Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Thanks, Ben -- stay classy or it's going to be a very long and unpleasant three months and change.
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Legal Beagle: Q&A: John Banks' judicial review, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
That would be a firm reason for Labour to refuse to support a deferral of the by-election, thus ensuring that ACT criminality remains a foreground issue.
A firm reason for Labour not to play this game at all is by that point in the electoral cycle if they don't have a sizable chunk of uncommitted voters convinced they have a credible agenda befitting a government in waiting, "ACT criminality" isn't going to do shit.
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Hard News: The Digital Natives, in reply to Sacha,
Labour does not have to agree or disagree with everything their likeliest allies propose.
However, making a reported blanket ‘no comment’ promise between now and the election is not smart behaviour under MMP, and at 30% it hardly makes them look like a government in waiting, does it.
No, just as nobody should expect National to have an instant reaction to everything their current or potential future coalition partners propose. But if, say for the sake of argument, Winston Peters started consistently clearing 5% and mooted a pretty radical shakeup of immigration policy I suspect we'd all be finding a "no comment" or "we'll look at it after the election" from Key a little too cute for words.
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Up Front: Lighting the Dark, in reply to Moz,
In my experience Russell is quite selective and often quite slow with his take-downs.
Possibly – I think Russell would rather say he’s not a heavy-handed moderator and depends a lot on the community’s ability to set fundamentally civilized standards and self-correct. But honestly, I would feel safe e-mailing Russell or Emma and saying “hey, I’m not cool with that would you think about a takedown” and getting a respectful and fair-minded hearing. (Which is not the same thing as getting my own way in all things. Shitters.) I don’t want to derail this thread any more than I already have, but there’s plenty of local blogs where none of this could happen without things turning to crap in minutes. Public Address isn't perfect; I'm certainly not but I feel safe around here because I feel we're trying to figure it out and just do better.
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Up Front: Lighting the Dark, in reply to Tess Rooney,
Exactly, and Emma talks a lot about why it’s really important guys do their share of the work. “Leverage you privilege” works – and not just when it comes to jamming cultures of misogyny. Just saying “dude, that shit isn’t cool” when your peer group is talking sexist (or racist or homophobic) smack? It won’t change the world, but it’s a start. You're not only implanting the idea that casual bigotry isn't socially acceptable, but you never know who's also hearing they're not alone.
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Moz -
Thanks for having my back there, but Lilith is on the button. Jackie is a very good friend of mine, and if I thought she was out of order I've certain no inhibitions about saying so -- and because PAS is a space where "don't be a dick" is the standing house rule, I wouldn't be shy about asking Emma or Russell for a take down.
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Up Front: Lighting the Dark, in reply to Tess Rooney,
Doesn’t it suck that we have to do this kind of risk assessment just to be outside our houses at night?
Bloody oath - it sucks, blows and hurls rancid chunks all over the good carpet. And I think that's precisely why men find things like the #yesallwomen hashtag really... um, challenging. It's really hard cashing that reality check that we're all part of a very ugly, scary world for an awful lot of people. But it's not even in the same ballpark as living it.
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Up Front: Lighting the Dark, in reply to Russell Brown,
The thing here is that what Emma aptly describes as “the script” (I thought “the text”) came from a pervasive culture of misogyny. It was that which colonised the space in Rodger’s alienated life. It is that which is a constant reality for women who have to be around misogynist men. That weighs heavily on me too.
True - but "the script" plays out in the lives of plenty of men who aren't on the spectrum and aren't mentally ill. What's really got me nervous about a lot of chatter around this is how the framing of Rodger as nothing more than a "psycho" is a very convenient way to avoid talking about the culture of misogyny. It's much easier to load more shit on the millions of mentally ill people who don't go on misogynistic kill-sprees.
I've spent a lot of today trying to write something more or less coherent about Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow's Twitter-tantrum at Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday, the way it was reported and the sadly predictable shit Hornaday's had thrown in her direction. (Sorry, don't think it's appropriate to link here but it's not hard to find.) In the end, I just don't really have the spoons for much more than a lot of crying.
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Up Front: Lighting the Dark, in reply to Bart Janssen,
As an aside, I suspect not all derailing is done maliciously, I suspect some of it comes from needing to avoid some pretty ugly conclusions about our own behaviour as men. I certainly don’t feel like I’m confident I have not been party to some of the behaviours described on #yesallwomen and that isn’t a comfortable thing.
Well, sure. And that's why an incredibly important -- and incredibly difficult -- part of being an ally is having the right answer to this question:
Are you really listening, or are you just impatiently waiting to assert your unexamined male privilege to speak?
So often, the most empowering thing us guys can do is just give the floor all the way over to the women who are told on a daily basis: "You can't talk about that, and certain not that way. And even if you do, nobody who matters cares about what's rattling around in your empty little lady-brain."
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Up Front: Lighting the Dark, in reply to Emma Hart,
I was late to realising that people though like this – men and women, who see the entire opposite sex as one undifferentiated mass.
And it's depressingly related to what I like to call emotional vampirism -- this 110 proof sense of entitlement to everything in every space they're in all the fucking time. I liked the simile to a vending machine in your post, Emma, because that's precisely how these emotional leeches view people.