Posts by mark taslov
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Up Front: I Never Been ta Borstal, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Looking forward, for me a problem is – assuming we are capable of accepting the findings of the now quite dated research – how might we adjust our family violence campaigns accordingly? As a leading question; if we were to ease up on the gender profiling and instead heighten our focus on the maxim that It’s Not OK, regardless of whether someone ends up in the hospital or the morgue, inclusively applicable to all genders, then how might such a reconsidered approach to violence as a whole potentially drive a reduction in homicides, suicides and numbers of victims hospitalised and not hospitalised?
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Up Front: I Never Been ta Borstal, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
That’s not remotely close to my interpretation. Firstly none of the papers produced are 40 years old. These are recent findings.
Very simply, Moffitt’s statement presenting the claims that most feminist criminologists flat rejected the study’s findings and that the researchers were not invited to submit the findings at conferences doesn’t sound to me as if Professor Moffitt was attributing the widespread rejection to flawed research, individual scruples or poor presentation but rather hinting at there being some minor degree of collusion for a period for such a comprehensive suppression to occur.
Despite what I’m certain is a far more nuanced reality, the statement itself echos the kinds of conspiracy theories one is likely to hear from deluded men’s right activists,and hence “for a moment” sometime in May it felt like a natural fit for Matthew’s thread, in exactly that context.
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Up Front: I Never Been ta Borstal, in reply to Helen Wilson,
When this finding first came out it was flat rejected by most feminist criminologists so we really had difficulty getting those papers published. Even after the papers were published, we were never invited to submit the findings at any conferences. It was one of the most difficult parts of the research to get it out there.
Prof Terry Moffitt
Associate Director
Dunedin Longitudinal Study
(31:50) Why Am I Ep2Learning of this at the time and considering the implications, for a moment I wondered if it might even be worth including in Matthew Dentith’s thread. As you are no doubt aware the doco goes on to mention that their research has subsequently been backed up by studies in the UK, US etc. Good posts Helen.
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Hard News: Stop acting like the law is…, in reply to Sacha,
Ruefully taking a string from a warden’s bow; I’m prepared to accept that you had (past perfect tense) never seen welsh or german written without caps, I likewise had not seen them written without caps until I encountered (simple past ) them in the dictionary while I was writing (past continuous) the post above. I’m absolutely confident that we have (present perfect tense) both seen them now.
I despise correcting native speakers language use given that languages are communal – despite the best efforts of prescriptivists to centralise them – their evolutions in freer societies are largely driven by the proles – that and the fact that efforts to disrupt communication for the explicit purpose of correction seldom occur due to a lack of intelligibility but oftentimes in spite of it.
I do see where you’re coming from Sacha with regards to Pākehā, and I’m certain that what you are saying will be swallowed without a squeak at primary schools, however as a cack-hander I’m ruefully aware of the way language has been historically exploited as a tool to impose conformity, and personally I’m reluctant to value it as anything less than a means of expression.
We have been trained to accept the rationalisation behind the imperative to reformat an exclusively oral language into a written language, this largely being cast as a progress for primitives; a mission of civilising and integration, unfortunately we’ve never quite managed to do so without repurposing the intrinsic function of the language itself, colonising it.
This advocacy of the macron by Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori – which is after all just another autonomous crown entity – is one more notch in colonialism’s belt. Given the advances in AV technology which had occurred prior to the establishment of this crown entity in 1987 and moreover given the uniformity in the way the Maori language had previously been alphabeticised, I find the decision to further accessorise Maori, sorry Māori language oddly condescending to its native users who by definition will for the most part pick up the language orally. This is especially evident when compared to the widespread irregularities we seem equipped to parse in both the spellings and pronunciation of English words. Furthermore given that the crown entity is not the English but the Māori Language Commission, their brief and dictates don’t carry much weight across languages. Given the tendency in English to discard these types of modifiers I remain undecided as to whether imposing these macrons onto commonly used loan words in English usage is either another facade or perhaps a façade of cultural unity. Ultimately, as with all things, one hopes pragmatism prevails.
I appreciate that linguistic imperialism is essential in sciences, academia, industry and the like, but in an informal context, the impetus to misascribe, manipulate or police the intentions, formatting and inherent meaning in the language use of others is not entirely dissimilar to our authoritarian tendency to recharacterise and reframe the intentions, functions and uses of human beings and by proxy everything we might perceive: nature – as a means of consolidating power. As such, I have found your responses astutely appropriate and meticulously pointed in the context of an article related to ‘the war on drugs’, I say this sincerely, not having ventured to ask for clarification as to whether this was your intention or not. If I did have a question though, it would be; what agenda does our “secular” government-owned national broadcaster have in disseminating Christian doctrine in the form of It Is Written on TV2 from 4:15-45 every Monday?
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Hard News: Stop acting like the law is…, in reply to Sacha,
how awesome is it to be a pakeha in Aotearoa New Zealand?
Even better to be Pakeha. Will leave macron bonus for others but any ethnicity deserves Caps.
I didn’t have the energy at the time, but to be clear, pakeha is as intended; used in a multicultural rather than a bicultural sense. As in:
(in New Zealand) a person who is not of Māori ancestry, esp a White person
Perhaps tauiwi would have been clearer, but given its lack of currency in English, I had hoped that the lack of capitalisation in that context might have been adequate to distinguish it from the capitalised ethnicity, as in:
Both the Governor and the Queen will be well pleased to hear of your opposing Heke, and so will all the pakeha people.
Similar to the way we are accustomed to distinguishing between China and china, Welsh and welsh, Swede and swede, German and german, Mongol and mongol etc.
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Polity: Behavioural economics and Hekia Parata, in reply to mpledger,
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Polity: Behavioural economics and Hekia Parata, in reply to bob daktari,
I worry when people with power act as if the real world is a academic exercise with points for effort
The possibilities are endless, bonus payments for great doctors and nurses when patients recover; for great WINZ staff when people come off benefits; for great police when crime drops, for great jazz equipment maintainers when instruments – though raucously played – function as designed. Or we could just leave this approach to the Act party.
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Polity: Hekia's waynebrave, in reply to Sacha,
Absolutely, but considering the Labour connections on this thread, I’d be feeling far more optimistic about our country’s future if political movers and shakers were countering bad ideas with better ones rather than flippantly dismissing online education so broadly. After all, drastic remedial steps will surely be required upon Labour’s inheritance of Parata’s legacy.
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Polity: Hekia's waynebrave, in reply to Deborah,
It is worth considering the limitations of the model that you’re basing your argument on here. I taught ESL online on and off from 2006-10 and full-time from 2011-14, I’ve written about my experiences with that company on this site previously and the biggest issue was not the concept or technology but the administration of it, which placed a number of unnecessary hurdles between the students and teachers, undervalued the work of teachers etc.
it takes an enormous amount of work to prepare distance materials, far more so than preparing internal courses
One of the key advantages of online learning is that distance materials can be prepared by highly qualified groups for use with 1000s of students and reused year in year out as a curriculum dictates. This:
NZ First has slammed the idea saying it"s “dangerous” and the “final nail in the coffin in devaluing trained and qualified teachers”.
In our case Immediate feedback was supplied by teachers in the online classroom which was in essence managed in a way not dissimilar to how one maintains a RL classroom, the opportunities and avenues being largely identical as one expects in brick and mortar schools, bar the use of technology to transmit the voice/ images. A truant is a truant whatever the platform.
Though Rob states:
And there’s a very good reason for that – in an in-person school, students learn at least as much from other students as they do from the teachers. Both inside the classroom and in the playground, kids at a traditional school learn about meeting new people, friendship, sharing, scheming, new skills, winning, losing, and so much more besides.
I don’t think this proposal should be taken as a sign that there is any plan to outlaw parks, playgrounds, sports teams, messenger apps or friendships. It’s not that I don’t see a number of issues in what Hekia is proposing but I do believe that these can be easily dismantled point by point. By contrast a knee-jerk opposition to the immense potential of online education based on perceived limitations within current models may indicate that our education system’s purported emphasis on developing creativity and imagination is still inadequate.
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Hard News: Stop acting like the law is…, in reply to Sacha,
TLDR: The doubloons