Posts by richard
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The poor job TV dramas usually make of portraying sex has always surprised me as well, given how accurate they are with everything else.
(I, for instance, used to live in a New York apartment at least as nice as the one on Friends.).
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I must admit I am perpetually astonished at the extent to which local American politics is global news. (I know, I know, America sneezes, the rest of us catch cold, and are grateful for our socialized health care)
But Russell, and I mean this in a loving way -- the headline "Hard News: America: Chill out!" reminds me a of a story my mother used to tell about trawling through the archives of a little South Island paper. She was greatly tickled by a thundering editorial written during one of the Russian scares of the 19th century, which began, "This is not the first time we have warned the Tsar."
I just wish I could remember which paper it was...
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I would say I hadn't given it any thought at all, but when I was in grad school there was an attempt to organise grad students - by the UAW, of all people - at which time my approximate thoughts were "this really is nothing like a NZ student association, why do people make that comparison?".
As a point of clarification, this refers to an effort by graduate Teaching Assistants (ie PhD students who also teach -- and who often have a good deal of responsibility, relative to what one would see in New Zealand) to "organize" -- that is to have a labo[u]r union and engage in collective bargaining with the university.
It is not really analogous to Students Associations, but would potentially involve all graduate students paying union dues whether they wanted to or not. Heated arguments raged over whether the students were primarily employees who were taught, or students who also happened to teach.
But it was sometimes instructive to see otherwise liberal (and thus supposedly "pro labor" in the US parlance) academics turn purple over the thought of having to deal with unionized students.
In the most part the issue has gone away, largely because many US universities substantially improved the pay and conditions for their graduate students -- and at all decent research universities, grad students will get both their fees covered and a stipend (certainly in the sciences, and I think in most humanities disciplines as well), whether they are American or international -- which is a startlingly good deal by New Zealand standards.
Richard points out that student association fees are more like the US activity fees, and I think that's accurate. It's also accurate (in my experience) to state that nobody seems to complain about them, though this may also be because a couple of hundred dollars is just noise in the overall bill.
You may hear more grizzling about this at public "schools" (again to use American terminology) where the tuition fees are legislatively capped, but the administration can increase various ancillary fees, and have turned to these as a source of revenue. (Or where add-on fees are used to keep the "headline" number low -- the US really does have a competitive tertiary marketplace, and it is fascinating to watch it in action.)
But what I'm left with right now is this: if Roger Douglas is in favour of voluntary membership, there's probably something deeply wrong with it.
Certainly a useful rule of thumb....
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As someone who has spent a substantial fraction of their life in universities of one sort or another, I feel very ambivalent about this topic.
To the extent that Students" Associations are separately incorporated bodies from their parent universities, by far the strongest argument against compulsory membership is the simple freedom of association argument presented by Graham.
As a matter of practice, I might be a lot more sanguine about this argument if the people pushing the law change in parliament (who by and large seem to be on the right of the aisle) were consistent in their advocacy of individual freedom (drug decriminalization? gay marriage?) rather than giving the appearance of trying to nobble organizations they perceive as being likely to disagree with them politically. But as Graham would (rightly) respond, freedom is freedom and we should not quibble with something that advances it.
On the other hand, many US universities have things called something like Student Assemblies with (I believe) universal (and thus compulsory) suffrage among students and some power to spend money raised through "activity fees". In this guise student associations look more like Faculty bodies, whose membership consists of the fulltime teaching staff. The latter mainly deal with the academic offerings of the university but will occasionally express opinions on broader issues, and staff do not have the ability to "opt out" of membership (even if we do opt out of meetings -- I have been to far more faculty meetings as a student representative than I have managed as a faculty member).
In New Zealand simply rebranding Students Associations as "student assemblies" is probably not going to make anyone happy, or materially change the circumstances in which they operate -- but the force of the freedom of association argument depends mainly on the students associations being separately incorporated bodies from their host universities, and this would seem to be something of an historical accident.
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I recently encountered a group of very serious model train enthusiasts (the ride-on, steam powered, coal-fired sort), and it crossed my mind that all first-person pieces about some demi-monde will read the same way:
Everything you know is wrong... Much more diverse than you think... Can't tell from looking at them... More women than you might expect turn up on club nights... Very sensitive to jokes about clothing and accoutrements... And how dare you suggest participants must have grown up next to a railyard, or had a formative experience while Eurailing, or were spanked while wearing a set of Thomas Tank Engine pajamas (when subcultures collide)...
The only thing I did not learn was whether the "Model Engineering Enthusiasts" had a word akin to vanilla (or the SciFi TruFan's "mundane") -- "passenger" perhaps??
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The same is true in at least some states of the US. I've seen BDSM subs talking about being scared to make too much noise in case their neighbours get the cops called to a 'domestic disturbance' - once the police are in, charges go forward no matter what the 'victim' wants.
I know someone who had the police called on them when in early labor -- although it has a happy ending, as they got a squad car escort to the hospital.
But is it too much to hope that the participants would keep the noise down so as to avoid disturbing their neighbors' peace and quiet (or find a location with few neighbors), even if they were not concerned about an over-zealous police force??
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What a complete and total arse. Words may have failed me, but at least the jury did its job.
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@giovanni tiso: I have heard it said that you know you have lived in a place a long time when you give directions that take the form "Turn left at the place where the Circuit City (or whatever) used to be."
I caught myself doing it the other day, as we celebrate 5 years at the same address (easily the longest continuous stint of my adult life).
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I had momentary visions of a city where people commuted to work via a lazy river, but I guess the problem with that is that water only flows down hill. Perhaps you could accomplish the return journey via a system of locks?
And the express lane would resemble a log flume ride.
Would be a great way to get to work, as long as you didn't have to wear your best clothes...
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putting it well on the road to wtf-is-this Hershey Hell anyway.
That road is more usually referred to as the Hershey Highway (just Google it).
So much for the glass and a half of full cream milk.