Posts by Emma Hart
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Russell Brown,
It allegedly uses “behavioural targeting” to choose which stories it shows
It better bloody not be.
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Northshoreguynz,
Danyl over at the DimPost is looking for an aggregator, having read this article. That is what Twitter does for me. Points me towards journalism I want to actually read.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking while I was reading that. If I want to know what Matt Nippert has written, well, I follow him on Twitter and he'll tell me. I don't just follow a whole bunch of journalists because I like their deeply bitter sense of humour.
I'm not from Auckland, so I've never been a big reader of the Herald. But Stuff. In the same time-frame people are talking about for the Herald, I've noticed a change in Stuff's "related stories" links, at the bottom of the page. They're not related, they're the worst kind of Women's Weekly diets, junk science and body-shaming crap. I used to go there every morning for news. Now I just do the quiz and leave.
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Up Front: I Swear, It's True, in reply to nzlemming,
Has anyone else had the Mockers going through their heads while reading this thread?
I should bloody well hope so.
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Up Front: I Swear, It's True, in reply to David Haywood,
it was banned at the Titirangi Library on the basis of RB’s bad bad language
See, Russell tells people it's MY fault. Lying cock-sandwich.
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I feel I should apologise for all the filters this column will not make it through. And give a special wave to the Titirangi Public Library. Also, my copy of Word had a nightmare with this. Interestingly, while it simply assumed most of the words were spelt wrong, it was adamant that "twatcocks" was ungrammatical.
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But the only reason they’re doing online education, sometimes with phone and visit support from the folk at the Correspondence School, is because they physically can’t get to a local in-person school. If you grow up on a remote sheep station, their school might be an hour away, each direction. That’s obviously not practical, which is where the Correspondence School comes in.
Online schooling is a product of necessity, not choice.
I just want to note that this is not true. That is the traditional idea of who Te Kura is for, but it's not how it functions any more. My daughter did correspondence courses while enrolled at and attending her local school, because it gave her less time she had to be physically present in a classroom which, as for Russell's son, was Not Working and hugely stressful for everyone involved.
(And actually, when I think about it, I did French by correspondence myself way back in the 80s while attending my local school, because I was the only student taking it past 5th form. I quite literally sat 6th form certificate French exams in a cupboard.)
Some kids benefit enormously from being in a school environment. A few kids suffer enormously through it. Giving them the alternative of learning on line would be great. This just really, really isn't the way to go about it.
And yes, they'd need some kind of supervising adult. When you have a special needs kid, you learn pretty quickly that two full-time working parents is never going to be a thing. What would be nice is some kind of universal allowance or benefit that would provide those parents with support.
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Up Front: Dear Dudebros, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
But seriously, I think part of the big pattern of violence against women is that it is often perpetrated by men who are, given the chance, violent to everyone…
So, there are some people who have genuine self-control issues and are violent pretty much indiscriminately.
But. Most abusers are bullies. They are ONLY violent towards people they perceive as being weaker than themselves - children, women, non-Masculinity-Box-conforming men. They are only violent in circumstances where they feel there won't be consequences - in the privacy of their own homes, or in a social situation where they feel people are on their side. That last is vitally important. The higher they perceive the odds being of someone speaking out, the less likely they are to abuse. These people have ENORMOUS self-control. They exercise violence in a culture that supports them doing so.
Also, let me say, there are things I write about because they're "my" things, and things I don't because they aren't. I don't feel, for instance, that it's my place to write on Trans* issues, because they're not MY issues. I did feel it was my place to write on the higher levels of abuse that bisexual women suffer, and when I did that, nobody was all "But what about straight women?"
Male victims, particularly of sexual and domestic violence, are frequently and sometimes deliberately erased. If anyone wants to write on that, because it's "their" thing, I would happily publish that here, anonymously if necessary.
Relatedly, I'll put my hand up and say, I am the person Lilith is talking about with the dating thing. When I go on a first date with a new guy, I:
- choose the venue. Some bars, like Pomeroy's and The Twisted Hop, are Safe Places. Others, like Aikman's, are not. I will only go somewhere where, if my date turns out to be a Problem, the staff will back me up and help me out.
- get there first. I have a table chosen with good sight and exit lines. I have bought myself my own drink.
- let a select few people know everything I know about the guy, all the identifying details, in case I don't make it home.
These are the "sensible precautions" I feel I need to take in order to lessen my chances of being raped or killed when I go on a date. Let that sink in.
A while back, I asked people for their humorously awful dating stories, so I could do a column about it and conceal which stories were mine. After a bit, I specifically asked for stories from men, because I was only getting tales from women. I got two stories from men. In the meantime, the stories from women just kept getting more and more horrible, and less funny. A woman who let a man drop her home after their first date. He broke into her house and attacked her. I have a couple of dozen of these.
Last year, I went out with a guy for four months. After we broke up, I politely asked him to please stop contacting me. He did not. For seven months. (I eventually got him to stop. If you want to know how, contact me privately, and I'll tell you.)
So yeah, not all men. I know that, I've never said otherwise. Many of my best friends are quite literally men. But,as has already been pointed out, I cannot, simply cannot, afford to assume that any new man I meet is not one of Some Men.
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Up Front: Dear Dudebros, in reply to ,
Why make such a strongly gendered argument about it? What are you wanting to achieve?
Because, in this case, I am addressing a gendered problem: the different social expectations of male and female behaviour. Because the two incidents that sparked it, the Chiefs' debacle and the Kuggeleijn trial, were men attacking women, and people were all 'boys will be boys' and 'what was she expecting'.
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Up Front: Dear Dudebros, in reply to Bart Janssen,
How do you stop the “not all men” without making the ones who try feel like shit – and give up.
The feeling like shit is OK, women suffer much more so feeling like shit is part of the deal – it’s the giving up.
Okay, so. You don't have to fight every battle. You can't: you get exhausted and you quit. It's okay to let one go, which is what I'm trying really hard to do today.
#notallmen is a derailing tactic. Stay on topic. If you feel up to it, point out that they're not disagreeing with anything that was actually said, therefore you can assume that they have no argument.
Also, I'm a big fan of Thomas Jefferson. "Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions." Mock them. "OMG, #notallmen! I am totally defeated by the freshness and originality and impeccable logic of your argument! You so smart!"
What I can't deal with is the women. The women who think Tony Veitch is a pretty good guy, and strippers are just asking for it, and what do the stupid slags expect if they're going to dress like that and drink like that and stick their arms in the shark tank. I can't fathom what's going through their heads.
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Up Front: Dear Dudebros, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Sadly the dudebros won’t.
Here's the weird thing. Okay, it's not weird, it's entirely predictable, but still.
I've never had a column as widely-shared as this one has been. Someone went to all the trouble of going over to The Isis Knot to donate money because she needed to read this so much. I thought this column was going to get me piles of shit, but it's been forty shares on Facebook and twenty new Twitter followers.
One guy, one guy got all "not all men!" on Russell's FB link to the column, and the amount of mental energy I've put in to composing replies I'm smart enough to not make is just ridiculous.