Posts by Russell Brown
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Just another thought about the fringe casualties of the illegal street race scene as described by Rebecca: it makes the subjects of some previous moral panics - say, thousands of loved-up kids at dance parties - look remarkably benign. Of course, we had the moral dial turned up to 11 for those too ...
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I also love driving. I hate commuting and won't do it. But since this thread is about boy racing, I feel obliged to point out the the extremely obvious fact that cars are choice.
Don't really get it. Jolly handy, fer sure. But as a main event in life, whatever ...
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Good comments Rebecca. I think you're articulating why things are a little different now from when we were kids. Sure, there was booze and a bit of dope but that was it. And there weren't 200+ people gathered at each 'event'.
I think what Rebecca did was knowledgeably articulate a specific problem for vulnerable kids around these scenes, as opposed to the mayors blathering about, well, things in general. My guess would be that those girls' parents aren't particularly reachable either.
I presume one of the drugs of choice would be P, which would have certain advantages: gets you up for the action, not a problem to drive on; and inevitably disastrous consequences for some of them. There's probably not that much of gap between being raped in the back of a car and giving it up for the sake of another pipe. I'm just not sure that you wouldn't have the same thing if you took the cars out of the picture altogether.
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this scene, like all the scenes young people are involved in, is a microcosm of society. i'm preaching to the converted, i know, but i've got to say it - no point blaming these kids for the things they get up to, because what they're doing is what the grownups do. drink, drug, fuck, fight, and drive like a fucking arsehole.
Wow. That's certainly some information to be getting on with.
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What Haydn said. I've been really stunned at the total absence of actual young people from any of the media coverage of these Big Wig Pow Wows in the last week.
Have you ever seen boy racers interviewed on TV? They really don't tend to come across well. I remember when Holmes had a couple on when John Banks was fuming and farting about the issue. They appeared so stupid as to make me fear for our future as a nation.
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Sorry to drag you into that RB, my point wasn't to slag you (or upset you).
I am not easily upset in such situations ;-)
Notwithstanding the efforts you make to check your facts before asserting them).
I try and find them out first, and then assert them. Takes longer but saves a lot of grief.
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Of course I bothered to read RB's blog Rogerd, did you bother to read my comments properly? I said "...there didn't seem to be such carnage back then..." and then went on to recount how my sister flew out the back window of a rolling car and landed unscathed. And I prefaced that with a comment about a friend who wrote off 2 cars at aged 16. Now do you get it??
Oh, and BTW ... if you're going to accept every word from RB as Gospell written by the hand of God himself, then I've got a Wikipedia entry you might like to look atSteady on - I was just quoting the official statistics. It's actually something of a bugbear of mine: the assumption, which generally goes unchallenged in the media, that there was some golden age when everything was better and not all nasty like it is now. It's surprising how often the reverse is the case.
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Not that it matters I suppose, haven't looked it up, but isn't it baying for blood? (Or the full moon, whichever is more convenient at the time).
Of course it is. But if the mayor says braying, then braying it is.
I should note that Garry Moore is a longtime Hard News reader and may well see this ...
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I have some sympathy for Celia Lashlie's "parents need to learn to say no" position - if parents required from their teenagers a bit more information, and set some clear guidelines ...
Yeah, and I do think there are parents - including wealthy, middle-class people in Auckland's inner 'burbs - who simply don't take sufficient interest in where their kids are at night.
But I'm not sure a bunch of hick mayors on a "Jobs Taskforce" are the right people to be assuming "leadership" in decreeing parenting practice to the nation.
And it's important to stay out of ordinary people's lives when smacking is the issue, but equally important to get involved in their lives when boy racers or child deaths is the issue? Cab't have it both ways, people....
Quite. It would be interesting to know how the mayors dispensing parenting tips yesterday felt about the Child Discipline Bill. But the perpetrator in Christchurch was 22, and the victim in Tauranga was 20. They're both accountable adults.
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congrats russell. but robyn's both right and wrong.
wrong because hard news had ever-so-slowly become part of the msm. many of us remember the guerilla bfm daze.
Quite right, of course. The reason I started hard News (apart from my chronic need to editorialise) was that I felt people like me and my friends never got heard in the media. I was workin' for the dole.
Since then, the media have become far more accomodating of niches - a trend driven to a large extent by the internet - and I've gotten more respectable. As I observed in a Metro thinkpiece several years ago, I appear to have become part of some establishment.
But I still feel more akin to my fellow netizens than to most working journalists. The fact that I shared a table with Ana Samways, Stephen Shaw, Alastair Thompson, Selwyn Manning, Lyndon Hood, Kevin List, etc is what made for a very different awards experience. I'm culturally internet, I think.
but, right. because, as they say "u iz in ma internets, taykin all ma awads"
I made u an award. But I eated it ...
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