Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: A Work of Advocacy, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Ya, anyway all the good biffo happens in the station, where cops are the only witnesses.
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Lots of black-and-white analysis in here of a very grey problem.
Meh, sometimes things aren't as complicated as they can be made to seem.
why not? It's not hard. They have the votes to do anything they want, and we don't know which sections were amendments inserted at Labour's behest. National could've just put in an amended bill, since this was all done under urgency.
This would be done after having passed their own bill? I don't think they'd want to look like such fools. Indeed, I don't think they really want it to become bigger news, that they have used urgency for something like this. It would be the perfect example of why NOT to do that.
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to Sacha,
I hope they are ashamed of themselves.
Say what you really feel!
It’s possible that if Labour hadn’t voted for it, the government would have pulled the improvements and due to them voting against it would be worse law.
What 3410 said. It seems an unlikely scenario to me, that they would repeal their own bill, and introduce a shittier one, just to spite Labour for not bending over.
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Smoking anything seems likely to be a little bit harmful - bombarding tissue with large, very hot particles. I notice numerous side effects that couldn't be said to be good. But compared to so many other things we do, it's not high on the list of dangerous killers.
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Hard News: A Work of Advocacy, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yes, I knew she had other reasons. Apologies for the overstatement. She did seem especially grumpy about it when she said in her farewell:
Coincidentally, the day that I joined the [Redacted Place] and became unsure whether I could say exactly what I wanted on this forum without getting fired, was the day something happened in New Zealand that had me feeling sick to my stomach every time I checked my email and found no reply to a 'where are you?/are you okay?' callout to some of my activist friends. Good friends. Eventually, when the replies started coming with reports of raids of their homes and young families, and when the posts and discussions on Public Address showed their colours, it certainly drove home for me how far away I am from this country, and from the overall middle ground of this site, from its essential gut.
Peter
But what people in this thread seem to be saying is that it is incumbent on these filmmakers to observe standards of "objectivity" (whatever that is) that are routinely ignored by the MSM.
Can I trouble you for an example? I think you are mistaken, again. Most of the commenters seem to me likely to be highly sympathetic to the film, even though they will of course apply their own minds to what is shown and judge the impartiality that way.
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Hard News: A Work of Advocacy, in reply to Peter Calder,
because protest and dissent was an important part of social discourse.
It was and still is. But so is reasoned debate.
It looks like a good watch to me, I'd like to see it. The raids themselves provoked a heck of a lot of heated debate on both sides. IIRC we even lost one of our main bloggers, Tze Ming, over the way the disputes went (at least partially).
which some contributors to this thread apparently enjoy for entertainment value, but see as quite free of problematic implication.
I think you're mistaken about what the contributors feel about this. They just haven't expressed it enough, I guess. I personally hate these cop-propaganda shows, and watch them occasionally just to confirm that they're as bad as they promised to be.
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to linger,
In the MMP environment, parties can govern very effectively by negotiating in good faith with other parties
Yes, that's particularly true if these good faith negotiations involve their Opposition voting how they are told to by the government. Extremely effective. So effective, that any party that could swing that would seem like the natural party of government for as long as the Opposition allowed it. Hell, I might even vote for that party. Why not - voting against won't stop them getting in?
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Hard News: Dreaming of a world without evidence, in reply to Jeremy Eade,
It is bizarre. I don't like to smoke something that has so little history. It took many decades for the truth about the dangers of tobacco to be widely accepted - the baccy companies still deny it to this day. The virtual absence of any recorded incidences of deaths directly attributed to toxic effects of cannabis span many decades, and millions, if not billions, of users.
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Hard News: The file-sharing bill, in reply to Matthew Poole,
It's possible (and has happened) for the government to fail to pass legislation without bringing about an election
Technically, yes. But if it's failing to pass legislation, it is usually because its coalition is falling apart or it's internally divided, even.
I take 3410s point as hinting that failing to stop a bill is not the only reason to vote against it. That's an unlikely outcome anyway, even at the worst of times. You could vote against it because you disagree with it. Actually voting for it, is a traditional indicator of agreement. That's my understanding of what the phrase "vote for" means. If it doesn't, then I really don't get our parliament at all*.
Now sure, there is an argument that if you don't vote for this, then they'll do something worse. But that's rather undermined by the fact that "it won't stop the bill". They won't do something worse because the bill passes. What does happen, however, is that the Opposition is on record for having dozens of their members officially voting something they disagreed with into law. IF they disagreed. I can't actually know if they don't vote using the usual meaning of the phrase "vote for".
*Edit: A distinct possibility
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Hard News: A Work of Advocacy, in reply to Heather Gaye,
I find it especially cringeworthy when the narrator tries really hard to paint a dramatic picture of the poor munter as a heinous criminal, recklessly endangering all those that encounter him with his 20kph shuddering fumesome exhaust
It is interesting just how pathetic most of the things we get busted for in NZ are. Last time I watched it, I saw 3 busts before just getting sick of it. One was a poor old guy who changed lanes without leaving enough gap - $300 or so. Another was an old lady with a boot full of wood, that was not secure enough. They fined her a few hundred, and made her catch the bus home, in the middle of the night, somewhere miles from home in the rain. Another was a young Maori guy who wasn't wearing a seat belt. They took him down to the station and questioned him for ages, a massive long fishing expedition, from which they got zilch, because he had actually done nothing, except not updated his lifetime license to a photo one. Seat belts are for safety, presumably, which is sort of fair enough, except that most of the time they were questioning him at the car, both of them were practically standing on the motorway. He got a big fine too.
After each there was the little bit by the cop about how they'd just prevented some terrible thing from happening. The saddest thing was that they seemed to believe it.
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