparation that goes with it - for the good folks at home could have been the crucial difference.
“Sean Connery, classic, he’s the one and only Bond for me.”
She likes John le Carre and the novels of Stella Rimmington, the former head of Britain’s MI5."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11351368
I suggest that she is so institutionalised that she has lost touch with who she is issuing these statements to and for that matter who she represents
-
Polity: Saudi sheep: Misappropriating…, in reply to Alfie,
there will always be 40% of the population who believe what he says, no matter how odious or obvious the lies.
I’m not so convinced that 40% are that gullible or even care that much, the choice they’re presented with at this stage is someone who sounds effortlessly natural:
Key said bars could apply for permission within the existing law, but it was expensive and bureaucratic.
When told by reporters that the Green Party would block the Bill, Key said “I thought they probably would”.
“It’s just par for the course, isn’t it.”
The Greens were “always opposed to anything that’s sort of vaguely good fun”.
Or someone who sounds unconvincingly try hard and possibly a liability to himself and others:
Andrew Little said he personally supported it.
“There’s hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who enjoy a tipple, usually when watching sporting games and they do so responsibly,” Little said.
“This is a tournament that happens once every four years and it’s totally in keeping with social intercourse that they have a drink.”
Little said if he was in a pub at 5am and the All Blacks were winning he wouldn’t say no to a drink.
“If we’re losing I’d probably have two beers at 5am."
When the average punter is probably somewhere here (comments):
scarymonsters 22 hours ago
"To all the people trying to make the link between watching the RWC in a pub and getting smashed, it’s about just being able to watch the game in a social atmosphere. I have Sky, but for the big sport events I like to go out with my mates at watch it with other people. I’ve had plenty of breakfasts at The Fox watching the Champion’s League final. I wasn’t drinking at 8am, just enjoying the atmosphere amongst friends."
-
Hard News: Judicial caprice is no way to…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
The more effective anarchistic actions in my experience are the novel approaches.
Totally. With regards to the kauri, at the time I kept trying to calculate the size of the forest if all those hours spent climbing, petitioning and liking on facebook were instead devoted to planting, but it's not like kauri grow on trees.
Similarly with the pohutakawa 6, when their cuzzies ask them about things the trees usually mumble something about being jammed between a road and a carpark, limited space to root, constant noise, vibration and exhaust fumes, a pretty shit quality of life truth be told but they're stoked that they're valued enough in that state to be kept until the rot sets in.
-
Hard News: Judicial caprice is no way to…, in reply to Amanda Wreckonwith,
yeah...
-
Hard News: Judicial caprice is no way to…, in reply to Amanda Wreckonwith,
targeting the prosecutor is no different to what these people already do
To be clear, what I am weary of is that for any protest movement there is always a ready supply of opponents prepared to step up and dismiss it as ‘misinformed’ and reduce the act of protest to its criminal outliers. This type of analysis sits well with those who would subvert democracy by suppressing the right to freedom of assembly.
On the one hand I’m not convinced that boycotting/ picketing the firm would be the most effective avenue in the grand scheme of things but on the other hand I totally support any person’s democratic right to peacefully protest according to their beliefs without beating up an equivalence between their cause and another and/or an equivalence between peaceful protest and crime. Especially in this instance where those participants likely to gravitate towards this kind of protest would most likely be that breed of stoners who don’t throw them.
-
Hard News: Judicial caprice is no way to…, in reply to Amanda Wreckonwith,
One would expect that he’d be able enough as a lawyer to distinguish public protest from assault/willful damage/threatening to commit offences - not to minimise the seriousness of what you have experienced but to accurately respond to Katherine's position in this context.