Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: Friday Music: Good ideas and grumbles, in reply to Russell Brown,
The full text of Don McGlashan's response to Blink's Playing Favourites interview with Kim Hill, which was read out in part last Saturday
Wow, that was a really great effort. It seems to me, from the outside, a lot of organizations could learn from APRA when it comes to genuine and constructive engagement with its critics.
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Hard News: Auckland's future: Keep calm,…, in reply to Mark Graham,
You’re joking right Craig?
I'm not joking. If central government really thinks local councils are too fiscally incontinent to be trusted with the powers delegated to them by the Local Government Act, then I'm sure the next Parliament will have no problems passing a bill to take them away.
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Hard News: Auckland's future: Keep calm,…, in reply to Graham Dunster,
One thing I continue to find hard to understand is why the MPs elected in Auckland constituencies are not supporting their city. Nary a peep from them, let alone an organised group ensuring that their constituents are properly served.
To be fair, Graham, constituency MPs do all kinds of advocacy on local issues which are no less real because the media takes precisely zero interest in them. (And a fair amount of it involves constituents who deserve to have their privacy respected.)
But are you seriously calling for central government to try directly influencing local government decisions over their own affairs? To take that to the reductio ad absurdum, why not just abolish elected councillors and have Parliament set rates and decide how they are to be spent?
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Speaker: Not even a statistic, in reply to Danielle,
Why are we still using “teach women to do stuff” arguments anyway?
And as Melissa McEwan rather sharply, and correctly, puts it in her Rape Culture 101:
Rape culture is refusing to acknowledge that the only thing a person can do to avoid being raped is never be in the same room as a rapist. Rape culture is avoiding talking about what an absurdly unreasonable expectation that is, since rapists don’t announce themselves or wear signs or glow purple.
What “stuff” can you teach anyone that makes living your short and exceptionally unpleasant life alone in a locked room a viable option? There's nothing because it isn't.
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Speaker: Not even a statistic, in reply to Emma Hart,
“Self-defence” is very focused on the ‘attack by a total stranger walking down a dark street’ rape myth narrative. Learning self-defence will not, as I said, keep you safe from being raped.
And it can also disappear a lot of abuse victims for whom "self-defense" wasn't an option. Some years back, a member of my extended family pulled her elderly mother (who has dementia) out of a home after one of the staff was discovered sexually assaulting another resident when her daughter unexpectedly dropped by for a visit and thought nothing of walking into her Mum's room without knocking. He'd been doing this to vulnerable women for years.
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Speaker: Not even a statistic, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
You CAN protect yourself. The Crimes Act specifically allows it. Teach our daughters to defend themselves…permission to go into beserker mode if threatened. Pull out every weapon at their disposal. Teach our daughters that they are in control, teach them to be stroppy and staunch. If the attacker holds a gun/knife to you…and ‘cooperation’ is unavoidable, teach our daughters to remember every little detail that could potentially lead to a conviction.
I totally get and respect your point, Rosemary, but how you do it can be really tricky, and (however unwittingly) perpetuate a major rape culture enforcement tool “She didn’t fight back so…”
I’d also argue we’ve also got to be really mindful and respectful of the reality that disassociation is the way a lot of people deal with profound trauma, and it’s really dangerous to put the message out there that people who don’t remember every detail of abuse are failing in any way.
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Hard News: Auckland's future: Keep calm,…, in reply to Sacha,
At least Rudman seems able to string a few thoughts together without making shit up.
Meh... in the interests of general amity, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree there and move on. I wouldn't be too upset if both of them were put on gardening leave for a while, because their signal-to-noise ratios have been moving the wrong way for a long time.
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Hard News: Auckland's future: Keep calm,…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
For some reason people seem to think you can have the benefits of a city without having to pay for them.
Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die first? Who hasn’t been there – but I really enjoyed a week of deliciously unseasonable warm spring weather in London a couple of years back. A week that was made all the more delightful because, following the “Great Stink” of 1858 an enormous amount of money was invested in a modern sewage system for Central London. Joseph Bazalgette’s scheme was completed 140 years ago, but the people of London are still enjoying the benefits of not having a giant open sewer and disease incubator running though the middle of the place they live and work.
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I’m also enormously annoyed by The Herald (and everyone else) running the “Len Brown’s a lying liar who’s dancing naked around a bonfire of YOUR money” line.
Last time I looked, there is no local authority in this country where budgets are set by Mayoral fiat. Perhaps folks like Mr Orsman would be a little clearer on that if they got professional help for their obsession with Len Brown’s penis, and started taking fact-based reporting of local government seriously again.
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Hard News: A wretched editorial, in reply to Russell Brown,
I actually didn’t realise Gavin Ellis had made such a complete ass of himself.
Eh... this is the former editor of a newspaper that has a long and shabby history of rape culture enforcement. I wish it surprised me even a little bit, but it doesn't.