Posts by UglyTruth
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
But it’s not about citizenship, it’s about deciding how the country should be run.
Citizenship has a deep influence on politics because of the security relationship between citizens and the state. Hopefully Dotcom's "moment of truth" will shed some more light on this.
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I think that your emphasis on the link between religious belief and the legal system is a kind of genetic fallacy, to put it mildly.
It's not just about origins. Blackstone describes how the common law survived the Norman conquest, and the religious role of the head of state of NZ should not be ignored either.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
While the "vast right wing conspiracy" of Slater, Farrar, and friends was only toungue-in-cheek, it doesn't change the fact that the far right, be it Slater, Lusk, and company, or the US neocons, have the most notoriety regarding dirty politics, and out of the NZ political parties National/ACT have the most to gain from it.
But to think that this means that the left is the preferred option would be a mistake. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
Politics isn't just about about the ideological differences between liberals and conservatives. A more meaningful view is the difference between statists and libertarians, in the NZ context this is the difference between the liberty of the common law and the statism of the civil government.
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“Only if you are an atheist, which is a more irrational position given the number of witnesses who support the idea of theism, and the fundamental difficulty in proving that they are wrong.”
That argument can be reversed to demonstrate the opposite, leaving you with two positions that are “more irrational” than the other.
No, the essential point is that you've got to be omniscient before you can truthfully deny that deity exists, but you don't have to be omniscient to truthfully state that you've witnessed something that is most simply explained as evidence of deity interacting with the world, eg fire and brimstone.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Moz,
Interesting that your god is so democratic. Most of them are more “my way or the highway”.
Understanding the connection between theism and English democracy involves going back the the advent of kings in the Judaic tradition. If it hadn't been a popular idea at the time then kingship would never have been implemented.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to tussock,
"Yes, common law isn’t static, but it’s not so fluid that it can disown its own source."
"I’m only interested in English common law, as it applies to NZ"
Right, but not it’s sources
Common law without its sources is hollow.
The connection to Christianity is unavoidable because of the common values which which originated in Judaic law and are found in the gospels, but there is also Christian doctrine which has no place in the common law.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." ~ Jefferson.
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Dirty, dirty shit.
Same shit, same day, but thirteen years ago.
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I’m pretty sure you did mention it when you quoted Blackstone
Yes. I avoid using the term “natural law” myself, but obviously I can’t change the fact that Blackstone did. The problem I see is that natural law is described in humanist terms, but the fundamental idea of the law of nature has nothing to do with humanism. Humanism originates with the civil state in the idea of homo humanus being distinguished from homo barbarus.
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“rational theists” is surely an oxymoron
Only if you are an atheist, which is a more irrational position given the number of witnesses who support the idea of theism, and the fundamental difficulty in proving that they are wrong.
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“We think you’ve been involved in corrupt politics.”
“Wasn’t us.”
“We have evidence that implicates your office.”
“It’s a beat up from the opposition.”
“But there’s an official inquiry!”
“We don’t talk about security intelligence.”“Here’s our petition: we request that you establish an impartial investigation and protect freedom of information”.
?!?
To be fair, what ActionStation is doing is raising awareness of the fact that this remains an issue, and that people do care and are willing to support moves to fix the problem. The fundamental problems, though, are that a petition is only a request, and no conventional political party has an interest in looking at any fundamental failure of the checks and balances that are supposed to prevent the misuse of institutional power.
An alternative response is to take responsibility for the situation and look at what has happened in the context of the security of New Zealanders who rely on corparate media for their information. Making sense of information from alternative sources is more of a challenge, but if you’re aware of NZ’s history regarding foreign allegiance and international security arrangements, then it becomes apparent that the state has no interest in extending the scope of an investigation to anything that could provide a meaningful interpretation of the actual cause or causes of the problems.
Unless New Zealanders educate themselves about the way that traditional security protocols influence day-today politics, any attempt to find a meaningful solution will be ineffective. To do this effectively involves maintaining a discipline of verification and rational analysis – of being able to source facts from experienced commentators and connect the dots without giving undue weight to your previous beliefs.