I said it was an “idiot’s tactic”, I was referring to the particular argument, not you in general, and I do consider ‘quisling’ to have Nazi connotations, not just “a word that originated from WWII’.

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Actually Sam it was you who started abusing the messenger by calling me names because I used a word that originated from WW2. The modern meaning of quisling is ANY collaborator, not just a Nazi one, just as the modern meaning of blitz is ANY concerted attack on a target, not just one conducted by Nazis. So the analogy was not a Nazi one.

And I am quite willing to consider LOGICAL reasons why men should not be allowed near children on aeroplanes. So far I have not read any that would not apply equally to many other groups. The context of my original comment was a quite reasonable question from Paulense about why the man in question did not make a fuss. I was not aiming my comment at you in particular, but I have certainly met the types of self-loathing jellyfish I have described, and this seems to be a common feature of anti-men rhetoric.

With regard to the plane being overbooked, when I have booked a seat on a domestic flight on the terminal at the airport, it gives me a choice of seat based on which ones are empty, but it does not describe the passengers in the other seats. It would therefore not be possible to deliberately choose to sit next to a child, or to avoid sitting next to a child.

But perhaps a different ticketing method was used?

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Frankly, Kiore1, I just think you are talking rubbish. Suggesting that dubbing people with terms with Nazi connotations is no different to using any other metaphor connected with WWII seems to demonstrate either a lack of undestanding of history, or an inability to make simple distinctions. Calling men who agree with chunks of feminist philosophy traitors, collaborateurs, quislings, men-haters and self loathing jelly-fish is just shooting the messenger in a particularly unpleasant way.

I’m happy to consider any thoughts that provide a useful explanation of the world, regardless of whether or not it comes from my own gender, race, political viewpoint, nationality or any other category. If you want to abuse me for not sticking up for my own kind, right or wrong, who cares?

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Yup airlines put undue pressure on themselves, for all the wrong reasons. In my recent trip to Europe, I had a ticket that flew Barcelona-Amsterdam-Sing-NZ. But I was already in Amsterdam. They would not let me just pick up the flight half way. I was required to fly back to Barcelona, and then back to Amsterdam. I already had the ticket, but I appealed to the airline, for their own good and for mine, to just pick me up in Amsterdam. I couldn’t see that being forced to put my 95kg body and 20kg of luggage on a flight to Barcelona and back that I didn’t want or need and had already paid for was in anyone’s interests. I didn’t want a refund – I just didn’t really relish the 40-odd hours of travel this craziness entailed.

Ultimately, reason prevailed, but only by the dodgiest backdoor method ever, and for reasons that luckily fell in my favour. The flight to Barcelona that I was on was overbooked. I appealed again to the checkin lady to let me just stay in Amsterdam, I didn’t want to waste the next 6 hours of my life in planes and airports just to get back to Amsterdam. She said I should jump on the chance to be stood down on the flight. I said why do I even have to go through with this charade, wasting at least 2 hours of my life getting through passport control to get to the gate lounge to wait for the inevitable stand down, and all the mucking around involved? She thought about it for a bit, saw that I had a point, that the strictness of the rules hurt the airline and me, and came up with a truly dutch solution.

She suggested I check my bags in on the flight to Singapore right then, and then do whatever I liked until it the flight got here. And if anyone ever asked about the flight to Barcelona to just say I had been on it. And to never let anyone know I had been told to do this, and to forget her name and she would deny ever having seen me. She then showed me how to manually check my bags in, got me a boarding pass and disappeared into the crowd.

It worked, I had a nice day in Amsterdam instead of a horrible 6 hours of arsing around in planes and airports. Sometimes it does take someone who realizes the rules suck to do the right thing, even if it’s the wrong way.

That’s what the hostess on this AirNZ flight should have done – she should have let the guy sit there, and told the airline about the problem with their software. C’mon the odds of that particular guy being a molester are miniscule (if that’s what the rule is about, which I’m STILL NOT CONVINCED ABOUT IN CASE ANYONE HASN’T HEARD), the reputational damage potentially large. But I think kiwis are either less imaginative or more blindly honest than the dutch, so here we are, 20,000 outraged posts later, and still none the wiser about what really happened and why.

Grist for the bitterness mill, that’s all this story is. The lame NZ bitterness mill that grinds on relentlessly, getting us nowhere, acheiving us nothing.

I suppose the only good thing about this, is that we might end up on Clive James getting mocked again for treating the story of a guy having to change seats on a plane as national news. If that’s all that gets NZ’s (or shoud I call it the Shire’s?) dander up, then we mustn’t really have that many problems.

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jgg : “I am concerned that the idea that most abuse of pre-pubescent children is done by men is being supported by statistics on domestic violence.”

Sorry if my posts gave that impression, jgg. In fact, in bracketing together three behaviours — rape, domestic violence and paedophilia — that I characterised (perhaps incorrectly, concerning paedophilia) as predominantly male behaviours — I was trying to make a point about “political correctness”.

I believe that the PC tendency to pretend that men and women are functionally identical (other than the direct physical sexual attributes) is profoundly dangerous, and that differential treatment of men and women in order to reduce risk, is justified in some cases.

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Craig : “In this particular case Mark Worsley was in his assigned seat on a fully booked (probably over-booked, knowing airlines) flight.”

That’s interesting… not apparent from the original article. In that case, it’s purely a ticketing blunder : the airline should have applied their rule at that stage, and the whole issue would never have arisen.

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Ben : “Alistair, you say insurance premiums should not take sex into account. But they do. It’s that simple. Are you saying this is wrong?”

Yes, I am. Is the differential sending a useful message to someone? Do young men think “hey it costs a bomb to insure my car, that’s because I’m part of a high-risk group, makes ya think eh, I’ll try to be rilly careful”…?

More likely, it provokes a “well, I might as well get my money’s worth” attitude. Or makes absolutely no difference at all to behaviour.

The fact is, the young male can’t actually change his young maleness, so it’s purely a commercial matter of the insurer covering its risk. This is an exceedingly slippery slope.

A higher premium for powerful motor bikes, or sports cars, is justifiable, because the higher risk is voluntary.

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But collaborationists and traitors are the lowest form of pond-scum.

I’ll take that as a compliment … considering that you see yourself engaged in a war of the sexes.

My point of view is that we’re all in this together.

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Sam: Uh no. Indoor sports etc. are not necessary or sufficient for Nazi philosophy. Nazis used them, just as they used language, but it is not part of where they are coming from.

The term Quisling, while coined in WW2 is now used to mean any traitor or collaborator. According to your logic I must avoid any WW2 terms, so to talk of “taking the flack” or a “blitz” on drunken driving would lead to arrogant assumptions of my lack of intelligence.

And that gets me back to my point which is certain men that have been so brow beaten by feminist propaganda that they have become self-loathing jellyfish, willing to denounce members of their own sex as paedophiles to score kudos with the feminist N –oops almost used the “N” word … Mafia.

I can actually see where the feminist men haters are coming from and have a certain sympathy for them even though I can’t agree with any policy based on hate. But collaborationists and traitors are the lowest form of pond-scum.

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a hypothetical question to all of those who agree that the airlines’ policy is a good idea on safety grounds:
do you also advocate a total ban on male school teachers in New Zealand?
after all, teachers–with both authority and ample opportunity–must surely be far more of a threat to small children than passengers on an aircraft with not a single spare seat.

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jgg:

Thank you – it’s a pleasure to agree with a thoughtful, nuanced and well-expressed comment.

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Alistair, you say insurance premiums should not take sex into account. But they do. It’s that simple. Are you saying this is wrong?

For instance, a young man has to pay a lot more to get full insurance on a car. This is because young men cost insurance companies the most. I don’t think that’s unfair. It’s just a reflection of the reality.

I don’t know if racial profiling happens in insurance – that’s much more of a can of worms. Certainly it is that case that some races have far worse health cost statistics than others. But I can see problems with allowing discrimination in this way.

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I am concerned that the idea that most abuse of pre-pubescent children is done by men is being supported by statistics on domestic violence. While it may suit some people’s ideology to conflate the two of these, they are quite separate phenomena. People who sexually abuse children (as opposed to physically attack them) are rarely overtly violent to adults, for example.

The evidence that most pre-pubescent sexual abuse is perpetrated by men is far less clear cut than is commonly thought – see for example http://movingforward.org/v2n6-cover.html

I chose this paper because the author is female. Similar discussions can be found in the US and UK literature in a number of places.

If we are to have a discussion about child safety then we need to recognise that (i) “stranger danger” is very very rare; most abuse is done by relatives/friends; and (ii) that certain assumptions about male versus female sexual abuse need careful consideration against facts.

The phenomenon of new male partners killing other men’s children, male violence towards women and the phenomenon of adolescent sexual abuse, may not be a good basis for developing policies for protecting younger children in public situations. Both these have distinct cultural and anthropological antecedents.

I would also note that sexual abuse is only one form of abuse of children. Parents can damage children through emotional abuse in a variety of ways – many of which are every bit as damaging as sexual abuse in the long run.

To chose one example – “I love you so much I am staying with your father/mother even though it makes me unhappy” is an almost perfect mindfuck for a small child. The message is “my misery is your fault”.

We desparately need to recognise that children need love, consitency and stimulation in their lives. Sexual abuse is just one of may ways in which adults betray children.

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DG:

I decided to e-mail a friend of the family who used to be a trolly dolly and get her perspective, and her reply was rather interesting. She said that when she was in the industry (quit about ten years ago) her main concern wasn’t male passengers, but under-staffing and lack of training.

The airline I really hope things have changed, because I don’t think I’d want an inquisitive child going walkabout while all the cabin crew are otherwise occupied doing meal service or having to deal with a problem elsewhere in the plane.

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While Mark Worsley was, obviously, very badly treated, as someone involved with sending children unaccompanied, I appreciate the airlines caution and their general policy of not seating them by men.

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Alistair wrote:
But if seating is not pre-allocated, and any man can then cruise up and install himself next to the U.M (which, I’m guessing, was the case on the Ch-Ak flight), then this self-selecting sample is a greater risk.

I reply:
Um, no. I take your point but in this particular case Mark Worsley was in his assigned seat on a fully booked (probably over-booked, knowing airlines) flight.

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It’s not about sexuality…

It’s about the fact that we want to be trusted around children as much as women are. Men can be loving and parental just as women can. And we both have the potential for neglect or abuse, too. We have human rights. One of those is the right to freedom from discrimination. It is discrimination in essence to suggest that a man of the same personality under the same circumstances will react differently to a woman of the same personality under the same circumstances. It may be statistics that suggest we have a less empathic personality, but profiling through statistics is not generally a good idea ;p

Personally, the only special seating arrangements I would see as appropriate would either be having UMs sit next to the aisles so that they can be seen more easily by attendants, or to have a dedicated club or group of volenteers who are checked out for such abusive behaviours/caring natures and are willing to help UMs on flights :p

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Alexei : “clear air” policy.
That doesn’t work, because planes are often full. Airlines want to avoid trouble, but not to the extent of renouncing a full fare for every unaccompanied minor.

I just thought of something else. When seating is allocated in advance, then a random male may end up sitting next to our U.M. The “risk” of that man having paedophile tendencies can be assumed (for the sake of argument) to be pretty low.

But if seating is not pre-allocated, and any man can then cruise up and install himself next to the U.M (which, I’m guessing, was the case on the Ch-Ak flight), then this self-selecting sample is a greater risk. i.e. if there happens to be a paedophile on the flight (and if there are 100 men on the plane, we can’t discount that), then he may well seek out that U.M.

But, as Ben says, there’s no indication that paedophilia was even a consideration in the airline’s policy. The whole outburst of male hypersensitivity has been pretty revealing : the immediate assumption that sexuality is the issue, and that their sexuality is being insulted…

get over yourselves guys!

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Nich:
“Why bother checking further?â€? This already happens anyway (see Insurance, for example).”

Yes, commercial enterprises make commercial decisions based on statistical data. In my opinion, that’s a good reason for using mutualist (or even, gulp, government-provided) insurance. viz. Accident compo.

Ben:
“For instance, whether you are male or female should rightfully affect your insurance premiums.”

Absolutely not. Insurance premiums should be affected by risky behaviour that the person can do something about (e.g. nothing wrong with a higher premium for a smoker or a skier) but there should be solidarity for the rest. Are you alleging that women should, as a class, carry the cost of their generally higher health risks? That’s a lovely little can of worms!

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Ben: In my humble opinion you should have some guiding principles in these matters. You can’t just assume that for every situation you can reliably come up with an ad hoc solution that is fair. That assumes you always know what is best for other people. I think that a good guiding principle is that you should not judge an individual by the behaviour of the group that they belong to. You should instead judge them on their individual behaviour and actions. That is, avoid prejudice at all costs. As a statitician I am all to painfully aware of how much variation around the average usually exists. As much as possible I try to live by this guiding principle.

In this particular situation there is no reason why Air NZ can’t just have a “clear air” policy to keep all people away from unaccompanied children. This would be totally acceptable to everyone as it treats everyone equally. I see no reason why they can’t implement this option apart from stupidity.

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