Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Methinks I spotteth a Cunning Plan to Nab New Zealand First’s core social conservative constituency. Which isn’t working very well
He will insist on taking pages from the Tea bagged/Theo-Conned GOP playbook without properly acclimatizing them to New Zealand or properly committing to the sheer awfulness required. You call that slut-shaming, Colin Craig? This is slut-shaming.
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“Why should, say, a 70-year-old who’s had one partner all their life be paying for a young woman to sleep around? We are the country with the most promiscuous young women in the world. This does nothing to help us at all.”
To be fair, I rather like this line of reasoning. Now, could Colin Awful-Hypen-Namesake please cut me and the significant other a refund for all the money we’ve forked over to the government to subsidize the heterosexual lifestyle choices of people like him? Really, I’ve got nothing against you people, but I don’t see why I should be paying for the education and healthcare of your children.
(In the unlikely event anyone missed the snark: Of course it's a bullshit argument. After all, I suspect Mr Craig's hypothetical 70-year old is drawing super, accessing geriatric health and social services and working that Gold Card for all she can get. I'm OK with paying for that, and I suspect most people feel the same. Because that's how a civil society more or less works.)
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Isabel Hitchings,
I often find it helpful to draw a thick line between someone’s right to choose and my obligation to like their choice. I may be uncomfortable with some reasons for choosing abortion but I’m even more uncomfortable with imposing my ideals onto another woman’s choice about how she uses her body.
THANK YOU, couldn't have put it myself. I don't mean to be offensively glib, but I long ago reached the point where I just curtly shut down people expressing their "discomfort" with LGBT by saying "Just as well nobody's asking you to suck cock/eat pussy then, isn't it?"
Perhaps I'm naive, but I always thought the quid pro quo of living in a pluralistic civil society was the notion that every single day of my life an awful lot of people are going to be doing many things -- trivial and momentous -- I don't much like for reasons I'm never going to grok, and which I don't get veto right over. Nor do they fall within the legitimate interest of the State to regulate or control.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to blindjackdog,
(There’s so much talk about “choice” around here, it sounds more like a neoliberal think-tank than a supposedly left-leaning blog.
Haven’t simplistic, positivist notions of choice been given the old heave-ho by, oh, I don’t know, a moment or two of critical reflection?)
OK, let’s do some criticial reflection here. I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday, and just as an experiment I asked my GP about getting a vasectomy – which, if I wasn’t already sterile would affect “what the species should look like”. You know what didn’t happen? My doctor (who happens to be a woman, FWIW) didn’t try to impose her religious/ethical views on me. I didn’t have to convince her I was mentally ill. I live in a society where I have the enormous dick privilege of not being socialized to the same degree as #yesALLfuckingwomen to view myself as something broken and worthless if I don’t (or can’t) bear children. And I have the even greater social privilege of being a fairly articulate, well-educated person living in a city with the ability and confidence to argue with health professionals and access information and networks where I can find medical advice where my autonomy and personhood are respected.
It’s easy to be brave with other people’s lives, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to look any woman in the eye and pull that shit on her. Not again. That's the great and brave thing Emma has done here -- written a reality check that abortion law affects women making brutally hard choices about their lives. They're not running thought experiments in a seminar room, and they're not tabs in a policy paper.
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You’re in peril of mansplaining there, Craig. Hilary is a woman and she is firmly pro-choice. But this does have really difficult resonances for people with disabilities and their parents.
First, I’d like to extend a sincere apology to Hillary (and everyone else) for coming across like that. It’s really self evidently absurd to anyone who has known her for a nanosecond to question her credibility on either front.
But, FFS… I spent a very large chunk of my childhood being fostered in a family where my oldest foster sister is severely intellectually disabled and my foster parents never had it easy. I love her and am profoundly thankful she’s part of my life and anyone who thinks the world would have been a better place if she’d never been born can keep it to themselves.
But that doesn’t change my view my foster mother should have had the meaningful choice of a safe, legal termination and so should her daughter, my sister, without anyone else getting audit privileges over her motives and character. (Can we both grant “eugenic” is a term that has a lot of very ugly baggage?) Just as, since we’re on the subject, I could go get a vasectomy tomorrow without anyone else’s approval being either required or desired.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Hilary Stace,
This is often a difficult topic for the disability community because of their concern that society/the medical profession etc has an entrenched view that termination is the only rational option when there is any diagnosis of an impairment. And I guess this becomes a bigger issue the earlier testing is available, and how strong is the neoliberal assumption of individual self-actualisation, rather than an acceptance that it is the responsibility of us all collectively to raise a diverse group of children.
Many parents of disabled children such as those with Down Syndrome, feel strongly that making it any easier to get testing and a resulting termination will therefore be eugenic.
And I totally get and respect where that's coming from, but I've got to admit I've done a 180 degree turn over the last twenty years or so to being pro-abortion and actually taking "pro-choice" at face value; which means I get absolutely no auditing rights over any woman's decision whether or not to seek a termination. And we're got to keep women in the center of the frame here, not abstractions like "society" or "the medical profession".
And, yes, let's have the conversation about better public support of children with disabilities and their parents/caregivers because someone bloody has to bother. But where I get terribly uncomfortable is having another go-around where where all women are entitled to control their own bodies (or at least not be treated like brood mares on a stud farm), but some are more entitled than others.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Original Beats, in reply to Russell Brown,
According to Chuck D, radio stations, record labels and festival promoters can begin changing the culture by including ethics clauses in their contracts, prohibiting artists from being “derogatory to the community [they] come from”.
Well, that’s interesting, but it’s hard to miss the historical irony that a very long list of African-American artists (including Public Enemy) couldn’t get arrested because of their “ethics”. Would Chuck D consider women or GLBT artists of colour calling out rape culture or homophobia “derogatory to the community” – because plenty of people do. Or is it OK if they get political, as long as they don’t get too sweary about it? And as he spared a moment's thought for another middle-aged man setting himself up as the arbiter of "ethics"; you don't have to be too cynical to think that sounds far too much like the same old song with a slightly different beat.
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Hard News: The People's Poet is dead!, in reply to Nick Russell,
I always loved the story about how, for some sort of funding or programming reasons, they had to have a music act each week as part of the show.
Well, that bit's true -- if they had a musical act then it was classed as "variety" rather than "light entertainment" and allocated a larger budget.
I think they more or less conned the BBC into funding and broadcasting it without actually letting them know what was being made.
And that I don't believe, but as producer Paul Jackson has said it could well have ended up getting shelved if Channel Four hadn't come along at a most fortuitous moment.
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I don't want to re-watch The Young Ones because I have a sneaking suspicion it's one of those things that had it's time and place but won't age at all well. (Who does?) But everything I read about Mayal, he came across as someone who really took thinks seriously enough to take his own piss first and hardest.
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Legal Beagle: Q&A: John Banks' judicial review, in reply to Russell Brown,
There was some urgency in the sense that if it hadn’t been validated there would have to have been a costly by-election, which he would have won.
... and which, to be cold about it, no party really had the money or inclination to contest at that point in the electoral cycle. Which sucks for them (and I've eaten enough rubber chicken and brought enough raffle tickets to say that sincerely), but is a pretty lousy justification for fucking around with electoral law without proper select committee scrutiny or public input. And, in all candor, "it's too expensive" is about the worse argument against any by-election you can come up with. Hell, if you want to do democracy on the cheap and nasty that's what you're going to get. We do better than that.