Posts by Thomas Beagle
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Hard News: Trump's Dummkopfs, in reply to Conal Tuohy,
To put it more succinctly: Trump is the symptom, not the cause.
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Allow me to be the first to #notallboomers
Like #notallmen it's both accurate and completely missing the point.
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Hard News: The Police Ten 7 State, in reply to Thomas Beagle,
I put that a little more forcefully on the NZ Council for Civil Liberties website: http://nzccl.org.nz/content/police-control-information-anti-democratic-and-must-stop
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I am shocked by this report.
The Police hold a lot of power in our society and the need for transparency and oversight is accordingly great. The Police actions are contrary to the principles of open government and the Official Information Act and must cease immediately.
I am even more concerned that multiple people in the Police hierarchy have conceived of, approved of, and applied these policies. By blocking transparency and seeking to control what is said about them, they have demonstrated contempt for democratic government. They have shown that they are not fit to hold their positions.
The Police Minister must take strong action to fix this problem and clean the rot out of the Police.
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I'm really looking forward to see how Christchurch votes in the general election as I think this will be the real indicator of how they feel about the National government's rebuild efforts.
Anyone want to predict whether Christchurch voters will vote for National more, less, or about the same as the rest of the country?
(And yes, this is a comment about politics in relation to a national disaster, but politics is how the country decides what is important and what we should spend our collective resources on.)
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I'm feeling pretty happy with my submission to the Law Commission that a) where possible, protections for journalists should be extended to everyone, and b) if they're not available for everyone, they should be available to anyone "acting in the role of a journalist" regardless of whether it's their 1st or 1000th article.
http://techliberty.org.nz/new-media-submission-opposes-media-regulation/
Of course, they ignored it. :)
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I bet you were really thinking "Sphere of Effluent", right?
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I'm still giggling at: "Apologies to Russell for going the way of The Listener in terms of subject matter. The good news is that my house hasn’t made me fat."
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I'm going to quote myself (because no one else will do it!) from something I wrote in 2008 ( http://thomasbeagle.net/2008/06/03/a-climate-change-manifesto/ ):
"That humanity would rather ride the spiralling corpse of the current ecosystem down into the abyss than voluntarily give up the modern consumer life style."
The sad thing for me personally is that I've had a kid since then and when I contemplate their future I feel our collective failure even more keenly.
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Damn all Aucklanders and their oh-so productive feijoa trees!
(I think we're going to get two wee feijoas on our Wellington trees this year. Maybe next year...)