Posts by Stephen Judd
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the cops knew that Thomas had done it but couldn’t pin it on him.
I have trouble understanding how you can *know* something and yet not be able muster the evidence that substantiates it.
Now, I suppose it's comforting to feel that when the police fit someone up, their motivation is that they believe that person is guilty anyway. It would be an even worse state of affairs if they deliberately framed people they thought were innocent. But honest intent hides a dishonest claim. You don't need to be a professional epistemologist (paging Mr Dentith!) to be suspicious of a claim that you know something with certainty -- enough certainty to justify putting someone in jail for life! -- but you can't produce the evidence.
And yeah, this event along with the policing of the Springbok tour is what made me a skeptical child when it came to the police. Interesting that Ross Meurant figured in both these confidence-destroying exercises.
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Kumara Republic,
As for those who wished for prisons to be privately run, they should have been careful what they wished for – they seem more ‘Club Med’ than under the fully state-run system.
Dunno about that. But word on the street is that when that dude escaped from the new Mt Eden recently, he was able to do so because the alarm system wasn't working, even though it had been signed off. I could be wrong. But you know, when you make things a matter of contract with financial penalties, then mistakes can be treated as a cost of doing business. The discipline of business is real but it doesn't necessarily align with what we want in a public service.
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Ben Curran,
Ben, I think it's purely and simply that vengeance is an element in any penal code. There has to be some element of revenge in order that people are satisfied enough that they don't try to get revenge themselves. McVicar etc simply aren't satisfied with existing levels of vengeance.
As far as news coverage goes, appealing stories are easier to build on some emotions than others. Crime and vengeance is an easy angle, forgiveness and sympathy is not. I think McVicar's incredible productivity is one reason he gets lots of press coverage, but he's also giving a message that automatically adds drama and pull to a story. News stories are *stories*. You have a deadline. Why not see what he can give you? Unless there is someone at the Howard League who is as available and as adept at framing things in an emotionally appealing way, his side is always going to dominate irrespective of the merits of their argument. And I can also see it's potentially dangerous for journalists to aggressively police the soundness of the case someone is making before they decide to report on it. That would very much be a practice that could hurt as much as it helps.
On another note, I was hanging out this weekend with a mate who just took redundancy from Corrections; he's a former prison officer from Mt Eden. Some interesting stories about the spatial design of the new Mt Eden facility, which he had a look at (too many blind spots), and the number of stabbings in the first few months of operations. Another angle on the growth of the prison-industrial complex is that it's really shitty, dangerous work for the people employed in it too.
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Ah, tourism. Really, I think it's just common sense that if you are considering emigrating, you should visit first.
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Hard News: Time to move on, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I have to admit some admiration that the woman was able to recognise her own prejudice
I think the idea that middle class white women *in particular* are subject to unfair bias is itself a bit prejudiced.
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Jack, there's nothing stopping you making such OIA requests yourself...
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Hard News: Unwarranted risk, in reply to insider,
We the taxpayer don’t own any local lines.
That is an embarassing mistake on my part. Thank you. I can only plead some confusion stemming from largely public ownership of generation.
Maybe that ongoing intervention is creating more of a problem than it;s solving by distracting powercos from the basics?
I agree that the intervention we see isn't necessarily achieving its intended outcomes. But the scope and kinds of intervention is inherently limited by the current model too.
Ownership might be a disincentive in effective social intervention because govt will always be counting the dollar impact on its businesses around rule changes.
I think any intervention has complex effects on the government's financial position (eg, tobacco excise). I don't know that I find that particularly persuasive.
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A thing I would like to see discussed more widely is how a partial sale makes it enormously harder for a more interventionist government to use assets as instruments of policy.
Right now, we have citizens who are too cold and can't afford to be warm, and we own both generation and delivery of power. Using our ownership to solve the problem would require structural change, but since we do own the whole thing, the obstacles are purely political. Once we have even a partial sale, then the corporate structure is embedded and issues of compensation for private owners make it vastly more difficult.
Sales are about limiting the power of the Left and cementing the corporate governance model as the only legitimate model to operate any enterprise.
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Speaker: Who guards the guardians?, in reply to Moz,
I was talking more of the situations where “Tabloid Today” makes up something, gets forced to show a correction, then when it goes to resell/reshow that episode it no longer fits into a standard timeslot because the correction makes it too long.
OK, that makes sense. Though I reckon that if the schedule gets disrupted because of the need to run a correction, that's a powerful incentive to not do things that need correcting.
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Speaker: Who guards the guardians?, in reply to Moz,
but a 22 minute (half hour) story with even 2 minutes of corrections is going to be very hard to show on commercial TV.
I dunno, look at the success of the Daily Show and Have I Got News For You. In fact never mind that, look at the success of Fair Go. Imagine a Fair Go focussed on media. Done right, it could appeal.
I look at the Madison Police Blotter and think there is nothing that can't be made compelling.