David Farrar the other day posted an interesting clip. The Daily Show, a satirical news program from the US, has discovered the satire ban on images captured in-house. See David’s site for the full video clip (now Whangarei is known as the cultural-backwater of New Zealand – and to you Americans, the a in “Whang” sounds like the a in “car”, not like the a in “fang”). The clip wasn’t that funny, but at least they know about it.

Now, the story has reached Slashdot.

One comment (out of the swathes of bad comments) stuck out:

By coincidence, there was a programme on TV yesterday about the origins of democracy (in Athens, 400BC). One point that came across strongly was that when democracy is strong, states are willing to put up with more criticism.

As democracy weakens, states clamp down on their critics and introduce more extreme punishments for transgressors.

This sounds like a good example of this kind of action - sadly it seems to be getting more common across the world, not just in NZ.

The only MP who’s in my good-books over this issue is Rodney Hide, as he was against it all along. Bad-books include all of Labour and all of National – especially by their flip-flopping over the issue.