Posts by Finn Higgins
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
In the same way, I think that people are refusing to believe that activists are being arrested for their beliefs in NZ and clinging to the idea that those in power have secret information that Tame Iti was going to nuke Auckland, or whatever.
Rich, as you might guess from my name I'm somewhat Irish - I say somewhat as I don't have the accent, but I do have the passport. More specifically, Northern Irish, from a Catholic family. I'm well aware of the circumstances you're discussing, and they're not even remotely applicable here. The British police and courts made some shocking fuck-ups in the 70s in a heavy-handed attempt to respond to REAL bombings that were killing real people. The public pressure on them to secure convictions for these bombings was massive, and the checks and balances intended to protect the public from corruption of the legal system by police officers failed spectacularly.
New Zealand does not have this environment. We are a peaceful place, and the general response of virtually everybody I know - including ex-cops, notably - has been one of surprise and a degree of incredulity at the possibility of home-grown terrorists. Quite simply, the police are going to have to confront and modify public expectations rather than merely submit to them in this circumstance. You are not discussing comparable situations at all.
Now, at the moment all we have is some known key facts. Some people have been arrested. Their cases are before the courts. Some aspects of their treatment appears to be a little irregular, but we're not privy to the evidence and neither side seems to be overly excited about giving it a public airing before the trial.
So in that circumstance leaping to the conclusion that activists are being arrested to have their views suppressed seems to be a massive and unsupportable leap of faith. Where is the evidence that this is the case? It's not that we're blinding ourselves to the evidence, it's that the evidence is not there. The evidence for the contrary is not there either, but at least somebody claims to actually have it.
-
Paul, your prior post listed "people being rounded up" as a complaint against the police - so forgive me if I didn't take that too seriously given that it is their job to round up people they believe they can demonstrate have been committing crimes.
Now, moving on to the outfits.. they were only worn in one specific part of the operation, in the location where most of the weapon-handling is seemingly alleged to have taken place. If they genuinely believed they were raiding a group of people training for an assassination or similar then a very cautious and substantial police approach to the area seems pretty reasonable, and it's not like those clothes are outfits they bought for the occasion from a fancy dress store. They're standard garb for those kinds of operations.
I don't see either of those complaints as reasonable. If the police believe the information they have then I think their garb and approach is pretty reasonable and I'd be quite happy with them arresting people. Whether their information is accurate is for the courts to decide.
The only remaining point from your two posts is the issue of the photographs at the roadblock. This is not a unique event, and it has happened before without this scale of protest. What's different this time?
-
secret stuff is going on, people are being rounded up, denied bail, people are being pulled out of there cars and photographed without warrants, police are going around dressed as ninjas - it just seems so, well, un-kiwi .I think the secrecy just pushes people buttons.
The secrecy does push people's buttons - it's pushing mine - but how they respond when their buttons are pushed is telling. Of those issues you listed above, which of those do you think are actually legitimate complaints against the police? And why?
-
the broader context of the relationship here between activists and police at the moment. Yesterday's protest has not come out of a vaccum (vacuum? I can never spell that word). Yes some of the protesters are "the usual suspects". It doesn't mean that they don't have a point when they express their concerns about the recent actions of police towards political activists.
Could somebody clearly articulate what exactly these perceived wrongs against the activist community actually are? And how they could have been avoided? There's been an awful lot of shouting, but without people making salient points about things that have actually happened it's a bit difficult to have a discussion of any issues. For example, it's hard to reasonably address the concerns of people who're claiming that political prisoners are being held by a police state in NZ. By any reasonable definition of either term those two assertions are false, so what's to address?
I mean seriously. There's people sitting there at that protest in orange boiler suits, claiming some kind of parallel with the goings on at Guantanamo Bay. That doesn't stand up to even a second of rational consideration of the facts. Is there any rational engagement to be made with people who, not to put too fine a point on it, are acting so stupidly and irrationally?
-
When travelling to the states they do ask about arrests not only convictions - so even if they drop charges now none of these guys are off to Disneyland anytime soon.
Since they were arrested on firearms rather than terrorism charges (of which none have yet been forthcoming) I think that might be less of an issue. The only use of the terrorism legislation so far has been its inclusion on the search warrants, and I don't think you're asked to declare those.
More of a worry would be that (given recently reported budgets for such things) the US can probably afford to have somebody reading the Herald who can add some names to a few lists somewhere.
-
Stephen, that stuff concerns me too - I think it's arguably the most worrying aspect of the whole affair that is being discussed in public by anybody with any meaningful direct involvement.
However, I do think it's unfortunate that the only opposition that's being fronted to this situation comes with some serious signal-to-noise problems. This is the single strong salient point the Indymedia et al crew have to work with right now, and yet they're largely blowing their chance at a wider hearing with a whole lot of their usual brand of over-excited paranoid hyperbole about political prisoners, police states, racist oppression, land confiscation and god knows what else.
I don't think that does the cases of the people involved any good whatsoever. All the fund raising appeals for them that have landed in my inbox have been exasperating in their lack of ability to avoid paranoid rambling that might just seem reasonable were the author living in Burma rather than New Zealand. Sticking to the facts and laying off the borderline delusional spin would be gold right now, and might help swing enough public support to get some light cast on the importance of proper and fair process in deciding what's actually been going on.
-
Being able to physically materialise abstract thought in symbolic form enabled writing and maths, without which science is impossible. That doesn't make all subsequent symbolic representations - whether maths equations or this thread or diagrams on the back of an envelope or whatever - art, but it does make them dependent on art.
And, for example, there are many forms of art that are dependent on technological innovations. Trying to claim that technology is dependent on art is as silly as the inverse - both are pretty clearly fairly innate parts of being human. Humans are differentiated from much of the rest of the animal kingdom by our ability to use tools and shape abstract thought into physical implementations. Sometimes the physical implementations are expressive or communicative - art. Sometimes they're practical - technology.
Trying to claim that only one of those approaches to expressing abstract thought can have an ongoing influence on culture is fatuous.
What next, are we going to start arguing over whether eating is more important than drinking?
-
Not only that, I think "smash" is a useless word when talking about ideas. It suggests that your mode of thinking is one defined by opposition and aggression, and that you're likely to be blind to even points of obvious, mutually beneficial agreement.
Ideas can be very substantial things. Ideas about society (and the actions and structures that result from those ideas) underly our ability to feed our kids and not get beaten on the streets by roaming gangs of thieves - and, all complaining aside, even the worst off in NZ are still doing pretty OK compared to some of the nastier bits of Africa in this respect. Things here could certainly be a shitload worse. So, trying to claim that "smashing" the prevailing thinking about society is somehow benign and non-threatening is pretty facile.
-
I'm also very suspicious of - or rather, more often that not just generally irritated by - any worldview that suggests smashing functioning-but-faulty systems in an attempt to institute perfect ones from scratch.
I'd personally observe from experience that if you're going to do anything creative you need to be able to contribute some positive ideas to the situations you find yourself in. If all your opinions about something are "X, Y and Z suck and should be smashed" then your opinions are worthless to anybody trying to actually get something of value done.
Just to pick one very objectively testable example of why this kind of stuff is destructive: There are many good explanations in the world of software development why "The big rewrite" - chucking out all this ugly, complicated, flaky code you have and starting from scratch with clean, clear perfection - pretty much never works and is largely a dumb idea. All this "Smash the state, smash capitalism" stuff seems to me to be the cultural equivalent of a big rewrite, and it seems stupid for most of the same reasons.
If you want some good practical explanations of why it's a very bad idea in software systems, try:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
http://www.chadfowler.com/2006/12/27/the-big-rewriteMany of those reasons seem spookily applicable to the kinds of extremist politics that require total social change as a starting point, too. Putting it simply: it's easier to think in terms of imagined outcomes than it actually is to deal with the practicalities of what you're suggesting.
-
if you wanted to assassinate a new zealand politician, why in the hell would you need a bunch of military weapons?
Well, you probably wouldn't, if you're talking about a practical solution to a practical goal.
But if you were a bit of a munter and fancied trying to raise your standing with some munter mates by presenting yourself as a revolutionary then running around in the woods with weapons would probably seem like a better idea than just planning to go whack some dude on the head with a hammer. It's all about the bling, yo... I mean, if you have training camps and IRA manuals then you can feel a bit special, if you just go bash somebody then people might get the wrong impression and think you're a murderer!
It's hard to claim that the extreme activist left doesn't have a bit of a soft spot for revolutionary chic, after all.