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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.