that said, the more of this stupid that keeps happening, the more the twisted version becomes true in the eyes of the NZ public.
while generally fans of regulation to keep both the powerful and the deviant from causing problems for everyone else, Kiwis are also quite big fans of Personal freedom. in a sort of apathetic 'you leave us alone and we'll leave you alone' kind of way, usually.
also not big fans of failures of justice or unfair processes. again, usually with a sort of detached attitude and 'cheering from the sidelines for the guy who's fighting the system to get it sorted out' kind of way...
thing is though, once something gets past that apathy... well, methods vary but stands tend to be taken and stuff changed.
cronyism is an issue here... but that's in the executive, not the judiciary.
cronyism is appointing your buddies to positions of high office regardless of their abilities or alignments, over both those more skilled and those more popular. (its neither democratic nor meritocratic.)
oddly, here-abouts, this only seems to affect current PMs and their favourites. everyone else has the choice of resigning or getting raked over the coals. (and even being the PM's favourite only gets you so much protection. and being the PM wouldn't do it either if we had GGs who actually did their damn jobs.... then again, if that were the case we wouldn't end up with such slimeballs in the job so often either. also, as the PM, they don't generally have to do anything that runs afoul of the system. it works in their favour most of the time and when it doesn't they can assign someone else to take the job and thus the fall. they'll quite happily lie to the public's faces though.)
the legislature and executive are pretty much lost causes. (if we somehow fluked out utterly and got a Strong governor/monarch willing to take a personal interest and got one of the more honest and idealist currently minor parties end up running things, the executive MIGHT be salvageable. maybe.)
yeah. you gotta watch out for the cops here sometimes: once they decide you're the one who did something they're not Always above manufacturing or mucking with the evidence to back it up... (that said, even when they do that they're Usually very good about getting the right person in the first place... but it still a problem.) they sometimes seem a bit obsessive about saving face to the point of not doing their jobs properly... but the judges are honest. only issue with them is sometimes stupidly light sentences for major crimes (which has less to do with the judges and more to do with how the system's set up.)... sometimes the Juries are easily mislead... sometimes they come out and do unexpectedly awesome things. (look up activists damaging a US 'spy base' and the court ruling there.)
also: I'm pretty sure that, here at least, quite a bit of noise would have been made over bias in favour of the cartels, if it were reported at all. that whole 'favour the underdog, favour our own' thing kicking in again. (there's an exception for actual criminals who have actually done something morally reprehensible, mind.)
I don't actually think anyone here who wasn't Already being an idiot (and i say that because i've yet to see someone on the side of the cartels who doesn't come across as a red-neck analogue or corporate shill) here would have objected to Judge Harvey continuing, whatever the (mostly US interest owned) press had to say about it.
i suspect Judge Harvey may well not have stepped aside had he not been sure his replacement was not in the pockets of the cartels.
it gets better, mind:
there's a fairly strong, getting stronger, and surprisingly mostly 'left' aligned, nationalist sentiment floating around NZ these days... and numbers one and two on the 'foreigner' front are, depending on the day and most recent news stories, China and the US (they swap places depending on what's going on.) that said, most people seem to have a positive opinion of Korea (south Korea, that is), Australia (so long as you're not talking banks or sports), and Canada... if they even bother thinking about it.
...
the other thing is, here at least, if it's worth going to court over, odds are very good that one party has massively more resources than the other.
in NZ, the small stuff goes to the disputes tribunal (doesn't even get in front of a judge unless you can't resolve it and the mediation becomes arbitration (or whatever the word is) and/or one party or the other fails to follow through on the resolution. and then it's for that failure, not the original issue.) bigger stuff, well... again, if it ends up in court, odds are good that you, as an individual, are probably dealing with an entity with substantially more resources than you. at which point, if it's worth bothering with, it's worth going to the police and having the Government pay for it, generally.
(basically, if it's not worth doing that way, there's probably a process in place that'll let you resolve it without draining your bank account and losing because you can't afford the lawyers fees...)
this probably isn't very coherent. i blame the flu.
on a similar but not really related note: not only is it forbidden to end a sentence with a preposition, It's Impossible. the moment you put it after the noun it goes with it's a post-position. (all pre and post positions collectively are adpositions.) ... English is just really erratic about the proper placement of it's adverbial and ad-positional phrases.
it gets better: not sure if this is still true, but it was a few years back: DVD players built for the NZ and Australian market were/are REQUIRED to play all discs regardless of region.
which means the cheap-arse budget ones always do.
spend your thousands of dollars on a top of the line model, though, and it's probably been made for Europe, the US, or Japan and just tweaked to the right region or whatever... Those will lock you out. (yes, it is silly.)
ehh... when dealing with NZ the USG usually manages to find an excuse. not usually a very GOOD one, but an excuse none the less.
they got out of the only mutual defense treaty they ever signed by throwing a hissy fit when we refused to allow nuclear armed ships to dock in our ports. (never mind that the people were kind of leery about nuclear powered ones too, and that we were willing to let them anchor a ways out in our waters and still supply them and meet all our commitments and what not. (and the story about how NZ ended up with such a solid nuclear free stance is amusing as well. let's just say that it was partially by accident :D) ) which somehow lead to them refusing to allow our warships to dock in their ports at ALL. (this year, even, there was some joint exercise or celebration thing or i don't even know what up in hawaii. NZ ships were invited then promptly told to go dock in the civilian ports because they weren't allowed in the naval base, unlike everyone else.)
then there was the couple of thousand NZ dollar cruise missile built out of off the shelf consumer parts. some iranian guys get wind of this and try to contract to the guy did it to buy some. he contacts the NZ government to find out what he should do about this, is surprised to find he can legally do so. all parties agree that he should not do it (including him) he says he will not. he does not. all parties agree the law should be adjusted to make it illegal. this guy is, incidentally, in the process of setting up a business to supply the US and NZ military with some cheap, high tech stuff. (unmanned recon drones or something?). he's had some tax issues previously but has a payment plan all set up and is paying it all off. his plan for the missiles is to, again, sell them to the NZ and US militaries.
some brightspark in the US intelligence agencies hears about this and freaks out.
this leads, Directly, to the NZ government calling in all his overdue taxes at once (despite the payment plan in place as per SOP), resulting in bankruptsy for him, his business being shut down, hundreds of jobs lost, and the US and NZ governments missing out on their crazy cheap short range missiles and unmanned recon stuff.
NO ONE GAINED ANYTHING OUT OF THIS. the US actually shot itself in the foot.
so, the one built prototype missile is shipped out by a third party so he doesn't know what happened to it (so no one else can hold him responsible for anything to do with it) theoretically scrapped, the guy sets up a new payment plan for his taxes (apparently a much friendlier one, if memory serves) and life goes on. but still.
(it should be noted that he posted online somewhere that he had built this thing, and some proof that he had done so, as proof that it was possible. nowhere were the plans, parts used, or anything else of that nature available.)
also due to US influence: it is illegal to export cryptographic devises from New Zealand. this includes ANY sort of microchip or computational device. this sort of vaguely made sense during the early days of the computer and the cold war, but is nonsense these days.
(the official NZ government position on the subject? 'we have to cease it if you declare it. but if you don't mention it we make absolutely no effort to check for these things or enforce the law and the punishment is non-existent.'... seriously.)
despite having a multi-party system here in NZ, our media keep trying to spin the situation here as being like that. they keep encouraging 'strategic voting' (which is basically deliberately shooting yourself in the gut at point blank range to avoid a 1% chance of being shot in the head.)
of course it helps that, all though our center left and center right parties Can be fairly similar sometimes (there are some major differences, but there's also a lot of overlap.), the Other parties are all quite different in pretty much everything but the fact that only the extream-right party wants anything to do with the center right party... (honestly, if the center right party hadn't, through a combination of redrawn electorates and lack of voter participation, managed to essentially win a majority by themselves, we could actually have seen a coalition of 'everyone else' just to keep them out, given how things were going last election, which is quite unusual.)
biggest problem here is that if you don't want to vote for a party perceived as being on the 'left' (not really an accurate way of describing things at all here) you didn't really have much choice beyond' current problematic center-right' and 'more extream and obviously stupid right'. in the last election we had an actually sane center-right option... but it's really hard for new parties to get in. to the point where the outcome of the last election left a lot of people dissatisfied with the system. (when the party that gets the fourth most votes doesn't get in, but the 5th, 6th, and 7th do, there's something wrong with the system. in this case a stupid idea called a 'threshold'. if you don't get more than... 5% of the vote i think? which is about six seats... you don't get Anything. unless one of your members gets an electorate in their own right. in which case that threshold is outright ignored and you get assigned the number of seats your votes entitle you to, even if it's only one or two. )
blah blah blah.
tldr:
two party systems suck. bias media sucks. 'strategic voting' should be renamed 'suicidal voting'.
the only way to reverse it is to make the issue not protecting our rights to free speech and property and due process, not about preventing the expansion of their rents, but about attacking them.
probably not going to happen, not even sure quite how you'd got about it, but the only way you're going to get out of the 'we have to win every time, they only have to win once' trap is to pin down the 'they' and destroy them.
i wonder what it would take to start criminalising these industry associations? ripping apart the IP system? dismantling the multi-nationals and mega-corps.... all that good stuff.
again, i don't see it happening, but the only way to get off the defensive is to attack, and until that happens it's a losing battle, even if the war ends up won.
licensing aside, being deaf in one ear (Particularly the left, as everything seems to assume that if you only want one speaker or whatever it should be the left one (WHY?)) is a major nuisance.
having other sensory issues, i somewhat dread the day they decide to make everything 3D by default with no off toggle. *sigh*
and i can grantee that if this nonsense keeps up at that point they Will charge an extra licence for the 3D stuff despite there being no way to get it without. (and then they'll encrypt it so you can't even strip it out... natch.)
On the post: Pro-Copyright Judges Never Drop Cases Over Conflicts, So Why Does Megaupload Judge Have To Step Down?
Re:
while generally fans of regulation to keep both the powerful and the deviant from causing problems for everyone else, Kiwis are also quite big fans of Personal freedom. in a sort of apathetic 'you leave us alone and we'll leave you alone' kind of way, usually.
also not big fans of failures of justice or unfair processes. again, usually with a sort of detached attitude and 'cheering from the sidelines for the guy who's fighting the system to get it sorted out' kind of way...
thing is though, once something gets past that apathy... well, methods vary but stands tend to be taken and stuff changed.
On the post: Pro-Copyright Judges Never Drop Cases Over Conflicts, So Why Does Megaupload Judge Have To Step Down?
Re: Re: Buk Buk
cronyism is an issue here... but that's in the executive, not the judiciary.
cronyism is appointing your buddies to positions of high office regardless of their abilities or alignments, over both those more skilled and those more popular. (its neither democratic nor meritocratic.)
On the post: Pro-Copyright Judges Never Drop Cases Over Conflicts, So Why Does Megaupload Judge Have To Step Down?
Re: Re:
On the post: Pro-Copyright Judges Never Drop Cases Over Conflicts, So Why Does Megaupload Judge Have To Step Down?
Re: Re:
the legislature and executive are pretty much lost causes. (if we somehow fluked out utterly and got a Strong governor/monarch willing to take a personal interest and got one of the more honest and idealist currently minor parties end up running things, the executive MIGHT be salvageable. maybe.)
On the post: Pro-Copyright Judges Never Drop Cases Over Conflicts, So Why Does Megaupload Judge Have To Step Down?
Re: Re:
also: I'm pretty sure that, here at least, quite a bit of noise would have been made over bias in favour of the cartels, if it were reported at all. that whole 'favour the underdog, favour our own' thing kicking in again. (there's an exception for actual criminals who have actually done something morally reprehensible, mind.)
I don't actually think anyone here who wasn't Already being an idiot (and i say that because i've yet to see someone on the side of the cartels who doesn't come across as a red-neck analogue or corporate shill) here would have objected to Judge Harvey continuing, whatever the (mostly US interest owned) press had to say about it.
i suspect Judge Harvey may well not have stepped aside had he not been sure his replacement was not in the pockets of the cartels.
it gets better, mind:
there's a fairly strong, getting stronger, and surprisingly mostly 'left' aligned, nationalist sentiment floating around NZ these days... and numbers one and two on the 'foreigner' front are, depending on the day and most recent news stories, China and the US (they swap places depending on what's going on.) that said, most people seem to have a positive opinion of Korea (south Korea, that is), Australia (so long as you're not talking banks or sports), and Canada... if they even bother thinking about it.
...
random ramblings... ... ...
rawr.
On the post: Lord Finesse Learning How The Streisand Effect Works: Tons Of People Re-Upload Dan Bull's Video
Re: Re:
On the post: Lord Finesse Learning How The Streisand Effect Works: Tons Of People Re-Upload Dan Bull's Video
Re: Re: Re:
top-down no-fog i'm going with 'both' :D
On the post: In The Patent Battle Over Speech Devices, The Real 'Irreparable Harm' Is A Child Losing Her Only Voice
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: To a corporation..
the problem here being that somehow corporations have come to rate as 'people' in their own right, rather than simply organizations made up of people.
On the post: Police In Tasmania Explain To The Public That Someone Saying Something Mean Online Is Not Illegal
Re: Re:
On the post: Police In Tasmania Explain To The Public That Someone Saying Something Mean Online Is Not Illegal
Re:
in NZ, the small stuff goes to the disputes tribunal (doesn't even get in front of a judge unless you can't resolve it and the mediation becomes arbitration (or whatever the word is) and/or one party or the other fails to follow through on the resolution. and then it's for that failure, not the original issue.) bigger stuff, well... again, if it ends up in court, odds are good that you, as an individual, are probably dealing with an entity with substantially more resources than you. at which point, if it's worth bothering with, it's worth going to the police and having the Government pay for it, generally.
(basically, if it's not worth doing that way, there's probably a process in place that'll let you resolve it without draining your bank account and losing because you can't afford the lawyers fees...)
this probably isn't very coherent. i blame the flu.
On the post: Even Obama Is A Pirate: BMG Issues New Takedown On Original Obama Singing Al Green Clip
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
the ability to dry out grasses?
On the post: Jon Stewart Blasts Viacom For Stupid Blackout; Viacom Sheepishly Turns Web Streams Back On
Re:
On the post: NZ Judge In Dotcom Extradition Case Speaks Out Against TPP & US Copyright Extremism
Re: Isn't that ironic
most of them will cheerfully ignore* region locks on DVDs. (or at least, they did a few years back.)
*not sure How they do this, but they do.
On the post: NZ Judge In Dotcom Extradition Case Speaks Out Against TPP & US Copyright Extremism
Re:
which means the cheap-arse budget ones always do.
spend your thousands of dollars on a top of the line model, though, and it's probably been made for Europe, the US, or Japan and just tweaked to the right region or whatever... Those will lock you out. (yes, it is silly.)
not sure what that means for blu-ray mind you.
On the post: NZ Judge In Dotcom Extradition Case Speaks Out Against TPP & US Copyright Extremism
Re: Re: And then Suddenly
they got out of the only mutual defense treaty they ever signed by throwing a hissy fit when we refused to allow nuclear armed ships to dock in our ports. (never mind that the people were kind of leery about nuclear powered ones too, and that we were willing to let them anchor a ways out in our waters and still supply them and meet all our commitments and what not. (and the story about how NZ ended up with such a solid nuclear free stance is amusing as well. let's just say that it was partially by accident :D) ) which somehow lead to them refusing to allow our warships to dock in their ports at ALL. (this year, even, there was some joint exercise or celebration thing or i don't even know what up in hawaii. NZ ships were invited then promptly told to go dock in the civilian ports because they weren't allowed in the naval base, unlike everyone else.)
then there was the couple of thousand NZ dollar cruise missile built out of off the shelf consumer parts. some iranian guys get wind of this and try to contract to the guy did it to buy some. he contacts the NZ government to find out what he should do about this, is surprised to find he can legally do so. all parties agree that he should not do it (including him) he says he will not. he does not. all parties agree the law should be adjusted to make it illegal. this guy is, incidentally, in the process of setting up a business to supply the US and NZ military with some cheap, high tech stuff. (unmanned recon drones or something?). he's had some tax issues previously but has a payment plan all set up and is paying it all off. his plan for the missiles is to, again, sell them to the NZ and US militaries.
some brightspark in the US intelligence agencies hears about this and freaks out.
this leads, Directly, to the NZ government calling in all his overdue taxes at once (despite the payment plan in place as per SOP), resulting in bankruptsy for him, his business being shut down, hundreds of jobs lost, and the US and NZ governments missing out on their crazy cheap short range missiles and unmanned recon stuff.
NO ONE GAINED ANYTHING OUT OF THIS. the US actually shot itself in the foot.
so, the one built prototype missile is shipped out by a third party so he doesn't know what happened to it (so no one else can hold him responsible for anything to do with it) theoretically scrapped, the guy sets up a new payment plan for his taxes (apparently a much friendlier one, if memory serves) and life goes on. but still.
(it should be noted that he posted online somewhere that he had built this thing, and some proof that he had done so, as proof that it was possible. nowhere were the plans, parts used, or anything else of that nature available.)
also due to US influence: it is illegal to export cryptographic devises from New Zealand. this includes ANY sort of microchip or computational device. this sort of vaguely made sense during the early days of the computer and the cold war, but is nonsense these days.
(the official NZ government position on the subject? 'we have to cease it if you declare it. but if you don't mention it we make absolutely no effort to check for these things or enforce the law and the punishment is non-existent.'... seriously.)
On the post: NZ Judge In Dotcom Extradition Case Speaks Out Against TPP & US Copyright Extremism
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
of course it helps that, all though our center left and center right parties Can be fairly similar sometimes (there are some major differences, but there's also a lot of overlap.), the Other parties are all quite different in pretty much everything but the fact that only the extream-right party wants anything to do with the center right party... (honestly, if the center right party hadn't, through a combination of redrawn electorates and lack of voter participation, managed to essentially win a majority by themselves, we could actually have seen a coalition of 'everyone else' just to keep them out, given how things were going last election, which is quite unusual.)
biggest problem here is that if you don't want to vote for a party perceived as being on the 'left' (not really an accurate way of describing things at all here) you didn't really have much choice beyond' current problematic center-right' and 'more extream and obviously stupid right'. in the last election we had an actually sane center-right option... but it's really hard for new parties to get in. to the point where the outcome of the last election left a lot of people dissatisfied with the system. (when the party that gets the fourth most votes doesn't get in, but the 5th, 6th, and 7th do, there's something wrong with the system. in this case a stupid idea called a 'threshold'. if you don't get more than... 5% of the vote i think? which is about six seats... you don't get Anything. unless one of your members gets an electorate in their own right. in which case that threshold is outright ignored and you get assigned the number of seats your votes entitle you to, even if it's only one or two. )
blah blah blah.
tldr:
two party systems suck. bias media sucks. 'strategic voting' should be renamed 'suicidal voting'.
that is all.
On the post: NZ Judge In Dotcom Extradition Case Speaks Out Against TPP & US Copyright Extremism
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
the only way to reverse it is to make the issue not protecting our rights to free speech and property and due process, not about preventing the expansion of their rents, but about attacking them.
probably not going to happen, not even sure quite how you'd got about it, but the only way you're going to get out of the 'we have to win every time, they only have to win once' trap is to pin down the 'they' and destroy them.
i wonder what it would take to start criminalising these industry associations? ripping apart the IP system? dismantling the multi-nationals and mega-corps.... all that good stuff.
again, i don't see it happening, but the only way to get off the defensive is to attack, and until that happens it's a losing battle, even if the war ends up won.
On the post: NZ Judge In Dotcom Extradition Case Speaks Out Against TPP & US Copyright Extremism
Re: Re: Re: Re:
having other sensory issues, i somewhat dread the day they decide to make everything 3D by default with no off toggle. *sigh*
and i can grantee that if this nonsense keeps up at that point they Will charge an extra licence for the 3D stuff despite there being no way to get it without. (and then they'll encrypt it so you can't even strip it out... natch.)
On the post: Is A Petition Calling For A Pardon Of The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde 'Offensive'?
Re: Is it automated?
On the post: How Not To Build A 21st Century Trade Agreement: In Secret
Re: Devil's advocate?
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