Posts by James Butler
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Up Front: Sex with Parrots, in reply to Emma Hart,
I certainly shouldn’t have to declare which one is my “real” spouse.
Serious question: how many people are allowed to adopt a single child? Now that our adoption laws are under scrutiny, that would be one obvious place to start.
In software development, there is a saying known as the “zero-one-infinity” principle: when you’re inventing some kind of logical entity, you should plan on it being never used in a certain context, using it exactly once, or using it as many times as you like. Anything else is inviting trouble. Why not apply the same principle to parents, or partners?
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Hard News: The Editorial Image, in reply to Russell Brown,
We do have our own unfortunate history with eugenics, though.
Once as a bored teen I was perusing my Gran's bookshelf when I saw an ageing tome on "Social Hygiene". I flicked through it until I was enlightened, then quickly put it back. Many stupid ideas seem to need go through a period of being mainstream before enough people realize that they're stupid.
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Hard News: The Editorial Image, in reply to Kumara Republic,
In Freakonomics, the authors linked falling US crime rates in the 1990s to the fewer unwanted babies that resulted from Roe vs Wade in the early 1970s. They also made it clear that it all happened by accident, with no government coercion – hence the title of the book.
The Freakonomics guys are very, very clever, but they also have a real habit of saying, essentially, "We're not trying to read anything into this, but look at this funky data!" while plucking the interpretation which is most fun to write about. It always makes for an interesting and stimulating read, but not always for the stated reasons.
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Is this the right time to say I've never watched an episode of Shorties? Is it any good?
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OnPoint: To Whom it May Concern, in reply to tussock,
Do people not now grow the ganja here? I mean, tobacco plants are a bit fussier, but not that much. Poppies aren't even banned here.
I think I've posted it here before, but this is relevant.
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I’d be interested to know how well an “inflation adjusted” figure would correspond to what we actually expect politicians to be paid over the long term; ie. if salaries had been inflation adjusted from some point in the past, would they have ended up where they are now? The appropriate pay for an MP is a very subjective judgement, and it would be good to know how well a formulaic approach would capture that.
A simple experiment* would be to chart actual MP salaries against an inflation-adjusted value starting as far back as we have good data for. You’d have to assume that on the whole, like on a scale of decades, MP salaries do track public opinion; but it would be interesting (for certain values of interesting).
*Not volunteering (:
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We do have an utterly conditioned basic assumption that everyone we meet is heterosexual-monogamous-vanilla, and it comes through in our language.
I think it is even more general than this: people who are part of a mainstream majority assume that everyone else is too, whether it is about sexuality, chocolate or football preferences. And one way to discourage this way of thinking (as you do with your writing), is to keep pointing out that this is not true.
There's another way in which the problem is more general. As well as our assumptions being constructed such that we assume cis/hetero/vanilla as a default, they also make us think that we can make assumptions based on behaviour, appearance etc. to "guess" someone's orientation. While eg. homosexual erasure is probably a bigger problem in general, being for example a straight man who people think is gay based on dress, voice etc. is a different side to the same problem.
We need to learn that sexual identity is not something you can ascribe to anyone without their input. The complicating factor is the definition of "input" - for instance a gay man might deliberately dress, act "camp" as a statement of ownership of that particular stereotype, in which case one might be forgiven for taking him at his (implied) word. But I personally try not to, as I have been wrong before.
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OnPoint: Student Loans are Loans (Duh.), in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
the idealistic young will still go into areas they think matter. If they weren’t idealistic they’d be doing law and economics or civil engineering anyway.
I'd just like to suggest that it is perfectly possible to want to study Law, Economics or Civil Engineering for idealistic reasons. Commerce (and its brethren such as the "Bachelor of Property") is about the only discipline in which it isn't, IMHO.
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Tom Beard,
trendy, lefty suburban Nagio
I’ve never been to Nagio, though it sounds quite quaint. Ngaio, on the other hand, is pretty much middle-of-the-road politically (at least according to voting booth figures) and far from any definition of “trendy”.
Oh, and there I was thinking it was now trendy and lefty for suburban households to remotely manage their IT infrastructure.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Prefacing any genre with the world "Christian" just seems to not work out.
Except, like, Church music, right? Because that's often awesome.