Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
You can teach Philosophy and get NCEA credit under other subject headings, such as Religious Studies and Social Sciences.
Yes, my son will get his first Religious Studies credits this year because of this. Which to me makes it even more ridiculous. Religious Studies is a more acceptable academic discipline than Philosophy? Really?
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to BenWilson,
I think kids can do critical thinking courses in high school now.
Philosophy is taught in some primary schools now, as well as secondaries. The problem is that, for some reason utterly beyond me, you can't get NCEA credits in philosophy. So the only kids who can afford to take it are those who have room after getting their necessary qualification-credits. (Except, y'know, the way my son's school is set up, he took PHIL and got all his ENGL literacy credits through it.)
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Cracker: It's urs!, in reply to Bart Janssen,
They'll be able to make it but not read/see/hear/touch it.
Yeah, this is the issue we're running into with my daughter. She's producing stuff that's, well, "inappropriate" for a fifteen year old. Still, come next month she'll be sixteen, and legally allowed to do things she's not legally allowed to watch.
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
when expectations are that parents are The Font Of All Knowledge
I reckon one of the few things I've got right as a parent is frequent use of the phrase, "I don't know. Let's find out!" So yeah, now my kids think google is the font of all knowledge.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Jeremy Andrew,
If I'm paying $15 bucks to go see Ender's Game, odds are the amount OSC gets from that is measured in fractions of a cent, so if I donate $30 to a pro-equality cause, that not only counteracts any money I gave to Card, but offsets pretty much the rest of the theatre as well.
This is actually the argument I buy least. I mean, okay, you're pro-equality. You have money to give to a pro-equality cause? Just give it. If you didn't go to Ender's Game then theoretically you'd have $45 to give to a pro-equality cause, right? (I'm not saying people Must Give Money to their Causes. There are lots of cheaper and more visible ways to support something.)
Also. When it comes to Ender's Game's supporters making their cause, whether it's that Card's involvement wasn't damaging, or that there should be a Speaker for the Dead movie or whatever, you count as someone who saw it. Your presence counts for the numbers, your dollars count for the box office take. What else you did with your money? Doesn't count. It's not visible.
What would make it work is if someone organised a big, visible Offsetting Campaign, where people who were going to EG could very obviously donate to a specific pro-marriage-equality fund. This has just come to me as I type, and it seems like a pretty sweet idea. Mostly, tbh, because I imaging it would really annoy the piss out of Card.
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So, a couple of days ago, my (queer, disabled) fifteen year old daughter showed us a short story she'd written in her Creative Writing class. And I kept thinking, there should be some way of sharing this more widely, in a safe environment.
I'm not sure, though, that's it's "age-appropriate" - whatever that means for 13-25 year olds.
However. That aside, I think this is a brilliant idea, and I'd be happy to help curate content.
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to Russell Brown,
We tend to forget the behaviour towards others that apparent grown-ups justify in themselves when they feel insecure or under pressure.
Yeah, there is careless behaviour that comes from a lack of empathy, and there is vicious behaviour that comes from knowing how someone will feel, and deliberately hurting them. My daughter went through some horrible Teenage Girl Shit at the end of last year. I want to be able to say to her, "It's never going to be that hard again. Adults don't behave like that." Gods I wish that were true.
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Up Front: Oh, Grow Up, in reply to Russell Brown,
Are we adults? We don’t feel like adults.
Dude. I'm 50. And I still get that all the time.
"Everybody" does. At some time in my mid-twenties (by which time I already had kids) I had a conversation with friends and suddenly realised that I wasn't the only person who felt like they were faking being a grown-up, and at some point I was going to get called out on it.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Jeremy Andrew,
Since all the scare-ads make the point that illegally downloading deprives artists, and leaves their children starving in the gutter, is this a legit option?
Yeah, I've been quietly pondering this question, and sort of hoping it wouldn't become explicit, because I don't really know the answer. It's a solution to the "want to see it, don't want to fund bigotry" problem, but it's ethically fraught in itself. It also doesn't, I think, have the same impact as an actual boycott, as far as deterring people from working with Card in the future - witness the Superman kerfuffle, which was largely framed around people saying they wouldn't buy the issue, as well as the damage by association to DC's brand. So maybe the compromise position isn't as strong a stand, regardless of how you feel about opyright-cay.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to ChrisW,
I have often thought back over the last few months to your May 2009 post on the subject and especially the long discussion thread: Are we there yet?
Ah yes, me saying I wasn't going to have this argument any more, four years ago. It's... something, to note that since I wrote that, nobody has come up with an argument I haven't covered. And Family First have got so desperate for reasons they've just started making shit up.
I thought it would take something like 20 years to shift enough of them, as I had shifted, across the political pivot point between the ayes and the noes
I was talking to a friend yesterday who had changed his parents' minds during the second reading debate, from a 'soft' no - never really thought about it deeply but nonetheless definitely opposed - to a more thoughtful soft yes. I am fascinated by the process of mind-changing. The number of people who have changed their minds on this - here, in the US, in Britain, and Australia - in the last decade is mind-boggling.