Posts by Emma Hart
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Are people still all being surprised that Russell Brand is a good writer and a deep thinker?
Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just... another one bites the dust..." This demonstrates I suppose that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it is likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.
And on Thatcher and feminism:
It always struck me as peculiar, too, when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of Girl Power. I don't see that. She is an anomaly, a product of the freak-conomy of her time. Barack Obama interestingly said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women." Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Hebe,
surely trout is ungendered?
Would you ever use it to describe a man?
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Of course, I've spent all morning grateful for the way my friends and my feeds have been talking about and demonstrating compassion, and what's running through my head? This:
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
No Bragg ?
I know what you mean, the 80s for me was largely sitting in freezing student flats listening to Bragg, but here's what he has to say today.
"This is not a time for celebration. This is a salient reminder of how Britain got into the mess that we are in today."
Mitch Benn has described living in Scotland under Thatcher as like living under a foreign occupation. That Thatcher's legacy is what's happening in Britain right now: the feeling that, if you are of a certain 'class', your own government despises you. How else would any government come up with something like the bedroom tax?
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Hard News: Violence in the streets, in reply to Chris Miller,
the behaviour of all the overly-macho dispossessed men in Christchurch (and in the rest of the country) who think the only thing they can do to have some power over their lives is to smash up other people.
Yeah, but in Aikman's? That's a hard-out stripy-shirt bar. Not too many of the Dispossessed drinking there.
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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.