Posts by B Jones
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Wow. It's like watching those L&P ads, but real. As an addict of early morning kids' tv in the mid to late 80s, I saw that first clip many times. It gave me a huge advantage when people started the bilingual national anthem at sports matches.
These days, it seems a little odd to focus so much on the pride of NZ industry stuff like the oil wells and steel mills and tractors, but that was the 80s. It's funny how these things give such a vivid snapshot of a particular time.
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I don't think having fixed identities and reputations to protect is enough on its own. The worst bit of abusive language I've ever seen on a forum (directed at an absent figure rather than a fellow participant) was posted by a guy using his own first name, and whose profile linked to his staff profile on his publicly funded employer's webpage. And the post was made during work hours. One phone call could have lost him his job.
The key thing was that the culture of the forum was such that nobody questioned his manners (or sense of self-preservation). There was a rule of no death threats against other members, but that was it. The abuse stopped short of a threat, and no sanction was applied.
When deranged people ring up MPs offices and threaten them, the police get onto it real fast and trace the phone call. It's apparently much harder to apply that level of sanction to IP addresses, judging by the difficulty in shutting down the "post the addresses of people we don't like" school of internet users. Being able to respond to real-life threats is a far more serious issue than dealing with simple electronic vandalism like trolling.
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I thought it was common knowledge that when the Crimes Act was passed in 1961, the second National government led by Keith Holyoake and Jack Marshall was secretly infiltrated by radical feminists two years before The Feminine Mystique was written. Why else would male assaults female be a separate, more serious charge than common assault, along with adult assaults child?
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Sexual offending against women is far lower.
There's this as well:
The U.S. Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey (considered our best measure of crime because its anonymous surveys capture offenses not reported to police) reports that rape has been falling dramatically for decades...The crime surveys further indicate that the decline in sexual violence is greater among younger females than older women.
I don't know if similar data is available here, particularly over the long run.
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I'm not saying it's a good idea. Neither is the end of the world, or the holocaust, but I'll watch both in a movie.
Neither of those examples are ever offered up so explicitly for a viewer's pleasure. You don't get the wokkita-wokkita soundtrack or the everyone's-having-a-good-or-at-least-interesting-time subtext in any Holocaust film I've ever seen. Sympathetic frisson, perhaps, but not pleasure.
Sure, it's a symptom rather than a cause of sexist culture. It's one of those symptoms like a hacking cough, though, that spreads the germs around as it makes its hosts miserable.
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I don't know if it's a gripe, so much as the element of consent being so dubious.
Apparently that's the point - it's no fun when they set out to participate willingly, according to GGW's founder.
It's only half a sexual revolution when women mainly have the power to be as sexy as men want them to be. The other half comes when you can say that women have the power to be as sexy as they want to be. Case in point - two women recently kicked out of a bar for kissing. The kiwiblog lads were up in arms about their civil rights being breached, but only until they saw photos of them and decided they weren't sufficiently hot for their viewing pleasure.
Hotness is power, and anyone starting their journey to adulthood is likely to experiment with whatever kinds of power come their way, whether it's a V8 engine and an alcohol-fuelled sense of indestructability, or the power to wear tight jeans (god, they're back again) and make the boys' heads turn. Of course it makes sense to limit the harms that either can do to the participants (or the bystanders, for that matter), but it would be nice to hear some proposed solutions to this age-old issue that don't involve restricting girls' freedom even further - that road leads towards the Magdalen Asylums and the hijab. Tight jeans and saucy tshirts don't tend to kill people, after all, whereas the things teenage boys get up to in the name of youthful experimentation often do. If porn does any moral harm, it's more through (primarily male) consumers getting used to the idea that the (primarily female) subjects are a tradable commodity, than to those who get a decent wage performing in the industry.
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"The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire...".
My history teacher used to say that, from time to time. The unification of Germany was a major part of the 6th form history syllabus - there was definitely a German people before there was a German nation, back when countries' borders had more to do with who their king married than who lived there and what they had in common. For those of us who didn't do or don't remember 6th form history, there's always wiki.
In short, Bismarck (who may have either been an opportunist or had a Grand Plan, discuss) unified most German-speaking peoples apart from Austrians under one country. After some arguing over Alsace-Lorraine and WW1, Hitler finished the job by annexing Austria and the Sudetenland - the end result of that move being that Germany was forcibly dis-unified.
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Barks like a dog on IE6 at my work (won't load properly, text is too big, no images, half the links look like rubbish), but it seems ok on IE7 at home.
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Perhaps a song we sang at school had some ethnic/national themes buried under the nonsense, maybe from one of the wars:
Eye tiddly eye-tie, eat brown bread
I saw a sausage fall down dead
Up jumped a saveloy and bashed him on the head
Eye tiddly eye-tie,
BROWN BREAD!It's surprisingly resistant to googling so no idea where it first originated.
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They used to aggregate New Zealanders into Other, and before that, into NZ Euro/Pakeha - see the note at the bottom of the graph at the start of the post. The last census, they decided to count them as a distinct group. Who knows what they're doing with pakeha these days. I would assume it would be aggregated into NZ European.
This is an illustration of "others agreeing you are a member of x" principle, I think. There's a certain amount of classification I think the statistical people do so that some sort of order can be applied to people's diverse experiences. It's not like Itunes where you get an entry for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and another entry for the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.