Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Music: In before Christmas, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Great pic, indeed…
It looks like Bill is becoming
our Leonard Cohen,
and deservedly so!It's funny -- there are a few dozen of us who convene every time Bill plays in Auckland, and we're all convinced he's a bloody genius. We are the Billievers.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Megan Wegan,
I'm really sorry you've suffered, Megan, and I hope you can come back and feel comfortable here. If I seemed to dismiss your experience, that was never my intention and I'm doubly sorry. I've found aspects of this discussion quite hard too. And I was furious at the way you invoked "immense privilege" on Twitter, because if you were talking about the men in that column, it seemed to me you were talking about people way out of the mainstream, like my boys. And I'm very, very protective of them. Let's move on.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Emma Hart,
This year, I found out that there are men – and not just a few men – who will consciously alter their behaviour or the route walking home at night so they don’t frighten women.
Heh. I may have told you my story about walking up Ponsonby Road at night many years ago and steadily picking up my pace to put some distance us between when I realised there was a woman walking behind me, so she wouldn't feel threatened.
Turned out, she was simultaneously trying to catch up with me so she'd have someone to walk with and feel safer. She eventually had to call out and get me to slow the hell down so she could catch up. That was funny.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Lilith __,
I’m not a neuroscientist, but surely this is NONSENSE. Brains are plastic. They wire and rewire in response to the purposes for which they’re used.
I'm sorry, I really wasn't attempting to start an argument and I;m somewhat distressed to have done so. I don't have any view on Witelson's social commentary, but she is an internationally respected neuroscientist (I gather her paper on Einstein's brain, published in The Lancet, was regarded as a gamebreaker) and I remembered the part about responses to stress, which seemed relevant to the discussion, as did the other link about differences in the manifestation of depression. Which are, in Bart's words, at the extreme end of the graph.
And Simon Baron Cohen, the leading British autism researcher, has written quite a bit about sex differences in the brain as they might relate to autism. There must be a reason that so many more boys than girls are on the autism spectrum, and that their experience with autism is markedly different. It's not social conditioning.
Anyway, sorry again for starting the argument. I don't really have the energy to carry on with it.
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I took this picture of Bill Direen playing with the Bilders last night. I think it might be the best gig pic I've ever taken.
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Hard News: Music: In before Christmas, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
While waiting for the brain I’ve been trawling, I remembered Kevin Hill’s Flickr thread of ‘70s & ’80s Chchch bands (thanks Mysterex ) which only has a coupla interior shots of the Hillsborough
Look at the size of that effing stage! In a pub!
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Emma Hart,
But it does happen. Sometimes. One of the biggest problems we have in comments at The Lady Garden is people getting pissed off at men entering the discussions, or objecting to male perspectives, or male victims, being included in discussions. (Srsly, I’ve been told off for including men by a man. My brain, etc.)
You'll also doubtless recall that the LadyGarden's predecessor blog shut down shortly after it launched -- and I was unwittingly and unhappily the cause of that, when the abuse I got after politely taking issue with part of a post became an issue that split the founding group.
I've been abused by pros, but I felt sorry and embarrassed that it had had been such a problem for my friends, you included. And I did have a strong sense that I needed to keep my own composure, even when I was being yelled at for not retaliating in kind. It was actually then that I decided it would be simpler to just not take any active part.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to David Hood,
However, because brains within a population range, we cannot speak about th specifics of those differences between two individuals – Danielle could have a more masculine brain than Ben, or a more Tibetian brain.
Oh sure, I wasn't trying to pull any Men Are From Mars stuff. But we've been discussing various pathologies and I was thinking more in those terms. I'd also read about the neurologist Sandra Witelson's work, which touches on different responses to stress. ("It turns out that chronic stress may be biologically responded to more adaptively in the female than the male brain," she says.)
I guess I'm more inclined to see neurology as a a key to experience because of my boys. Their brains demonstrably work differently to mine.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
Honestly, do you really think of us as a bunch of hatchet-raised harpies, Russell, poised to come down on you like a tonne of bricks? Because that’s the impression you’re giving me right now.
This is hyperbole. I tried to give a good-faith answer to your question. Let's leave it at that.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Stephen Judd,
It would be a bit less likely to cause a shitfight if we could rigorously use quantifiers like “some” and “many”.
Or "may"? I said "may".
and we shouldn’t erroneously extrapolate out that I’m taller than Danielle.
But I can 100% guarantee you that your neurophysiology -- your brain -- is different to Danielle's, and that that has an influence on your responses to your environment. It's a value-neutral fact.
In the present case, where we are talking about antisocial behaviour that skews strongly male, it’s not clear to me how labelling its cause as neurological or biological actually would shape a reasonable policy response
And yet we regard depression as an illness, rather than telling people to pull themselves together. And many of the men who harm their families and themselves suffer from depression. The decades in which autism was treated purely as a behavioural or social issue -- the "Refrigerator Mother" years -- were disastrous. I'm puzzled as to how medicine could not inform a social policy response.
And it may be that the biological basis for spree killing is not testosterone driven status aggression alone.
But who, anywhere in this thread, has actually said that? Not me.
