Posts by Pete George
-
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Russell Brown,
Russell, I think it was you who introduced that particular topic:
http://publicaddress.net/system/cafe/hard-news-never-mind-the-quality/?p=320974#post320974I was asked to link to proof that Hager got some things wrong in his book but didn't mention "the topic" in that.
Do you believe David Farrar's claim that Hager got that part of his book wrong (the topic being discussed at the time)?
-
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to nzlemming,
And, if you’d read the book
And if you read what I said you would have seen that I have read it, and the data dump, and that I said much the same as you said, and SteveH said.
It seems like you both are jumping to diss before you think.
It’s not often I recommend dumping someone from PAS but does Pete George really add any value to the discussions?
I guess it depends on what you value in your discussions. But that's a pretty sad (albeit not unusual) sort of comment for a political forum.
-
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Russell Brown,
FFS Russell, no I haven't addressed all the issues raised in the book. Have you?
but you’ve on and on and one about the peripheral issue of who organised the party they were going to
I don't believe I've done that at all.
-
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to giovanni tiso,
I can't see anything in the book or the dumps that says all that.
Hager wrote "The documents do not contain the texts and we do not know they exist. There is also no evidence that a direct threat was made to Hide".
I remember the Whale Oil posts but there is no evidence that Hide read them. At a time that he was fighting for his political career it's possible he didn't spend time reading blogs.
I don't see where Lusk says he had "done it".
This is one of a number of examples where Hager has fitted some communications with a story but says "there were of course various political pressures on Hide".
There is no evidence that I've seen of what prompted Hide to resign. I think there's far more chance it was due to conversations within the ACT Party.
-
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to giovanni tiso,
Plus, you know, we actually have the messages exchanged between Lusk and Slater about the Hide blackmail, and no-one is disputing their veracity. So either they were lying to each other, or…
That shows that they discussed doing it, nothing more. Hide has said it didn't happen and there are no facts to indicate that it did actually happen is there?
-
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Russell Brown,
Sorry if I’ve missed it Pete, but have you at any point devoted any of your unending outrage towards the actual hideous content of that rape conversation? Or expressed sympathy for the young women being targeted by these creeps?
I've addressed that particular issue extensively over time Russell, often being attacked for it. In fact I was banned from Whale Oil for going and confronting their attitude to rape and Tania Billingsley. This is what I posted there:
http://yournz.org/2014/07/12/why-theres-anger-murray/How often have you gone and stood up to them Russell?
-
Rodney Hide has emphatically disputed what Hager said about him being blackmailed.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/election-2014/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503581&objectid=11309981David Farrar has just posted:
I was not the organiser of the party, and was not a party to the conversation. Yet Hager published this as fact. It is reasonably defamatory as various people have smeared me over it.
Now this e-mail is presumably why Hager thought I was the organiser. But he gets it totally wrong. They are laughing at the fact that someone thinks I am the organiser. This is the problem where you write a book on stolen e-mails, and don’t verify, fact check, or interview a single person for it.
If Mr Hager is doing reprints of his book, I would appreciate it if he could make the appropriate corrections.
And perhaps this is a lesson to everyone out there, not to take everything in the book at face value. If he has got this wrong, what else has he got wrong? Again this is what happens when you don’t verify anything or give people a chance to respond.
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2014/08/how_hager_got_it_wrong_on_the_princess_party.html
There are a number of insinuations that are not based on facts.
A journalist would do their job thoroughly and factually enough that they wouldn't be concerned about injunctions.
-
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
while the third is an internationally-respected investigative journalist.
Yes Hager is "an internationally-respected investigative journalist" to some degree. There's a number of claims this is not his best work by a long shot. He doesn't seem to have checked out any of his claims with those he has effectively accused, not a good practice for a supposed journalist.
who has never had a single fact in any of his books successfully challenged.
Really? Hager admitted he got the moving prisoner claim wrong in his current book and that he shouldn't have included it. That caused a flurry of accusations for a day or two.
Mostly he has just quoted selected parts of conversations with insinuations - that's a common form of dirty politics where it's difficult for those targeted to prove they haven't done something.
-
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Rob Stowell,
And that doesn’t worry you? Fine. That makes you part of the problem.
Don't answer your own question for me.
It's obviously a problem that more and more people get turned off by dirty politics. That's why I try to address the problems across the board, not selecting one side or the other.
Most parties are relatively clean, coincidentally (or not) Greens, Conservatives, Maori Party, ACT and UF all increased in today's NZH poll.
National, Labour and NZ First all have histories of running dirty, smearing, lying campaigns. Being selective about who is worse or not diverts from the issue - they all need to be challenged to leave last century politics behind.
It's very disappointing Key hasn't stepped up and condemned what has come out over the past couple of weeks.
It appears that Cunliffe and Labour are trying to rise above it with their Vote Positive approach, as long as they walk the walk. It doesn't help when Goff stirs up historical dirty stuff when his own hands aren't clean, and Grant Robertson can't help dabbling still either, he learnt too much from working with Helen Clark.
I don't think Peters will change but probably won't last much longer.
How about building a campaign to pressure all parties and MPs to improve behaviour? I know many MPs hate the current levels of dirt and disrespect but obviously have difficulty confronting and containing the entrenched habits of a few.
-
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to SteveH,
I don’t think the idea that “everyone is doing it” is valid – if it is then please provide some examples from the left
Phil Goff has revived his history of leaking and using people in his office to leak to leak to try and damage opponents and lying about it.
Not as bad as Whale Oil but not dissimilar to some of the things Slater and National are accused of.
Helen Clark was a well known leaker, even using this to dump on her own MPs.
And Garner has posted today:
Voters are looking for something else to talk about. I’ve been in David Cunliffe’s electorate today. So many voters told me they think all politics is dirty and all politicians don’t tell the truth. A number of people told me they don’t care for the Dirty Politics book or care for dirt at all. They are sick of it.
Many and probably most people just see all parties and politicians generally as dirty players and liars. The degree of dirt and the number of lies matters little to them.