Posts by Russell Brown
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That was really good, Finn. I could (hah!) probably debate bits and pieces of it, but I'm most grateful to you and Deborah for putting in the spadework.
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I am lost for words at the foolish outburst from the inept Maori party pointing the blame on our white settlers for smacking.
Actually, the evidence points to that being true. Pre-European Maori were very happy to slice and dice each other in the context of war, but outside of that, it seems that hitting children (or women) was very rare indeed.
The idea of hitting children for correction seems to have come with the missionaries.
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Heh, Okay, my partner may not thank me for this... He has a huge scar on his upper right arm where he put a concrete drill through it. He's right-handed, the drill was in his right hand.
Good news? He did it in a hospital. Bad news? He did it in the fertility dept.
Reading this has given me cognitive dissonance. Help.
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I'll chip in a few more, but my first injury of note was sustained by falling all of nine inches off a tractor-tyre sandpit in our backyard. I managed to sustain a broken arm and concussion.
For some reason, I was not at all keen on the idea of going to hospital. And when we got there and my mum left me in the care of the doctors, I made a break for the carpark. They actually strapped me to a gurney after that ...
It must have been serious, because they kept me in hospital for a week or something. I remember being bored and being constantly told off for slipping my arm out of the sling to I could play with some stuff and be less bored.
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Our neighbour's dog was (I think) taken away by dog control. Actually, it was a pretty agreeable most of the time, but I didn't like the way it was frequently wondering around our house.
Surely canine sentience is something to be cherished. What was it wondering about? Is there a God? Will the All Blacks win the World Cup?
And do you reckon it did its wondering at your place because you have a lot of books?
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It’s a fact that seems to have eluded the writer of this editorial in the Herald on Sunday:
But the real surprise, of course, is that such attacks don't happen more often than they do.
What, more than 553 times a year in Auckland City? More than 100 times in Wellington? What kind of Cujo-esque rampage were you hoping for?
Are we agreed that HoS editorials are lately setting new standards of know-nothing badness? It's like a certain other column is seeping up the page.
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Whoops Russell not Russel - I blame Dr Norman for introducing the other variation!
De nada. Serves me right for teasing you ...
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And now for something completely different. Most of us remember all too well a handful of physical traumas. They might have been painful but transient, or have had a lifelong impact. They might have been funny at the time, funny later, or just bloody serious. It's time to tell the story.
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From Keen's blog, a link to a Comment is Free piece bemoaning the blogosphere by Jonathan Freedland.
I like Freeland's column writing a lot, but this reads like yet another bit of special pleading from a Guardian journalist.
But what interested me was the repeated claims in the discussion that Comment is Free is "the best" of all blogs in terms of its discussions. It just isn't. A lot of the time, it's all opinion and no experience.
You learn something in a good discussion, and there are plenty of blogs where that holds. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and declare that Public Address is better than Comment is Free.
There, I've said it. Perhaps I should drop Toby Manhire a line and send him something for CiF ...
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I think the Kathy Sierra story is a classic instance of this. She wasn't abused for having opinions, or for writing, or for being out there in public. She was abused for having the temerity to be a woman. Hmmm... maybe that's an exaggeration. Maybe she was successful and popular, and being a woman gave people a way to attack her. Whichever way you view it, she was attacked qua woman.
There's an extent to which Kathy Sierra was attacked for being blonde. She's an attractive middle-aged woman. and for some people that made her fair game. She's not political or controversial - she writes about making technology more appealing.
It seems to have begun as a mocking campaign by some people who didn't buy her theories, and escalated because no one had the good sense to call a halt.
The founder of the meankids.org site - including, it should be noted, a couple of well-known women - didn't initially know that at the same time Kathy was getting very nasty emails and comments via her own site, but they should have understood that a site specifically constructed to vilify people wasn't going to end in a good place.
And when Chris Locke set up a replacement after Frank Paynter, having talked to Kathy, closed the site down (there had also been a racist, hateful comment about another blogger's pregnant wife), you had to wonder what he was thinking. They enabled this stuff through being juvenile and callous and then they complained they were the victims of the subsequent "hysteria".
You see this kind of denial in teenagers who don't know any better. The fact that it was practiced by grown men and women is pretty sad. Not everyone thought so, of course:
Another interesting point is that these twits were so wedded to a misguided idea of free speech that they couldn't do the obvious thing and clean house. They had no space between open slather and closing the whole site down. For members of the digirati, they weren't too smart.
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