Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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<i>On Iceland: I am setting an assignment for my students on the Icelandic film industry</i>
I thought Jar City was awesome. And how about those Romanian film makers? Those guys are on fire.
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I find it highly encouraging that the most articulate and damaging criticism of Obama comes from the liberal blogosphere - Atrios and Krugman, for starters. Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo has been the main driver of the AIG bonus story. Meanwhile the right are still chasing after Obama's birth certificate and demanding to know if he's a 'stealth muslim'.
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Actually in my pretend future it’s ‘Lord Christie’, but I’m not sure how that relates to whether or not we have a titular honours system in New Zealand
I think some sort of military honorific - Field Commander Christie, or possibly Rear Admiral Christie - is more probable.
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Sky taketh away, but they also giveth. Check out their political donations in 2005.
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For those who like such pastimes, I did actually attempt to discuss the Iraq elections in good faith on Kiwiblog this morning.
And then: Redbaiter ...
Ten thumbs down! Boo-yah! Take that RB!
And in all fairness, Redbaiter was there first. It's practically his house.
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n reality, Murray McCully's can't-you-see-I'm-trying-to-have-a-holiday performance as foreign minister has been embarrassing.
I'm curious to know what this is in reference to. McCully has spent most of the last week in PNG and the Solomon Islands, attending the Pacific leaders forum and visiting the RAMSI mission respectively, both reasonable things for the Foreign Minister to be doing. I haven't heard any snarky gossip from anyone who went along on the trip about McCully's behavior - do you have inside gossip?
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That they called their new company 'Yellow' (word association: cowardice, urine) tells us everything we need to know about the quality of leadership and decision making going on down there.
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Moore is on record stating that he specifically designed Watchmen to show what comics can do that books and movies cannot. He's baffled as to why anyone would want to turn it into a movie when he went out of his way to write something unfilmable.
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So do we hold them accountable when things go wrong or not?
Do we hold surgeons accountable? The stakes are the same (life or death) and they kill a lot more people than the police do.
The answer is that sometimes we do and sometimes we don't, depending on the circumstances. Sometimes people make stupid mistakes and need to be held accountable but sometimes they were trying to do their best in an impossible situation at which point we accept that the world is an imperfect place in which horrible things sometimes happen.
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The problem here isn't the shooting - I absolutely believe that people should be able to defend themselves by whatever means necessary, and that people who can't defend themselves should be defended by others - the problem here is that they hit the wrong guy.
What would happen if I did that? They'd throw the bloody book at me.
I'm not a surgeon, so if I perform an operation on someone and they die the authorities would throw the book at me - but our laws allow for medical doctors to cut people up, just as they allow police officers to use deadly weapons around civilians.
If a patient dies because a surgeon is careless then that person is legally liable but if the patient dies because the operation is really hard and the patient is really sick then we accept that horrible things sometimes happen.
In this instance the police were dealing with a hostage situation in moving traffic on a crowded roadway - its hard to imagine a more difficult situation. If the investigation determines the AOS acted in a careless manner then I'm all for the officer being prosecuted, but we also have to accept that if we give police the right to shoot at people in public things are occasionally going to go wrong and horrible things will happen as a result.