Posts by Finn Higgins
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Not for one moment putting any weight in the accusation but to support a person isn't the same as to condone their actions.
Russell why is it you want the evidence to come out prior to judgement but in the next breath support Bombers accusations?
Do you even read the stuff you post?
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For a minute here I thought I was back in the terrorism thread but everybody had swapped sides...
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Rich: You reckon? In the 1960s and early 1970s there was, in Northern Ireland, a functioning movement for peaceful change similar to that which was effective in bringing an end to officially-sactioned discrimination in the US and which helped end British occupation of India, a far more valuable bit of the empire to the British than Northern Ireland. It was only after Bloody Sunday that armed struggle became the preferred vehicle for change in the catholic/republican community. Bloody Sunday was a totally dispicable act by the British armed forces, but the reaction of turning to the IRA with open arms was, in my view, a terrible and costly mistake. Non-violent resistance worked just fine for Martin Luther King and Ghandi, I'd rather have seen that given a better shot rather than the decades of pointless tit-for-tat violence which occurred through the 1970s, 80s and parts of the early 90s.
It's also worth mentioning that for most of the troubles the IRA were heavily if not primarily funded by only-very-slightly-Irish Americans who for some reason had this idealised picture in their head of a "just war" fought by "our boys" against the evil colonialists. They spent plenty of time living remotely from the violence they were helping to fund, all the while kicking around minimisations and justifications remarkably similar to the ones you might find reading back through this thread. Their money went into buying weapons that killed substantial numbers of Irish people, enabled highly dubious paramilitary organisations to take up a role in running (and taxing) Northern Irish organised crime and held up the process of reaching peaceful settlement for decades.
Not only that, the climate of distrust and fear that the 70s IRA campaigns generated on the British mainland resulted in the beginning of some of the stupid anti-terror laws we're seeing around the Western world today and helped stir up increased levels of anti-Irish racism and official mistreatment in Britain.
I really, really can't see any justification for the violence that happened. It resulted in a whole load of shitty results for Northern Irish people and was heavily funded, supported and justified by people who were safely remote from any negative side-effects of their actions.
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Does that run on Linux?
Keep your white liberal guilt away from me!
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I think this really all ultimately boils down to a conflict between the core structural concepts of object oriented and aspect oriented thinking patterns. Possibly a functional approach to considering the problem could contribute some real positive results also, but I think in terms of communicating effectively with urban Maori one really needs to keep object encapsulation carefully in mind and ensure proper separation of the model, view and controller. And while object-relational mapping may be the Vietnam of our time, at least by trying to resolve these issues we're stopping it becoming the Guantanamo Bay-meets Dresden of our time!
I'm also a big fan of Neal Stephenson's writing and really think we should try to keep in mind his ideas about "meme hacking" and the metaverse, which could really help us nail this issue down to the brass tacks!
Creon - I'm a big fan, love your work.
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Oh, and to those who complained of the analogies with Gitmo. This is what is known in rhetoric as hyperbole. It has a pedigree going back thousands of years.
Just to engage in some rhetorical hyperbole for a minute, so does rape, murder and state oppression of the working masses. I'm not sure that people having done things for a long time is any argument of merit.
Sadly so does attempting to control a debate by disallowing your opponents devices you use yourself, but it's not as nice.
If you catch me doing this then feel free to call me out specifically on it. I'm not being snarky, that's a genuine request.
And to address your hypothetical post about just war: I'm very dubious of the idea of a "just war" in the first place. The US arguments in favour of the Iraq war have been roundly discredited by events subsequent to the invasion. Far from the liberating freedom the US claimed they were bringing the country has instead plummeted into insecurity, unemployment, death, human rights violations and hatred on an even worse scale than when Saddam was in power, which is saying something.
Similarly, the argument for a "just war" against the British in Northern Ireland was more compelling than it is for Tuhoe here. There was specific and open ingrained discrimination in the governance of the country. When Bloody Sunday turned public opinion towards belief in a war there was certainly a far more compelling case for claiming the state had overreacted to their peaceful protests with violence. But again, all the troubles achieved was decades of tit-for-tat killing, death of innocent people and hatred. It was only when the populace started caring more about peace than about "just wars" that progress could again be made towards a country everybody could live in.
In New Zealand those arguments are even weaker than they were in both examples above. Quite simply, both Tuhoe are not subject to violent state oppression in the way that either Iraq or pre-troubles Northern Ireland were. And since both of those examples worked out crap anyway I don't think there's much argument that a war by Tuhoe would be positive for anybody involved. That's my argument, anyway. And it's not to say that Tuhoe don't have legitimate things to ask of New Zealand, but picking up guns is just asking for a trip down the same path of bloody history that numerous other countries have gone down in the past.
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Offering yourself as some kind of don't-frighten-the-chooks events management consultant comes across as playing Colonel Blimp on stilts. Just stating the obvious to all but the terminally self-important.
Well, if you could indicate me offering myself as such that might be relevant. Instead I was doing something you seem to have a bit of difficulty with: discussing issues rather than being insulting. Would you care to argue a point in my post that you took issue with rather than just repeatedly being a dick?
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Refusing bail is justified in some cases, but not many, and not this one (at least for the majority).
You keep asserting this, but just saying it doesn't make it true. Do you have access to all the evidence that was presented at those hearings? We've heard some of it, and it sounds pretty damning that people would even keep talking to people saying this kind of stuff, let alone hang out and fire guns with them.
I'm sure there are a small number of people (2-5 sounds reasonable) who might qualify for the "totally fucking crazy" label, but that doesn't mean that being less than totally crazy should qualify people for immediate release while charges are still being prepared.
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Most of which is "comical".
It wasn't comical enough to get everybody bailed before the possibility of its use in court was struck down by the SG. Who in turn described it as "disturbing".
Except Jamie Lockett's hospitalisation.
Which was done by another prisoner. Not good, clearly, but far from official torture or deliberate mistreatment.
Except when they haven't.
That's still far, far better than you'd expect were you actually in a situation comparable with Guantanamo Bay. Again, not ideal - but not extrajudicial detention in a legal black hole off the shores of the country.
I can claim that they shouldn't have been locked up for a month before the trial, though. People should not be punished for unknowns.
It was not punishment, it was a denial of bail. That is a choice the court makes based on evidence, not a whim of the police. It is also part of NZ's normal, democratically-decided legal processes. Don't like it? Come up with a better suggestion for a system to protect the public. I had my house burgled a few years ago by a guy who was due in court the next day on over 140 outstanding charges. Are you suggesting that bail should be automatic for all people arrested? Or that there should be a better system for deciding who gets it? What's your better system? Have you had it legally reviewed? Campaigned for it? You're quite able, in NZ.
No, nobody is suggesting that; Guantanamo is clearly much worse. But there's a spectrum between "the same thing" and "totally dissimilar".
That's correct, and this particular case falls under "totally dissimilar". If you examine the reasons why people have been protesting and arguing against Guantanamo Bay and then compare them to this case I doubt any one of the substantial points against Guantanamo could be considered to directly apply. The only way you can get even any of them to look moderately close is by either twisting and exaggerating the happenings in NZ or completely diminishing the severity of the plight of those held in Guantanamo Bay.
The difference being that she didn't serve her time till after she'd been tried and sentenced.
Fair enough. But "A month in a prison with access to legal representation under the normal rules of your country" is a much better description of what happened here than "Five years in a legal twilight with no access to due process, held off-shore by a country you weren't arrested in after being picked up by mercenaries". Their case is certainly not the same as Paris Hilton, but their experience and treatment by the legal system is about as atypical as hers.
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Why unjustified? In both cases people were locked up for extended periods without charge (the firearms charges didn't justify denial of bail), and mostly turned out to be innocent (12 of the 17 never expressed any desire to commit terrorist acts, let alone planned them). Fortunately the NZ version only dragged out for a month rather than years, but that doesn't make it ok.
WTF? This is nuts.
The complaint about Guantanamo Bay was that the people detained there were held in an extra-legal state in a military base deliberately off US soil, denied access to normal due processes of justice, denied all manner of rights normally assigned to prisoners etc... all of this done in a very dubious manner with respect to US obligations under international conventions. And it went on for years, and is still going on. Not only that, many of those detained were handed over by afghan warlords being paid by the head for "terrorists" rather than being investigated or arrested by any kind of proper authority.
Here some people were arrested using legally obtained warrants supported by 150 pages of evidence off the back of millions of dollars worth of hands-off observation by the police, there have been no allegations of beatings, sleep deprivation, unusual interrogation etc, they've had prompt access to their lawyers and they've been bailed as soon as the AG declined to approve terrorism charges. Their innocence or guilt is yet to be decided, so you can't claim that twelve of them have been proven to have acted in a manner undeserving of a month of jail just yet. That's simply an unknown until the evidence comes out, just as claiming they should rot in jail is unsupportable until the trial given the potential maximum sentences for their charges.
You're suggesting that this is the same thing as the military extra-judicial detainment of prisoners captured in Iraq and Afghanistan? Either you have no idea what was wrong with Guantanamo Bay (and don't really care to think about it either) or you're completely fictionalising your account of what happened in New Zealand.
The people arrested here spent about as much time in jail as Paris Hilton, that's a more far accurate comparison than those detained at Guantanamo Bay. Except she was detained for more minor crimes than illegal use of firearms. Sorry if my tone seems aggressive, but that's a disgusting and pathetic minimisation of a serious international issue.