Posts by Russell Brown
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hey , the parents may be disastrous parents for all I know, especially the step father ( there, Ive said it... happy?) I blame CYFS, actually.They were bringing up this kid.
You blame CYFS? Look, forget it. I'm just plain appalled now.
Please refer to your own relay of the mother's account of the earlier case involving the 14 year-old: "Apparently he did not respond well to the man's encouragement to help." Oh really. You need to stop believing this woman.
I have a 16 year-old boy. If I assaulted him, or stood by while my partner committed a sustained bodily assault on him, I hope I'd have the moral sense to know I was wrong.
-
Russell has criticised the actions of both parents, but not the teenager. Why?
Because one party is a child and the other two are adults who are expected by society to be able to resolve disputes without resorting to assault on a minor. Because I am not inclined to accept baseless conspiracy theories about CYFS and more inclined to trust the judgement of the police, who I have no reason to believe acted corruptly.
According to the evidence given in court, "his mother slapped and punched him in the face at least three times," before the son reciprocated. Is this your idea of sound parenting?
Furthermore, the account includes things the mother left out of the self-serving version of the story you uncritically relayed on her behalf, including events backed up by an independent witness:
Mr Hobbs saw the man kick the boy two or three times and then grab him by the scruff of the neck, pulling him toward the vehicle, and put both his knees into the boy's ribcage.
"He was putting everything into it," he said. The woman did nothing to stop the assault.
I am honestly appalled that you cannot acknowledge that these people appear to be disastrous parents, and instead prefer to continue blaming their children, who are the victims. Think hard about this, Dave. You are wrong.
-
garth george's column has been fairly well slammed by its online readers:
NZ Herald - Your Views
thank god (!) for that - i was getting the impression that all kiwis were greedy selfish pricks like himThere still seem to be at least as many people cheering him on. Wilful stupidity is clearly in fashion.
-
A top night there RB, and might i add that your dance technique has improved... You just had to drop those arms a bit, and you did- well done!
Dude, I had my hands in the air back in 1988, while you were still playing with your little high school indie band, so really, no more dancing lessons from you, young fella-me-lad ...
-
That is quite funny.
how do you post a vid clip directly like that?Just paste in the URL from YouTube (not the embed code). It's special geek magic.
-
Just got this in my inbox from someone called Catherine:
Bjorn Lomberg , Augie Auer, Leighton Smith et al are not deluded by U.N. propaganda like so many of the tragic and gullible followers of spin.
Many of the arguments of the pro-lobby would get a fail mark in Science 101.
It's hard to argue against this kind of blithe unreason.
Oh, and that'll be Mr Lom__borg__, who, if the author bothered to check, readily acknowledges anthropogenic global warming as both a fact and a problem. But let's not get that get in the way of blind, unthinking prejudice.
-
Also have a feeling that they will promote the scoop story that Russell linked to. Try and cloud people into seeing the parents as victims of a volent child, who anti-smackers are going after.
They can try (and the strained rationalisations seem to be rolling in already), but the account of the third-party witness, who has no reason to lie, directly contradicts the account relayed by Dave Crampton on some key points. Hopefully he'll now stop depicting these people as victims of their terrible children and think a bit harder about the violence in this family.
-
Someone who isn't in a position to comment by name invited me to relay their perspective on Ralston's comments:
You know there was excruciating irony hearing Bill Ralston on Morning Report this morning hold TVNZ up as some kind of gold standard in news and current affairs. Anyone who has regularly watched PBS in the US or CBC in Canada or the BBC or the ABC in Australia would know just how far TVNZ is from being a model for quality public broadcasting.
There’s a lot of spot news reporting but little analysis. World news is fairly desultory and driven by images. If Sunday got canned, who would miss it? It certainly wouldn’t be me. For example, talking to the family of Graeme Burton’s victim is not investigative or deep journalism. The opposite in fact – it is the easiest kind of journalism to do. You’re guaranteed an angry/tearful reaction and some poignant quotes but it is hardly groundbreaking or challenging. Unfortunately a story like that encapsulates what Sunday thinks it should be doing.
I can't really disagree with this. Sunday began as a fit of hubris on the part of a former new chief, Heaton Dyer, and I also wonder about its cause to exist, given its recent performance. It doesn't seem like a healthy production, or a good advertisement for the current news and current affairs culture.
-
I think this is an important point. On what grounds does someone like Garth or Leighton discard the findings of the IPCC? It is absurd that some people presume to make authoritative claims about the truth or falsity of scientific theory without a command of the science. Its absurd to invite us to try.
Yep. So you just try and apply some of the usual gauges of credibility. So it's our two major national climate science organisations, the G8 science academies, NASA, the IPCC, etc, etc versus small, shifty, largely non-expert lobby groups prone to misrepresenting their credentials and their funding sources. I mean, really ...
I've said this before, but comparisons with the GE panic are instructive. There were plenty of people on "The Left" who seized on the GE issue for political reasons, now it's the other side doing the same thing. You see the same phenomenon of circulating factoids on ropey-looking websites.
But I think the difference is that that anti-GE lobby has actually informed some decent policy choices, by raising issues like proper crop separation (we know now, for example, that we don't want GE canola here). I'm not seeing that from the CSC.
-
I thought god killed a kitten every time you pleasure yourself.
Only when He's watching. Which is all the time ...
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 2178 2179 2180 2181 2182 … 2279 Older→ First