Posts by linger
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to WaterDragon,
There are a few nominations for #metoo back on page 1;
but of course repeating it’s especially appropriate!
(and … yes, you’ve also nominated it without the hashtag, near the top of page 3.) -
Speaker: We shouldn’t have to look back…, in reply to mark taslov,
In context, those questions are rhetorical (assumed answer “Bloody few”), and intended as an ironic comment on the rabbit-chasing away from the theme “Violence is mostly a male problem, yet impacts mostly on women”.
In retrospect it’s easy to understand the reaction “I don’t have any solutions to the problem as stated, so let’s talk about something else instead”, but it’s also easy to understand how that can get very frustrating.
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Actually, why do we keep falling down that particular rabbit-hole?
(i) It’s easier to sympathise with a victim, so that’s where our attention goes.
(ii) A surviving victim needs to recover some sense of agency, which often means seeking out something they can easily change.
(iii) The aggressor is (presumed to be) harder to change.
(iv) An aggressor is harder to identify as such than a victim (after the fact; but also before the fact, in the sense that aggressors are better at identifying potential victims than victims are at identifying a potential aggressor [and trivially, an aggressor is more likely to know in advance they’ll be an aggressor than a victim knows in advance they’ll be a victim]).
(Hence we're left with -- inaccurate, but predictive -- profiling, e.g. by gender.) -
Well, yes. But again, looking at characteristics of the victim distracts from the point that the aggressor is the problem. (And it turns out we're really easily distracted by characteristics of the victim.)
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And the population-level statistics – while they may help set the optimal outreach targets, campaign designs, and policies – are possibly misleading in another way, too. Drill down deep enough, and really what you’re left with is: how safe do I feel right now in this relationship with this individual? Which is a perspective that may identify danger signs regardless of category membership.
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The safest relationship to be in is a gay male partnership; the most dangerous is a lesbian partnership.
But that conclusion is premature, as the measure compared (probability of reporting of domestic violence) is not equivalent to the actual risk measure (probability of incidence of domestic violence)*(average impact of incident).
It's likely there is some differential bias in reporting domestic violence by gender and/or orientation; also, it’s a safe assumption that the average impact will be higher in cases with a male aggressor! -
Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Peter Martin,
Ooh, that suggests another simple contender summing up several threads over the year:
burn
denoting, e.g.:
(i) gaslighting as standard political discourse
(ii) the acrid smoke indicating a leadership crisis in National (emanating from burning Bridges)
(iii) growing consensus that global warming must stop now (“nuclear moment”)
(iv) wildfires as evidence supporting (iii)
(v) growing public apathy in the USA and the UK (rejecting all compromise, to "let it all burn" -- e.g. Mr Tangerine Man announcing he's "proud to shut down the government", while the British government galumphs towards a "no-deal Brexit") -
OTOH, "police discretion" tends to be unevenly applied in practice, so this should be seen only as a stopgap measure.
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Andre,
Though, as you note, that's part of a more general trend, which argues against singling mahi out. I've been on sabbatical in NZ this year after 20 years away, and have been feeling a bit Rip van Winklish to see the te reo loanwords I didn't know that have become mainstream.
Even the macron has seen a surge in use (partly championed by Stuff), up from 0% in 1986 and around 30% online in the 2000s. (Possibly it reflects everyone now being able to use Google Translate and other online resources to check accuracy of loanword forms and meanings? Against which, my spellchecker then keeps annoyingly "correcting" them back to [other] English words, e.g. "te reo" becomes "the roe". So it's not entirely better living through technology.)
So -- with a side nod to French politics -- how about Macron? -
Hard News: A complicated pathway to wellness, in reply to tussock,
Cuz NyooZuld doesn’t have culture??
Nah, of course there are relevant social norms, e.g. about the acceptability of drinking with the purpose of getting utterly munted: social activities may be “within the limit of the law”, but they don’t have to be “testing the limit of the law and/or the body”. The levers you’ve mentioned haven’t had much influence on that despite many tinkerings with settings over the past century (witness the extreme case of the “6 o’clock swill” as a reaction to early closing). Other levers might be more relevant (e.g. “responsible host” laws), but still offer only small parts of the solution.