Posts by B Jones
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Lois McMaster Bujold writes lovely SF. I could rant about her for hours. One of her most interesting books, Ethan of Athos, is about a planet populated entirely by males - the story follows one obstetrician's quest to replenish the planet's failing stock of ovarian cell lines.
I hesitate to try unfamiliar male sf/f authors, because there's just so much of a higher chance of their female characters being few and poorly drawn within those genres.
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How much of a problem this is depends on whether you think Auckland house prices are going to stay high or come down. If they stay high, that will hurt everyone who's been shut out of the market by the price, but be ok for everyone who's in already. If they crash it's going to hurt the owners, especially the investors or anyone who might need to sell soon for whatever reason.
Wouldn't the best way to insulate the NZ economy from a property crash be to transfer as much risk as possible to overseas investors?
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From today's news:
"Alex grew up on homeopathic remedies and Rose knew he would not respond to conventional medication...After a month in the hospital, Rose applied for legal guardianship over Alex so she could refuse some of the medical treatments."
To me that article reframes the issue - from the right to access a medication which has links to prohibited substances to the right to abandon on someone else's behalf conventional treatments in favour of unproven ones. This seems more like an analogue to demands for intravenous Vitamin C or other fringe treatments that are somehow less "chemical" than conventional medicine.
After all, diacetylmorphine, otherwise known as heroin, is legally prescribable and conventional treatment for pain relief. Cocaine is also used medically as a local anaesthetic sometimes.
Anyway, roll on the research, it's always better to proceed from a position of good information.
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I'm not that surprised, unfortunately. That's a facet that stands out a lot more when it comes to other drugs, including alcohol (with some vivid Australasian examples), but less so with respect to MDMA and its cousins.
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Thanks for that clarification. I think your point risks getting lost if you're trying to compare forced relocation of children and other racist policies to prohibition. There's a real difference between policies designed to change people's behaviour and policies designed to wipe out a cultural identity or preserve a social hierarchy. People in the main choose which drugs they consume, and those choices are affected by the legal and social environment, they're not inborn.
Of course, prohibition can be deployed in ways that preserve social hierarchies and damage cultural identities - there's a well-known ethnic disparity in arrests for drug possession. But that's not an indictment on prohibition itself, just its implementation.
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Could you expand on that, Daniel, as I'm not sure I follow. There's an aspect of puritanism to any drug debate, but I'd be very surprised if the majority of people who have contributed to this issue were motivated by anything other than trying to reduce the amount of preventable harm going on, in whatever way seems best to them.
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It'd be great if you could legislate for the sensible majority, who don't drink to excess, who don't abuse a legal mind-altering alternative, who drive sensibly, who follow the instructions on the bottle, etc etc. But it's also useful to have some crash barriers in place for the small but apparently irreducible minority who aren't sensible.
What sort of regulation would work for MDMA, do you think? It would need to deal with the people apparently addicted to synthetic cannabinoids when they were legal. MDMA isn't particularly addictive, but neither is sugar, and we're struggling with that. Gambling too. There's a black market in relatively non addictive prescription pain killers, which suggests that regulation isn't 100% there either. What would work, and how would you define "work" anyway? Fewer psychoactive ED admissions? Fewer alcohol ED admissions if people switch? No increase in hyponatremia, hyperthermia, depression etc? It might not work very well if all you did was switch people from alcohol to alcohol plus MDMA. Would that be a sufficient improvement from alcohol plus whatever the hell else is around, or do we expect some corresponding reduction in booze? That's a whole other kettle of fish.
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This is what valuing the life of the fetus over the life of the mother can look like: Pregnant and no civil rights.
Women have died because other people insisted on making that choice for them and got it wrong. In most cases where there are serious health issues with continuing with a pregnancy past whatever official viability is these days, the pregnancy is ended via caesarian and the baby looked after in NICU until it's fully cooked. Sometimes that won't work and our laws need to be flexible about that.
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The news today had a reminder of a time in our history when unmarried pregnant women had no good options available to them.
Twenty foetal remains and two infants' skeletons - all kept by the museum - were found buried in Hastings abortionist Isabel "Annie" Aves' garden in 1936. Aves helped women with their "problems," as a New Zealand Herald report of the time put it. It was in the days before abortions were legal. According to Te Ara Encyclopaedia Aves was a fashionable figure, noted for considering men financially liable for unwanted pregnancies - she would send "IOU" notes for the abortion costs to the fellows responsible for impregnating her clients. After three hung juries Aves was acquitted in 1937 - but was shot dead in 1938 by an abortion client's boyfriend after the woman became ill.
People think for some reason that if it's illegal it doesn't happen.
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My daughter's doing Anzac Day at school - last night I found a copy of her great great great uncle's photo and service record, and printed it off for her. A 26 year old former architect, he was in the Ambulance Corp (I think) and at Gallipoli from the start to the finish, after which he was sent to the Western Front. That having not finished the job, he "committed suicide due to temporary insanity" in 1918. This is for him:
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.Siegfried Sassoon: Suicide in the Trenches