Posts by Andre Alessi
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Pretty much nailed how I feel too, Craig. I'd like a Wishart-free world as much as anyone, but I feel uncomfortable with the way the big chains have responded to this. (Imagine the outcry if Google decided to filter its results to exclude particular legal but unpopular websites.)
I have slightly more sympathy for Unity books-they're a relatively small operation, and there are obvious commercial pressures there whichever way they lean. But still, in the long run, I'd rather this stuff was available and able to be looked at critically and openly rather than hidden away in online stores for cranks and losers.
I never noticed this sort of outcry over the multiple Shappelle Corby books (who, lest we forget was actually convicted of a crime.)
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It's a shame the Catholic Church in New Zealand (often a proponent of real social justice in so many areas) hasn't chosen to stand up to Head Office on this topic.
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Hard News: That's Entertainment!, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
And thanks, Russell, for the mention. It's quite exciting seeing it right up at the top of the page. (Though I'm just as excited as news of the UMO album. Yus!)
You do have fantastic taste, Robyn! If only a New Zealand musician were to be able to use Fassavoy imagery in their videos, it would be something like a cultural perfect storm.
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So, essentially, the thing that reversed the steady rise in the proportion of offenders being sentenced to imprisonment was the introduction of home and community detention and intensive supervision for the least serious offences.
Without going into too much detail, I've been indirectly involved in aspects of the the home detention process (in my professional role, not as a participant) and I can honestly say it's no picnic. There is a shitload of monitoring that occurs 24 hours a day, and it's often hit or miss whether someone will be successful in even being allowed on home detention. Most people who criticise home d as soft have never seriously thought about how draining it is to have your movements restricted so completely (though ironically, those same people usually belong to the "OMG government is Big Brother!" crowd.)
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Time to invest in a mandrill?
"Sounds like a lot of fun, doesn't it? If you want to be part of the summer of death."
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There's a dairy right next to Westlake Girls' that has Kronic quite conspicuously on display behind the counter. I wouldn't have even noticed it if not for the recent publicity. I've never actually seen the owners sell to schoolkids, but you can't swing a cat in that place without hitting someone in school uniform so I imagine it'd be a fairly irresistible temptation to do so.
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I think anyone who wants to talk about the evils of drugs in public should be forced to watch Brass Eye ’s special on “the new superdrug, Cake”:
ETA: Looks like embedding is disabled for this video, you can watch the clip here.
At the very least, it’d stop some of the more over-the-top grandstanding.
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Bizarrely, my Auckland-based coworker has been holidaying in Christchurch during both of the last two big quakes. He's managed to predict both by his presence within a 2-3 day window. (He was due to fly out from Christchurch on Sunday night this time, but his flight was cancelled due to volcanic ash.)
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Hard News: Bishop Brian: It's worse than…, in reply to recordari,
Need to do some more reading. Interesting, but struggling to see how it fits.
I did wander a bit there, didn't I?
I was replying to the suggestion in your comment:
should we forgive people their indiscretions for some perception of a greater good?
that the "people" we were talking about were Destiny Church, and that the "perception of a greater good" was the social good they achieve in helping people like my uncle to get their lives back on track, while the "indiscretions" were Destiny's less-than-stellar social views. If that's not the case, then I've totally misread your comment and the reference to double effect would be irrelevant.
If that was what you were after, then double effect applies because it's about how far you can justify the negative side effects of an act by the good it eventually does. In this case, the negative side effect would be Destiny's homo-/xeno-/gynophobia and the positive would be the social help it provides its congregation. My personal take is that the negative side effects of an organisation like Destiny helping people at the very least cancel out the good that they might do. YMMV
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I feel like I've benefitted an awful lot from reading this thread. It's extremely refreshing to read an intelligent discussion about rape culture that isn't a flame war (thought I admit, my first reaction on seeing the number of comments was "Oh lawd, 13 pages already? This can't be good..." Colour me pleasantly surprised.)
I've thought about adding my own experiences of sexual assault, too, but on reflection, I'm not sure it adds anything to what others have said (and have said better than I ever could.)
One thing that I would like to add, and I hope it's not too tangental or trivial, is the way in which rape is portrayed in literature. This ties into something Emma mentioned upthread about the way rape is perceived. Often "rape" is portrayed in a specific way-particularly in fantasy* literature, it's generally brutally violent, committed by a stranger or near-stranger, leaves the victim emotionally traumatised but physically unharmed, and is always clear-cut as rape. As a learning tool, the books we read growing up have a significant impact on how we percieve issues like rape, so managing to change how writers write about rape in a fictional context is one small step towards dismantling some of the culture that allows rape to happen so frequently.
* - I mention fantasy literature because it's something of a trope use the kind of rape mentioned above as shorthand/lazy writing for "the worst possible thing that could happen to a character without killing her". It's incredibly, distressingly common in fantasy fiction, and very few fantasy writers manage to avoid writing about sexual assault in a less trite fashion.