The good arrogant people of Auckland got to enjoy some real SEPTA-grade knife work this past week. One in the local beards in residence whole-ass 61-Ridge cut a baker’s half-dozen bitches in the supermarket, in this case at the LynnMall, and that sounds like majors fun. The average Kiwi can only guess where the country is in its latest countdown to the next stochastic mass-casualty attack, although, in all fairness,given the official overreach in plaguetime and the disclosure that this random angry ex-con was shot dead on a minute’s notice by his own 24/7 surveillance detail, a casual observer might be forgiven for detemining that the average New Zealander is a cop.
It’s always fun when a grossly overpoliced country with a troublingly high incarceration rate and a habit of addressing its simmering racial tensions with performances of right sentiment proclaims its own national exceptionalism vis-a-vis its biggest, strongest eye of five. Washington may be the world leader and Wellington one of the stragglers, but Gough Whitlam tho. At least Australia has the common consideration to take that stance as a federation.
Love that rude old Anglo tradition of self-government.
The story holds that the real attitude problem starts beyond the Bombay Hills. But there seems to be a gap in the pines, letting the aggression through. I mention this because my parents and I drove within two blocks of the Central Dunedin Countdown, the site of this year’s first mass stabbing, and by all evidence we’ve been in the Auckland Airport more recently than the Current Individual. An old bald prick with immigration demanded my driver’s license and then told me I should shave next time because I didn’t match my passport photo before he let me leave the country. Meanwhile this dude was a Gary Glitter-grade cop attractant and they couldn’t bundle his ass across town and onto a one-way flight abroad. Dun nuh nuh nuh nuh. Huh. How bow dah.
We also spent a night in Riccarton, three or four blocks up Deans Avenue from the Masjid al-Noor. For some reason I didn’t look up the locations of the massacre and had no idea at the time. I went for a walk downtown through the park when I was there, and I mean, I’ve suffered from my share of postmodern ennui, so I don’t entirely know what gives. Guess I’m no individual. Is there no way to hire adrift local kine yoof to pick mangoes instead of jailing charter widebodies full of Vanuatuans in Howard Springs for a fortnight? I’m absolutely in earnest about this. I’ve been picking tomatoes commercially this summer long enough to get sprung from the Springs. It’s good for the food supply, and it’s damn well good for me.
Then again, Australia gave Mark Wahlberg priority for quarantine over its own citizens stranded abroad. I’m waiting to hear about some shifty billionaire sneaking, or getting snuck, into Queenstown without offcial dispensation. New Zealand is expensive enough that its border officers and police are guaranteed for sale, maybe not all of them, but it only takes one.
Or, in the case of our man in New Lynn, thirty. What’s going on there? What’s going on HERE? The FedEx Hoosier brony had been interviewed by the FBI. Nova Scotia isn’t exactly here, even in Maine, but Gabriel Wortman was known to the RCMP. Sick Willie, too, of course: woman after woman desperately begging the cops to investigate him, one Vancouver sergeant hitting a brick wall and getting ridiculed around the office for taking them seriously, and then, supposedly out of nowhere, a rookie Mountie burning the guy on a gun warrant. The trolley time hothead in San Jose had been found with a diary containing a screed about how much he hated the VTA when he was pulled aside for secondary inspection on his way back from the Philippines.
The Individual, briefly of Christchurch, now of Auckland (but not one of the nice parts), had to have been known to NZ Immigration and the police. I have trouble believing they were too incompetent to know where he’d been on his trips abroad. They had to have had an idea. They’re in touch with their counterparts all the time. They”re constantly snooping on all sorts of people, mostly good, for all sorts of reasons, mostly bad. New Zealand’s population is barely larger than the combined populations of Brooklyn and Queens. It famously has rural folkways resembling Vermont’s, although it’s a deceptively urbanized country, but still, somebody needs to run the farms and ports and warehouses, drive the trucks, and run the butcher shop at Countdown. #TooSoon. When a country of only five million fields its own national intelligence servces to liaise with the three-letter agencies in the Potomac Swamp in addition to lavishing its police, prisons, and courts with money and personnel, it’s surely by design a country of professional busybodies and snitches. Sure enough, New Zealand does a terrible job regulating the shit that matters, like rent, mold in expensive low-end rentals, and utility rates. It celebrates Maori liveries, though!
It probably shouldn’t come as a shock that Jacinda Ardern is in charge of the Society for the Prevention of Monty Robinson for Police Commissioner. We might say the Countdown detail put the lead into leadership the other day. Again, #TooSoon. They think it makes them look good, just like they think when they scrub the old imperial liveries off the Air New Zealand planes, but these are the same cops who insisted on not following our dude closely enough to stop him BEFORE he cut up the Countdown. They didn’t want him to think he was under surveillance, you see.
Bullshit. How did they imagine a normal person would react to having the same rotating cast of suspicious characters popping up out of the woodwork in the middle distance every day or two while he went about his own business? They turned him into a paranoiac. He’d already been in prison, a known breeding ground for mental illness. If he’d told, say, a therapist he was being followed, he would have been correct.
“Goodness, that sounds farfetched.” Yeah, that’s the point. These suspicions are implausibly bizarre by design. Why would some foreigner have his own snoops following him around at all times? The police would never do that! Please. They’re out solving crimes. They don’t have the time to waste on that kind of nonsense. Buddy’s seeing things.
Indeed. He’s seeing things that are there, always lurking in the background of his life. He fell for a gaslighting campaign. Who wouldn’t? The police drove him literally crazy. When, still under their eerily watchful eyes–more like sixty, am I right fellas–he snapped, they were there to shoot him down on a big box floor, but not before he slashed several other shoppers.
Every one of them should be sued into a moldy downmarket flat for being close enough to send that poor guy over the edge but too far away to actually stop him from committing a violent attack on the general public. Their whole story is that he was a threat to public safety. No kidding. I know nothing in particular about what New Zealand has in the way of sovereign immunity, but they should sue everyone involved for not doing their jobs.
Of course, for that matter, it’s tricky to say what exactly was their job. The dirty thirty trailing this dipshit around Auckland officially report internally to Andrew Coster and externally to Jacinda Ardern, as Liz reigns but does not rule. Gough gough something something Pine Gap something something gough gough. Alexander Acosta mentioned characters lurking in the shadows BEHIND Jeffrey Epstein. Wood does dat godda do wid pussy? Probably a lot. Now I’m not here to assert that he killed himself, or that he’s dead, only that he belongs to intelligence.
On New Zealand’s per capita basis, the Tri-State could field four national intelligence services, perhaps even five (!). Every one of them might be an improvement, as long as [locate your nearest airsickness bags] the district lines didn’t gerrymander the “up-and-coming” parts of Brooklyn and the Connecticut Shore into Manhattan. Park Slope and Williamsburg won’t be the only things “coming back” up your throat and “revitalizing” your mouth by the time you’re done thinking about that and definitely done with lunch.
God knows how many smug nationalistic sermons are still in the pipeline vis-a-vis Kiwi moral superiority and this most recent Countdown caper. The ones I bought at Safeway a while back weren’t bad, but I’m all for comparison shopping. New Zealand is the cone tray with the beast vellues, the beast pull lease, the beast six, the beast loires, the beast all the reast of et.
Give it a rest, mate. That whole society dealt with Brenton Tarrant as a cultural institution by denying him object permanence. To reverse effect and cause, everybody on earth who finds his message resonant and has an internet connection knows his name. The same idiot impulse is why the NZ government thinks dually rechristening their land as Aotearoa is a reasonable substitute for the currently absent regulations that would make it possible for ordinary Maoris to afford their electric bills.
Forgive me for being in no mood to listen to any of these self-righteous phonies. Their prison service has seized the moral low ground from any of the local color who would get fed up with The Individual and dispatch him with a shank to the neck. For a time the waiting list for returning citizens and permanent residents to get hotel quarantine slots stretched to a full year. Think about this for a second. These poor saps signed up to wait a year for the privilege to spend two weeks locked in a hotel room under paramilitary guard.
At heart, this is not a decently governed country. At least its spook cops had the decency and good sense to let our Sri Lankan friend go out and about in the neighborhood and ice him on the spot when he snapped, albeit with a made-for-TV delay. None of these antics prove anything good. Victoria imposed a similar public health lockdown for three and a half months and still very nearly let Covid-19 go endemic. It went fully endemic in swathes of Continental Europe that imposed equally draconian lockdowns. New Zealand has a population close to Victoria’s and overseas shipping ties that would take years to sever without causing catastrophic failures of domestic supply chains. During the first lockdown, its truckers were grateful to businesses in Ashburton for allowing them to use public restrooms.
This applies mainly to the United States, but I do not accept chastisement on behalf of societies that refuse to provide their own people with toileting and bathing facilities. That’s an intolerable regression of human development levels. It’s the stuff of failed states. It doesn’t matter why they crack down. Plague is no excuse. Indoor plumbing saves lives. Everything about the shutdown of public services is an attack on the vulnerable poor to assuage the hysterical fears of the coddled affluent. The affluent vote, and they lose their minds at the possibility of exposure to the diseases of the poor. They’re scared to death of equity, as some of them lately like to call it.
New Zealand’s virtues here are damningly weak. Kiwi normies have the decency to grant foreign countries a degree of object permanence they deliberately deny their own politically inflammatory criminal undesirables, but it’s mainly on account of national narcissism. Where Brahmin Americans assert their own ritual purity to elevate themselves above the ritually impure servant castes, whom they casually dehumanize (“just pay everybody to stay home”), New Zealand proclaims itself the supreme Brahmin country, a national caste apart and above. Yeah, how much bulk grain are yinz importing from unhealthy second-world states like the Dakotas?
Again, in fairness, it’s somewhat less insufferable and toxic than the corresponding stance in California. I always enjoy listening to voters who seem to grossly outnumber their sensible neighbors preen about how Tinder and Uber use less water per capita and per unit GDP than the almond groves of Lost Hills. It’s also cool and normal that they maintain much higher almond content in their feed than I do in mine.
On the defecit side of the ledger, New Zealand has no viable political opposition to the biosecurity fortress state its government rolled out overnight last year. We have the Sierra Foothills, whose local rich get their own groceries. Hell, even Victoria has crazy Facebook moms.
Why does everything in New Zealand have to be all Cares Emoji? The Ardern government can’t even govern their own police.
I knew I had a reason for stickng with New World.
Murica Derp 