Male Watch – Downunder

No, it’s not ‘Whale Watch’ or ‘Crime Watch’ it really is Male Watch – the new State, how to keep-our-women-safe system, being introduced by the Duluthed Government of New Zealand.

The new disclosure scheme was announced by Justice Minister Amy Adams and Police Minister Judith Collins, and is part of a range of measures designed to reduce domestic violence.

Secret Santa is alive and well, handing out the big Xmas pressy to White Ribbon and the billion dollar Domestic Violence Industry that exists in this country. Yes, this is an industry that rivals Fonterra, it’s now the backbone of the country.

It’s as draconian and Stasi-like as the recent behaviour of the Police, but you won’t see the media beat the drums of freedom or the likes of Barry Soper leaping out of your TV screen in protest, as he did when the Police pursued his wife and executed a retaliatory raid by warrant on their apartment.

The primary issue that arises here isn’t even with the political definition of Domestic Violence in New Zealand: Male violence against women.

Or, the on-going and foreseeable disaster that will result from the implementation of ideological processing rather than an intelligent procedure.

No, this in reality, is the initiation of bare-faced male surveillance and public record keeping by the police, on every man in New Zealand.

You’d be naïve and ill informed if you believed that the Police had never had or used an arrest-the-male policy at domestic incidents because it was the easy way out.

You’d also be naïve if you thought that every man who pleaded guilty did so because they were guilty rather than because it was the least expensive and easiest door to walk through.

You’d be naïve and ill informed if you thought that the Justice Department hadn’t run a prepaid conviction service through the experimental Domestic Violence Court system established in ‘various places’ around the country.

This is a major affront not only to male freedom or human rights in this country, but also to the processing and availability of personal information, supposedly for the benefit of the protected species of the country – ‘women’.

Instead of having a policy that will create the mandatory gossip-gossip “Oh, what came back in his Police check” and a further lowering of our marginal birth rate, why don’t we pass a law that says that all men must have their domestic-violence clearance papers on them at all times. (We’ve already got a similar policy for child-support defaulters to stop them escaping the country)

Same thing isn’t it?

Oh, except it was a policy and not a law and didn’t get debated, but that doesn’t matter in a democratic society, does it?

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Gender-Centric Media

Woman rescued from concrete truck

This is a very good example, from the NZ Herald, of how modern media construct an article based on gender rather than the subject of the news. The text from the linked to article, is copied in full below.

The politics of get the man, is certainly alive and well here too, but frankly, I’m sick of this deconstruction of the news, and the standards of journalism in New Zealand. They’ve hit rock bottom.

The story should be about an accident between a concrete truck and a tourist rental van.

What the writer is targeting, is ‘the tourist’ – yes, they’ve become a bit of nuisance on our roads, of recent.

The man they’re ‘getting’ – let’s have a look at that too.

They’re straight into it with the ‘click-bait’ headline-

woman rescued from concrete truck

‘She’ in the headline isn’t even the driver, because ‘she’ is being used emotively, to prospect in our sympathies. Who did something to a woman in a concrete truck, was she hurt by someone, not a male by any chance?

I’m actually quite impressed with any woman who can operate a heavy vehicle. It’s not that easy, and the vast majority of women wouldn’t want a bar of a rough vocation, but in this case, this woman ‘she’ ‘the driver’ is first off, just click-bait for their media machine, then, her occupation is totally beside the point.

It happens again in the photo caption: The driver and the concrete truck have become ‘She’. Didn’t your mother always tell you; ‘She’ is the cat’s mother.

Police said that as she approached the intersection of Jones Rd and Dawsons Rd a rental van appears to have failed to stop and the concrete truck collided with the vehicle. Photo / File

Look at the construction of the sentences below from each paragraph, where it doesn’t suit the writer to have the a ‘driver’ in the story – ‘She’ has to be a woman.

Can you see the insult, ‘she’ receives, demeaned to just a woman, for the writer’s purpose.

A woman was trapped
the 52-year-old Christchurch woman was driving
Police said that as she approached the intersection
The woman was cut from the truck she was driving

There were three persons in the rental van and the male driver is assisting police with their investigation.

Most concrete truck drivers are men. They are men at work, busy runs, heavy vehicles – with an expensive piece of machinery and it’s a be-there-on-time-job for the pour.

This was an accident between a concrete truck and a tourist vehicle, but the way it’s written up is, forgive my French, a gender-centric load of crap, and it’s hate mail in disguise.

Judge and jury has already decided, that this woman couldn’t be at fault. ‘She’ has been written out of the story as a driver, and a male tourist is helping Police with their enquiries.

All the police said was “a rental van appears to have failed to stop”

And if it was an electronic fault in the vehicle?

A woman was trapped in a concrete truck south of Christchurch this afternoon after a rental van collided with her.

At 12.55pm, the 52-year-old Christchurch woman was driving on Jones Rd near Rolleston.

Police said that as she approached the intersection of Jones Rd and Dawsons Rd a rental van appears to have failed to stop and the concrete truck collided with the vehicle.

The woman was cut from the truck she was driving, which rolled into a hedge, and taken to hospital with moderate to serious injuries but not life threatening.

There were three persons in the rental van and the male driver is assisting police with their investigation.

Acting Senior Sergeant Kath Pomfrett told Stuff.co.nz that a group of tourists were travelling in the van.

 

Those Taringa on Recieve?

When I was a child, Christmas was generally a happy time for most, or that, in my innocence was the way it appeared to me.

As I began to pay attention to the world, I noticed a trend in the news – somewhere in New Zealand, on Christmas Day, there would be a homicide.

Now, World Peace is probably a bit of a pie-in-the-sky ideal for the human race, but surely in ‘God’s Own’ with just a few million of us down here at the bottom of the world, in a land of plenty, we could get through Christmas without killing each other.

But no, I see the trend has evolved. The state of our society has deteriorated further. We don’t hold out for Christmas Day anymore. It appears December has become the Killing-Season rather than the Silly-Season.

Wait. Maybe, that’s it. The season just got sillier, than it used to be.

Is it us?

Are we individually more selfish, more demanding?

Are we less loving, less caring, less concerned, less thoughtful, less kind to each other?

Are we now, more of what is wrong, and less of what is right, than we used to be?

Have we stopped caring about each other, looking out for each other, helping each other?

Have we stopped listening to each other?

Perhaps if we wanted to make a change this Christmas, to this disturbing trend, we might put aside some listening time – it may just lighten someone’s load.

So, those taringa going to be on receive during the Killing-Season?

The Politics of Get a Man

This is much more visible in American culture, as it has existed through the racial feuds of Black against White, since the days of slavery.

Modern technology has released many men in the US from wrongful conviction, especially black men who were essentially convicted, on the basis that if they were proven to have been present, they must have done it.

It’s the ugly side of the human mind, that takes the freedom of another human being, to prove expedience, at the expense of what the majority of us like to believe is justice.

We’re not perfect in New Zealand. Perhaps it is only … that this … is not so visible, at least to ourselves – I can’t speak for the independent observer outside of our goldfish bowl.

The last man hanged in New Zealand was a lesson for us. We, yes, ‘we’ hung a man for a murder-that-wasn’t. It wasn’t right, but looking forward we abolished the death penalty and aimed to do better.

The political pressures of the 1970s derailed that idea. With murders increasing, suspects becoming more random, failures in getting the basics right, holes began to show in a system that we believed was much more capable than we thought. What we saw appearing, was perceived as failure, rather than a failure to evolve with a changing society.

Politicians demanded better, they wanted convictions, not failed inquiries. It was the Arthur Allan Thomas case, that was the undoing of the Police and our Justice system. It was a tireless media that brought out in the end, not only the truth, but a truth about ourselves.

This lesson was learnt, or should have been a couple of decades back, but when the now Commissioner of Police spoke in unwise denial at the funeral of one of the investigating officers from the Crewe Murder – that was ‘clear evidence’ that there still exists within the Police, an acceptance of the right to pursue expedience in the name of credibility, over and above their obligation to pursue the truth.

The police are not there to ‘get people’. A culture of this nature is an abuse of power, and damaging to society. We’ve seen that play out in an unfortunate manner of recent, with a raid on a journalist’s apartment. It’s well publicized and I’m not going to rehash that story here.

But there’s another side to this culture that is equally disturbing, which shows up in another murder investigation – that of Lisa Blakie. There’s evidence to suggest, that again, the wrong man is in jail. Regardless of his race, his social standing, or anything else that’s happened since, if there’s the possibility that the wrong man has been convicted, that is as urgent as the initiation of any murder inquiry, when a homicide is first suspected.

We had a new Minister of Police appointed yesterday, in the form of the resurrected Judith Collins. Maybe the Prime Minister can see the gaping wounds, and the dwindling professional surfacing again within the leadership of the Police?

Well, if The Crusher is out to crush again, maybe she could start with this culture of mediocrity, this acceptance of second best, this culture of get a man, rather than get the job done the right way.