Posts by giovanni tiso
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Bart Janssen,
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Saving pennies at the expense of pounds.
I'm not even sure you save pennies. 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.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall,
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Thank you Lilith. I meant it yesterday when I said I haven't been able to reread it yet. Got halfway through once. The things they make you do (or, worse, do to your child) just make the anger well up every time.
On the sunny side, our whole school is learning sign. That's how having a child who is different can benefit an entire community.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Sacha,
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At its root, we need to regard disabled people as worthwhile. Which won't happen on its own.
We need to regard people as worthwhile. Which is even less likely to happen on its own.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Sacha,
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Almost inhaled my coffee. If only.
Yeah, I know, it's thorny. Put it this way: schools have to be. So you can access the building. Not necessarily access education however.
They're called waiting lists - and private medical insurance. Most of the public are just not aware how much the public health system has been put into rationing mode over the last few years.
We try to contain overall costs. And yes, there are waiting lists. But not outright denial of essential services. Break a leg every Sunday morning playing rugby, they'll fix it every time.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Hilary Stace,
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There is just not enough resourcing or understanding
There is plenty of understanding, which actually makes things worse. Nothing like the awareness that the people you are dealing with know exactly how much they are hurting you. The perversion is the capping of the resources. We don't set a limit of how many broken bones people can have - the hospital system will set them all - or on the number of cancers people can have. We also require that public buildings be physically accessible. Yet we cap the number of children who have full access to education.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall,
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"There's been no change of criteria, but what she's seeing is that it's becoming a lot harder to get."
The classic doublespeak logic of disability services. It's like the ORS scheme: we'll take all children who fit our wonderfully inclusive criteria of need, but not above 7000. How will we manage to cap this number without failing people who meet the criteria? Don't worry. We have ways.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
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This discussion is making me wish I'd got to the end of Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, which was, I thought, pretty eye-opening
See also her Let's say goodbye to the straw feminist, in convenient blog-post-length.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Lilith __,
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But girls DO do math. Lots of girls excel at math! And probably many more would if everybody weren’t telling them, “you can’t do that, you’re a GIRL!”
I was agreeing with you.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Lilith __,
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I have major issues with the pop-psychology “this is why men can’t load the dishwasher; this is why girls can’t do math” version.
Let's not dismiss it as pop-psychology though. One of the main proponents of "girls can't do math" is Steven Pinker, who is about as big a name in the field as they come. You could say that evolutionary psychology is practically wired to make those kinds of arguments.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
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But there are multiple levels of privilege. You can be a poor white man and still retain privilege, like, I dunno, the privilege of not being sexually harassed on the street or having workers in the hardware store answer their questions directly rather than talking to their spouse (not that this happened to me recently or anything.) Privilege applies differently in different situations.
I'm just going to link to this post that my friend Dougal McNeill wrote earlier this year about (against) privilege theory. I think it's highly relevant here. Carry on.