Posts by Bart Janssen
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The thing that I have always struggled with in the debate is the fact that people can decide that the rights of a possible human are more important than the rights of an actual human.
Embryos frequently fail to develop into humans, there is no guarantee of survival to birth and no guarantee of survival after birth to the point where the child genuinely becomes a human that contributes to society. No guarantee that that human will even contribute positively to society. Yet all the anti-abortion nutjobs stand around and proclaim that this embryo has some magical divine potentiality, which is bollocks.
Meanwhile there is an actual fully developed human who is casually ignored. Her rights and choices are dismissed. It makes me a bit grumpy when that happens.
That our (old, male) politicians can waffle on about how the law kinda works is yet another mark on how our political system fails to select decent human beings to manage this country for us.
Sigh.
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As a point of anecdata, I had a conversation with an in-law who used to vote Labour but wouldn't this time because he thought The Greens would then get to control the country.
It isn't the first time I have heard that. It's an interesting and frustrating situation for both The Greens and Labour. What's weird is people don't seem to apply the same fear and distrust to the influence of The Maori Party and ACT over National.
I think there is something strange going on out there particularly in the older (voting) public. It seems that there is very little acceptance that The Greens have shed their more extreme views and are now a much more serious party and hence more reasonable.
I don't think Labour distancing themselves from The Greens will solve the problem, I suspect that what needs to happen is for both the parties to establish what the coalition will look like and just how much influence each party will have on overall policy. But I doubt anyone is keen to do that.
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Hard News: Two roads lead to the city, in reply to Russell Brown,
But some communications I’ve seen do underline that the engineers’ sole focus is on getting motorised traffic through faster
One way to do that is to totally separate pedestrians and bikes from cars and trucks.
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I've always wondered why they don't take cyclists and pedestrians under the road, particularly at intersections like the St Lukes overbridge. It's a method used in Davis CA a lot, essentially a very big drain pipe gets laid under the road and becomes a safe path for bikes.
It's particularly good in places like St Lukes where you want to raise the road up to the bridge anyway. A couple of tunnels at each end of the bridge would make life a lot safer for bikes and pedestrians and might make the actual bridge crossing for bikes easier to design.
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Hard News: The Digital Natives, in reply to Paul Campbell,
something not quite so soft that puts hard requirements on polluters to clean up after themselves
Not wishing to derail a thread that is about politics rather than this issue specifically.
This is not the issue for NZ. The fact remains that NZs contribution to greenhouse gasses is insignificant. We can't affect climate change by simply reducing or even eliminating our emissions. Hence any scheme that solely focuses on internal effects is useless and potentially even harmful to NZ.
What we can do is two things, first is set an example, "here's how we did it aren't we good". That is what the green party policy aims to do and also what the old ETS aimed to do. It is a good goal but not likely to change the world.
The second thing is to develop solutions that can be applied worldwide. That is likely to only come from research aimed at solving worldwide emissions problems preferably with a focus on the problems in NZ. Neither the Greens nor Labour have made any attempt to address climate change as a worldwide problem that NZ can contribute towards. On that score they both fail and are both irrelevant.
Where Labour and The Greens could link really well is to take the penalties they impose on greenhouse gas emitters and apply it to actually solving climate change rather than simplistically trying to bribe voters.
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Hard News: The Digital Natives, in reply to Russell Brown,
He’s also seeming less like an android.
That'll be the latest patch.
People were so hard on Shearer but they didn't realise he was running on the beta.
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And from The Herald today an obscene story about rape and murder in India with this gem.
Health workers, police and women's rights activists say women and girls face the risk of rape and harassment when they go out into fields or bushes due to the lack of toilets in their homes.
No. No it isn't the lack of indoor toilets that results in the men raping women to death. There is a whole other problem here that you are not mentioning.
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Up Front: Lighting the Dark, in reply to TracyMac,
reasons we are hyper-vigilant about stranger danger
Is some of that because the victim is so often blamed for not doing X or Y and in reality the more common assault by someone known is so very difficult to do anything about that you over-compensate with the stranger assault? Holding your keys may not actually reduce your chance of assault significantly at all but since it is something you can do you are obliged by society to do it?
Not sure that thought made sense.
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Up Front: Lighting the Dark, in reply to Danielle,
it’s all in your head
If you feel it - then it is real.
It is so strange that a species that has this amazing ability to have emotions, to share emotions, to empathise and sympathise and express all those things in numerous forms of art that can literally stop you cold with wonder, can turn around and insist that someone's feelings (a whole gender's feelings) are not real.
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Not sure I can contribute much but some thoughts occurred while reading the various links.
Historically when you wanted to go to war for whatever reason one of the first things that needed to be done was to define the other nation as "not human" or "other". That definition makes it easier for the humans on your side to kill the humans on the other side. The next thing you need to do is make the humans on your side who are doing the killing less human themselves. That's not easy, most soldiers find it very difficult.
Much of what I read today on this seemed in many ways to be about reminding all parties that we are all human. And at the same time a tremendously outpouring of frustration that this is not blindingly obvious.
At what point does a man decide women are not human and then take that decision far enough to do harm - of any kind? What is it that we are doing when we raise generation after generation that casually define women as less-than-human, because as far as I can see that appears to be the case.
As an aside, I suspect not all derailing is done maliciously, I suspect some of it comes from needing to avoid some pretty ugly conclusions about our own behaviour as men. I certainly don't feel like I'm confident I have not been party to some of the behaviours described on #yesallwomen and that isn't a comfortable thing.
For me as a man the scary part is not knowing - no scratch that - being pretty certain there must have been times where I was "that man".