Posts by Lucy Stewart
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The first step in the debate should not start with abortion, but in valuing parents & children. Providing full care for children, sole parents, and drawing in the fathers who are absent from almost all debate on this issue.
I'd say the first step is limiting unplanned pregnancies through more widespread and more efficient use of contraception.
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I don't know if I could handle abortion being thrown into the election right now. Can't we just have the normal stupid debates?
Yeah, it'll be messy as all hell, but I'd rather have the messy public debate and settle this thing than keep on with the current legislation. I mean, surely by now we're grown-up enough to just legalise abortion and be done with it. Enough with the compromise crap.
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I've often wondered about the legislation regarding abortion...it's always seemed a litlle 'grey' to me at best. Regardless of whether or not the law is being (technically) broken/ignored, it seems to me that the system works pretty well as is?
Well, yes and no; yes, in that most women can access abortions when and as they need them, but no, in that the requirements for them to see two certifying consultants mean that most do not have the option of chemical abortions, which are much safer and easier than surgical abortions, but only available in the very early stages of pregnancy. It would be much better if those requirements were dropped or altered, at least for the first trimester of pregnancy. Plus the law as it stands smacks of paternalism and half-measures. I doubt that's enough to get it changed any time soon, though.
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I was feeling pretty dozy when Morning Report came on this morning, but the abortion thing woke me up right quick. The thing is, of course, that Judge Manning is one hundred percent correct: most abortions performed in this country are technically breaking the letter of the law, in that it's hard to argue a serious mental health risk to the women involved - but he was also correct in noting that no-one gives a damn, because no-one - or no politicians to date - is willing to challenge or change the law.
And that's the problem, really; not that the law is being (technically) broken, but that the law makes those abortions technically unlawful. What we need is for someone to get out there and make abortion on demand fully legal. Otherwise you leave far too much room for groups like Right to Life to get in there and try and limit its availability.
Speaking of them, could their spokesperson have been any more odious on the radio this morning? I'm not even talking about the bits where he wanted to protect the "rights" of the "unbord child" from conception on; that was bad enough, but the way he talked about needing to "protect" women from the "tragedy" of abortion - the only protection I need is from fuckers like him trying to limit my access to it, thank you very much. I'm just glad the women's rights advocate who came on after called them out on treating women like children who can't make up their own minds.
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Jesus Christ. These people are utterly divorced from reality, aren't they?
Divorced? I don't think they made it as far as the altar.
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michael laws: two words, "eye" + "liner".
He should perhaps also note that if he's going to complain about Teh Gays, it would be wise to not write columns going into quite so much detail about Doug Howlett's pumping thighs.
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I totally agree re:Obama's race speech - it's just amazing to watch an American politican talk about American racial politics in a realistic and honest way. I was leaning a bit more towards him before that, but that's what sold me; the ability to start that sort of dialogue is priceless in a President.
As for Brown, I watched his interview with Campbell and he just came across as an bit of a joke - repeating the same statement over and over, refusing to engage with the fallacies in his argument even in the face of the facts, and, of course, insisting that he's the right kind of immigrant because he speaks English, unlike those Asians, who don't. I can't believe that anyone would take him seriously. In which case, he probably is in need of a hug.
What I really can't understand, though, is the constant repetition of "Asian". Stats NZ's definition of Asian is anyone from Afghanistan to Timor Leste - it's an incredibly wide area. The immigration experiences for an Afghani refugee v. an Indian small business owner v. a Malaysian international student are going to be so different that they're almost not comparable. When Brown talks about "Asians" as a monolithic group, he just comes across as someone who hasn't been outside for the last twenty years.
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But I'll finish now unless you want to address the logic of your 1st statement. That the thesis wasn't about the holocaust but then drew conclusions about the holocaust.
As to that, I can only repeat the story I heard - which was, essentially, that it was included because the author got overexcited about what he thought he'd worked out and decided to include it. The material was unfortunate, but the inclusion of something basically unrelated to the main topic of one's paper because one is overly impressed with one's own cleverness - that's pretty normal. God knows I've done it in an essay or two.
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There was a rise of Holocaust Deniers world wide in academia at the time - Butz. Irvine was not so roundly refuted back than and still sits on the Canty Library shelves today.
So does Mein Kampf. The existence of objectionable and/or incorrect material in a university library does not immediately indicate the university's support for that material. And employing someone who lied about his past doesn't make the uni responsible for or automatically aware of that past.
It's been my (and others') experience as a student at Canterbury that the History department neither supports nor teaches Holocaust denial. It's possible that my lecturers and fellow students are lying through their teeth, but somehow I find them a slightly more reliable source than you.
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It rode the Holocaust Deniers wave that Canty got caught up in around that time.
An ill-considered paragraph in an otherwise perfectly good thesis from one postgrad student does not, as far as I'm concerned, constitute getting "caught up in" a "Holocaust Deniers wave". What actually happened was that one of the postgrads, who was doing a WWII history thesis on a non-Holocaust topic, managed to convince himself he'd proven that the Nazis couldn't possibly have burned all the bodies if the Holocaust had happened. His maths was wrong, as it happens, but he put it in his thesis before he realised that, the thesis was accepted, and the History department got branded Holocaust deniers. I believe the guy realised he was wrong later on, but it was a bit late then. In any case, to imply that there was some sort of general or partial acceptance of Holocaust denial going on at Canty at any time is a load of bollocks.