Posts by Emma Hart
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Anyway, the interesting thing about this sort of problem is that, like the question, "Why did Rome fall?" it excells at telling you more about the hobby-horses of correspondents than much of anything useful.
Absolutely. The reason there's no magic bullet solution is that every abuser is different. It's not Maori, it's not step-parents, it's not beneficiaries, it's not rugby fans, it's not drugs, it's abuse. And yet every potential solution seems to be directed at targeting a group because there's a corelation (heh, which is not causation) between that group and abuse, rather than at targeting abuse.
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Daniel: re step-parenting, read the rest of the paragraph of mine after the bit you quoted. I'm not up to endlessly repeating myself here: just reading this thread has been tough enough.
A comparison of the incentives of the two policies actually would be really helpful.
That, at least, is easy. Neither policy incentivises anyone to have more children than they've already got solely for the money. If you want to argue with that, produce an example of someone who baby-farms, or an opinion from someone who's at least MET a beneficiary. Or you could ask yourself, for what sum of money would I have and raise a child I didn't want? Call it a thought experiment.
The last time I saw the figures, which was back in the nineties, just over half of DPB recipients were single mothers, and a third were men.
The Domestic Purposes Benefit can help meet your living costs if you are a:
- sole parent or
- caregiver of someone sick or infirm or
- an older woman living aloneCourtesy Ministry of Social Development. I do get tired of people talking about the DPB as if those last two categories didn't exist.
I totally agree, but at least doing something about the former is not a catch 22. If internal family factors perpetuate violence, external factors need not add fuel to the fire.
Unless the end result of 'something must be done!' is 'we banned video games' and then everyone wipes their hands and goes home feeling vindicated. Given domestic violence predates video games, I don't really see how it would help at all.
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Hi Daniel, have you met my point? I think not. If abuse was caused by step-parenting, then every step-parent would be abusive, and no natural parent would. Something makes SOME step-parents abusive, but that natural genetic brake that makes people protect their own genes is still absent in the vast majority of step-parents who aren't abusive.
You may be trying to look at policy mechanisms, but I find it really interesting that you picked on the DPB and not WFF, which offers a much higher financial incentive for having extra children.
As for the effect of sporting or gaming violence, I suspect it's much weaker than the observed effect of real-life violence. Which, when I was going up, was that it offered bugger-all negative consequences and considerable positive consequences. When your dad smacked your mum, she shut up and did what she was told. When you got big enough to smack your dad, he stopped bashing you. If people were scared of you, you didn't get picked on. Nobody called the cops because they were The Enemy. Ditto anyone else who came in from the outside and tried to interfere. My dad was hitting my mum and my brothers (his step-children - what was needed there was some way of stopping people dying), the guy downstairs was bashing his partner and their kids, we all knew about it, but it was just the way things were. The thing about 'community' is that sometimes it reinforces some pretty appalling behaviours.
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It seems to me by combining these two facts, if you wanted to have a high rate of child homicide, you'd incentivise step-parenthood, and vice versa to lower it.
Well, let's say that for some bizarre reason you'd decided step-parenthood causes abuse in and of itself. What you'd want to do is make sure solo mothers didn't feel financially pressured to enter new relationships. You'd want to provide them with some sort of Benefit. For Domestic Purposes, perhaps.
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Strangely enough, the first bastard that springs to mind is my old boss who I chronicled in last month's work stories discussion.
Ditto.
However, upon racking, Dan Pedersen came to mind.
Previous to moving to Chch, my partners had all been sort of Van, Tyson and Pascal types. My first year at uni, I met Dan. Dan's dad had just given his mum a fashion boutique in Fendalton as a birthday present. Dan would do things like pick me up in a Mercedes and take me to dinner at an actual restaurant. Give me a single long-stemmed red rose, and when I got home, the other eleven would be waiting for me. He was romantic and sweet and kind and doinking his ex-girlfriend the entire time we were going out.
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Why are elves tall chaps with bows instead of little pixie like creatures? Tolkien. Why are goblins snivelly nasty green things that live underground, rather than things that live under toadstools at the bottom of my garden? Tolkien. Trolls turning to stone in sunlight? He borrowed that one.
Not disputing that, I wrote this for work a while back. What I dispute, I guess, is the treatment of Tolkein as some kind of god-wonder who made the whole thing up. He had a huge influence on what came after him, but 'quest for the magical artifact' is one of the oldest stories there is.
And they're a hell of a long book - to accuse Tolkien of plodding along is rich.
By 'plodding', I don't mean long, I mean dull, and I'm standing by that. I watched my son have the same problem with LOTR as I did - zipped through book one, inched through book two, nearly gave up halfway through book three. I've always felt it would have done wonders if he'd written the outline and then passed it to someone else to actually write. someone who could write breezy engaging prose and leave out all the 'songs'.
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Mm, when I write an article for a client to fill their particular need and jam in their SEO requirements, that's not very creative either. I'm creative when I'm writing for myself. My pet coder is the same - he likes to play with code, but most of the time he has to Build the Widget, so we can eat and stuff.
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Tolkien created his own vision with very little outside encouragement, and effectively started an entire genre.
That's a very, very big call. Tolkein drew heavily on Norse mythology. He didn't invent elves, or dwarves, or orcs, or magic rings, or fantasy for that matter, and he freely acknowledged his own influences. I'm not saying Rowling isn't derivative, she is, hugely. But so is Tolkein, and his prose is heavy, plodding and dull. I know that's heresy.
And Ben, I respect your position, but dude, it's code, not Gerard de Nerval.
Coding is still creating. It's sticking existing elements together to make something new, just like writing or music.
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I found myself wondering very briefly this morning whether Jethro was absent from that episode for actor unavailability reasons like (I presume) Pascalle.
Um... you mean only half of Anothony Starr could come into work? I've had days like that.
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But Craig, chicks dig that.
Tis true. And for all I adore Van, it's either Munter or Hayden Bloody Peters, the best example of tmesis on TV ever.