New Zealand Conservative

The first car belonging to a boy racer has been crushed today. "Crusher" Collins has been well and truly blooded with the title, which is no longer be in name only. Though Anne Tolley oversaw it, I doubt she will really share in the glory. "Crusher" Tolley? Nahh. It's a disturbing turn of events in New Zealand, heralding a return to the scapegoat sacrifice. At this point it's only a car that is being crushed, but in the future, who knows? In my post on the Hunger Games and Human Sacrifice , Fr Barron talks about the Scape-Goating Mechanism, which is so prevalent in human history as a way of discharging our anxieties onto someone (or something, the car being a proxy for the boy-racer at this point): Why is it, that this dynamic of human sacrifice is so prominent in our culture ... from ancient times to today ... Rene Girard uncovered this dynamic ... discovered what he called the scape-goating mechanism ... tensions arise within human communities ...

Over the last week days I've had some incoming links from readers of Whale Oil Beef Hooked coming over to this more quiet and serene part of the Blogosphere to see what type of site I hail from. Most of them flee; one look is enough as far as I can tell from StatCounter. I'm not really encouraging them, beyond a link I made last week to an old post of mine on car crushing and why I found it disturbing. After reflection, I think the post is now inadequate to my position three years later. In it, I wrote of the logical reasons as to why car-crushing is wrong, but the visceral were not mentioned. Fr Barron's discussion on The Hunger Games movie (currently running at the theatres here in NZ)and it's connection to the scape-goating mechanism where he says: ...by this mechanism we choose someone to blame, someone to isolate, someone to ostracise, at the limit, someone to kill. We discharge our anxiety, our tension, our fear onto that person or that group. In that ...

Maybe she can sort them out and we'd be rid of her. But I doubt she would get very far, they are just about ungovernable. Coming as we do from a society where we are increasingly wrapped in strangled by cotton wool there is something magnificent about these dumb dzhigits following an age old wedding custom and having fun. Watch the whole thing it is quite a ride.

Mr and Mrs Smith returned home after a weekend away to find their house crushed. Previously, a charming three bedroom and study bungalow with carport, it has become a 3 metre by 4 metre compressed block. "Frankly, we are stunned" said Andrew Smith. We had no idea our teenage son had organised a party in our absence. Apparently things got out of hand, the police were called and made the decision to crush the house. The thing is, without a house, we can't even ground him." Neighbours were quick to confirm the party was totally out of control. Old Mrs Beezle from number 66 talked of how wild parties had been going on for years, with nothing being done about it. "For the last 15 years or so, always, around the end of January two balloons were hung out on the letter box, and you just knew it was going to be a noisy night." "And you can't believe the parents didn't know what their kids were up to, they used to organise these parties. It wa...