Posts by Stephen Judd
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Yeah, I wouldn't be volunteering to go through US airspace if I had the terrorist label. I'm pretty sure that's one of the reasons the defence have been going for name suppression.
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Sad? I'd call it an insult, really. I think you're saying we are incapable of having a reasonable view because we reject counter-evidence. Boo to that proposition.
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That's Tze.
You'd better hope she doesn't see that or evil beams of focussed Mok-rage will probably bore the earth and erupt out your monitor.
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I'm amazed Clark didn't just stick with the standard "leave the police to do their jobs" line that all politicians should have written on a reference sheet for this kind of occasion.
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I don't understand how pot could possibly be 34% THC.
I mean, that would mean more than 1/3 of your pot was nothing but THC. And given that some of it has to be cellulose, some it has to be water, and that the sap must have other stuff in as well, I find that quite unlikely, except perhaps for the stickiest sticky bud ever.
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Aye.
But: "I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have seen what the Police have in terms of allegations."
Who has seen what they have in terms of evidence? The only report that I know is that one from John Minto I just quoted. (Spotted by the ever-vigilant Idiot/Savant on NRT, by the way, I'm just passing it along).
Bomber has the very valid point, also made by Finn Higgins earlier, that multiple issues are being confused here, and that people are being carried away into promising unconditional support that they may later regret.
At this point, I find the allegations unlikely. If the evidence is produced, I will have to eat my words and direct my ire at a totally different group of people - and I will.
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Andrew:
Re Rongomai Bailey:
The police opposed bail and were required to indicate the strength of evidence against him. It was a somewhat bizarre legal discussion which followed. It transpired the police had no admissible evidence to justify laying the arms charges. In fact, they had no direct evidence whatever that he had ever even touched a firearm of any sort. What they did have was evidence gained under surveillance which cannot be used as evidence on the arms charges.So here was a person arrested on gun charges but then detained on evidence inadmissible under our gun laws but admissible for denying bail for charges under the gun laws. Confused? I was.
So the police proceeded to spend the next 20 minutes or so reading what they regarded as the juiciest excerpts from the surveillance transcripts. These were obtained by bugging conversations in a car on a couple of road trips.
I'd like to record here the details of these transcripts but that evidence is suppressed. Suffice to say, these conversations were nothing one wouldn't hear on a Saturday afternoon at any gun club around New Zealand – even before the beer comes out.
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Andrew, re Jackson: consider his audience.
He said "We must not define our people as terrorists. We might not agree with their methods but there's no place for words like rebel, heathen or savage."
Now I could be wrong, but Jackson is a lawyer, and a clever cookie who wouldn't parse his utterances carefully.
He didn't say "they are not terrorists." He said not to use that word, or other negative words. And he said that to a Maori party meeting on a marae: in other words, he wasn't chastising the news media, he was talking to his political peers about strategy.
I guess I agree with you that Jackson could be hard up against the facts, when they come out; but I don't think that's an example of panties in a twist, it's an injunction to his audience to get control of the discourse.
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Actually, I understand why (or at least how) the judge decided to deny bail.
I was more thinking of the difficulty the accused's lawyers seem to have in getting access to their clients.
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.
That's why I wasn't at the march on Saturday. Not just because I have a problem with jugglers, but because the organisers seem unable to narrow their brief down to something I can say I honestly support.
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This shit is really concerning me:
"My client's case has been transferred to Auckland without his consent, he's been denied bail, he cannot speak to his lawyer, and whereas the Crown can gain access to the High Court to hear its appeal on the same day, my client has to wait over a week without even being given a date to hear his appeal," Mr Bott said.
If Graeme can spare any more of his time I would love to know whether this is normal.
(To me it would be unacceptable even if it were, but I'm interested in whether the "terror" accused are receiving normal treatment. The person concerned is the aquaintance of mine I referred to in an earlier thread.)