Posts by Mark Easterbrook
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My cousin worked in the Team Policing Unit during the 90s, when the out-of-control-Shore-Kids thing was at its height.
Based on his anecdotes, there wasn't much teen-on-teen violence; the aggression mostly got directed at the Police. And they couldn't direct much back; they were routinely dealing with well-informed kids with forgiving parents, who knew exactly how much they could get away with.
I think that the push to get some of the boy racer-related powers Police now have, with things like confiscating cars for "sustained loss of traction", grew out of the feeling of impotence Police had back at those Shore parties.
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no Asians, no gangsters
Sounds like a great email signature line for New Zealand First.
Or Tariana Turia, judging by her comments in the Herald.
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You're right about kids and parties, Russell. In Whangarei in the late 80s and early 90s me and my friends (and we were the 'nice' kids) did exactly the same things.
Friday after school always turned into a ring-around to find where the parties were. Sometimes the results were concerning - hundreds of kids hurling abuse and bottles at police - and sometimes they were comical - like the time we gatecrashed a stranger's 21st that had about 7 people at it.
Even my Dad admits to doing much the same in the 50s. It's not the booze or the texting or whatever excuse talkback wants to find this week that caused the deaths in Christchurch. It's the facct that, for whatever reason, some kids grow up not understand the fundamentals of right and wrong.
Why? I wish I had an answer...
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What's wrong with Huntly?
Oh, right, the coal.
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Any of the precious and offended notice the title? Yellow Peril. I think that implies that references to ethnicity via colour are meant with just a little bit of mirth and irony.
Yes, but as noted earlier, there is a difference between self-referential humour and comments directed at others. To reference the recent Don Imus furore in the States, a black girl calling herself a "nappy-headed ho" is a whole different situation to a white man using the same term on the radio.
Yes, this thread has grown into something out of proportion to Tze Ming's throwaway comment. But hey, how often do us white middle-class males get to call for some Political Correctness to demarginalise us? ;)
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with the photographer's knack for taking delightfully unflattering snaps, it wasn't your typical society page.
I'll never forget the day my mum rang me to ask my why I was on those Metro pages putting my tongue in the mouth of a girl she didn't know.
Due to...um...factors, I couldn't really tell her an answer to either...
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I just tried to watch MyStory online, and it Denied me because, apparently, I'm located outside New Zealand.
Maybe it meant outside MAINSTREAM New Zealand, in the Brashian sense...
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Out of all the jokes made on PA, some of them infinitely more cutting, this one gets all the attention?!
Makes you wonder if there's not some reason for it.An alert went out on the secret White Boy Wire (a network of corporate stooges, misogynists, colonisers and private school old boys) telling us to man the barricades and defend our hegemonic superiority. Your secret decoder ring didn't vibrate? </light-hearted sarcasm>
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Alert! White Boy chiming in...
Away from my desk last week, or I would have come to this sooner...
Tze Ming, I think the root of the offence that some of the other white boy's here have taken is that, to throw a blanket term over all white males unfairly drags us into the company of those we do not want to identify with.
I do not consider myself as part of the same subset of people as George W. Bush, for example, or Gerry Brownlee, or the National Front munters. I use other identifiers to define myself.
Being white and male does not mean I feel I have anything in common with other white males. If by being a white boy, I am required to fit the same subset as Byron Kelleher, do you as a yellow girl have to fit the same subset as his wife, Singapore-born ex-porn star Kaylani Lei?
At university, I hit some negativity early on from both lecturers and fellow students who, seeing only my 'white boy'-ness, assumed I had nothing to say that they wanted to hear. So I kept saying what I had to say, and eventually they realised they were wrong to assume anything based on race and gender.
Big deal, some might say, welcome to the world of the minority. But I can clearly remember the way a particular self-identified feminist lecturer would physically react when I put my hand up before she got to know me. I could see her bracing herself to rebutt what I said before I even opened my mouth. I didn't like the way that made me feel.
And I think that's the crux of the issue here - by calling someone by a loaded name - and "white boy" IS a loaded name - you can hurt them. If that someone is Kyle Chapman (for example), the attack may be justified but, ironically, the bullet won't wound. If that someone is me, Che Tibby, RB, Steven Crawford, or anyone who feels they have tried hard to overcome the dark side of their white-boy-ness, so to speak, the attack hits AND it hurts.
Feel free to suggest I get over it - I have a stromg enough sense of self that this stuff isn't ruining my day - but I'm just trying (probably poorly) to show the view from the other side.
Christ that was a long post. -
Wearing them as necklaces?