Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: The Up Front Guide to Plebs, in reply to Moz,
It’ll be fine, really, because the Christians have so far failed to get the restrictions on hate speech lifted for the duration. They have tried, though.
Wow.
at best you’d get some awful version of “Throw your arms around me”
That would be fabulous.
One positive is that Turnbull has managed to send Cory Bernadi out of the country for the duration.
I do wonder what the UN did to deserve that.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Alfie,
You presumed that the rest of us somehow instinctively knew that. How exactly?
Even if I'd dug the hole all sneaky and a-purpose, which I didn't, nobody forced you to jump in it.
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Up Front: Five, in reply to Sister Mary Gearchange,
And *I* get accused of being sanctimonious?! Nice mention of “with your children”, by the way. Very John Key-esque in the irrelevance of it, but at least Someone is Thinking of the Children!!1!
It's not irrelevant at all. Hebe has had to run from her home with her children. That was part of the point.
Would you defend their position? Would you be supportive of someone saying they still feel grief from the Napier earthquakes? Consequent effects from stress, yes, can last decades. Grief? No. Grief is a phase, not an occupation or vocation.
I wouldn't police someone else's emotions, because that would be a Dick Move. Funny, when we were discussing my mother's death here, nobody told me what the expiry date on grief was. Instead, we talked about how it actually never really goes away, you just learn how to carry it.
Certainly, I would not criticise someone's grieving during a memorial.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Alfie,
I guess for every statement that’s ever made, “somebody on the internet” will argue the opposite position Emma. In this case you’re quoting a “friend” of somebody on Twitter.
"Someone on the internet" is Phil Lyth, who works for the Electoral Commission. His "friend" is the person who did the translating for the Electoral Commission. But what would they know, right?
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Alfie,
Such as the Hindi translation which adds an extra ‘new’ to the instructions – “tick the flag you want to be the new New Zealand flag”.
You might want to hold on and see if that's actually true first.
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One of our main issues with watching television is accessibility. What we watch with our hearing-impaired daughter must have subtitles. Preferably subtitles for the hearing-impaired, which include sounds like doorbells, phone chimes, gunshots, etc, which often carry plot details.
By far the easiest way to do this is to wait one day after US airing, then illegally download the files, and illegally download matching subtitle files, which will already be available. However, Prime's adoption of closed captioning may change this, because they get, pretty quickly, two of the shows we watch with her: Dr Who and Elementary. Also with her we watch Orphan Black, Agent Carter, Agents of SHIELD, Sherlock, Castle, and Once Upon a Time, which sounds like it's terrible but is really well-written.
As friends, we get together and have flash-drive Tupperware parties*. The latest winner to come out of that is The Expanse. I would love it if we had access to something like Syfy TV here.
I am very glad there will be more Westside, and I LOVE The Brokenwood Mysteries. It is exactly a very Kiwi Midsomer Murders.
*We call them Tupperware parties, but given we're all swapping things we brought, they're really more like Key Parties. -
OnPoint: Yeah nah, but what *do* we…, in reply to Alfie,
The Herald allows serial plagiarist Bruce Logan
That's okay, I fixed it for you.
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Up Front: Five, in reply to Hilary Stace,
I don’t understand how people who are not affected lack empathy for those who are. Even Joe Bennett on the RNZ Panel yesterday was very dismissive. His attitude was that most Christchurch people aren’t or weren’t affected, and that a tiny minority of people are still making a fuss about nothing much.
I've recently worked out that it's classic victim-blaming. People are treating the victims of the quakes the same way they treat victims of domestic violence. You don't really want to do anything, you don't want to feel bad about yourself from not doing anything, you just want to get on and pretend it hasn't happened. So you minimise the damage. It's not as bad as they're making it out to be. And if it is, why don't they do something about it? Why don't they just leave? Why didn't they get geotech reports before they built their houses? Why are they so angry and rude all the time? How could they choose to put their kids through this?
You avoid feeling sympathy by making these people into people who don't deserve your sympathy.
(The other way to do it is to turn them into people who are 'strong' and 'resilient', and therefore don't need help.)
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Polity: Hooton’s Zombie Apocalypse, in reply to bob daktari,
labels of extreme this or that are but tools employed to control the discussion… please don’t get caught up in justifying left and right cause you’re all bunched in the centre (much to my dismay)
Yeah, from a Person of the Left POV, having Labour accused of being Leftist and their response being "No we're not!" is a bit fucking depressing.
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to BenWilson,
Here’s my question: Does that absence make you think that you got through to me? Or does it make you think I wasn’t listening? How could you even know? I’m interested in your answer, but I’m also going to guess it (that’s ALSO something people who are listening can do. It means I’ve thought about you a lot and am trying to model your answers – if I can do that, then clearly I’m getting you. If not, you can tell me so, and I can fix the model). I guess that you don’t find a lack of male engagement indicative of having communicated to men well.
Silence is, without a doubt, the hardest thing to parse on the internet. Did the person you were arguing with go away because you made a really good point they couldn't refute, or because they decided you weren't worth wasting their time on? Even harder to interpret the silence of people who've never entered the conversation at all. TBH, I don't really keep track of individuals. I don't think you could, and stay sane.
And I'm going to say this, and try to ignore how dirty it sounds*: I've never had a problem with a lack of male engagement. There are loads of men here who've constructively engaged on threads of mine, and threads of Russell's on the same kinds of topics. A good sign of someone who is listening and engaging is that they will ask questions. I've also had 'conversations' with men here where I'm clearly not being listened to, but lectured at. Because this is the internet, I've seen conversations I was clearly never supposed to, where guys who comment here occasionally have said things about me that... well, they wouldn't say in front of me. The people I've seen defend me in those circumstances are also disproportionately men. They're disproportionately Russell, to be fair.
I've known a lot of you guys for a really long time. I've met a lot of you in person. That helps me interpret both your speech and your silence.
*by 'ignore', I clearly mean, 'point out'.