Posts by andrew gunn
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For some light relief may I recommend following Russell’s link to the Media7 “shouting match”, starring Ana Samways as Woman Talking Sense and featuring some rooster called Swney who chews up the scenery in the role of Every Unfair Negative Stereotype I Ever Had About Aucklanders.
Priceless… (unlike, I imagine, Swney’s charge-out rate)
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'Right team, here's the name for our new credit-rating agency'
'Hmmm - I'm a little worried that one day we may be complicit in enabling a world-wide financial crisis, and this name may somehow be used as the basis of an embarrassing play on words. Perhaps we should run it through some sort of basic anagram-checker'
Pause.
'Nah..."
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I read that post David, thanks. Can I just say that some of my best friends are cyclists (oil companies not so much), so in a general sense: all power to your sprocket.
Still, I think I missed the bit that justified breaking the law. Could you direct me to it? Sorry to bang on.
As for the Paglia stuff: Crikey. I had no idea I was that deep.
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Hi Jolisa, I think you’re right. There is a continuum of bad things done by people in power, and it runs from Things That Make You Go Hmm right up to Things That Make You Go Dead. My two cents worth: not being able to walk or cycle across the Auckland Harbour Bridge is insufficiently advanced along that continuum to justify civil disobedience.
But perhaps one had to be there. Let’s hear from those that were. When you pushed past the people with blue uniforms asking you to stop, were you thinking: “A fundamental breach of human rights is occurring such that I have no alternative but to break the law, conscious though I am of the seriousness of such action”
Or was it more like: “Cycling good. Police silly. Woo-hoo!”
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I just have this thing about breaking the law.
And how, if you’re going to, it should be for a seriously good reason. Something fundamental, like the abuses that led to:
Sitting in the whites-only part of the bus.
Standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square.
Being chained to the fence at Greenham Common.
Occupying the pitch in Hamilton in 1981.
But here? Believe me, I’m quite prepared to accept that biking: good; NZTA: bad. You had me at “bureaucracy”. But being gosh-darned frustrated by a government agency – that’s a rather low threshold to set for justifying law-breaking, n’est-pas? Or maybe this particular law just wasn’t that important. Guess I didn’t get the memo on that one.
And this, too: There’s been a lot of cheap talk lately about the difficult job the police have and how we need to support them. Well here’s a suggestion: don’t arse up their Sunday mornings. And no, giving them a patronising round of applause after disobeying them does not make it all better.
I am now feeling the urge to write a sentence using the word “respect” in a non-ironic way. So I’ll get my coat.