Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Sounds strange. I can imagine some of the farther flung housing developments being a bit like that, but mostly because they’re too new to have developed any character or soul or community.
It seems likely to me that's what he's dealing with. Also, he hates the climate, and that always colors one's perception. But his partner won't have a bar of his oft-repeated desire to move to, say, HK. She's from Beijing, it's her town, and she likes it. She's from an old army family, so I wonder if they've got a bit of a barracks mentality. The way he tells it, though, I think I'd rather live in an actual barracks.
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Then again, I know quite a few people who grew up in a village lifestyle who just couldn't wait to get out. So maybe there's "grass is greener" effect here, and the main issue isn't so much what modes of existence there are so much as the ease of mobility between them, so that people can move toward whatever makes them happier. In Auckland, there's a shortage of decent dense living. It doesn't have to be all dense, just a bit more. As Russell says, it's going to be a long, long time before the vast majority of dwellings here aren't suburban plots.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Nathaniel Wilson,
If the same happened to New Lynn, Glen Innes etc. (I have my doubts), then that’d be brilliant.
New Lynn is definitely more awesome than it was, but it’s no rival for the city and inner suburbs when thinking of a place for a night out. I frequently go there on a Saturday night to get some takeaways, and there’s no buzz. Quite a few restaurants, but nowhere playing music, no bars, no shows. Avondale town center is the same, with the exception of the old man bar next to the bottlo, filled with people remembering into their beer when the racecourse was a humming center, Kelston, a little further out, goes off a bit more, at least the bike gangs seem determined to have fun. Inwards a bit, Mt Albert has a bit of a vibe, although it’s mostly around the kids in gaming cafes/tea rooms. Pt Chevalier has more going on again, multiple places open late. Grey Lynn has a small central core of bars but not much outside. Kingsland has actual foot traffic, people appear to be wandering around looking for a good time. Ponsonby is open late most nights and toward the city end there’s usually something going on. K-Road is actually vibrant. But by then you are actually in the CBD. I prefer that end of the city to Downtown, not really sure why. Downtown seems to be yuppies, whereas at the K-Rd end there’s actually a feeling that a lot of people live there, that it’s a neighborhood rather than just an expensive entertainment district. There’s people just idly hanging around who aren’t drunk, maybe sitting back and reading a book, or chatting with people who appear to be on a budget but not a timetable. Like you’d get in small town or village.
Which is strange, that the more densely populated the area, the more like a village it becomes in the mode of existence of the people. I think that’s a testament to just how unnatural our suburban mode of existence really is, what a weird technological offshoot it can seem. If we all have a castle, we all become aristocrats, and only after we’ve got it do we realize what a sad bunch they have always been. The ironic wealth-trap in which one is terrified of losing ground towards poverty, and yet in a perfectly controlled life, we never get to live.
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Fantastic piece of writing. Even more fantastic slice of life, so vivid and recognizable to me in many parts. I wish I had your strength of character, David, and I hope you and Paul remain friends forever. It is good to hear that in the midst of the bureaucratic tomfoolery that is involved in ensuring disadvantaged people are able to live with some comfort, that there is a safety valve by which someone like Paul does not have to deal with it.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to J Browning,
Evidence – Melbourne CBD is an example close to home.
Evidence of what? I lived there for years. I had a car, but I just didn’t use it for doing things in the city, that would be pointless and tedious. I either walked or caught trams, within the core area a few kilometers around the CBD. Outside of that, I’d probably use the car.
Honestly, the CBD is the good part of Melbourne. I don’t miss the sprawling suburbs, that go on for up to 50 kilometers from the center. I do very much miss living in Carlton, in 3 story low-rise, getting up for breakfast at any one of 100 restaurants within a 3 minute walk, and the 10 minute tram trip in to work on Collins St, or a 5 minute walk to see my thesis supervisor, or do some waterpolo training at the club pool. I miss having a town that strolling around at night in was actually fun, that stuff was happening, and home was only 10 minutes walk away. Sure, I couldn’t park my car there easily, but I seldom needed to. The car was for the tackling of the horrendous suburban distances – you really needed a nice one because you were going to be stuck in it for hours.
I will admit to feeling a sense of the horror of the grey city commuter grind the few times I was staying outside of the central area. Trains were excellent, got you there pretty fast, but really, you can’t put 20 kilometers each way behind you without it taking a substantial bite out of your life, no matter how good the infrastructure. This just wasn’t an issue in the dense low rise central zone. I periodically struggle with the sense of just how much of that I’ve lost by coming back to Auckland.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Where I live in southeastern downtown Beijing all green space is communal.
Just had an interesting chat with a mate living in Beijing. He's an absolute Sinophile, but Beijing is his least favourite city. I don't know where exactly he is, but his description of the amenities of life where he is don't paint a particularly happy picture. The description was of a life lived virtually entirely in his apartment, which is in huge slab of similar things, but that itself is disconnected from anything around it. He seldom goes for an idle stroll, because there's just nothing to see or do within a ten minute walk. It's just miles and miles of apartment blocks. If he wants to go anywhere he has to drive (he doesn't know how to ride a bike). Curious, it's so contra to my mental image of China, but that's most formed around places like Hong Kong. So he's in a very densely populated area that somehow seems to have very little soul. How much of the city is like this?
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As an example, I am teaching my son right now, aged 7, to swim. Eventually, when I believe he can swim, I will be able to allow him freedom from control near deep water. The consequences of this are far, far, far more severe than any likely consequences of poorly managed sex. He could die, and that's not unimaginably unlikely, it happens to dozens of people in this country every year. I expect he will be fully in control of this by the time he is about 9 years old. He's likely, like me, to have some terrifyingly unpleasant experiences in water. But the upshot of those experiences for me is that I'd be extremely unlikely to die in water short of being knocked unconscious or trapped underwater. And a love of water, doing things in water, has been an enduring part of my life since I was about 7 years old. It has made me who I am. It was worth it, even though the consequences of it being done wrong are terrible.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Then you did the right thing, and didn’t get the outcome you wanted. That sucks, but it happens.
Did I do the right thing? Really? I’m asking this in a moral sense, rather than a legal sense. In hindsight, I am not sure at all. In avoiding a harm, I also avoided a good. I think the good would have been way more than the potential harm, to both parties – except for the law. But we’ll never know.
Ethnicity and age are really, really not the same thing, primarily because everyone older than fourteen was fourteen once themselves.
Struggling to see the relevance of that. Croatians are even more unobliged to reveal their ethnicity to other Croatians, who could have much higher probability of having a real problem with them. Ethnicity and age are both features about a person they can’t change. Age will eventually change, but the teachable moment might pass for a lot of people on a lot of things, waiting for it. Age will change, but it will never change back. Lost opportunity is not inconsequential.
I don’t have a plan, just to be clear. I’m only debating the strange ups and downs of the morality debate around children. I’m certainly not against there being age limits for many things, they’re a practical solution to an important problem. My point is really a lot more abstract, and sits on the back of steadily rising information about the danger and cost of too much protection.
I have to say that we’re a very, very strange animal when it comes to sex. We like it, and yet we strictly prohibit it right at the time when any other animal would be doing it most. And yet we’re the only species that has nearly total control over the ramifications of it, it is not the life-altering moment that it is for other animals. My cat has sex, nek-minnit it’s a mother of 6. For humans in the developed world, the average age of child bearing is somewhere around 30 years of age, and it’s only rising.
We could be a species that educates children about sex as our only control of it, letting them make some of the mistakes in controlled circumstances before releasing the controls gradually, just as we train them in all other things. We do actually have that power. It’s our choices that are increasing our level of paternalism, our control over the bedchambers of youth, it’s not some automatic and obviously good thing. Not to me, anyway.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Absent the law, you don’t know what her personal feelings were or would have been about sleeping with a 14-year-old.
Absent the law, I don't know why I'd particularly care what her feelings were about it, unless she brought it up specifically. I may have deeply held feelings about Croatians, too, but that doesn't mean someone who is Croatian should have to tell me that they are one. I don't have to tell anyone what my income is, or dick size, or any number of other things they may be concerned about. It's not on me to think of things about me that should exclude me from being eligible. I wasn't going to a meat market nightclub so that I could explain to everyone why they shouldn't have sex with me. Nor was anyone else there. To suggest that that's the way it is is naive. To even say that it should be any different is highly debatable. It's true only from a legal positivistic point of view, and that's a view I have never subscribed to.
Like it or not, age matters socially, never more so than at the stages of life when you can’t wait to be older. Framing the story as “oh, if only it wasn’t for the legal age of consent, I could have got laid!” seems a little simplistic.
You totally misunderstand the point of my story. I could have said nothing at all, and maybe got laid. I only said something because of my understanding of the severity of the law regarding underage sex (like practically everyone I didn't know that it might have not even been technically against the law).
Like it or not, age matters socially, never more so than at the stages of life when you can’t wait to be older.
Perhaps so, but that's their problem, really. Like it or not, weight matters too, but you're under no compulsion to tell me your weight in a flirting social setting. Indeed, to highlight your good points and cover your bad ones is expected. Unless, of course, there's a law against some aspect of it.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Maybe not, but it sounds like *she* would have been traumatized if she’d found out you were 14 later on in proceedings. Whatever the reasoning for that, it probably wouldn’t have been pretty in practice.
No one will ever know if that is true. The trauma you are referring to is entirely manufactured by the legal ramifications of "proceedings". Without that context, it was 2 humans meeting, liking each other, and maybe doing something fun. Without that context, the worst that could have happened is she would possibly find out that she didn't want to have a relationship with me, something that needs to be found out for every person one has "proceedings" with. I wasn't going to turn out to have some kind of weirdly damageable or damaging body just on account of my 2 years shy of the law. On the contrary, I looked like an 18 year old because my physical development was much more like an 18 year old's. Could my personality have been damaged in some way? I really doubt it. I know exactly what not getting laid for far too long is like and there's nothing good about it, IMHO. Hence saying I think it would have done me a power of good. Absent the law, the worst damage she might have got is friends telling her she's a cradle-snatcher, etc. The remedy, simple - don't continue. Or tell the friends to fuck off because she likes what she likes. If she likes it (and it's not against the law...this is a hypothetical case).
I'm mentioning my story because it's the flipside of the extremely common other side, like Emma's story, the person who does have sex despite being underage. You can talk all you like about the way in which they might not have been the person they could be from having that innocence taken away. I'm talking about it from the side of that being my actual experience, and I honestly don't think it's necessarily less damaging. Sex is good for people. It really is. It can also be bad for people, and all the public discourse is about that. It's similar to any number of public safety measures, backed up by the hammer of the law. They almost never take account of the damage of the lost opportunity, the lost chance to make mistakes.
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