Posts by Rich Lock
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I sense a drift towards a discussion of semiotics here..The study of signs can be taken to excess but I reckon it can also be an exciting and fresh way of regarding the world and the making of meaning
I recently read an interview with Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, which is unfortunately locked behind the New Scientist paywall.
I don't have synesthesia, and neither does Ramachandran, but he points out to me the strangeness of asking why, say, the cheddar cheese in your sandwich is 'sharp'. It's true , cheese isn't sharp, it's soft. So why use a tactile adjective to describe a gustatory sensation?
"It means our brains are already replete with synesthesic metaphors" he says. "Your loud shirt isn't making any noise, it's because the same genes that can predispose you to synesthesia also predispose you to make links betweeen seemingly unrelated ideas, which is the basis of creativity".
I'll be hunting out more of his work, I reckon.
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Closer to home, the way forward faces the obstacle of the Whaddarya Mentality (TM), which erroneously regards stay-at-home dads as having a loser or poofter stigma. If anything, it's a subset of barefoot-and-pregnant-ism, which itself is a subset of the flourishing Ladder Kicking Syndrome.
OK, so what do we do about it, aside from speaking out when we see it?
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Megan Clayton,
(I am not a frequent commenter as PAS because I favour the long-form in writing and don't wish to clog up the columnage unduly. I trust more active members will grant me this diversion.)
Well, my view is that as soon as we start talking about the complex stuff, we don't really have a choice except to go long-form.
Thanks for your response Rich.
I think it's me that should be thanking you, not the other way round.
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Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to jessica scott,
'The Bad Baby and the Elephant'
I've been trying to remember the title of this book for the last two weeks!
Thanks for that.
'He never once said please....'
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how do you browse on-line? Some of my best purchases -- and longest-lasting literary romances -- were a result of going into a store looking for one book, and stumbling (in one case literally) over another that I'd not even heard of.
"People who bought this book also liked...." has worked for me on Amazon with surprising frequency. Although I like to confuse their AI by buying presents for my family with the wide and varied taste that implies, including my two young nieces and nephews. People who bought Rob Zombie's Hellbilly Deluxe also liked the Thomas the Tank Engine Big Loader, apparently. Your robot mind is boggled, Amazonbot.
Also, the silver lining in the super city is the new library system. And keyword searching can often throw up some enjoyably surprising results. Did you know Spike Milligan wrote a Frankenstein pastiche? Me neither 'til just before Christmas.
If I borrow a library book, and like it, I'll usually order a copy for my permanent home library at some point down the track.
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Hard News: Gaying Out, in reply to Yamis,
It’s quite depressing knowing my desire provokes discussion that equivocates it to the worst of humanity. Since when did discussion of heterosexual marriage lead to discussion of incest, marrying horses, poly whatever, and other scintillating titbits and innanities which in the end are nothing to do with heterosexual marriage? Or my wanting to marry my partner??
Sorry. +1 to wot Danielle said.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Megan Clayton,
For me, it's the transformation of society as part of a wider movement for social justice (which for me, again, would include democratic socialism) to the extent that gender equality is both consistently upheld as a "first principle" of the state and within the lives of individuals and groups.
You can infer from that intersectionality the extent to which I consider sexism on the left wing along with the politically conservative beliefs of some branches of feminism (none discussed here, I might add) to be problematic in this regard.
That's kinda what I was after, but wanted something more.....concrete-y.
For example, paying a woman who does the same work as me the same wage as me is not (necessarily) going to solve the problem and be the end point. She still works within a corporate structure that was built by, and for the benefit of, the patriarchy.
One example of where that starts to become an issue is when children enter stage left. Does she leave work to look after them? If she returns to work, is she A Bad Mother (tm)?
I know one relatively high-flying woman who believes her career with a reasonably large law firm has effectively dead-ended since she had children. She can't devote enough focus or raw time to the workplace to keep advancing.
I know another single mother who feels that having to leave her workplace on the dot every day in order to pick up her child from daycare contributed to her being 'managed out'.
Oddly enough, those aren't issues for the men in those workplaces.
If a couple discuss who out of the two of them is going to stay home, then it is often going to be the man who returns to work in a purely practcal sense. He earns more, and has better prospects. That isn't right, but what do we do about it?
These aren't new issues or new questions, but I'm interested in how people would structure something to replace what we already have, and how you would go about building it.
Women-only firms? Positive-discrimination quotas? Forced paternity leave?
I'd welcome being directed to any writings on concrete solutions anyone wants to post up, but I'm more interested in the thoughts of people on here.
To kick off, I'll give this example from Sweden.
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If feminism is, broadly speaking, a struggle for equality with men (by defeating an overbearing patriarchy), do we need a definition of 'equal'?
In some circumstances, equality is relatively easy to define: Pay equality is a simple enough concept, especially for office jobs - you do the same work, you get the same pay.
Equality in the eyes of the law is easy in most circumstances, but I can see that it might throw up a few gnarly curlers.
But I can think of more than a few circumstances where nutting out the finer details is going to be a really hard ask, for both genders.
What is the end goal here, crudely speaking? I'm after something a bit more concrete than 'overthrow the patriarchy'.
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I did think about putting hundreds of thousands, but thought it possibly might not quite be that high, once children and straights are excluded from the population.
Thanks to a lack of sleep, I don't currently have the mental agility to do sums good.
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So your argument for denying someone a basic human right is that they do not make up an arbitrarily sufficient proportion of the population and that they may not want to exercise that right?
Would you also argue that, since gay people make up a small proportion of society and many do not want to get married anyway, marriage equality for gay people is not important?
The number of consenting adults who are: 1) in an incestuous relationship, and 2) want to get married, is vanishingly small. Single figures? Non-existent?
The number of gay people in this country is well into the thousands.
From a purely pragmatic sense, I'm entirely comfortable with concentrating on gay rights to the exclusion of those in an incestuous relationship.