Posts by Deborah
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Up Front: How I Learned to Stop Worrying…, in reply to Emma Hart,
Congratulations! I enjoyed reading that. You've creating an oddly compelling set of images for me - making pictures in my mind - which is a little unusual for me, as I tend not to do that movie-in-my-mind thing when I'm reading.
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I wrote about quotas myself a few years ago, when various people were having attacks of the vapours over the thought that a little gender equality might be in order. I reached the same conclusion as Emma, via a slightly different route.
Here's the somewhat tame version I wrote for publication: Quotas may be needed to boost female MPs
And here's the version I blogged, where I was a little more direct.
There’s a very straightforward reason for using quotas. They work.
The meritocracy arguments, even offered as provocation, bore me to tears. Our methods of measuring "merit" are hopelessly compromised by sexism.
But that just raises the question of how merit is measured. And as it turns out, the characteristics that we tend to think of as being merit-worthy in political leaders turn out to be the characteristics that we tend to associate with men (one, two, three, four, type “stereotypes men women leaders” into google and browse through the results).
We see a man, and we think leader, and we see a woman, and we think, not-leader. It’s nothing to do with merit, and everything to do with our pre-conceptions about who is fit to be a leader.
As for "provocation", just... don't.
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Up Front: How I Learned to Stop Worrying…, in reply to Isabel Hitchings,
Geena Davis Institute for Gender In Media found that, in crowd scenes, women tend to comprise about 17 percent of any given crowd. She's argued, based on outside data and her own interpretations, that this imbalance relates to and reinforces the way men perceive the actual number of women in any given room.
“If there's 17 percent women, the men in the group think it's 50-50,” she told NPR. “And if there's 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.”
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Thank you, Claudia.
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Knowing that the middle-aged, supposed powerhouses of the workplace, self-identified rocks in their family, usually aren’t as bulletproof as they project is a good start.
Exactly so.
I think the thing that I'm finding hard at present (staring 50 in the eye come January) is that we have several friends and family members who have terminal diseases. People of our age and up. And it's becoming more usual for us now to hear of another person who is facing serious physical illness.
On the other hand, now that our children are teenagers, we're free to do many more things. I rather like my children so this is not free in the sense of escape, but free to do a few more things on our own schedule. Like going out to movies, or heading down to Wellington for a concert, or vaguely saying, "Shouldn't you kids be going to bed now?" instead of going through that nightly hell two hours with small children.
On the gripping hand, that means that they also go off and do their own thing. And our eldest will be leaving to go south for university in less than 18 months now. That's exciting, and I will miss her terribly.
On yet another hand, my long held desire to effect change through senior political roles may never come to fruition either, just because I'm too old to really get going in politics.
Life, eh.
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This poses some obvious problems for people who are generally uncomfortable with hugging or being hugged.
I'm okay with a brief hug. Even a slightly longer hug. But I have one friend here in Manawatu who insists on a very long hug, and I always feel, well, trapped.
My daughters have kindly informed me that I'm not very good at hugs. To wit: "Mum, you're not very good at hugs."
I don't WANT to be good at hugs.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to izogi,
Expiration of copyright doesn’t deprive the original copyright owner from having it and using it, it merely deprives them of placing conditions on its copying and distribution for any longer.
If they're no longer earning income from it, sure. But if it creates a revenue stream for them, then removing copyright restrictions also removes a tangible benefit for them.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to SteveH,
Honestly, I don’t see much reason why your family should continue to benefit from your creation 50 or 70 years after you die.
I’m puzzled about (as in, still trying to think my way through the issues and I haven’t reached even a tentative conclusion yet) the parallels with real property. If it’s okay to remove copyright protection after a certain period of time, is it also okay to remove real (land, buildings etc) property that people have inherited after a certain period of time?
NB: This could well be a flawed analogy. But I’ve found that it has brought several issues to the fore for me, with respect to both copyright and real property.
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Gordon Campbell on the Greens bad deal over the flags.
In one fell swoop the Greens’ Gareth Hughes has (a) rescued Prime Minister John Key from his personal flag fiasco (b) got the government out of a tight corner of its own making (c) agreed to vote with National to block Labour’s attempt to get a yes/no question added to the November referendum and (d) handed the Key government a club with which to beat the only other party – Labour – with which the Greens can hope to form a government in 2017. Was Red Peak such a compelling cause that the Greens needed to expend so much political capital on it?
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I'll be voting Red Peak first, Lockwood with the black bit second, Hypnoflag third, and that other Lockwood one fourth.
Come the deciding referendum, I'm not sure how I'll vote if Red Peak is the preferred alternative. I like it, but I'm not sure that I like it enough to choose it as our flag. On the other hand, it's way better than our current colonial obseiance.
If it's any of the others, I'll be voting No Change.