Posts by Grant Taylor
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Hard News: A different kind of country, in reply to Ben Curran,
Prism, GCSB, Sky City, to name just the most recent betrayals of democracy by this government that come to mind – and still the mainstream media are calm and hardly any one sees the relevance. What are they putting in our drinking water?
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been deeply traumatized that evening
The question of "what harm is being done?" has been implicit throughout this discussion but not really surfaced until now with Ben and Lucy's latest comments.
There seems to me to be important distinctions here between the various possible harms to a (young) person: to their rights, feelings, body, reputation, self-concept (and perhaps other dimensions of their existence). That preventing harm in one dimension can induce harm in another just makes it all rather hard and tricky and then the arguments start, when people disagree or talk past one another. But taking risks, choosing your poison and arguing about what is most important is life as usual.
The real side-track to be avoided, I think, is confusion about to whom the harm is being done - the individual/s engaged in the sexual encounter or others (parents, family, community, etc). Sex may hurt one or both of the young people involved OR others not actually directly engaged in the sex OR all. Sometimes we might want to protect people from others, sometimes from themselves (trusting they will be grateful later even if they are annoyed at the time), and sometimes we want to protect ourselves from them. It is the last one that is hardest to be honest about when discussing the former - and I think this is what lies behind many cases where someone other than those engaged in the sex are making the play.
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In a former life, I ran a charity. I couldn't count the number of times "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" came to mind during that time. Sometimes it was hard to be polite and tactful in declining to the offers of "help", so shallow and thoughtless were they.
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My perspective as an 'end-user' of published research who works outside of academic settings is that the costs of access are prohibitive, even for many commercial organisations. Perhaps there was a time, long, long ago, when the bulk of knowledge worth knowing within a field of endeavour was published in a selected few journals. In those circumstances, it was perhaps feasible to hold subscriptions to those journals. Now, especially in innovative and cross-disciplinary fields, the number of journals that comprise the resource pool is huge and it is simply not realistic to hold subscriptions to all of these - especially when a single title may contain a relevant article only a few times per year, at most. With the big publishing houses commonly setting per-article online access costs at US $35-$50, even a cursory literature review can cost well in excess of US $1,500 for article copies alone. These costs are a real barrier to the transfer of scientific findings into technological advances and commercial application.