Posts by mark taslov
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to Neil,
My genuine feeling is that you showcased how out of your depth you are in discussing sex or gender are when apropos of nothing you called trans women men.
Incidentally as Erin Pizzey who started the first women’s shelter has recounted – the reason we don’t have ‘peoples refuge or ’men’s refuge’ is because it’s not that marketable.Erin: Well, now just imagine, I mean, two people on my board—well three or four of them—were millionaires. Yeah, and they were very protective of women. And when you present them with the fact that men equally need protecting, they’d sew up their pockets. What I did then—I couldn’t keep the house open because none of us had any money. What I did … a very nice woman created charity shops and we called them Men’s Aid and that employed a man to go and see every single man who wanted to see us.
Dean: I see, but you haven’t been successful in continuing that sort of thing?
Erin: No, I managed to open the house and some men were ready to come in, but I couldn’t get a penny from anybody.
Dean: You couldn’t get a penny from anybody—for helping men? Still can’t really?
Erin: No you can’t.
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to Neil,
That link didn’t work for me but here’s another summary, here’s the study (cohort of 32), and here’s a recent article about the research leader Tania Singer:
But inside her lab, it was a very different story, eight former and current colleagues say in interviews with Science. The researchers, all but one of whom insisted on remaining anonymous because they feared for their careers, describe a group gripped by fear of their boss. “Whenever anyone had a meeting with her there was at least an even chance they would come out in tears,” one colleague says.
Singer, one of the most high-profile female researchers in the Max Planck Society (MPG), sometimes made harsh comments to women who became pregnant, multiple lab members told Science. “People were terrified. They were really, really afraid of telling her about their pregnancies,” one former colleague says. “For her, having a baby was basically you being irresponsible and letting down the team,” says another, who became a mother while working in Singer’s department.
The conclusion of that Guardian write up:
"They consistently rated the fair player as being more agreeable, more likable and even more attractive than the unfair actor," said Dr Singer. But she added that other studies would need to be done as the tests may have been slanted towards men for presenting a physical rather than, say, psychological, punishment.
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Hard News: The Midterms, in reply to Russell Brown,
They may not have been official feeds – at least I was getting 'video unavailable'.
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Hi Dennis, I hope my hesitancy in replying isn’t taken as anything but indicative of exactly how objectionable I find your position on this.
The problem has emerged due to inaccuracy of language usage. The original meaning of racism is belief that one race is superior to the others.
Excluding words which have undergone semantic shift basically obliviates the entire language.
Back in the colonial era it was conventional to believe the white race was superior.
Presuming we are now sufficiently decolonised, ignoring what’s right in front of our beaks:
Brash said that in 1840 Maori were “a stone-age people”.
Having linked to a couple of remarkable essays on the topic by Moana Jackson and Leonie Pihama last time we clashed on this topic which you appear to have disregarded entirely, I’m not sure where to even begin:
I’m aware that younger generations in recent decades have tended to view and call anything they don’t like racist, so as to devalue it as a technical term. A symptom of collective brain death?
Beyond being an abhorantly dismissive statement, what I’m hearing is that you feel that indigenous people and POC’s perceptions of racism are inferior/less valid than your own. This form of white supremacy is familiar – akin to those cis women of influence sneaking around behind the scenes on the twittersphere DMing trans women to splain what transphobia is/who is transphobic/who may or may not be criticised etc. Which we call trans-misogyny and which you again may refer to as ‘Collective brain death’.
In this case we’re not talking about a fringe perception, the current Justice Minister has called this
It was last year derided by Labour leader Andrew Little as racist. “This only works as an idea if you’re prepared to overlook the first 100 years of New Zealand’s history, ignore the fact that there were land confiscations, that there were unlawful detentions of Māori people, that there was discrimination and racism against Māori people in the early part of our history."
Your derision of the perspectives of ethnic minorities with regard to racism reminds me of this.
fascism is a revolt BY THE RULING CLASS. It’s not a revolt against the status quo so much as a violent reassertion of the status quo.
In that regardless of how you might consider yourself to be and talk yourself up as a “radical” on this issue, your opinion and hegemonic dismissal of the perspectives of tangata whenua is fairly stock standard conservative position.
One takeaway I have is that you see this as an issue of individualism – something to add to the CV:
I was the only Green Party member who stood up…
My first demo in 1970 was a march against apartheid in Auckland led by Trevor Richardson
ignoring the fact that at the time there were probably similarly conservatively drifting centrist liberals claiming "that’s not what racism meant in my day," you seem to insulate yourself with the notion that your work is done, that you stood up to racism, in 1970 or in 1990 and that as such you’ve now earned the right to disagree with and disregard ethnic minorities when they speak of racism, because their definition no longers fits in *your dictionary*. So you feel you no longer need to listen. Which entirely ignores the fact that these are wars – and in wars the lines shift – and you’re now on that side. You’re now the white moderate MLK identified as the biggest threat in writing from Birmingham Jail (thanks KR!):
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;"
Or as you put it:
The extremist trend has gone too far and must be rolled back!
Which does in a way tie in with the highly problematic suicide causality implied by Mayor John Engen in the video Russell posted:
"If my boss is a woman what does that mean for me, if my boss is a Muslim woman what does that mean for me?"
Both in their way representative of this oft repeated maxim:
“When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
That’s just my impression of where you’re coming from. People of pedigree and privilege doing what they can to maintain the hierarchical structures from which they benefit.
For me it’s impossible to ignore the timing – to overlook that these are – as Russell suggested back in early 2017 – “interesting times” – today no less so. As the GOP’s leadership is put to referendum, as you defend the integrity of those campaigning to remove Māori seats.
At a time when the air is awash with the dog whistles of bigots, when the rational man genre is enjoying a resurgence in popularity
“The move to MMP has coincided with the growth of identity politics, which has a tendency to formalise and reify the fracture lines of identity groups as the basis for political action, rather than to break down group barriers, emphasise a common humanity and seek shared ground.”
when wise men like these talk of identity politics being a threat to democracy, it’s not the gays or the disabled or women for whom the whistle pips.
Even Fukuyama isn’t sufficiently beholden to his neoconservatism to entirely misrepresent the nuance of the current situation.
“Trump instinctively picks these racial themes in order to drive people on the left crazy and they get more and more extreme in their response. I think he sees an opportunity to divide people and make the Democrats less united as a competitor.”
But anyway, for those who can see through Brash, and who wish to guarantee Māori voice in parliament, submissions are now open.
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to Dennis Frank,
I’ve appreciated your contributions to this discussion up to and including most of that post Dennis, but this excerpt struck me as somewhat self-contradictory:
Some pc-drones even tried to deny Don Brash his right of free speech. The moral of such stories is that politics gets more toxic when disrespect is used as a tactic
With regard to:
as those labels were applied to a couple of visiting Canadian advocates
Well shall we watch Stefen Molyneux claim Apartheid wasn’t racism? What kind of 'validating evidence' would tip the scales for you?
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to ,
It's all good steven, it's a comparison that comes up from time to time, thank you for your reply and open-mindedness and care.
The most thorough existing research finds intersex people to constitute an estimated 1.7% of the population*, which makes being intersex about as common as having red hair (1%-2%).
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to Walter Nicholls,
noting the correspondence between 'arguing' and 'argument' I thought that might be what you were getting at, can't be too sure these days and I'm pleased linger helped clarify my point at least, thanks for replying Walter and yes:
good luck finding a way of expressing that argument without sounding bigoted.
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to ,
I hear you.
And it’s up to each individual to decide how they would like to be addressed
That is assuming they know, if they’re even told or figure it out:
For Sterling, the pieces didn’t fall into place until the late 30s.
• Bearing in mind how deep our complicity (inadvertent or otherwise) in perpetuating this binary system runs
• Acknowledging that there are those on both sides of the ledger for whom maintaining these binary “sex=gender” narratives at the expense of erasing trans and intersex lived realities is their bread and butter;
proposed that men should be required to get permission from certifying consultants before getting prostate checks, as women seeking an abortion have to
• Accounting for these erasive narratives and this dissemination of ignorance as not only helping some folk pay their bills, but as part of an incredibly lucrative industry and method of social control– then absolutely this, as very much a best case scenario:
And it’s up to each individual to decide how they would like to be addressed
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to linger,
Absolutely – tolerance and normalisation of casual misgendering is the issue. That second example had me pondering whether it was in regard to cis-women undergoing testosterone therapy until the pronoun – then wondering why – in either example – are they not using “trans woman” and “trans man” respectively? Why would you choose to make statements about gender that may be construed as congruent with fascist positions ?
This month, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary banned university-level gender studies programs, declaring that “people are born either male or female” and that it is unacceptable “to talk about socially constructed genders, rather than biological sexes.” Now the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services wants to follow suit by legally defining sex as “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.”
so it’s always cool when bits and pieces of these discussions accommodate science.
There has been a lot of new scientific research on this topic since the 1950s. But those looking to biology for an easy-to-administer definition of sex and gender can derive little comfort from the most important of these findings. For example, we now know that rather than developing under the direction of a single gene, the fetal embryonic testes or ovaries develop under the direction of opposing gene networks, one of which represses male development while stimulating female differentiation and the other of which does the opposite. What matters, then, is not the presence or absence of a particular gene but the balance of power among gene networks acting together or in a particular sequence. This undermines the possibility of using a simple genetic test to determine “true” sex.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to linger,
True, thank you linger.