Posts by Stephen Judd
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I will support the idea of cutting people off after then n th child IF and ONLY IF every parent with fewer than n children is RIGOROUSLY audited to ensure that they are spending at least the state-prescribed minimum amount exclusively on the children. Surely we don't think only fecund parents will be rorting the system?
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Logicomix was my seasonal gift to the (then 14 yr old) offspring last year. She read it cover to cover and started asking a bunch of logic and philosophy questions immediately after and hasn't really stopped. Recommended.
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I always make a special point of lingering by the otters at the Wellington Zoo. They project cheerful, eager energy and good nature, even if they are vicious little buggers with teeth like razors and rancid fish-stink.
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What elevated concepts such as harshness and hardness to the forefront of our social inventory and what compels them to retain this position?
1. Capitalism building on patriarchy.
2. The apparent paradox that we can't challenge these ideas safely unless we are in a position of power over those who hold them dear, yet it seems that we cannot attain positions of power over those who hold them dear without acquiescing to these ideas to an extent that makes it difficult not to internalise them. -
Gold. Jackie, I'd love to hear more from you about your work in this vein as and when you have time. I'll be bookmarking this to send to certain persons when the subject comes up...
Kyle: possibly one problem is this. Suppose the risk of problem X happening is tiny, maybe 1 in 10,000. Suppose a certain group "G" has double that risk, so 2 in 10,000. That's still a very tiny risk, but I guarantee that after a news story has circulated and the usual suspects have commented, everyone will be left with the impression that problem X is rampant and common in group G and nothing to worry about anywhere else.
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...the National Review turn into a Tea-Bagger cheer squad, when its founder used its pages (and his considerable rhetorical ninja skills) to argue that American conservatism had no place for paranoid racists and anti-Semites. Sigh...
Whereas it was totally A-OK with segregation.
That editorial wasn't signed, but many people think Buckley wrote it. Perhaps the man who wrote "The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote" was not a paranoid racist, but I can't think of any more positive description.
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Craig, I think you missed the "on the side of capital" part of that sentence.
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If I wanted to be institutionalised and have all those 'benefits' I wouldn't be working in the film industry.
Good on you, you hard bastard you. But with respect, that might well go for any area where worker protections are crap -- those who can cope well stay and among them some will positively love it. That is not incompatible with conditions being crap.
On another front, I'm sympathetic to Scott Hamilton, although I don't agree that we have a reflexive duty to support all union action. I think his analysis of things in terms of class and the interests of capital vs workers is sorely missing from virtually everywhere else. He's right: the state has entered to meddle in the relationship between workers and capital on the side of capital (as evidenced by the overly broad, vague legislation being rammed through under urgency as I write).
I'm not buying into arguments that don't acknowledge people's right to withdraw their labour in pursuit of better conditions. I understand that other people's jobs become threatened in turn, but by that logic, no one in our interdependent world can ever act. I'll own that industrial action here has been a strategic error, but it's not a moral one.
Where Scott goes astray, I think, is in the claim that we "ought to support their fight, even as [we] argue for the improvement of their strategy and their tactics." How are we to support them if we don't buy the strategy and the tactics? You help your friends by pulling them back from the cliff edge, not by telling them they have every right to jump if they want. Especially if you're roped to them.
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were women everywhere walking around with similar facilities for bestowing such pleasure!
Luckily for us all, I do not have a copy of Portnoy's Complaint to hand and so cannot quote the passage in which the eponymous narrator expresses a similar sentiment is similarly wonderstruck but less lyrical fashion.
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I don't know why, but I suddenly remembered the best workshop safety advice ever, namely:
NEVER PUT YOUR FINGER WHERE YOU WOULDN'T PUT YOUR PENIS.