Death threats made to rightwing blogger?

.

 

.

As the heat goes on right-wing blogger Cameron Slater, Jason Ede, John Key, and Judith Collins as a result of Nicki Hager’s book, “Dirty Politics“, Slater has  alleged being the victim of a hate campaign himself;

.

 

.

“‘Cos I’ve got a torrent of death threats as a result of Mr Hager’s book…”

Regarding Slater’s claims, I have these observations to offer;

1. Police

Threatening someone’s life is a criminal offence. Instead of discussing it over the airwaves (and thereby giving ‘oxygen’ to the alleged offenders), one would have thought to take the matter directly to the Police.

Airing this over the airwaves doesn’t achieve much except give credence to suggestions that Slater is “crying wolf” and trying to garner sympathy for himself.

2. If the allegations are true?

Death threats are very, very uncool.

For one thing, it takes us down to Slater’s faecal-pile level.

Secondly, Slater has a family who are in no way responsible for his anti-social activities. We don’t blame kids for living in poverty-stricken families – no-one should  be stressing his children and partner with vile threats of violence and invitations to self-harm.

3. If the allegations are false?

If Slater is fabricating these allegations (which I believe to be the case), he will not take a complaint to the Police. He knows full well that there exists a criminal charge called “wasting Police time“;

In New Zealand, one can be charged under Section 24 of the Summary Offences Act 1981 for committing either of the following acts:

• Making, or causing to be made, to a police employee any allegation of an offence “contrary to the fact and without a belief in the truth of the statement”.
• Creating serious apprehension for the safety of any person or property (whether by statement or behaviour), either with the intention of causing wasteful employment or diversion of police resources, or being reckless as to that result.

A person convicted under this section may be sentenced to imprisonment for up to three months, or a fine of up to NZ$2000.

If Slater does not lay a complaint, we’ll know why.

My bet is he won’t. And I know why.

It’s called deflection.

4. If the allegations are true (issue B)

It would be hard to feel sympathy for Slater. He has posted obscene comments on his website, along with hate commentary; people’s addresses and other personal details; and incited  threats of violence to be made by some of his associates in the comments section.

As I wrote above, death threats and calls to violence are uncool.

With Slater’s past history of engaging in this kind of on-line thuggery/bullying and cheering the deaths of young people, it is hard to feel any sympathy for the pathetic little germ that he is.

As Gordon Campbell wrote on 15 August,

“Talking of death threats, too little has been made of the threat to Hager himself in an email sent to Slater, David Farrar and Matthew Hooton (see pages 91-92) in the wake of Hager’s previous work on international tax havens. “Those Chinese can be very vicious when they lose face…It would be a disaster if they all knew where he lived. He might need Police protection…” etc etc. It doesn’t matter that Hager’s phone number and address are in the phone book. The intent seems all too clear.”

5. Other illegal activity by Slater?

Cameron Slater has already been convicted on several charges of breaking name suppression orders surrounding victims of child abuse cases. He is currently being sued for defamation by Auckland businessman, Matthew Blomfield. (Interesting, Slater has been given computer hard drives belonging to Mr Blomfield, and is using the material on said hard-drive to write critical blogposts on the businessman. Slater refuses to disclose where/how/when he acquired the computer material. Sound familiar?)

Meanwhile, on the blogsite, The Dim Post, blogger Danyl Mclauchlan questions the veracity of Whale Oil’s supposed high “traffic”;

DPF and Slater have both linked to me roughly the same amount of times during that period. I guess you could argue that readers of Kiwiblog and the other right-wing blogs in that graph are more likely to click on links than WhaleOil readers, for some unknown reason, or that my site is also linked to in their side-bars, maybe? But go back and look at the traffic stats for WhaleOil in the first graph. His traffic is, supposedly, immense, towering over everyone else – but the amount of actual people clicking through from his site is tiny. 

My hypothesis is that the WhaleOil stats are gamed, somehow, and that the number of real people reading WhaleOil every day is probably in the low hundreds, mostly National and ACT activists and media elites and outraged left-wingers. Which is funny, because he’s paid very handsomely by the tobacco lobby and other industry groups to publish their PR on the basis that it’s going out to hundreds of thousands of people. 

The latest traffic survey for blogs, released by Open Parachute, lists the blog  rankings for last July. The top ten are;

Visit Rank	Blog	Visits/month	Page Views/month
1	Whale oil beef hooked	2067499	3424236
2	Kiwiblog	464149	794565
3	The Daily Blog	226522	366224
4	The Standard	203712	444021
5	Transport Blog	156922	160849
6	The Dim-Post	56504	80703
7	Throng New Zealand	43672	79016
8	Liturgy	42217	56349
9	Sciblogs	41178	52242
10	NewZeal	37534	52102

Check out the number of visits per month: 2,067,499. Two million visits. That’s half the population of New Zealand. It is also four times the ‘hits’ recorded for number two on the rankings, Kiwiblog, coming in at 464,149 visits per month.

Seems credible? I think not.

Martyn Bradbury has done a follow-up story on alleged bloated traffic numbers, saying,

“…it looks like it’s all a farce with pumped up stats and bots running most of the actual traffic. It looks like many corporate are secretly paying Slater for nothing more than a bloated illusion. “

Martynhas a point. If Slater has artificially increased his traffic number by using services such as “click fraud“, “Paid-to Click“,  and/or other systems, then he may be guilty of misleading advertisers. De-frauding them, in other words.

Only a police fraud investigation may be able to determine what is going on with Slater’s blogsite.

6. Karma

She seems to be working over-time on Slater’s feral arse. Evidently there is much work to catch up on?

On a more serious note to conclude this blogpost on; a fair number of folk have dismissively shrugged their shoulders and dismissed Nicky Hager’s book with a “meh! – what else is new“. The answer; plenty.

With this book, Nicky Hager has forced us to grow up a bit, politically, and look deep into our political culture. If we shrug and look away with cynicism, we are in effect giving politicians carte blanche to behave as they will. It means we have taken away normal social restraints for what we want as acceptable behaviour. (And paid for with our taxes, I might add.)

If that is what New Zealanders – especially those who support National – really want, then it is easily achieved. We just do nothing. Which reminds me of an old saying,

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. – Edmund Burke

As always, the choice is ours.

.

---

 

References

TV3 News: Slater – Death threats over ‘Dirty Politics’

Wikipedia: Wasting Police Time

Gordon Campbell on the ongoing fallout from Nicky Hager’s book

TVNZ: Blogger guilty of breaking suppression

NZ Herald: Cameron Slater ‘incredulous’ over ruling

The Dim Post:  Two points about Cameron Slater. First: Who reads this shit?

Open Parachute: July ’14 – NZ blogs sitemeter ranking

Open Parachute: Blog Rankings

The Daily Blog: Are Whaleoil’s traffic stats a bloated illusion?

Wikipedia: Click fraud

Wikipedia: Paid to Click

Previous related blogposts

When Karma caught up with Cameron Slater

When Stupid meets Hypocrisy, the result is David Farrar

When Stupid meets Hypocrisy, the result is David Farrar – *Update*

David Farrar – A Question for you please?

Dear John – Time to answer a few questions! – Hone Harawira

“Dirty Politics” and The Teflon Man

Other Blogs

Public Address: Confidential information: the legal rights and wrongs

Public Address: Dirty Politics

Polity: National and Labour’s membership data

Gordon Campbell on Nicky Hager’s new book

Bowalley Road: Closing Our Eyes In The Sausage Factory: Some Thoughts On Nicky Hager’s Book, “Dirty Politics”

The Standard: Rob Gilchrist On Nicky Hager

The Standard: Was a crime committed when Slater accessed Labour’s computer system?

The Daily Blog: Hager’s Dirty Politics – Death threats or hit jobs?

Kiwipolitico: Ducking for Cover

Pundit: Dirty Politics: The battle of the metaphors

Pundit: The politics of vilification

Pundit: A crazy day in dirty ol’ NZ politics

Imperator Fish: Cameron Slater is the real victim

Porcupine Farm: Why My Next Printer Will Be An Epson

Porcupine Farm: #TEAMKEY2

The Jackal: Death threats and Dirty Politics

The Jackal: Nicky Hager – Hero of the Week

The Jackal: National’s death by association

Recommended reading

The Jackal: The real nasty bloggers

 

 

---

 

.

Above image acknowledgment: Francis Owen/Lurch Left Memes

.

.

= fs =