Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: The Wogistan form book, in reply to FletcherB,
If you’re hell-bent on taking over a plane and threatening passengers or air-crew… are you going to use nail clippers when you’ve also got a gun at your disposal?
It has long been my view that anyone who can take over a plane with a pair of nail clippers probably deserves to.
Interestingly, at the time of the 4th amendment, pretty much everywhere in the settled parts of the US was within 100 miles of the “border” (which includes the coastline). Obviously the framers didn’t intend it to apply at all, or relied on the hidden 0th amendment (everything herein only applies to white anglo-saxon protestant males).
Another problem with that definition is that they also contend that any non-citizen hanging around within 100 miles of a land border (they generally don't bother with the coastline) can be corralled by border officials and asked to show their papers at any time. (Places within this distance include, frex, most of the Seattle metropolitan area.) I'm not sure they fully understand the concept of "border".
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Hard News: The Wogistan form book, in reply to Simon Grigg,
To be fair, having done HKIA at least thirty times in the past 5 years, (without an issue – I rate it as one of the world’s more efficient) the one airport that leaves it in the proverbial when it comes to overreaction is Brisbane. Try landing there in any aircraft which has a an overwhelming % of non-Anglo passengers and observe the way the security treat everyone on the aircraft as Osama’s right hand.
It’s the only airport I’ve seen arriving passengers asked to disassemble their cameras…
I got a pat-down coming through Sydney last year while *transiting between flights*. I repeat: I had just got off an international flight (from America, home of institutional airport paranoia) and I had to go through the full security rigamarole between exiting the plane and entering the rest of the international terminal. At that point it's firmly in the realm of farce.
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Up Front: In Committee, in reply to Emma Hart,
It's hard to get across to people sometimes how much more offensive that smiling gentle bigotry can be.
Possibly because it's a tactic that is very often aimed at women (although it comes from both genders): it aims to render your argument invalid by virtue of your caring, without even having to accuse anyone of hysteria directly. The speaker, after all, is so nice and reasonable and couldn't be bigoted because they're not angry at you or being mean, they're just explaining.
I'd rather be yelled at.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Could the Sandy Hook tragedy be for gun safety what 9/11 was for airport security - that one tragedy that proves so morally indefensible, that it single-handedly forces everyone to pull together?
Can I hope that this is not the case in the same way? Because as someone who flies domestically in the US a lot, what the post-9/11 airport security changes have boiled down to for me is this: the price of my admission to a plane, almost always, is someone touching my breasts. In an impersonal and bored way, whatever, but that's how it stands. There are more effective reactions than this. There have to be.
This might help - but then again, it is a linguist's take on things, so hardly more expert on neuroscience than me. Still, googling "language log louann brizendine" turns up a lot of posts on Language Log which seem to all take the same line.
That graph right at the end? That's the graph to keep in mind when discussing male/female differences. That's how the distribution looks for most of them, albeit maybe slightly wider apart. The bulk of both distributions is still in the same range.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Sacha,
Pretty basic question would be: where was this young man's father?
Amicably divorced from the mother, by the latest reports.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Keir Leslie,
You can either buy into a model of taking power off white men (and end up with a hugely unjust society that has some different people at the top) or you can talk about taking power off the hugely wealthy and empowering most white men (and most black men, and most black women, and most queer people, and so-on.)
False Dichotomy Alert, cap'n! All of these things (race, gender, class, sexuality, disability) play a role in excluding people from power. Wealth is a very important one, and maybe it did play some role in this particular tragedy - Newtown is in a very well-off area of Connecticut. Maybe inequality factored into the shooter's motivation. Who knows.
But there are multiple levels of privilege. You can be a poor white man and still retain privilege, like, I dunno, the privilege of not being sexually harassed on the street or having workers in the hardware store answer their questions directly rather than talking to their spouse (not that this happened to me recently or anything.) Privilege applies differently in different situations.
I think the core of the problem is actually that most of the people in power are still old white guys - in America even more so than in NZ. Society tells young white (cisgendered, heterosexual) men, still, that their viewpoints and desires and beings are privileged over everyone else's. They are the baseline, the Normal. But that doesn't make all of them powerful. And the question arises - if success is epitomised and embodied by People Like Me, why I am I, personally, not sharing in that success?
The problem isn't that young white men are seeing their futures displaced by people who are not young white men. It's that their futures are being destroyed by old white men at the same time as everyone else's status slowly improves, and the old white men can't be the problem, because one day they'll be the old white men and in charge, or will be - if they can only get everyone else out of the way.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Anne Russell,
While mental health policy and the culture around mental health in both the US and NZ need improving, there's no suggestion that that Adam Lanza had similar mental health issues to Michael.
News coverage here (at least local - which this is, for me) has begun to address the fact that, had he only been a few months older, there was absolutely no legal barrier to him purchasing his own firearms - he had no criminal or mental health record (AFAWK) that would have stopped it.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to B Jones,
It's like they're having an argument with the hypothesis that boys and girls are exactly the same, even though nobody's said it. People are really invested in the idea.
Vague Hypothesis Alert: I think this is because gender is one of the basic social cues we use about people. Think of how upset people get when they can't gender someone or misgender someone. The idea that maybe it's not a very important social cue about personality/preferences/whatever takes away that comfortable ability to assume stuff about people based on their gender presentation. Cue chaos, dogs and cats living together, etc.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to B Jones,
I think taking into account male biology is more likely to be implicitly built in to that, than somehow excluded.
I think you're kind of saying the same thing? The largely-male viewpoint of the system means that the underlying biological impulses are allowed to control behaviour, instead of being recognised and dealt with, are ignored.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
But what does this actually MEAN? In practical terms? I can just imagine how dumbly this would be implemented. “Hey guys, you’re awash with hormones, which make you kee-RAZY! So that’s an awesome way to take no responsibility for anything you do!”
I really recommend reading some Ta-Nehisi Coates - he's not talking about the influence of testosterone specifically, but he does get into the effects of growing up in a place that emphasized violence as a core element of masculinity and how that was hard to separate from his impulses, and sometimes still is, even though he knows better. This piece, for instance.