Fragile Masculinity Syndrome

I recently had an altercation on a local community Facebook page with a person who, contrary to FB rules, uses a pseudonym. He posted something which sought to lay the blame for the smelly and sometimes toxic algal blooms that are now a feature of the region’s rivers in summer, on “council contractors” digging holes. The aim of these “council engineered ponds”, according to him, is so the smell and toxins can then be blamed on farmers to justify further environmental regulation.

I posted a mildly worded reply pointing out that responsibility for issuing licenses to commercial companies to extract gravel lies with the regional authority, Environment Canterbury. I also said that reduced river flows, and the increased use of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers combined with heavy irrigation are factors in the now yearly algal blooms.

Articulate women, especially older women, are anathema to men who suffer from fragile masculinity syndrome (FMS). Another man can call them a dick, thick as shit, a clown, etc but let a woman sound smarter than them, and their emotional fuses start to blow. 

I was soon to find out that this particular FMS sufferer is a misogynist of the first water; a wanna-be patriarch who believes that men should rule, and women should submit; that a woman’s place is serving her husband and looking after kids, and as for old women, they should do the world of men a favour, acknowledge their uselessness, and die.

He began the process of consigning me to the ranks of what eventually became a cabal of screeching-feminist-hippy-climate-change-doomsday-cultist-leftie-vaccine-promoting-authoritarians who, in his view are intent upon destroying the NZ economy. 

That combination of extreme ignorance and arrogance is like a red rag to an earnest pedagogue like me, so I tried to explain more about why ECAN licenses gravel extraction, and the part played in the blooms by increased use of artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation.

My explanations about reducing riverbed elevation to maintain capacity between the stopbanks and thereby reduce flood risk, were clearly not comprehensible to someone so deeply mired in confirmation bias. He was clearly ignorant, even of what stopbanks are, why they were created in the first place and are carefully maintained. 

A tongue in cheek reply advising him to calm his amygdala and engage his frontal lobes was a step too far for his FMS, and he fixed me firmly in his misogynistic sights. 

(Spelling and grammar original; my emphasis in bold.)

HOW is THIS thing going to stop any flooding if there is a few banks ACROSS the river bed???if you think what you wrote made you sound smart, it didn't. The world doesn't revolve around you and that might be very hard thing to comprehend for old woman that's well past her expiry date. it doesn't mater if I say 1 + 1 =2 or if I say you are dumb if you don't know 1+1 = 2. It's still correct statement and it's nothing hyperbolic about it. This hippie attitude that it's bad to point out stupidity rather than the stupidity itself is going out of fashion and more and more people are starting to catch up. NZ is too ruined, economy is destroyed and the whole country was run to the ground while hippes were cheering about progression of feminism and environmentalism instead of making sure things are run responsibly, by competent men and in a way that would make tomorrow better than yesterday. So far the only result of this current madness is the fact that median income of $65 000 in 2025 is the equivalent of $8 000 in 2000 and everything is worse than 25 years ago...”

Unwilling to engage on his post any longer but wanting to clarify issues for others, I posted something myself. 

As someone who grew up in Canterbury, I know the streams on our region's shingle riverbeds have always grown algae as the flow decreases and the temperature of the water increases. I know also that there has been an increased use of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers on the plains' thin alluvial soils, along with an increase in heavy irrigation which accelerates the leaching of nutrients into waterways.

As a result of that, when the rivers experience low flow, and/or water gets trapped in either naturally or artificially formed depressions, there is now a greater likelihood that the algae will proliferate and form "blooms".

Each alga is short-lived and as they die off, the resulting high concentration of dead organic matter in the water has the effect of reducing dissolved oxygen. The reduction in oxygen kills freshwater organisms which adds to the organic "soup" and to the unpleasant smell. Some algae also secrete toxins which, in high concentration, can harm mammals.

District Councils do not employ contractors to "engineer ponds" that form algal blooms in order to either deliberately or opportunistically blame it on farmers to justify an increase in environmental regulation of waterways. The responsibility for granting licenses to remove shingle from the region's riverbeds (to help slow bed elevation) lies with the regional authority, ECAN. 

It may be the case that the way shingle is being extracted needs to be more closely monitored.

It is certainly the case that the social and environmental costs of the impact on our region's waterways of an increased reliance on artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation to force grass and legume growth on thin alluvial soils, need to be addressed.

There are science-based facts and there are opinions. As noted by a pseudonymous poster on this page, it's a science-based fact that I'm part of the older demographic. His depiction of my age making me, "an old woman who is well past her expiry date", is opinion. We are all entitled to our opinions but when they are ill-informed, ideological, or stray into expressions of bigotry, best be prepared to be challenged.

Mr FMS soon made his noxious presence felt on my post. (Spelling etc as per original)

You sound like someone involved in the scam or devout fanatic of the doomsday cult of climate change. any conflicts of interst you wanna disclose?

Stagnant water is ideal for growing algae and that's a fact. 

Making ponds like that will supercharge algae blooms - fact.  

making banks across river bed doesn't help prevent floods - fact. 

NZ doesn't use liquid manure PITS so leaching nitrogen (aka liquid manure) leaching into rivers is no concern.

Fish, ducks gulls and so shits into the water and that's the main source of nitrogen in the water, not a cow peeing into grass 1km away.

Farmers were blamed for the stink because very few people know about cyanobacteria and how it stinks when the bloom dies off and decays - fact

Kids and families were exposed to the toxins - fact 

FIY: you know how to gaslight and BS and yes you are well past your expiry date but you still think people will treat you like if you were 20 when you had some value. you should be busy taking care of your husband, kids and grandkids insted of trying to mess things up.

On another post, he made the extraordinary statement that “99.999% of science is wrong” which made me chuckle given he’d taken exception to me calling him out for hyperbole. Presumably in his world all the means by which he forms and communicates his views and earns a living are created by magic.

I wanted to address his points, but others weighed in and challenged him which made his final fuse blow and served to increase his obsessive focus on me. He went into a full-throated rant against pretty much everyone who is not a middle-aged, white man with misogynistic, ageist, anti-authority, conspiracist political views. 

Had I been able to address his post, I would have pointed out that I specifically referred to nitrate and phosphate fertilisers in conjunction with heavy irrigation on the Canterbury plains’ largely thin alluvial soils which lie over deep layers of porous gravels containing vast amounts of water, interspersed with impermeable finer sediments. 

When functioning properly the rivers feed water into the aquifers which drain towards the sea. With heavy irrigation on land adjacent to the rivers, the surface flow of nutrient-laden water may be towards them. The amount of liquid cow dung and urine on intensive dairy pasture is undoubtedly an added factor.

A lot of our region’s once pristine bore water is now contaminated with nitrates, and other water sources are contaminated with coliforms and require chlorination.

Our rivers have always had trees dropping leaf into them, and arguably way more fish and birds pooed into them in the past given the populations of both have dropped in recent years. They have also always had naturally formed depressions which trapped water as flow decreased and in which grew mats of algae. Those natural depressions are now added to by gravel extraction, and it may well be that ECAN needs to monitor that extraction more carefully.

Gravel extraction aside, there is no question that the scale of algal blooms, and especially toxic blooms, is connected to changes in land use, away from predominantly dry land sheep and arable farming into intensive dairying that is dependent on artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation. 

Eventually I closed the comments and blocked him, and the page admins then removed his post and most of the comments under my post which is a shame as I wanted to screenshot them as evidence in the event that his abuse took a physical form.

This man, who seems to think it’s 1825 not 2025, and doesn't care that his ageism and misogyny will offend a lot of people, has clearly not factored in how easily identifiable he is given the internet and NZ's famous two degrees of separation which, in North Canterbury, is more like 1.25 degrees. 

Anyway, all this brouhaha diverted attention away from the pertinent issues – as it was intended to do. The strategy used by these people is, if you cannot address an argument, you troll the person making it. It's a despicable tactic when the issues are so critically important. 

 

Nothing Wholly Disappears Off The Internet ....

I've been re-reading some of my old blog posts, and 11 years ago I wrote a post about unhinged reactions to a video of some girls having a fight. 

The comments were on a Facebook page (prior to the "feminisation" of the site which led to controls which the newly masculinised-Meta (snort) is now removing to curry favour with Trump Inc.) 

Now, we all know that certain things trigger the Amygdala Brigade into what, in hindsight, even they might see as behaviour deserving of a spell in a mental health facility or a prison.

I quoted the worst of them verbatim and provided links. 

Curious to see how the angry ones have moved on in the intervening eleven years, I checked on them.

About half of the accounts have been deleted but others are still there. There were some that were unintentionally funny, like the one who hurled abuse at the offending girls and then claimed New Zealand is a nation of kind, friendly and welcoming people.

One especially charming fellow wrote: 

"Fuck the fat one is an ugly cunt. Pathetic bitches. Those are some girls ill gladly smash 4 on 1. Dont care that im a male. Scum like that deserve a face kicking" ...

He now seems to have a daughter. I wonder if fatherhood has changed his mind about calling a girl, a fat ugly cunt, and wanting to kick her in the face?  

His was by no means the worst. I think this one, whose FB page is no longer available, takes pride of place for the most unhinged and sadistically misogynistic:

"Fucking fat whores need to get probed in the ass with a knife shot in the knees tounge choped off ears cut off fingers and toes and the shove them in a dumpster"

Given the use of "ass" and "dumpster" I don't know if this person was a New Zealander, but there was a very seriously deviant young man in Christchurch who, in 2016 and 2019, was sentenced to a combined twelve-year sentence for possession and distribution of objectionable material, and for child rape and other serious child sex offending. In May last year, he was released on highly restrictive parole conditions, which includes no unsupervised access to the internet and a curfew.  

What are the odds?

That aside, these sorts of splenetic explosions of vileness are once again granted immunity, courtesy of Meta's spineless capitulation to the New Patriarchs.

Punch Bags

Without entering the realms of speculation about the medical history of the two individuals at the heart of the Paris olympics' women’s boxing debacle, there are some pertinent facts about the sport of boxing in general that people should bear in mind before deciding on which ideological hill to make a stand.

Women’s boxing was first introduced into the summer olympics in 2012. From 2016, professionals were allowed to enter and the same year the requirement for male boxers to wear padded head gear was removed on the grounds that padded headgear does not decrease concussion risk. However, women still have to wear it. 

The weight and style of gloves are controlled. Female boxers must not be pregnant, and they are required to wear breast protection because getting punched in the breast is not only potentially very painful, especially during menstruation, it is potentially damaging to long term health.  

Male boxers wear groin protection, and punches below the belt, or to the kidney region or back of the head are proscribed for both sexes.

The reason that women are still required to wear head gear may be more for face and ear protection than concerns about risk of concussion.   

The human face is highly vulnerable to cuts and fractures even from a padded glove, and the female face typically lacks the stronger bone of such post-pubertal male features as the brow ridge and stronger jaw. 

The sometimes permanently disfiguring effects of broken face bones, and damage to nasal and ear cartilage have greater social significance to women and very likely, the sort of facial harm that is routine in male boxing being done to women is not deemed a good look for the olympics. 

Most importantly, the brain of both sexes is highly vulnerable to the effects of a blow to the head because the easily damaged brain bounces around inside the skull. If a fighter falls heavily onto their head, the effects may be worse still. The main reason the floor of the boxing ring is sprung and the posts are heavily padded is to reduce the risk of brain or spinal trauma from impacting them heavily.

If a boxer is dehydrated – a common factor in pre-fight measures to make the very strictly controlled weight grades – the damaging effects on the brain may be amplified. 

Sometimes blows to the head result in obvious symptoms of mild concussion which, in boxing, could be a technical knock out; sometimes they result in a more severe concussion involving loss of consciousness – a literal knock out. 

What is now known about concussion is that if you have even a mild one, you should avoid any further blows to the head as they are likely to exacerbate the damage to the delicate structures of the brain.

More serious brain damage can be catastrophic and from a single blow, or accumulative from repeated blows. 

All contact sports involve the risk of forms and degrees of harm, but boxing is the only sport in which causing harm to your opponent's brain is not just permitted, if the damage is severe enough to result in a technical or a literal knock out, it's an automatic win. 

The aim of delivering blows to the torso and arms in boxing are not just for the points that can be scored by hitting the target areas of head and torso, they are also to hurt and tire the opponent to make them drop their guard so that bout-winning blows to the head can be delivered.

The importance of all this to the current situation in women's olympic boxing is, if boxers competing in the female category happen to have a genetic condition which has resulted in full or partial virilisation at puberty, they will have all or part of the very significant average performance advantage (APA) that male boxers have over female boxers. 

Part of that APA resides in a far greater punching power due, in large part, to the proportion of male body weight which is skeletal muscle and bone. 

People who have gone through a male puberty will typically have a significantly greater proportion of their body weight in bone and skeletal muscle than people who have gone through female puberty. This means their body type is more effective both in delivering punches, and in absorbing them. 

If that happened, it would not be fair, nor would it be safe.

There is no doubt in my mind that all these athletes are being used as pawns by forces engaged in a wider geo-political battle. 

The hapless boxers who have been drawn into this debacle now include a young Russian whose name has been dredged up from the round of 16 in the 2023 world champs as “proof” that the “Russian-led IBA” banned Khelif in order to restore the Russian woman's unbeaten record.   

This piece of mind-boggling post-hoc mendacity, which has appeared on Khelif’s Wikipedia page and widely via the western media, requires us to ignore all the preceding political shenanigans such as the US-led boycott of the IBA, the formation of World Boxing in opposition to the IBA, and the removal of IBA’s olympic accreditation etc. 

It also requires us to completely ignore the other women of colour who Khelif beat to get to gold medal contention, and focus instead on a very young, very blonde Russian thus helping to stoke both Russophobia, and the ethnically-charged elements of the drama which are exemplified by an emotive post on X which claimed in relation to Carini, that “white women’s tears have ruined another brown woman’s life”. 

I deplore the right's hysterical reaction which, by such despicable tactics as declaring Khelif to be a sexual predator, has descended en masse into the gutter where it is indulging in shameless Islamophobia.

On the other side, the west’s various useful idiots are focussing inordinate amounts of time and energy on supporting Khelif (Lin seems to be reduced to a supporting role), and on attacking “terfs”. 

As a result, most are paying little or no attention to the Israeli team whose presence at the olympics was expected to be the focus of much comment and protests, given the Israeli government’s shameful and on-going actions in Gaza and more widely in the Middle East. 

Go figure. 

On Violence and Human Nature

I don't believe that male aggression and capacity for violence is innate; women can be aggressive, cruel, violent and self-centred, and men can be gentle, compassionate, and altruistic. 

Because we are innately social beings who learn much of what it means and how to be human, learning is the dominant partner in the symbiosis between nature and nurture.

There may well be some people who, even in the most optimal of nurturing conditions, would be violent and aggressive, a lack of empathy making them incapable of feeling sympathy for the plight or the pain of others, and as a result, capable of extreme cruelty.
 
In a healthy society, such people would be seen as pathological and be treated accordingly. It is a measure of the possibly terminal sickness of our social world, that such people often become leaders who gather around them, echelons of enablers and colluders. 
 
Those lickspittles form a powerful buffer class which is generously rewarded in terms of status and money for such functions as portraying and feting their leaders’ cruelty and violence as strength and resolve; depicting profound self-centredness and venality as innate and desirable human qualities, the absence of which makes others weak, inferior, and in need of the superior ones’ steady hands on the helms of the state and the economy. 
 
Given most of these pathological humans are male, a necessary function of the enablers is embedding the notion that the qualities required of a leader are those associated with being male.
 
How better to justify pathological male human behaviour than to ascribe those qualities to an all-powerful creator which made man in His image. 

How better to cement that than to argue god granted His creation dominion over the entire world, including over the female human? 

Assert that the creator demands absolute, unquestioning obedience, and His chosen leaders have the devolved right to demand the same of those they rule over.

Create a mass of doctrinal demonstrations of the creator’s capriciousness and cruelty which serve to grant license to those He grants the right to rule, to act in the same way. 

Briskly sidestep such contradictions as to why a single, sexless god created a world in which, for the most part, every species requires both a female and a male in order to reproduce itself.

The inescapable conclusion is, the all-powerful creator of the monotheist patriarchal tradition is nothing more or less than a projection of the pathological human qualities that have come to dominate the social world, and as a result, now threaten the natural world. 
 
We are indeed a strange species. We are capable of being as viciously cruel and exploitative of our own kind as we are of all others, and yet many of us are also capable of acts of creativity simply for the joy of creating, and of being generous, compassionate, and altruistic without thought of earthly or heavenly reward.
 
In the modern world, many of us now have the capacity to see more widely than ever before in human evolution. That is a burden for too many and a blessing for too few. 
 
People who refuse even to acknowledge let alone engage with the annual holocaust of small children of colour, refer to their pets as “fur-babies”, lavishing the most extreme and anthropomorphised care on them. 

Many people collude in the mass extinction of other species while weeping over sentimental animal stories, or fly into homicidal rages towards anyone who bursts their virtual feel-good bubbles. 
 
Some of that is an understandable defence mechanism, a sort of self-soothing that helps people to deal with the unbearable horrors of the world our masters have created and want to perpetuate. 
 
I don’t blame them, but when they are warned to look up at the powerful because what is coming will not spare them, their human children, or their fur-children or any other living thing they value – if they still persist in looking down or sideways to find scapegoats, then I will attach blame.
 
 
 

The Politics of Peeing

I took issue with a post on X that the reason there are women’s loos, prisons etc is because men pose such a physical threat to them, women demanded and got separate provision. My post was misconstrued, so I will try to explain myself. 

Leaving aside the reductionism and pessimism of the view of men as innately inclined to physical and sexual predation of women, the reality of the emergence of sex segregated public provision is more complex than female activists having forced it.

The following just scratches the surface of a multi-layered and complex issue.

The rise of public sanitation 

In Britain and the empire, before the Victorian era, public health measures such as public loos, were largely non-existent.

Prior to the installation of water closets in the home, the wealthy would use a close-stool, the contents of which would be emptied by a servant, usually female.

If there was no ready access to a close-stool, ladies would pee in a special pot carried by a maidservant. Gentlemen, if in male company only, peed in a container in a corner of the room or out a window.

If they weren’t near a chamber pot or privy, poor women and men pretty much peed and pooed wherever they could, and their privies would be shared by the occupants of several dwellings.

The Victorian era saw an increase in wider public sanitation measures in cities to stop the spread of diseases like cholera. Epidemics are not only bad for business, they can also kill the rich.

The provision of public loos was heavily influenced by both concerns about public health, and concerns over the “immorality” of people exposing themselves in public. The latter was far more focussed on women than men.

Closed crotch knickers

Prior to the development of closed crotch knickers in the late regency era, it was easier for all women to pee in public, and with the influence of the French Revolution, wealthy women’s dress, outside of formal court dress, was much less restricting. 

Working women were always forced by finances and the physical demands of their lives to dress more simply.

Men didn’t wear knickers either but pulled their long shirt tail between their legs. NB. Men’s shirts still had a tail long after underpants became a thing.

Interestingly, closed crotch knickers for women were initially regarded as immoral. The rise of bourgeois Victorian morality saw them become de rigeur, and the absence of knickers or wearing of open crotch knickers were seen as immoral.

The impact of closed crotch knickers on the politics of peeing and pooing was that they necessitated increasingly voluminous skirts and petticoats to be lifted and the knickers to be lowered. Prior to the invention of elastic, knickers were held up by tapes around the waist which had to be untied and retied.Women of all classes no longer had the ability to spread their legs or squat and have a discreet pee.

Female sequestration

The wives and daughters of wealthy/powerful men were sequestered in the home for the most part, and were the main focus of patriarchal modesty and chastity standards aimed at the guarantee of paternity and the transmission of title and/or property.

However, the domestic sphere for wealthy women was a world away from the lives of the masses.

What a lot of middle class, white feminists forget or choose to ignore, is that many working class women were not sequestered in the home in the same way.

There was a “trickle down” of upper class and bourgeois morality, but it was often over-ridden by the need to exploit the labour of working class women. (1)

The first people to be drafted into factories were pauper women and children. Women worked on the land, and in workshops, in mills and mines, and in the houses of those whose exploitation of the working class enabled them to employ an army of servants to empty their piss pots and middens, and wash the cloths used to wipe arses. 

Even middle class people employed a maid of all work.

There was a vast army of women who carried the dual burdens of their own domestic chores plus low paid/low status employment, and were held to bourgeois standards of decorum while being forced to live in ways that made maintaining them impossible. 

The late Victorian/Edwardian era saw the entry of large numbers of middle class women into the public sphere, and with that the need for both public loos, and the provision of them in commercial and educational buildings etc.

Many men resented the intrusion of women into male areas of employment and blocked or did not support such provision – the so-called "urinary leash." (2)

Due to prevailing modesty standards, it was unthinkable for a “respectable” woman to lift her skirts and drop her knickers in the vicinity of a man, or even to do so within hearing distance, so it was inevitable that all public loos were strictly sex segregated. The clothes women had to wear also made the process of using a loo both time consuming and difficult.

Most women were influenced to some degree by the modesty standards that were a cornerstone of patriarchal religion, and those standards were in play in movements agitating for an increase in provision of women’s loos.

Women did not need to demand sex segregation, it was a given.

The penal reform work of the remarkable Elizabeth Fry is a case in point. She was a member of a wealthy Quaker banking family and very devout. As such, although her penal reform mission became wider than sex segregation, her concerns included the “low and deplorable state of morals” of both female and male prisoners in the prisons of the regency era when the infamous Bloody Code was still in force. 

The movement she ignited, to segregate prisons by sex, was as motivated by questions of sexual morality as it was by a concern for the safety of the mainly poor women who were incarcerated in the brutal prisons of the day. 

It was the wider acceptance of those concerns which resulted in sex segregation being readily agreed and quickly implemented, while other, equally important, penal reforms were not. 

Projecting a 21^st century liberal or radical feminist analysis of sex segregated provision back two centuries onto the likes of Elizabeth Fry risks taking presentism into the realms of caricature.

The Social Compact

Sex segregation of public loos, changing rooms, etc was and remains a powerful social norm which can be backed up by the law if there is criminal action or intent.

So powerful was the normative acceptance of sex segregation, when sex discrimination laws were drafted in the 1970s, no one questioned the exceptions written into them to make provision of women-only spaces and services lawful. It continued to be seen widely as natural and desirable.

 

 Notes:

(1) In the US, the role of slavery, Jim Crow, and the post-slavery hyper-exploitation of African American women, was a gaping hole in much of early white American feminism. In the UK and associated countries, there was a similar gap of the situation of working class women and women of colour.

(2) I worked in the Fire Service in London in the 1990s and saw first-hand how resentful many men still were about women's intrusion into what they saw a male preserve.

Open Letter to Judge Kevin Glubb

Dear Judge Glubb,

Let me say at the outset that I am against sending people to prison unless there are compelling reasons for doing so. I would much rather New Zealand's judges did not use remand and custodial sentences for young offenders as often as you all do. 

I know that people, and especially young people, can behave in uncharacteristic ways when under the influence of alcohol or drugs and/or hormones, and/or due to peer pressure or mob mentality. 

Given a criminal record can have profound implications for a person's future, I accept that in some instances a discharge without conviction, and granting of permanent name suppression are warranted.

All of this is why, in principle, I approve of your ruling in the case of the young man who, at the age of twenty, punched a woman who is old enough to be his grandmother, in the face, causing her bodily and psychological harm.

According to the reports I've read, you described the offending in question as "moderately serious" given the blows were to the head. 

The outcome for the victim was a fairly minor physical injury; the psychological harm is much harder to assess but importantly, the assault had the very real potential to cause serious, possibly fatal injuries. 

That fact should have featured in your sentencing, if only to use the opportunity to send a message to all men who punch women, and to young men who punch anyone in the head but especially old women, that it is an extremely dangerous act.

You may not be aware of it but men on average punch 160% harder than women. A man punching a woman is seldom an even contest; a young man punching an old woman is about as uneven as it gets.

That aside, women's ability to withstand the force of a blow to the head is significantly less than men on average because of sex-based differences in the musculature of the male and the female posterior cervical spine.

Add to that, the probability of age-related osteoporosis in a 70-year-old woman, and any blow from a man, especially one in the grip of adrenaline and testosterone disinhibition, is likely to result in fractures. A blow to the head could result in a catastrophic cervical fracture.

The young man's defence was that he is "neurodiverse", ie he has ADHD and mild autism, which make him more prone to acting impulsively. 

However, despite his reduced impulse control, he had got to the the age of twenty without any prior arrests or convictions which suggests either he must have had a sequestered life, or controlled himself pretty well, or there was a trigger in that situation, i.e. the anger he felt on behalf of trans people who he thought were being attacked by the mainly older, female rally attendees.

Whatever one's opinion of the victim vis-à-vis her reasons for being at the rally, her actions in challenging a person who was removing lines placed to delineate the rally and the protesters, her refusal to engage in restorative justice, or the use of the case in the on-going arguments about trans and women's rights, nothing can reasonably be said to mitigate such an assault.

It's as reasonable to argue that the young man's action, far from being impulsive, was somewhat calculated in that it is highly unlikely he would have lost control of his fists if the person he was confronting had been a large, muscly man.

It is noteworthy that in 2014, you were faced with another twenty-year-old man who was charged with a similar assault. 

In the grip of extreme alcohol and adrenaline/testosterone disinhibition, and after a domestic dispute, three police officers attempted to arrest him. In the course of the arrest he punched a detective in the face causing a small cut and a black eye.

The two defendants were the same sex and age; they both suffered a serious loss of impulse control, and there were analogous injuries caused to their victims.

So, what was so different that the young man in 2014 deserved to be sent to prison for thirteen months, with no reporting restrictions, while the young man in 2024 got discharged without conviction and was granted permanent name suppression?

Was it being drunk as opposed to being neurodiverse?

Was it resisting arrest by three police officers and in the process punching one of them in the eye, as opposed to launching an unprovoked attack on a 70-year-old woman?

Was it being working class and brown skinned as opposed to middle class and white skinned?

Or was it having prior convictions – which of course may well have been connected to being working class and brown skinned?

How are the mighty fallen ..

A sports writer for Yahoo!NZ, writing under the pseudonym of The Man in the Stands, joined the feeding frenzy around Lance Armstrong’s professional corpse. 

In a piece that, even by Yahoo!NZ standards, was remarkable for its emotive hyperbole, the writer expressed his disgust, shock, horror and revulsion at the – cowardly, cold-blooded, lying, deceiving, stealing, swindling, pilfering, cheating, con artist, ragbag, scumbag, monster. 

All that in a 440-word blog,

Unlike a lot of people who are queuing up to kick his corpse, I’ve never had a lot of time for Armstrong, but I refuse to join the likes of TMITS in baying for what they call "'justice"– but which, in truth, is vengeance. They want to see Armstrong suffer, and they justify that by claiming that they feel sympathy for his "victims" and outrage at his dishonesty. The truth is they’re full of anger, which prevents them from thinking and creates the potential for them to behave as badly as the object of their ire has done.

Armstrong’s offending is not unique; it’s not even unusual. He's the product of the confluence of massive corporate sponsorship of cycling (which started with American cyclist, Greg LeMond) and European cycling organisations that wanted to break into the rich US market. 

Armstrong was in the first-class carriage of a fast moving gravy train but he wasn’t the driver and he didn’t own the locomotive. He was able to do what he did because his corporate sponsors and sports officials turned a blind eye to what was going on, and they did so because his high-profile success was making them a load of money.

Nor is road cycling the only corporate-funded gravy train in professional sport, and it’s far from being the richest. You have only to look at golf, tennis, football and basketball to see that Armstrong’s wealth and his attitudes are anything but unusual.

Armstrong’s an elite and extremely skilled athlete in a demanding and very dangerous team sport; the use of drugs, plus his organisational ability and obsessive competitive drive, made him a phenomenal athlete. 

Had he been content with equaling the tour wins record he may have got away with it, but celebrity and power are notorious corrupters, and he came to believe his own narrative. He also hurt and angered enough people on the way up for his fall from grace to be emotional and very public. But, what made him behave badly is a quality common to all elite athletes – a single-minded determination to win. It is a small step from single-minded to ruthless.  

When Floyd Landis won Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour de France, anyone who knew cycling could tell he’d taken something, and given the way he was riding, that it was most likely to be testosterone. He went from riding like a stunned mullet the day before, to riding like a man possessed. That was incredibly dumb. 

Armstrong was clever and systematic in his use of banned substances and procedures, just like he was in his training and his team organisation. The training systems and procedures Michele Ferrari developed (EPO use aside) and which Armstrong utilised, and Armstrong’s race tactics, are now part and parcel of how professional cycling works. And Armstrong built on the American revolution in team organisation and application of technology that was started by Greg LeMond.

Did Armstrong force his team to use banned substances? In the sense that, to be of use to him they had to perform to his drug-enhanced level, that’s probably true. But, they did not have to stay with him and if they did so, it was because the rewards, in terms of money and professional profile, were great enough to stifle medical or ethical concerns. 

What of the claims that Armstrong "destroyed" people? 

Tyler Hamilton is doing the reformed character bit with his best-selling confessional book and appearances on the after-dinner speaker circuit. 

The most high-profile accuser is Betsy Andreu who speaks often and emotively about Armstrong having tried to destroy her family. However, Frankie Andreu worked with Armstrong for years after he and Betsy say they heard him admit to using banned substances in 1996, and they all remained close friends. The split came after the Andreus didn’t get the rewards they expected, first a contract renewal, and then a Directeur Sportif job.  

In an interview with Sports Illustrated recently, when Andreu was asked if she felt proud about her moral stance, she said “Yeah, I get that. But sometimes it feels like there's no profit in the truth, right? Would you rather have Lance's money right now, or my reputation?” 

Betsy Andreu may be as hooked on celebrity as Armstrong. She is also an absolutist and is as driven and obsessive as he is but is emotional and an ardent Catholic, while Armstrong hides his emotions and is an atheist. If he suddenly found God, perhaps America and Betsy Andreu would find it easier to forgive him.

Andreu said that she knew Floyd Landis’ Christian upbringing would lead him to confessing his sins but the path to that confession took a remarkably circuitous route via a book called "Positively False," solicitation of legal funds from his fans, and attacking Greg LeMond. 

In 2010, Landis filed a lawsuit against Armstrong and others to force repayment of the $30m+ in government sponsorship of the US Postal team. Landis (eventually) admitted to doping while riding for the team which he now claims "defrauded" the US government, a fraud that he benefitted from, and he now stands to make $millions by suing Armstrong and his financial backers, for that fraud. If successful, the action will give Landis 15-25% of the $300m if the U.S. Department of Justice joins the suit and takes the lead role, or 25-30% if he pursues the case alone. This is a travesty of whistle blowing legislation, but perhaps he’ll donate the proceeds to charity. 

If Landis, or any of the other post-hoc bean-spillers had serious moral scruples about doping they would have distanced themselves from Armstrong.  If Armstrong is personally to blame for what he did, so are they.  The only people who have a right to be aggrieved are the completely clean riders who might otherwise have won stages or tours, and the lower order of domestiques who could reasonably claim to have been pressured into doping.

Armstrong’s greatest mistake was to deny his offending past the point where the denials had any credibility. His nemesis, David Walsh, has been on anti-doping crusade for thirteen years and his pursuit of Armstrong became as obsessive as Armstrong’s pursuit of power and success. Walsh was right but there is a strong vein of moralism running through all this, and it suits that narrative to cast Armstrong in the role of a ruthless Machiavellian mastermind. It also makes for great press and television and now the only way he can slide out from under it is to turn supergrass like Landis – or find God.

Professional sports people and those who back them always skirt the rule boundaries and the rewards, in terms of money and celebrity, are now so enormous that many take the risk of doping. 

The US Olympic cycling team used blood doping in 1984 and it may be endemic in many sports that have not yet had the scrutiny to which road cycling has been subjected. The reason doping became endemic in road cycling is partly due to the physical demands of the sport itself and partly the pressures imposed by corporate sponsorship.

Before we all drown in the sea of smug, sanctimonious twaddle that is pouring out of the media, let’s consider where the pressure to use performance-enhancing drugs comes from and where performance enhancement starts. It’s okay to use a hyperbaric chamber and to train at altitude but not to use EPO, which has the same effects. 

It can be argued that the prophylactic use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories enhances performance in that it allows athletes to push their body beyond its normal limits in competition. NSAIDs can be bought over the counter, and team doctors hand them out during events and matches, despite the fact that the drugs are a metabolic and circulatory time bomb and especially dangerous if the person taking them is dehydrated. Logically, NSAIDs should be banned in sporting competition just as they are banned in horse racing. 

I’m not excusing Armstrong but I think the greater fault lies with corporate sponsorship of sport and its branding mania. Commentators should reserve some of their hyperbole for Nike, Trek, Oakley, Shimano, the TV networks and all the other corporations that made $billions out of Armstrong and those that are making $billions out of other elite sportspeople.

I reserve my pity and concern for the workers in poorly regulated countries, who are paid a pittance to produce shoddy commodities that mythologised athletes are grossly overpaid to sell to a dumb or uncaring public. 

In that sense, we, the consumers of those products, are as much to blame as athletes who take shortcuts. If we really cared about "cheating", we’d stop buying the products that encourage it. 

From Chris Kahui to Rush Limbaugh via Christine Rankin

On the Yahoo Xtra news poll recently, the question was "should Chris Kahui be given a clean slate?" 

87% of respondents, more than 15000 people, voted NO.  This was three times the total number who responded to an earlier news poll on climate change. I do not know why there seems to be so many members of the Amygdala Brigade who subscribe to the oh so aptly named Yahoo Xtra.  

For those not living in NZ, Xtra is the country's largest ISP, and it runs a daily news poll which they claim is an accurate indicator of public opinion, and Chris Kahui was charged with the murder of his twin baby sons, Chris and Cru in 2006. He was found not guilty in 2008 but Police said after the trial that they would not be looking for anyone else in connection with the murder  – in other words, they still think he did it.

In an extraordinary move earlier this year (2012) in an inquest into the twins' death, the Coroner pointed the finger of blame directly at Kahui. However, because no new evidence was available to the Coroner in arriving at his decision, Kahui is unlikely to be retried in a criminal court because of the double jeopardy principle.

Kahui is subject to controls, imposed by Child Youth and Family, on his contact with children. He has a daughter from a new relationship but he is not allowed to be alone with her. His challenge to these conditions is what the Yahoo Xtra poll referred to.

Christine Rankin, Child Advocate, Chief Executive of For the Sake of our Children Trust, and former Chief Executive Officer of the Department of Work and Income said that a lot of people in NZ think someone got away with murder and they are angry about that and think Kahui should never have anything to do with children. 

Unfortunately the sort of people Rankin is referring to often do not think, they suffer various forms and degrees of knee jerk reactions which deliver killer blows to even robust things like facts and logic. More delicate concepts like humanity and natural justice don't stand an earthly.

Ms Rankin is used to skirting the boundaries of what is acceptable conduct in a public servant and is sticking with her MO when she used her celebrity to promote Ian Wishart's new book about the Kahui case by urging all New Zealanders to read it.

Rankin was a controversial appointment to the Families Commission in 2009, with MP Peter Dunne being especially opposed to it because he said, Rankin is such a divisive figure.

The Trust, of which she is CEO, appears to be a politically neutral organisation but appearances can be deceptive. The Trust's website states that it believes "every child is precious and entitled to safety, care, and access to health and education" and that "strong families are the best environment for preventing child abuse and neglect".  In a foot note they clarify what they mean by a family – ie "two parent homes consisting of a mother and a father".

It's interesting how the modern nuclear family is offered up as the natural child rearing arrangement and no doubt any questioning of the ahistoricism or ideological nature of such claims would be met with outrage and counter accusations of PCness and left wing bias.

Of course this depiction of the monogamous, heterosexual, nuclear family and the "strong communities" in which that family should be embedded is very precious to right wing "think tank" The Maxim Institute. You remember the MI – it got its knuckles rapped over plagiarism of articles written by conservative organisations in the US – like the Heritage Foundation. 

The MI continues to maintain its close links with the Heritage Foundation, the aims of which are: to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defence."

Like the right in the USA, the right here seeks to mobilise (aka exploit) the "grass roots" by pushing its own profoundly political agendas under the guise of "common sense" and '"raditional values", and the establishment or support of what seem to be grass roots organisations like the Sensible Sentencing Trust.  

They are also busy on talk radio. Although there appears to be a balance of political opinion on talk radio it is in fact heavily biassed towards the right, a fact which does not stop the right from ritually attacking the "liberal media". 

In the US, the funding of influential right wing talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin by powerful right ring lobby groups is well documented.  

The Heritage Foundation (HF) sponsors schlock jock Rush Limbaugh who is the most listened to talk radio host in the US.  Limbaugh is responsible for coining phrases like "feminazi" and is so over the top so often that sensible Republican strategists have spoken about the need to "muzzle" him. I can think of other things to do with him that involve leaky boats and deep water, preferably oil-polluted deep water.

"Obama's America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,' and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white." 

Welcome to Limbaugh's world.

The HF also sponsors schlock jock Sean Hannity who sagely opined, "it doesn't say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state.'" 

I'd imagine that few of his listeners would register the hypocrisy inherent in his question 

"is the president purposefully using propaganda and hyperbole to garner the American public for support?'", and his statement, "why wouldn't anyone want to say the Pledge of Allegiance, unless they detested their own country or were ignorant of its greatness?"

But of course that's not propaganda or hyperbole, that's good old common-sense and traditional values.

Lawyer and talk show host Mark Levin has an endorsement deal with Americans for Prosperity which claims its aim is to educate citizens about economic policy and mobilise citizens as advocates in the public policy process. In pursuit of that aim, it was instrumental in the emergence and promotion of the tea party and was a major player in the Republicans' take over of Congress in 2010.

Levin is a mate of Hannity and Limbaugh and no doubt they all spend a lot of time stroking each others egos which obviously require a lot of tactile stimulation to remain so inflated. Examples of Levin's wit and wisdom may be found in his analysis of the state, and for those who cannot be bothered wading through its verbose, ahistorical nonsense, there are such delights as "Liberalism is mind-boggling and stupid". Well, he would know quite a bit about mind boggling stupidity given he practices it on a daily basis.

Glenn Beck is another one who appeals directly to the Amygdala Brigade. 

"Not a single time have we gotten a right from Congress or from the President. We get them from God."

Yes, Glenn, of course we do. 

Would this be the same God who told George Bush Junior, "to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them"? 

Beck has a sponsorship deal with FeedomWorks which originated in a group called Citizens for a Sound Economy that was set up by David Koch of Koch Industries.  CSE underwent a sort of political mitosis, and one part became Americans for Prosperity and the other merged with Empower America and was renamed FreedomWorks. 

It might seem a loooong way from these charmers to Christine Rankin, Garth McVicar and whoever heads up the Maxim Institute these days but give them time and enough astroturf support and who knows? Meanwhile, here's  a collection of some of the thoughts of the American Taliban, all chronic sufferers of Over-active Amygdala Syndrome.