Posts by Emma Hart
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I made the mistake of reading Maxim's opening blurb on Social Justice
We live right by Middleton Grange, a private religious school which is the Maxim Institute's fourth biggest funder. One the aims for the school in their prospectus is:
To develop confidence in, and the ability to, communicate effectively.
Training the religious fundamentalists of the future.
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My pleasure. Any time my (Canadian) boss comments on my bitchy Machiavelianism I just tell her it's a cultural thing and all Kiwi women are like that.
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It's not like we've given up, but (like most kids) however much you give, you can still feel you could give more.
I know that feeling. We have a daughter with a moderate to severe hearing impairment, and despite hundreds of hours of intense one on one work with her, we never feel that we've given her enough. We had to make major decisions that will affect her for the rest of her life when she was too young to be a part of them, that related to things we had no experience of, and there's a constant background worry that we've got things wrong. But in the end what it comes down to is getting up every day and doing what you have to, because what the hell else are you going to do?
I do feel that it would benefit my daughter more to see Deaf people in drama, rather than documentary, though obviously I think that's great too. Shorty's been remarkably good for that over the years when compared with just about anything else. A character like Joey Lucas on the West Wing does wonders for self-image.
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Okay, prefacing this by saying, I've been in online customer service/moderation/adminning for five years and I've reached near-toxic levels of cynicism. The net would be a much nicer place without all those fracking users buggering it up.
In terms of a public statement, I am working on a rant about terms which should not be used, and just piss me off. They include:
Strong statement of redirection, yes. Itemised list, no. It's like a dare. You'll have 'Gaybour' and 'threats of violence against MP's families' before you can refresh the page. Users are like virginity-pledged teenagers, they'll find any loophole you leave open. What's wrong with just 'no threats of violence'? Does anyone's political discourse really benefit from it?
The problem with increasing the signal to noise ratio at Kiwiblog isn't just the people who are there, it's the people who aren't, the ones who might actually have given you signal but who've given up and snotted off because the culture in the comments is so openly hostile to reasoned discourse.
God complex in mods is very easy to deal with: you take away their status if they start acting like jerk. That means they need really clear guidelines: nothing is so stupid that people don't explicitly have to be told not to do it. We had an admin I begged our boss not to fire because every time she did something, I got to add a new section to the manual. If you can't keep up with your comments and you genuinely want to change direction, you need mods, because you need at least a short period of hard enforcement. Yeah yeah, free speech, blah blah, it's not a license to be a dick. Our manual contains a quote from Star Trek: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Except 'one' has been replaced with a word too rude to use here.
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Stephen, damn you, where was that list before I wrote the admin manual for Bardic Web and had to work all that out myself?
-- seed the group early on with people who set the tone you want to have; then cultural norms develop and posters become self-policing.
We get a long way with this. And so does Kiwiblog.
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Bloody brilliant. Funniest thing I've read in ages.
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Tell me Juha, how long have you had this fascination with David's groin? Because I'm getting an inkling that it might be unhealthy.
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Or possibly when the TV schedule started in the mornings?
Ha, I think that's it! Soaring music over the alps first thing in the morning while waiting for the cartoons to start...
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but I bet I would still exhibit the motions of beer-drinking even if my head were removed (which might be an interesting experiment to try sometime).
That does sound like it needs to be tried. And anything else that seems to demonstrate some kind of behavioural relationship between Kiwi males and cockroaches. Like, hitting you with a rolled-up Listener appears to have no impact at all.
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Yeah, that interview would have been about the same time I was getting smacked over at school for 'talking posh'. I quickly munged my own accent in order to fit in better. There was definitely still an 'accent hierarchy' around in the seventies and eighties.