Posts by Joe Wylie
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Someone I knew who was a high-ranking kiwi bureaucrat spent a decade working in the UK and on return was full of dire warnings about NZ "heading the same way" with regard to immigration.
As Britain goes, so we go. Or should, eh? Personally I'm inclined to dismiss much of the tendency to dire punditry by returning kiwis as a symptom of culture shock. I remember a pair of returnees in the early 80s warning of the horrors of Thatcherism that they'd witnessed. Muldoon, they claimed, would now be emboldened to implement the same policies. Their solution? Vote Labour.
Then there was the boss of Stiff Records who made a brief visit at the end of the 70s, with the message that what culturally deprived NZ needed was a big influx of West Indians. I rather doubt that he'd have recognised a Polynesian if he'd met one.
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Italians. I don't trust Italians. And Catholics - which most Italians are. Nothing in the points system allows us to leave them out. We should have a national conversation about that.
Well those dreadful chattering classes seem overly fond of things Italian, which is probably a big negative.
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. . . the EU had a discussion 9 years ago about pretend chocolate such as what Cadbury sprews out.
I remember that, largely because of the angry Belgian who suggested that the Brits would be better off making suppositories from their dubious compound chocolate.
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Anyone using the term "let's be honest" deserves to have a lamington placed on their head.
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Meng Foon is Mayor, of all places, Napier.
Meng Foon is Mayor of Gisborne.
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Kerry, not offended by your statement re. Weatherston, or any other aspect of your post. Sorry if it came across that way. Because of Weatherston's monstrous individuality I just don't know how far his case is relevant to the issues Sian Elias has raised, so I took your mention of his case as a hypothetical.
"Mad as a snake" is, when I think about it, nicely put. It's an honest response to the can-this-really-be-happening sensation as each ghastly insane instalment is presented, along with the struggle to stay humane in the face of such slow-motion craziness, without becoming dehumanised. While monsters such as Weatherston are fortunately rare, there's plainly something badly wrong with a legal defence that facilitates a killer perpetrating further crimes against their victim in a courtroom.
Steven Judd:"The problem is that delinquent behavior is contagious, especially among adolescents. Putting deviant adolescents together creates a culture of deviance, which increases the likelihood of continued criminal behavior."
So true.
I've recently had to deal - as neighbours - with people whose intellectual disabilities had put them offside with the law. While they were heavy alcohol abusers, I had the impression that this stemmed from learned behaviour, rather than a real physical dependency. In the prison culture booze is forbidden and cool, and being freed is above all the freedom to be "on the piss".
An earlier generation would have classed such people as congenitally low IQ, and would have institutionalised them for their own protection. Instead of the shallow swagger and occasional misguided aggression they've developed, their lives would have been rather more infantile, with no emphasis on their rights. We should have progressed to a point where such people enjoyed protection along with the enjoyment of their rights. Instead we jail them and, as Dr. Tremblay notes, compound the problem.
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. . . possibly up to 70% of male prisoners have an anti-social personality disorder and 50% of prisoners with major mental health issues don't get any sort of treatment. Clayton Weatherston anyone? He's mad as a snake - what will prison do to him?
People with intellectual disabilities are jailed in large numbers all the time, mostly with society's full approval. Witness the "dumb crim" stories that regularly feature as trivial news fodder.
Weatherston, though, is a much rarer beast. How come his academic colleagues didn't pick him as being "mad as a snake"? If there's a plausible early intervention scenario that would have prevented him killing I'd like to hear it, but I guess it lies outside the range of this discussion.
As for what prison will do to him, probably much the same as whatever a secure psychiatric facility might offer. He'll be isolated for his own protection, and offered a form of therapy wherever he's incarcerated. In the meantime, the law affords him the opportunity to attempt a final butchery of his victim's legacy.
Sian Ellis's suggestions are at least partly a result of the great emptying out of psychiatric institutions that started around three decades ago. A huge cost-cutting exercise was undertaken under the guise of reform. There's been a myth abroad for some time that free-market policies somehow raise the general IQ, and the needs of the vulnerable can be wished away. Much of the present bloated jail population is due to this cynical nonsense.
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. . . a can of special Craig whup arse.
There's an image to conjure with - aerosol chocolate mousse crossed with pepper spray, with maybe a touch of Liquid Wrench™.
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Great Cadbury/Bourneville recollections webweaver, thanks!
About the palm oil - it's a real irony that Cadbury have succumbed, as they were supposedly the first to produce a an additive-free chocolate bar back in the 1860s with the slogan “Absolutely Pure: Therefore Best.”
The quaker connection is interesting. The original John Cadbury, along with Joseph Fry and George Rowntree, were all 'friends', i.e. quakers, and were supposedly drawn to the ethical aspects of chocolate back when it was simply a drink, as an alternative to alcohol. Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree were all notable for the practical aid they provided to Ireland at the time of the potato famine.
While Cadbury and Fry were a single operation for much of the 20th century any quaker influence, with its ethical considerations, was lost with the takeover by Schweppes in the late 1960s.
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saved by Soft Rock
Rofflenui
Ha!
Those soppy old tectonic plates eh?Sometimes when they touch
The honesty's too much