Posts by Emma Hart
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Hard News: Media3: Panic or Peril?, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm keen to see what you make of the show. I thought our two panelists were pretty high signal-to-noise at the recording tonight.
Heh, you might have to wait a couple of days given what else is on tomorrow night.
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Hard News: Media3: Panic or Peril?, in reply to BenWilson,
Isn't the art of the ancient world jam packed with nudes?
Indeed. I wrote this a couple of years ago, and the rest of the posts in the Porn Tuesday series, partly because I was so tired of hearing that sexually-explicit material was something new.
There’s a tendency, when we’re not thinking about it very hard, to assume that our history has been a constant drift towards increasing liberalism, but this simply isn’t true. The older state is “sex in the public square”, absolutely in front of the children. Censorship was imposed on that, and we’ve now come to a point where, instead of justifying why something should be banned or restricted, the debate is entirely focused on justifying why things should be allowed to be seen.
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Hard News: Media3: Panic or Peril?, in reply to BenWilson,
Emma, Emma, wherefore art thou?
But y'all know what I'm going to say, right?
"Sexualisation" of girls is a concept that buys into the idea that girls are not naturally sexual. Which is a lie. That paradigm is the same reason this debate always ignores the sexuality of boys: because all boys are total horndogs, all the time. Which is a lie.
Censorship is part of the problem, not the solution. Censorship stops sex from becoming normalised, when it's normal. The solution is education - comprehensive education that starts in kindergarten - and positive portrayals of the full diversity of sexuality.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I don't know to what actual extent the tearing apart of the body politic was a direct consequence of neoliberal reform (and to what extent the preceding egalitarianism is in fact a myth)
I was thinking about an aspect of this the other day, when I realised that, as far as structural assistance went, it was easier for my mother to walk out of an abusive relationship and survive financially under Muldoon than it would be if I did it now. Benefits were at much higher levels in real terms, penalties for earning extra money weren't as high, she could capitalise the Family Benefit and get a govt-subsidised 3% mortgage, which meant she could buy a home for herself and her four children on what she earned working part-time in the laundry of a geriatric hospital.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Rob Stowell,
At a guess, one of NZ's few crime novelists?
Yeah, probably not the guy who just won a Feminist Porn Award for "Friends with Benefits".
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I have the strongest suspicion that if we were to reverse the philosophy of our disability services - from the withdrawal of resources to the provision of resources - we'd waste a lot less money and spend no more than we are spending.
Certainly a huge amount of money is just wasted in persecutorial* practices. How much money and time would be saved by just never making people with permanent disabilities reapply for their entitlements? By assuming GPs aren't fraudulent bastards and never making anyone have a designated doctor visit? Like Lilith, we had the experience of having our benefit cut for absolutely no reason, and having it reinstated when we complained. That was someone's job.
*It's a word now.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Peter Martin,
While I confess to having little or no understanding of how your daughter's disability affects her cognitively, there is more than one way to get her through those literacy credits to achieve Level 1 NCEA.
Yeah, as I noted, her teacher was on to it enough to ensure that our daughter started Level 1 a year early, under the old requirements, so she could finish it under them as well. They did this for as many kids in the unit as could possibly manage it, regardless of age. And my son has got all his literacy requirements in subjects other than English.
The system can be gamed. It shouldn't have to be. Not all parents and teachers have the nous or the resources to do it.
I should note that my daughter doesn't actually require SACs. She gets assistance in-class (by, yes, banding special-needs kids together and all going in on a teacher-aide), but the SAC regime doesn't actually affect us personally. That doesn't stop me being absolutely filthy on it.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Brent Jackson,
Using Sign Language to talk must be considered a "spoken interaction", surely ?
After the requirement was brought in, teachers of the Deaf battled hard and eventually successfully for students to be allowed to fulfill it in NZSL, but only if that was their first language. So it is, thankfully, sorted for Deaf kids. For those in between, however, for whom spoken English is their primary means of communication but whose speech is not clear enough to pass the standard, the problem remains.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Lucy, no impairment group is soaking up resources.
Lucy was being sarcastic.
What she describes is very reminiscent of our experience of trying (eventually unsuccessfully) to retain our daughter's itinerant hours when she was at primary school. We would get together with her teachers and her facilitator and make her out to be dumber than she was. The help she got let her catch up, so it was taken away, at which point, apparently astonishingly, she fell behind.
She's a teen now and it is simply far too demeaning to her to adopt these strategies.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Robert Fox,
Ha, snap.