Posts by Joe Wylie
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Speaker: Abortion: morality and health, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
She is not ignorant, nor lacking in empathy, and certainly shows no signs of any sense of entitlement. I don’t think she would ever judge a woman for having an abortion...
She sounds rather like a now-departed relative of mine. It was the realisation that people like her wouldn't be around forever that drove me to research my family history a few years ago.
One day when I mentioned that an aunt of hers appeared to have died suddenly in her mid-20s in 1926 she surprised me with the revelation "Oh but she died as a result of an illegal abortion". It wasn't what I'd have expected from someone who I'd assumed would have been squeamish about so much as mentioning the A-word. Once she'd volunteered the story of how she'd discovered the truth I felt I understood something of the pragmatism behind her beliefs.
While she'd been an infant at the time of her parents' sudden trip to Dunedin, she wondered why she and her siblings were given souvenir presents of the Dunedin Exhibition when what had taken place was plainly a tragedy. As an adult years later her mother revealed the truth to her, adding that the presents were because "We didn't want you to worry too much".
So would there have been presents if her aunt had died in more socially acceptable circumstances? "People try too hard to cover these things up", she told me. "If it had just been about feeling sorry for Aunty at the time, I'd never have thought about it enough to badger Mum all those years later".
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Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Flaxmere is being slowly bulldozed to make way for vineyards and erased from the lexicon.
There's still Splash Planet.
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Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Personally, I am going to vote against the local government equivalent of being tied to a corpse and thrown into Hawkes Bay.
Interesting stuff Tom, though I'm mildly disappointed to find no mention of Flaxmere.
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Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I'd recommend reading David Graeber The utopia of rules on this subject.
Thanks for the heads up. His On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs has been something of a landmark piece for me and others. I've been rather surprised - and heartened - by the sometimes unlikely people who continue to discover and recommend it.
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Speaker: Abortion: morality and health, in reply to George Darroch,
That's basically abortion on demand...
What with kiwi_guy fulminating against "demanding" feminists, surely it's high time that nastily loaded old phrase was put out of its misery. As someone put it way back in 1976, if abortion on demand rankles, how about abortion on polite request?
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Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to Samuel Scott,
I'm not sure my parents *aspired* to anything at that point. They were creative free spirited individuals who left university in the late '60s with no debt into a society with close to full employment where buying a huge rambling victorian villa was just part of that next lentil and baby filled stage of life...
One small point - to the best of my recollection, Government policy up until the early 70s restricted banks to making loans only for new housing.
Re. "aspired" - I'm sure Paula Bennett's case manger was trained to gaze into her eyes to detect any lurking flicker of entitlement. Finding only the pure light of aspiration, her ticket out of munterville was given the deserving stamp of approval.
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Of the two Labour Christchurch rebuild spokespeople who were appointed post Lianne Dalziel's sidelining and eventual departure, Clayton Cosgrove has gone missing and Ruth Dyson barely puts her head above the parapet. Now we have this blatant stitch-up, while the Party of Social Justice oils up for a fresh round of navel-gazing. Jesus freaking wept.
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Hard News: Friday Music: About Apple Music, in reply to TracyMac,
Suzanne Vega annoys me just as much as she did back in the day. Vinyl or WAV, it's all the same to me! :-)
+1
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Hard News: Campbell interviewed, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
'Federated Farmers South Canterbury president Mark Adams, who has sheep on the ship... "There is a lot of speculation on the welfare of the animals; it's very emotive," Adams said.
"Mexico is paying a huge amount of money and will want the animals turning up in good condition."' -
Hard News: Friday Music: About Apple Music, in reply to David Bishop,
Re: James Last - when New Order toured NZ in the late 80s, they said Last had expressed interest in covering Blue Monday with his orchestra. Sadly, I don't think this ever came to pass...
Pity, that. A couple of years ago I attended a gold coin donation afternoon accordion show at the church hall up the road. While I preferred the veteran soloist support act, the headlining all-accordion big band was certainly interesting. The conductor made no secret of being a hardened fan of James Last's composing skills, assuring us that we were "in for a treat" with the grand finale, At Last.
I guess I'm a philistine, but it struck me as a polite version of the kind of crime jazz that Don Ellis once did for movies like The French Connection. An all-accordion version of Blue Monday would definitely have been more memorable.
