Posts by Stephen R
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Hard News: The Midterms, in reply to Emma Hart,
Sorry. I have lost all sense of proportion.
I'm not sure you have. I think the US has. I don't understand their attitude to voting suppression as anything other than "we won't win if we play fair, so we'll cheat, and we don't care who knows it"
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Angela Hart,
we can have hope that the Police will obey the law in future.
Nice theory. I'm betting that none of the police involved are going to be paying the fines and costs from their own pockets, and if they'd succeeded in figuring out who Rawshark was, they'd be getting pats on the shoulder from their bosses.
Socialised costs and privatised profits?
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Hard News: The miserable archive, in reply to Moz,
Note the US has implemented the obvious version of this policy: it applies to everyone, not just the criminally poor.
I'm aware of cases where drug dealers were couriering drugs to houses they expected to be empty during the day, and then picking the package up before the owners got home. The police found out and raided the place to be able to confiscate the house. (they looked up the house valuation on a real estate site before the raid). The police kicked the door in and shot the owner dead.
Then they found out they had the wrong address. There wasn't even drugs couriered there without the owners knowledge - that was next door...
But next door wasn't worth as much.
The asset forfeiture rules in the US around drugs are used in evil ways.
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I was called for jury service in a trial of a skinhead allegedly assaulting someone. The Prosecution objected to me.
The Prosecution!!!
Male pattern baldness does not equal sympathy for skinheads!
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Having a quiet drink with friends last night, we all remarked how the difference between this year and last year is a feeling of Hope. The Prime Minister's message at Waitangi felt like a description of a path to a better future. A path for everyone.
I'm pretty pleased with that idea.
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Hard News: All Change, in reply to Ianmac,
On one blog last night a number of members turned to watch Hosking because of the entertainment of his expected meltdown. He delivered! A Caricature of Hosking. Very very funny if you like that sort of humour.
I went to see Waru last night, and the bit with the Mike-Hosking-Analog was such a horrible person that I wanted to punch him in the face. But then, the real Mike-Hosking is a sufficiently horrible that I just turn off the media device when I encounter him.
So, pretty close to true life then.
Incidentally, Waru is pretty fantastic. Powerful, and heart-rending and I enjoyed the 1 cut per story arc limitation (though I found myself distracted sometimes by wondering "how did they do that? Did they have someone with a steady-cam holding on tight to the front of the car?"). If you get the chance, go see it.
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to Dennis Frank,
The Rongotai party vote ran Labour 44%, National 28%, Green 18%, TOP 5%, NZF 4%. Seems quite a hefty bias here against the cabinet minister Chris Finlayson. Have the locals have been irritated by all those treaty claim settlements he has masterminded resolution of? Peculiar. Why punish someone who is righting all those historical wrongs? A hotbed of racism?
You do know Annette King held that electorate for yonks, right? She was pretty well liked, and campaigned very well. I don't even remember who the new Labour candidate was (and it's my electorate) but I wouldn't be surprised if they're benefiting from a long history of the electorate voting Labour. Chris Finlayson felt parachuted in a couple of elections ago, and never really caught on as far as I can tell.
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Hard News: Our own fake news, in reply to nzlemming,
They really don't think these things through, do they?
Technically, with the revival of this programme and an honest belief that a crime has been committed, any FBI agent can now seize all of the Trump family's assets.Nah, the way asset forfeiture works is they take usually just enough to make it worth it, but not enough that the court costs to recover it won't be more. The side effect of that is that poor (often non-white) people with difficulty maintaining bank accounts have their cash nicked without comeback (Oh, you're carrying cash - must be for drugs.)
Trump (currently) has enough money to pay lawyers to fight it.
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Legal Beagle: A war crimes inquiry; or…, in reply to william blake,
They were expecting opposition and interpreted innocent civilian action incorrectly because of the misaprehended context.
My impression is that the SAS got the right houses for the people they were looking for (the ones that had been shooting at NZ soldiers a few days earlier) but that the actual combatants expected that someone might come for retribution, and had disappeared off into the hills to lie low. Only non-combatants were left behind, but the SAS didn't know that. So the SAS were in the right place, just the people they were hunting weren't.
In a situation where the SAS are expecting to be shot at (and using night vision gear which isn't nearly as good as Hollywood would have us believe,) I can totally see how they'd be inclined to see what they expect when someone heads towards them (someone who doesn't have NVG and so doesn't know they're headed towards the soldiers until the soldiers start shooting).
At the point when the shooting starts, the difference between how innocent people trying to get away from danger and combatants trying to get away from danger behave is probably hard to distinguish in the dark using NVGs.
Bit hard on the civilians though.
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Legal Beagle: A war crimes inquiry; or…, in reply to nzlemming,
After reading Jon Stephenson's rebuttal, I think some comms idiot gave Keating appalling advice. JS makes it clear that the two villages named in the book are part of the area that Keating names. Someone's in trouble at NZDF...
I just can't understand why, having had their arse handed to them last time they accused Jon Stephenson of lying/being wrong, that they chose this response to the book. It just makes them look stupid.