Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: The Song of Angry Women, in reply to Russell Brown,
I guess among the small mercies of this horrible story is the way his friend Owen Pallet responded.
I loved that piece of Pallet's. It was sure, it was nuanced, it was exactly what we need more of. And I think it provides a useful template for other people who find themselves in Pallet's position.
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Up Front: The Song of Angry Women, in reply to Moz,
Since we don’t have any choice and all our metadata (loosely defined) is recorded and available to all and sundry, surely there are options to use that to our own advantage. Possibly not down to “death threat on phone = in jail”, but a lot of the online threats presumably get scooped up and there are already laws against doing that.
Yeah, I mean, honest to gods, even I'm not sure to what extent I'm joking here. I don't LIKE this shit, but if it IS going to happen, surely it could work to our advantage some of the time?
On a separate note, a few people have commented on how angry and dispirited GamerGate has made them feel, and for this I do actually have a constructive suggestion.
Buy a game you know these guys would hate. Developed by at least some women. A game with a female protagonist. One with a strong, affecting storyline. My favourite is Gone Home, which I won't tell you anything about because Spoilers, but everyone I know who's played it has cried buckets.
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Up Front: Good to Go?, in reply to TracyMac,
Part of my kink is stretching someone’s boundaries. But that MUST be done in the context of mutual trust and negotiation. If you don’t have absolute assurance it’s there, then don’t do it.
And the thing is, if I do have that absolute assurance, I will let them push me further. If I feel like STOP might not immediately mean stop, I'll pull the pin a whole lot faster.
Or, Trust gets you better sex.
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Up Front: Good to Go?, in reply to George Darroch,
I think that so much of our issue with sex stems from the fact that we’ve separated it from normal human behaviour.
Yeah, I have a real bug-bear about this. You want to go to the movies with someone? You ask them. And then the two of you have a conversation about which movie, and when, and where, and maybe generally what kinds of movies you like. But having exactly the same conversation about sex? Way too scary. It is fear, and it's fear out of all proportion to "what's the worst that could happen?"
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If you have examples of stuff like this you want to share anonymously, you can email them to me, and I'll post them in my ID.
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Speaker: An Open Letter To David Cunliffe, in reply to Ianmac,
Perhaps ask David Farrier to poll this.
This is a poll I would quite like to participate in.
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Okay, caught up now. Some things.
Voting places MUST stay open until dead on 7pm. The signage will be taken in before the doors are locked. I would hope that “I can’t get there on the day” will be mitigated by growing awareness of advance voting.
I am still opposed to compulsory voting. I don’t want people to have the same attitude to voting as they do to jury service: that it’s an onerous and annoying requirement. The atmosphere in voting places is by and large really lovely, because everyone who’s there wants to be there. I love it that people are queuing by the time the doors open. (I also don't want to wade through dozens of deliberately spoiled ballot papers, thanks.)
We desperately need better civics education, though. I talked to people who didn’t know what an electorate was. I don’t mean people who thought their electorate was [suburb], or who didn’t know which one they were in, but who didn’t understand the concept of an electorate. That means you have no concept of having an MP, someone whose job is to represent you. And these were the people who actually bothered coming down to vote. I spent a couple of weeks before the election telling people stuff they didn’t know – like an Ezivote card isn’t voter ID. You don’t need it. I don’t know how many people didn’t vote because they didn’t have it, but I do know many came down on the off-chance that maybe they could vote anyone, even though they thought they couldn’t. The Electoral Commission does its best, but we fail massively at educating voters on our basic systems, before they’re old enough to vote.
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Legal Beagle: Election 2014: The Special…, in reply to Kevin McCready,
What would happen if a roll (there are more than 10 of them at busy Voting Places) goes missing for an hour or two?
This is insane. It would be incredibly obvious if a roll went missing. One is issued to each Issuing Officer. Without the roll, they can't issue votes. You make it sound like rolls are just lying around all over the place, but if you've scrutineered, you absolutely know that's not the case. And if you did get your hands on a roll without any IO or scrutineer noticing, what would you do with it? I'm seriously asking. What would you do with it?
I actually know from experience what happens when a ballot pad "goes missing" (it wasn't actually missing). You really don't have a clue what you're talking about.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Alfie,
Do you have a reference for that, Mike?
the yes campaign itself had intervened on Twitter on Thursday night to reassure voters that there was nothing awry with the Dundee footage.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Not The Messiah,
Are there many people these days without ID of some sort? ( I don’t know ) I would have thought pretty much everyone would have something – drivers licence seems a good start?
Thing is, voting ID laws always disenfranchise people, and disproportionately those people are poor and brown. That's why the Republicans love them so much. So surely, there should have to be an actual problem with voter fraud before you'd do that? We have a fantastic culture of making it as easy as possible for people to vote, and I'd hate to lose that.