In this country gangs attract girls to the wild side, and criminals everywhere ooze charisma for women who want to be The Only One Who Understands Them. Think of the killers snowed under with love letters in jail, and the serial killers who marry social workers.
Equally, any man who defies the status quo will always attract squeals of pleasure.
The wide-eyed IS fans are a mad sideline to the bad things happening in the Middle East, just as this election has turned into its own mad and bad sideshow. I'll be glad when the mud slinging is over, and somebody, preferably a New Zealander, emerges from the rubble.
It seems to me that Kim Dotcom's campaign, culminating in Monday night's event in Auckland, has always been basically about his own problems with extradition, though he tells us it's really all about John Key.
Only Dotcom and a group of Americans, surely, could paint our bland Prime Minister as some kind of Darth Vader, but there it is. They have savage wit on their side, a rarity in our political arena, and they hammered their points home convincingly, allowing that there was no opposition present to debate with.
But what would we be left with in their ideal world? Laila Harre, who calls Dotcom Our Friend in capital letters, as prime minister, and Edward Snowden, who she calls "Ed" as Prime Minister, with Hone Harawira as Minister of Finance? Quirky.
Surely only in New Zealand could a mega-rich, admittedly beguiling German wanted in the United States for criminal copyright infringement, who has past convictions for computer fraud, data espionage, insider trading and embezzlement, and a man evading sex charges look like white knights, but such is the way of this election.
I'll pass on Glenn Greenwald, who - among others working on the story - won a Pulitzer prize this year for public service reporting. He seems straightforward, but I can't craft a hero out of Wikileaks' Julian Assange, who hides in another country's embassy because, like Dotcom, he declines to face justice.
Then there's Edward Snowden, who kicked a hornet's nest when he leaked documents to Wikileaks, and is currently allowed to live in Russia because he, too, is avoiding justice, and in the background the intriguing figure of Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, who was caught leaking yet more classified material to Wikileaks, is convicted of violating US espionage laws, and whose best hope is to be paroled in eight years' time.
Meanwhile she's seeking a sex change operation.
Scratch the surface of any group and you'll find what you least expect, though possibly not many people as sharp as Monday night's lineup, yet try as they may, and I will, I can't seem to quake in my boots at the idea that governments practice surveillance of their citizens in a post-9/11 world, that they spy on each other, or that they have agreements about it. Wouldn't they?
I guess everything depends on your focus, and there's a useful example of that in Garth McVicar of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, who's standing for the Conservative Party in the Hawke's Bay. Just now the Bay should be a sea of blissful pink and white blossom under a benign spring sky, drifts of daffodils in green farm paddocks, and bouncing baby lambs. But in this bucolic vision Mr McVicar sees ... a shortage of policemen.
• Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author.
