Posts by Emma Hart
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Hard News: Our own fake news, in reply to Russell Brown,
Sometimes on Facebook threads I do wade in with citations. It likely won't convince the person spouting the crazy, but it does tend to help people wondering if this stuff can be true.
Yeah, this is why I replied to an actual friend of mine on FB sharing a piece asserting that Muslim families in Canada were trying to get pork banned from schools. It was obvious bullshit, and when I googled the name of the town it was supposed to have happened in, autocomplete provided "pork school Snopes".
So I linked to the refutation (not only was it a lie, it was a lie originally told about Belgium), because a) the dude is not an actual idiot, and b) other people were going to see it, and I wanted them to see the challenge as well.
I swear he's not an idiot. We used to go out. But he ARGUED. People should try to fit into the cultures they choose to move to, apparently. I don't like the world any more.
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Access: Hearing privilege and Deaf disempowerment, in reply to Kevin McCready,
The false claim is that bilingualism (English via CIP and NZSL) will reduce a Deaf child's chance to learn English.
Yeah, this is what we were told when our son was little (though he didn't have a cochlear implant but a Moderate hearing loss): that if he learned to sign, his brain would invest in visual connections and not make auditory connections, and so he would never learn to speak. We had to choose all NZSL or all oral English.
This changed, at least in the van Asch preschool, just a couple of years later, partly as a result of pressure from hearing parents.
As an aside, something that kind of irritated me during the Lions tour, was that the ground announcer at every test would say, the national anthem would be signed on the big screen. Which, yay. But why couldn't the tv audience see it? Couldn't they have cut to it, or put it picture-in-picture during the singing? Would have been nice.
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Finding out that “vexatious parents” is in fact a term they use to condemn us all into a single pile of complainers.
Fellow Vexatious Parent high-five.
I think one of the things all the people telling us to chill didn't really get is the necessarily antagonistic relationship you have with government agencies if you have a disability or a disabled child, and you want to get what you're entitled to. I would rather have drunk bubbles in the sun than spend hundreds of hours battling to get my child's needs provided for.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to BenWilson,
Large demographic change is happening. From the passage of time, generations die and new ones are born.
And the biggest demographic change with age in terms of voting is that the new ones are not voting. They don't support one party or another, they just don't vote. They're not inspired to. And I think it's particularly clear in Britain right now, but also the case here, that the right is pretty okay with that. The stuff that happens - like the housing crisis - just happens, it's nothing to do with government, and this is all complicated and boring and all the parties are the same and nothing ever changes so why bother, right?
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to mark taslov,
Submission: a comb of dildo (adhesion req.).
Well, if we're using bananas as a metric, then a hand?
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Up Front: For Your Own Safety, in reply to Hilary Stace,
The public toilets in the National Library's Wellington building are not gender-specific. Seems to work fine.
As do the public toilets in the new Bus Exchange here. I have never found them all covered in anything. Nor have I ever been aware of the gender identity of the person who used them before me.
Believe it or not, women bleed.
Some women bleed.
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Up Front: For Your Own Safety, in reply to Moz,
I have to admit my first reaction was that with fewer women than men at the cricket and the same number of toilets for each the queue for the womens might actually be shorter than the mens.
My rough estimate from the side of the ground we were on was that there were three times as many green toilets as pink.
I've no idea what the motivation behind suddenly doing this this summer, or whose idea it was. I've asked but had no response.
Meanwhile absolutely nothing is done about the handful of fuckwits in the crowd whose behaviour would get them ejected from any pub.
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Hard News: Drugs, testing and workplaces, in reply to Gregor Ronald,
This also applies to the ski industry.
A company I shan't name tried to bring in drug testing for their theatrical technicians a couple of years ago. I was talking to the guy who was going to have to enforce it, and hated the idea, and knew that a lot of their workers, while not impaired, wouldn't pass. On my suggestion, he suggested they get in touch with a company like Ora and look at doing impairment testing instead which, as it turned out, they were not at all interested in. They didn't want to know if their workers were impaired. In this guy's opinion, they wanted to be able to
- tell people they were doing drug testing
- have a handy reason to sack "problematic" workers who were doing their jobs just fine thanks. -
Up Front: The Little Things, in reply to Russell Brown,
DO NOT let the cats use the internet.
This is basically my top answer to 'what do our cats do while we're asleep?'
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This is what he's doing right now. That thing he's trying to kill? Is a concrete statue of a cat.
P.S. An all-black cat is not the easiest thing in the world to photograph.
