Comment by anigbrowl
2 days ago
I'm not really seeing the deception here since it specifies hard labour and says it would apply to all serious violent offenses. How could you vote for this and not know you were voting for hard labour?
2 days ago
I'm not really seeing the deception here since it specifies hard labour and says it would apply to all serious violent offenses. How could you vote for this and not know you were voting for hard labour?
The deception is that it combines two largely unrelated questions into one vote - leading with one that most will agree and followed by one that is more questionable. By the time people will be reading the second question they will already have be primed with an opinion on the first.
I can easily point to deception in two words
1) Hard 2) Words
"Should there be a reform of our justice system" -> "should the law be passed"
"emphasis", "restitution", "compensation" -> too hard to skim, brain is bailing out
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the only way to provide valid direct democracy is to provide more than enough explanations and rewordings from both sides of the debate *at the point of voting* to remove miscommunication
I agree that it's unnecessarily wordy, but I still don't think it's deceptive. If your brain is bailing out that fast maybe it's better not to vote.
Hard disagree. Systems must be designed with typical human fallibilities in mind.
Anyone that phrases a referendum like that ought to be sentenced to hard labor themselves for attempting to subvert democracy.
1 reply →
I don't know how you could vote for it, I didn't and was astonished that people did.
On the other hand. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44870087
I would probably not vote for it on principle, but my specific question was how the text as quoted could be considered deceptive.
In many respects I agree with you there, I almost went with softer language. The fact remains that it appears people were deceived. All of the advocacy pushing the referendum only focused on the first part. To this day I find people who are amazed that it mentioned hard labour and and that they voted for it.
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I guess think of it in terms of a vote that you had discussed and decided upon before you voted. Could you honestly say that you would read every word of the question or would you just look at the start of it to establish that it was the question under discussion and then trust that the discussion accurately represented what the question on the form would say. The length of the question, was I believe specifically designed to be long to prevent the frequency of its full publication.
1 reply →
People read "greater emphasis on the needs of victims" and stop processing afterwards.
No, we didn't. We knew what we were voting for. And I'd vote the same way today.
Do you believe you are in the majority? I'm quite confident that being in favour of hard labour is a minority opinion in New Zealand.
I guess it is at least consistent with your belief that there is a mandate for Project 2025.
7 replies →
I don't buy that, and even if they did that doesn't make it deceptive. I'm not arguing in favor of this increased punishment, it just seems to me that its stated plainly enough you can't seriously argue that people were tricked.
It is somewhat deceptive, or at least misleading, to bundle up the concepts of giving the victims compensation, and punishing the prisoners more aggressively.
Unless the prison labor is providing the compensation, but that would be totally bizarre and dystopian, haha. Not really the sort of thing you’d see in a civilized country.