Posts by B Jones
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Whoa, not trying to call anyone an Uncle Tom. All I was trying to say is that there's a concise word when you're talking about racism that means roughly what we're talking about here in the context of sexism - someone from the discriminated-against group who gets a dispensation from being discriminated against because they join in discriminating against the rest of the group. Pejoratives aside, it's a thing, and it can coexist in a weird sort of way with taking advantage of the anti-discrimination movement. See Sarah Palin.
I don't know a lot about Thatcher, and I can readily believe she had to fight a lot to get accepted into her role. But I still think it would have been easier for a staunch conservative Iron Lady slipping into a sort of Elizabethan exception role, than it would have been for one of the more feminist types in that era.
In short, conservatism for women can be a shortcut to joining the privilege club without the messy business of having to do something about the unfair distribution of privilege. Doesn't mean you get a permanent exemption (see sexist attacks against Sarah Palin, Thatcher etc), but it gets you past the manhating socialist feminist lesbian epithets.
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That's true. Nine times out of ten I violently disagree with Rosemary McLeod, but on the tenth, she nails an issue really well in a way that nobody else has thought of. I couldn't say that about Garth George.
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Helen Clark owes a lot of her success to the success of the lefty feminist movement in the past forty years*. When I said without feminism, I'm saying without the efforts of the suffragettes, the second wavers, all that. Before that the only women who could cut through the power structures were exceptional, and exceptionally lucky. Queens Elizabeth I and Victoria.
It's not so much absurd to dump on your own gender, as inevitable in a world where feminist successes are incomplete. Uncle Tom is the equivalent term in a racist society.
*which is exactly why she's vilified by the conservative right on such gendered terms. She personifies everything they hate about the last forty years, even though in fact she's much more a pragmatist than a radical.
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ladies politics
Ookay...
Put it this way, without feminism the only women who get into politics and public life are the ones who manage to contort themselves into the tiny window of acceptable public femaleness under patriarchy.
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Not only are idiots evenly distributed between the genders, but there's a long history of female columnists getting fame and fortune for ragging on other women, especially those nasty feminists. There's one in the US whose name I forget who has a beef about working mothers bringing down society, never mind the fact she's a working mother herself.
And there are several blogging leftwing rational females. Tapu Misa is a regular in the mainstream papers - she has her off days but is generally sensible.
There are a pile of other intelligent female columnists that don't deserve to be lumped in with the likes of McLeod and Coddington. I don't read Garth George, Karl du Fresne and Chris Trotter and wonder where the rational male commentators are.
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I have copys of my "life-time" drivers licence and a "life-time" fire-arms licence. Both of these were changed at the whim of the Government.
Oh, the humanity. Yes, that's exactly comparable to domestic violence. What an appropriate analogy.
Meanwhile, on this planet, government uses Statistics data to anticipate rise in demand for primary schools.
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Speaking of Facebook, I'm pretty sure at the start of all this business when I looked at his page, he had around 30,000 friends. It was up to 50,000 after a couple of days and is now hitting 65,000. That's more depressing than the comments.
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The first book I read on my phone via Kindle was Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and it was the first Dickens book I managed to wade through. The silly names put me off.
The main reason I read it was because one of my favourite SF authors, Connie Willis, recommended it in her anthology of Christmas stories. Connie Willis was recommended to me by the same person who recommended my other favourite SF author Lois McMaster Bujold, and the three of them are responsible for a binge on Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Sayers earlier this year. I like leaping from one influence to another.
My one year old is already a book appreciator, but mainly for the coolness of flicking through the pages and the expression on her mum's face when she whips out the bookmark. I'm seriously looking forward to her appreciating the words.
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A bank run -- if it were to happen -- becomes self-perpetuating. You want to get your money out while there's still some in the vault to get.
>>Didn't this happen to/at Countrywide Bank at one point?
Also in Mary Poppins. Young Michael Banks wants to use his shiny coin to feed the birds (tuppence a bag) rather than make his first deposit in his father's bank, and the fuss he causes when they won't give him his money prompts all the other customers to demand their money out, and they have to close the doors.
Ah, the Roaring 20s.
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> I heard it floats.
Yeah that's the way I understood it was meant to work. Essentially the building is on a large slab that should float on the "liquified" subsoil. With the dampers the building shouldn't move too much and shouldn't settle much either.
Friend of mine once convinced a country boy of our acquaintance that in an earthquake Te Papa would come free of its moorings and float safely across the harbour.