Posts by giovanni tiso
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Surely 3410’s sadness can be explain at least partly by the fact that the (brilliant) joke behind his gravatar will be somewhat lost?
PS More kittehs and I'm out of here.
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(It's actually fine. And I've hated every single site redesign since Gutenberg. My gravatar now looks like dirt though, will have to change it.)
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PA has just become so much easier to read on my iPhone, thank you
Nice work Russell. Nice on the iPad :)
Now you all know how I feel.
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While I’ll argue vehemently that we ought to provide better for all the children regardless of how big the family is, I’ll also argue that those people who do have big families are doing some harm to our planet – less harm than any merchant banker but more harm than a family of 2 or 3 children.
All things being equal, but then no things are equal. We've been stereotyping about families with multiple children being of a lower socioeconomic extraction, and poorer people are more planet friendly. They travel less, they own fewer cars, they eat less veal, they use less power. But then we are back to the accounting, aren't we? Shall we get people to trade their Suzuki Grand Vitara or their job as merchant bankers for the right to an extra child?
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These aren't niggly little details that could be worked out in implementation, they're reasons such a process could never be implemented without injustice.
But then reproductive rights are, well, a right, so injustice would be built in, no? And even if you somehow accepted that there is an objective number of children beyond which if you have them then it's bad for you, bad for them, and bad for society (which I don't, FUCK THAT), there are the usual implications of going down this particular slide. Pretty soon you stop allowing certain people to have any children at all, or you stop treating fat people, people who have certain types of cancer, drug addicts, the unemployed... it becomes a war on the poor and a war on the weak by default, as it almost always does.
One of my lecturers had eight kids. Very successful woman, great family, lovely children. Stephen Colbert was the last of eleven. And if you say yes it can work but you should do it on your dime, then it becomes another one of those things that only rich people can afford. And why? Beats the heck out of me. Are we suffering from a surplus of children in the country? No. We're suffering from a surplus of neglected children. So let's look after them more and better. That's really the only concern we should have.
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I'm offended on so many levels I find it hard to even collect my thoughts, yes.
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Why? Because Stalin, the Shining Path, the Red Brigades, or the Great Leap Forward haven't put you off them yet?
No, but I see your point.
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Boom and bust explainers and people who like to riff on how stocks will always outperform all other (less productive) forms of investment in the long run would do well to check out the Nikkei index every now and then.
In late 1989 it reached a peak of over 39,000 points. Last Friday it closed at 9,722.66 points. This is the long term trend.
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Thank you Graeme, I had been trying to get my head around that for years.
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Well voting alliance back then
and then alliance diasseaoed and we had greens as our option if we wanted to pull labour leftIt's not going to work this time either. Not with Labour - at least rhetorically - pulling so decisively away from the neoliberal reforms. And I'd be the first to cheer if we discovered an hitherto unknown reservoir of Marxists.