Posts by Deborah
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For many years now the routine threat among my brothers and I has been to give each others' children a packet of Jaffas and drum for Christmas. It's a powerful threat, and we use it to reinforce our present non-proliferation treaty.
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A bit late to this discussion, and only a moment to spare, because we're waiting for our boarding call to Melbourne, just Mr Deborah and me, leaving the kids at home with the grandparents....
When it comes to free consent, you need to distinguish between formal freedom, and substantive freedom. A woman (or a man, but can we just accept that in this instance I want the female to include the male), may claim that she has freely consented, and may even use the words, "I consent to appreaing in pron / breast implants / whatever." But that doesn't necessarily mean that she has made an autonomous choice.
It's worth reading Thomas Hobbes on this. (If I had time, I would find the exact quote for this, but maybe someone with a bit more time right now can hunt it down. If not, I'll post it on Sunday sometime.)
Hobbes asks his readers to imagine a situation where you are on a ship at sea, caught in a storm. To save yourself, you can cast all your goods overboard, or you can choose to keep them, and drown. He characterises this as a free choice. It is your free choice to either lose your goods, or lose your life.
If you find that implausible, then you will also want to be concerned about the to which at least some, if not many, of the women in the pron and sex industries really do freely consent.
And back to something Emma said in her post, here's another good feminist carnival, The Carnival Against Sexual Violence.
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Oh, Damian. I'm so sorry for you. I have mourned for cats like that too (NB the mourning is similar, not the cats, because clearly there could be only one Tonka).
We have a nice-enough cat now. She's actually my daughter's cat, and she made the trip across the Tasman for that reason. If she had been mine, I would have re-homed her without sentiment, but given that we were asking our daughter to leave her friends, her home, her life, it seemed unfair to not take her cat. Besides, my husband's employer was paying...
That said, were Rainbow to shuffle off this moral coil, or more likely, squish out her days beneath a passing car, I'd not mourn too much. My affections these days are far more directed towards my children. That's why I had them; they last for much longer than cats.
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You see that's the problem with being an expat, a couple of hours out of sync with the old country, and working all day to boot. You miss out on hearing the exciting news when it's fresh, and only get to it late in the day when all the best jokes have already gone to bed. Oh well...
All the best for the blogging, Emma.
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We're going to a friend's wedding in a few weeks.
She has booked the smallest registry office possible. It holds just 8 people, max. It's the happy couple, their parents and their witnesses, and that's it.
So technically, we're not going to the wedding at all. We're just going for the party afterwards.
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One of my uni lecturers has announced that using Wikipedia as a reference means you will automatically fail the assigment.
Poor form. Wiki is a perfectly acceptable starting point, although in my discipline, I would far rather they went to the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's when they don't go any further than Wiki, or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, that I get a little upset. Like any good encyclopedia, it will give you a basic feel for the topic. But that's all.
In any case, back in the day when I was doing my brief stint of lecturing, Wiki wasn't an issue, and these days, now that I'm a dilettante housewife, I'm just doing tinsy bits of lecturing and tutoring in other people's courses, so I don't get to set the rules anymore. I miss that.
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A, but you have sneaked a definition of 'proper cafe' in now, as a cafe that has an espresso machine. But with that definition in mind, then sure.
I went to Gov's for the icecream sundaes, anyway. And the hot chocolate.
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The Percolator was the first "proper" cafe in town, beforehand, it was only tea shops.
Not so! What about Governors.
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by the early 1990s there were a few well-recognisable places that are still there
In the early 1990s, my man and I used to frequent Expressoholic (sp?), for the coffee, the cake, and the pinball machine. It was on Willis St then.
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A dead baby at the end of it, despite some talented caring people.
Oh no. I'm so sorry.
That, and this phrase
parents weeping beside cradles
in David's post make me so aware of just how difficult birth and those early days of life can be.
I want to go and hug my darlings now.