Posts by commie mutant traitor
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I think I'll vote Maori again this time
That's just throwing away your vote. They'll get more electorate seats than the party vote entitles them to anyway, so voting for them isn't much better than voting for National. They're not especially reliable on policy, either.
the paddling-without-getting-his-shiney-shoes- wet poster
Ah yes, the "oops, what did I just tread in?" billboards... they were amusing.
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Does anyone else find this extraordinary?
I wish I did. It's highly amusing, certainly, and should absolutely be front page news, but it doesn't surprise me.
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I hate the idea of voting for them, but I’m terrified that if we don’t the Nats are back
Then vote Green; it will keep the Nats out just as well, and the more votes they get, the more they'll be able to pull Labour slightly closer to the right (ie left) direction. If we had an actual democracy, I'd recommend voting Alliance as another good option.
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And it's a strawman argument which I really shouldn't have bothered defending anyway; as pointed out earlier, the orange jumpsuits are worn in NZ prisons.
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That doesn't change the fact that occam's razor appears to be on the other side from you. You need to discard that argument.
As far as I'm aware, occam's razor is on my side; in the absence of any actual planning, the simplest explanation for a statement that the prime minister should be killed is that it's no more of a genuine threat than all the other similar statements being made in private conversations between ordinary people all the time.
It's the argument that no one who is yet to be found guilty should be denied bail.
Who's making that argument? I've only said the majority of these 17 should have been bailed straight away, based on what I know of the people involved and the evidence reported to date, and that bail shouldn't be denied without very good reason.
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Isn't the simplest explanation for someone saying they're going to kill a prime minister while on their way to a training camp where people fired weapons, that they were planning to do it?
Perhaps, though it would be more likely if they were on their way to where the prime minister actually was. However, nobody has said they are going to kill a prime minister - the quote said somebody should, which is quite different.
No doubt you have a history of railing against the bail system, which does this all the time for 'garden variety' criminals
Refusing bail is justified in some cases, but not many, and not this one (at least for the majority). According to the statistics I could find, only 3.3% of defendants are remanded in custody throughout the case, and
that doesn't include cases which never get to court. -
It wasn't comical enough to get everybody bailed before the possibility of its use in court was struck down by the SG.
It should have, for most of them. That's a failure of the courts.
According to Scoop, "it would be reasonable to suspect that two of the individuals are responsible for a large chunk of the "disturbing" things that have been reported" - that's just <b>two</b> out of the 17 who gave some indication of possibly becoming a threat at some point in the future, though in all probability wouldn't have actually done anything in the absence of any wider support even if they'd really wanted to.
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these people are self-described "activists"... they already have a history of taking action to publicize / support their beliefs. They are people already shown to do what they say.
Some of them are activists, and we don't know to what extent the published quotes overlap with that subgroup, if at all. And they have a history of taking <b>peaceful</b> action and saying they oppose the initiation of violence.
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Here some people were arrested using legally obtained warrants supported by 150 pages of evidence
Most of which is "comical".
there have been no allegations of beatings
Except Jamie Lockett's hospitalisation.
they've had prompt access to their lawyers
Except when they haven't.
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
I <b>can</b> claim that they shouldn't have been locked up for a month before the trial, though. People should not be punished for unknowns.
You're suggesting that this is the same thing as the military extra-judicial detainment of prisoners captured in Iraq and Afghanistan?
No, nobody is suggesting that; Guantanamo is clearly much worse. But there's a spectrum between "the same thing" and "totally dissimilar".
The people arrested here spent about as much time in jail as Paris Hilton
The difference being that she didn't serve her time till after she'd been tried and sentenced.
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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
Note that Minto's statement is in relation to Rongomai's bail hearing, so presumably the evidence in question consisted only of material involving Rongomai. It's very likely that none of the quotes published by the Dominion Post were aired in court that day.