Blog Bits

Stephen Franks blogs on the battle to save Crossways in Mt Victoria. I will be blogging on this myself during the week. It will be a tragedy if Mt Victoria loses what has been a focal point for the community. The City Council is justifying its lack of support by saying residents have lots of cafes nearby unlike suburbs further away from the city centre. A very very weak argument.

Keeping Stock blogs on an alarming suggestion by Auckland lawyer Catriona McLennan on Nine to Noon. She suggests that in rape trials, the burden of proof should be on the accused to prove there was consent. And this is not just a throw-away remark – she actually argues in favour of it against Kathryn Ryan for some time.

Whale Oil has been threatened with defamation by a lawyer acting for Pearl Going, who objects to comments he had made on her. The material has been removed from his blog after the blog hosting company was also threatened, but copies have sprung up on a dedicated blog hosted overseas.

I don’t intend to comment of the substance of the allegedly defamatory material, but would note that pressuring hosting companies to remove material, even after the blog author has asserted it is not defamatory and is willing to defend it in court, is not a particularly sensible tactic as it is so easy for the material to appear elsewhere – as has happened. Also of interest is that the lawyer for Pearl Going is Steven Price, who was very critical of the Listener for threatening the Hot Topic blogger with defamation.

This should not be taken as a suggestion that defamation laws do not or should not apply to the Internet. Of course they do. But more the appropriateness of targetting blog hosts if the blog author is willing to stand by their words and accept legal consequences for them.

The Dim Post has more satire, this one on how Winston is handling the Owen Gelnn scandal:

• Monday 2:00 PM: Hires two identical twins as press secretaries, one of whom always tells the truth while the other always lies.

• Wednesday 11:30 AM: Announces to press conference that he will explain everything but in doing so will be forced to reveal the secret surprise ending to Battlestar Galactica. Political media beg him to remain silent.

• Thursday 6:35 PM: Notifies Speaker Margaret Wilson that he is officially changing his alignment to Neutral Evil.

• Friday 10:30 AM: Recieves report back from Department of Statistics confirming that proportion of New Zealanders with IQ below 90 is still greater than 5%. Laughs heartily. Tells rest of country to go fuck themselves.

Heh.

Liberty Scott pings Idiot/Savant at No Right Turn for his comments on Gordon Brown approving a state funeral for Margaret Thatcher when she dies. The offending quote:

“On the plus side, it will at least give her victims a final chance to throw excrement and rotten fruit at her as she goes past“

As I/S goes on about how some on the right are often poisonous, spiteful and bitter, this quote brings to mind stones and glasshouses.

David Cohen looks at a case for Nicky Hager:

A column containing acidic opinions about a powerful political media personality mysteriously fails to show up on the author’s regular spot on her newspaper’s website. Another major news outlet, after allowing criticisms to be made of the same public figure on one of its shows, hurriedly issues a grovelling clarification. Does this sound like a case Nicky Hager ought to be investigating?

It would indeed if it weren’t the slightly inconvenient fact that the media power broker in question also happens to be the same gent.