Posts by Lucy Stewart
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The roads were clear in Christchurch, too: my street is normally bumper-to-bumper on Friday mornings (I have to walk across rather than biking right out of my driveway) and there was quite decent traffic movement this morning. Pity I didn't have to bike anywhere.
In general, though, I feel sort of apathetic about the whole thing. If the truckies want to block the roads for a morning? Fine, whatever. It's one morning. It isn't going to get the RUC charges decreased, it isn't going to make trucking more economical as fuel prices shoot through the roof, and it doesn't make them right. It just makes them wanky.
I kind of agree! This sort of thing is routine in Paris isn't it?
Not just Paris; on a school trip to Noumea I got stuck in my billet's house for two days while there was a strike about...something. Teachers, possibly. Whatever it was, it blocked the roads so badly there was no point anyone going anywhere. The family I was staying with thought it was totally normal.
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Also, women aren't allowed to do that high speed ski jump downhill as far as you can thing at the Winter Olympics, I think because the male sports administrators worry that their childbearing parts will fall off.
Only the latest in a long line of sports women have been forbidden from competing in at an Olympic level because their childbearing bits might fall off. To which the answer is always, men's hurdles, anyone?
It did demonstrate you can get given a free pass for employing racism if you cry about sexism enough.
Hillary Clinton ran a pretty dirty campaign, racist dogwhistles and all, but it doesn't negate the level of misogyny aimed at her (Citizens United Not Timid, etcetera.) For god's sake, people were making PMS jokes about a sixty-year-old women. It wasn't even clever. And I don't think she _did_ get a free pass on her campaigning, either; media outlets from the feminist blogosphere to the Economist called her on it.
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Gimelstob has apologised, and yet continues in his role as both a commentator and ATP player representative.
Which is just appalling, and a depressing reminder of just how misogynistic someone has to be to get reprimanded for it, even now. Not that Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign didn't amply demonstrate that.
The thing is, going by rankings, he's not half as good a player as the women he badmouths - I'd almost chalk it down to jealousy. But we're not going to hear that in mainstream media, because, of course, there's no way a man could be intimidated by the talent of a woman.
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And nobody's making excuses for him.
I've seen at least one quote along the lines of "oh, Justin's a great friend of mine, and he really respects women, so of course we all know he was just joking".
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Gimelstob, hands-down. Cowan's idiocy is pretty much self-directed; Gimelstob was repulsively misogynistic, and all the worse because he expected to get away with it.
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A single twenty-something might be earning less than the average wage and still have a high disposable income
And that goes double for students, most of whom are living on under $15k a year and still have a reasonable amount of disposable income, by dint of flatting in large groups. There's just no comparison, even between people of the same age, where one is a student flatting and the other has family to support or a kid.
Actually, I'd love to see a comparison of that deprivation index to average family size; I've heard anecdotally that number of children is one of the best indicators of poverty/deprivation.
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But in our house we've got a workable 'Don't ask, Don't get told to fuck off' policy in place.
Oh, I'd never dream of telling him who to vote for. (Okay, I would, but only in the context of a rousing political debate.) It was just that I was getting endless whining about the current mayor and how much he sucked. I figured "vote or shut up" was a fair ultimatum.
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Can't really see how you can get any more 'convenient' than having two weeks to put an envelope in the nearest mailbox.
In fact, I found that I voted at the last minute in local elections precisely because I had two weeks to put an envelope in the mailbox; most of my flatmates didn't vote at all. (Okay, "most" where two were not New Zealand citizens, but two out of three who could have, didn't, and the one who did, did because I sat him down and loomed until he got it done.) I strongly suspect that you'd get much better turnout if the timeframe was limited or, even better, people actually had to turn up to a polling booth. But we don't take local body elections seriously enough for those things to happen.
But on the secret vote thing - again, it's a nice part of it all, but I don't believe it is so critical to democracy that it has to be enforced for every vote in an election. Covered booths with computers should be maintained to give a choice but not enforced.
As much as I hate slippery slope arguments in general, I think this is a problem for precisely that reason; the moment you make voting less than secret, you open it up to intimidation and coercion, whether it's from partners, family, friends, or polling booth workers. When voting is entirely secret, then your vote is entirely between you and your conscience, which is how it should be. That privacy is critically important to getting people's real opinions out there.
And as for electronic voting, the security problems are so overwhelming I don't think they'll ever be fixed - hell, look at all the problems the US has with verifying voting by computer on-site, let alone over the net. It's like putting a sign up inviting people to interfere in your elections, whether for political gain or because they're bored. Why would you do that?
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In that instance if there was a collision, I could understand the batsman ending up out.
Make it no contact where the ball is not involved, then? In reality, probably too much effort to sort out something which just doesn't happen all that often.
I have to say I thought that the comparison to the underarm incident on the news was a bit far-fetched, too; that was malicious, this was a bit unsporting but, I think, not deliberately so. And surely by now we have other cricket scandals to call up when trying to invoke the atmosphere of bad sportsmanship.
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Where NZ lost the moral high ground, however, was in the embarrassingly petulant display on the balcony.
It might not have been on the moral high ground, but I don't think you can fault them for reacting in the heat of the moment. And it did have high amusement value. My fiance doesn't even like sport and he was still trying to find a clip which he could slow down to see what Vettori was really saying.
I really don't see in cases like this why they just don't institute a contact rule: cricket is a non-contact sport, contact between runner and fielder/bowler makes it a dead ball. It'd save fuss in cases like this and I can't think of an easy way for anyone to use it to their advantage.