The story so far:
(1) A couple of allegedly notable people are charged with sexual offenses. Courts order that their names should not be published (on account of the innocent-until-proven-guilty business), nor those of the alleged victims.
(2) A NZ blogger publishes their names anyway.
(3) Police charge him with breaching the name suppression orders.
The blogger in question (a libertarian climate-change-denialist evidence-cherry-picking wanker who has made pugnacity into a substitute for a personality) responded to the charges by publishing more names, causing the police to speculate about further contempt-of-court and perverting-course-of-justice charges. So it's him on one side and the police on the other. To misquote Substance McG, the nice thing about this kind of court case is that at least one side has to lose.
These would be the same protecting-the-rights-of-the-accused police department who spent the end of 2007 leaking 156 pages of suppressed wire-tap evidence to supportive newspapers, in order to make the people mentioned in the wire-taps sound like terrorists, after the Solicitor-General found the evidence to be so shonky that actual 'terrorism' charges against said people had to be dropped.*
I am boring our non-NZ readers with this stuff mainly to prove that we do have our own homegrown wankers, so when we mock overseas wankers it is out of politeness rather than necessity.
Also it's an excuse to use the Martial Laws tag. Ex-MP and all-round rat-bag Michael Laws has come out against name suppression, at least when used to protect an ex-MP, because it "places all ex-MPs under suspicion and that is unconscionable."
* The police did lay face-saving replacement charges, with the idea that they will eventually be abandoned for unreasonable delay, since they are not due for a court hearing until nearly four years after the initial arrests.
Monday, January 11, 2010
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8 comments:
It seems necessary to mock wankers of all stripes, no matter their location. As well as the police. But we appreciate your politeness, as our Yankee wankers spread themselves so thickly over the world it would be rude not to mock them.
Yankee Wankers, that's the name
Senators and Bankers, all the same
Leaky tankers, faulty aim
Yankee Wankers play the game
all ex-MPs under suspicion
Surely the scope could have been widened to include sitting MPs.
The way the name-suppression legislation works, Mr McG, is this: the prurient-minded NZ media publish whatever corroborative details they can, to flesh out their otherwise bald and unconvincing narratives, e.g. that someone accused of a crime might be an ex-Olympian athlete from Town A.
They then complain in editorials (or in rants on their radio talkback, in the case of media members like Laws) that these details have narrowed down the possibilities and brought a small number of people under suspicion, this being the fault of the legislation.
Therefore the legislation should be repealed so that suspicion should be narrowed down to one person, which in a happy coincidence would be both In the Public Interest and to the advantage of the media companies.
So scope widening = quite the wrong idea.
But the wider the scope, the more writers at paper X can accuse writers at paper Y of rape.
Don't be silly, Subby.
Writers can't issue traffic tickets...
One would be gratified by the obvious double standards on display were these creep arses so prominent in the public discourse. Lhaws will say what he thinks will get ratings and, as with whankers of the same stripe in the US such as Orielly and Beck.
Whale oil is a loathsome type much given to petulant displays and this can seen as yet another. There may be some financial pain involved and this will be concerning the most. Though his costs will be met by his overlords.
'Tis a nasty little stew what we have 'ere.
the more writers at paper X can accuse writers at paper Y of rape
Newspapers in NZ are a cozy duopoly with two Aussie corporates apportioning the market between them (Fairfax Media and APN News & Media). Nothing but fair play.
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