I have found the last few weeks of relentless spin about Rudd’s perceived transition from last year’s alleged cynical spinmeister whose soundbites mesmerised a malleable public to this year’s alleged droning word-salad-tosser who can’t convey his vision to the voters to be the most tedious period of media non-analysis for years. As the weekly spin doctor segment on yesterday’s Morning with Deborah Cameron (ABC Sydney 702) guest experts commented, along comes Abbott with a few one-liners and suddenly Rudd’s entire skillset disappears? Laaaazzzzyyyyy.
There’s been much written at LarvatusProdeo and Possum’s Pollytics about how the reporting of polls has changed to hype some metrics more than others, even though what used to be the gold standard, Preferred Prime Minister (PPM), still has Rudd ahead by 25 percentage points (even if the 15% of undecideds all went for Abbott, that still leaves him 10 points behind).
The tactic by the ALP to allow Abbott to speak for 10 minutes in Parliamentary prime time was a a risky one, but they wagered it was worth it, because they wanted the issue of the day to be Health policy and not insulation or asylum seekers. They wanted the last day of Parliament to be on the topic that they wanted; they would not have dreamed that the Libs would let them make it the issue for next week as well.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages has withdrawn the birth certificate they had granted to Norrie May-Welby, stating “Sex Not Specified”.
It says it cancelled Norrie’s “recognised details certificate” after receiving legal advice it was invalid.
“When I got the call on Tuesday I was absolutely devastated. I felt like I had been killed,” Norrie told AAP on Thursday.
“My identity has gone all over the world … (now the) attorney-general’s taking back what they sold to me.
To add insult to injury, Norrie is now going to have a job of work ahead changing details at various agencies and companies:
After receiving the ungendered certificate, Norrie visited the bank, Centrelink and the Roads and Traffic Authority to update their details.
“They all said they didn’t know how to put it (gender unspecified) into their computers, but they all agreed to do it and to have a word to their computer programmers,” Norrie said.
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– “To own my own privilege: I realised halfway through posting all these images how few of these women step outside the boundaries of thin, white, cis, TAB and het. (Also, the shamefully heavy emphasis on the sci fi.) I wondered whether to post or not, but then there’s always room for a conversation on the intersections of race, ability and gender portrayal. This is how silencing works. This is how thousands upon millions of people are ignored and sidelined. I know this. As I said, I don’t have anything heartening, incisive or witty to say. “
– So, because Obamacare would actually save his mom if it was in place now but it won’t be in place until 2014, that’s why Americans should wait even longer instead of getting the reforms started now?
– “ThoughtfulAtheist doesn’t mention talking to any boys or men who exploited her increased alcohol consumption and doesn’t talk about warning other boys and men about the dangers of using what was “known” about this girl to justify their behavior toward her.
This doesn’t sound very thoughtful to me. It certainly doesn’t sound like the response of a friend. He said he knew it was inevitable that she would be raped which means he knew that someone around this girl would rape her yet all he did was focus on her behavior.
Those who? repeated this narrative about her availability, or who let it stand unchallenged, basically helped point rapists in her direction.”
– “It isn’t just the tremendous health risks of feeder porn that most find unsettling. Several months ago, an excellent Bitch magazine article explained:
Feeders get off on the idea that their feedee might one day become too ‘satisfied’ — and too obese — to move, thus making them completely dependent on their feeder. It’s an extreme manifestation of the idea that masculinity in men involves eroticized dominance over women.
It’s that element of misogyny that makes extreme fat fetishism unpopular in the fat acceptance community.”
– “So let me get this straight. You’re saying that when men’s college basketball was starting up, at first there were some killer teams and breakout stars — which built excitement and attracted more people to the sport — before things balanced out? Kind of like…? Yeah. “Essentially, there is zero difference in the trajectory of men’s and women’s college basketball,” writes Longman. So why are women “held to a different standard, derided as somehow lesser or undeserving”? Take a wild guess.”
– “The FFPC says the use of the wrong image was a mistake. Though it seems they’ve made similar errors before when alerting members about gays and lesbians trying to adopt children.”
– “An astounding comment that I saw on Twitter and in the MSM a number of times was along the lines of “why do atheists need a conference?” I suspect that some were making the mistake of assuming that atheism is a form of solipsism.”
– “What floors me is that even people whose stock-in-trade is language seem to feel quite happy about trashing language as essentially worthless. It’s nothing more than intellectual laziness: an acceptance of the notion that words and deeds are somehow the opposite of each other, each with a clear moral value and no prizes for guessing which is which. The lure of the false dichotomy is strong, I know — it makes opining so much easier — but you’d think a Rhodes Scholar would have been taught at some point in his education how to avoid its simplistic snares.”
Disclaimer/SotBO: a link here is not necessarily an endorsement of all opinions of the post author(s) either in the particular post or of their writing in general.
Taxi driver James Young should probably not be buying any Lotto tickets.
A Sydney cabbie is in the doghouse after refusing to allow a guide dog and its high-profile owner – Disability Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes – into his vehicle.
James Young could not have picked a worse person to turn away than Mr Innes, who is a lawyer and human rights advocate.
He promptly reported the cabbie to the Department for Transport, which launched a prosecution.
Today, Young was fined $750 and ordered to pay $2500 in costs at a Sydney court.
A recent Guide Dogs NSW/ACT survey showed one in three guide dog owners were turned away by cabbies in the past 12 months, with Sydney drivers the worst offenders.
– “I am sure by now we are all aware that a Mississippi school board has cancelled the prom, rather than allowing Constance McMillen, an 18-year-old senior at Itawamba to wear a tux and have a woman as a date. “
Disclaimer/SotBO: a link here is not necessarily an endorsement of all opinions of the post author(s) either in the particular post or of their writing in general.
“If we just take our temperature, all of Australia has experienced warming over the last 50 years. We are warming in every part of the country during every season and as each decade goes by, the records are being broken.”
The global warming denialists have nothing but noise generators.
A misleading focus on the proportion of rape cases that result in conviction has left victims’ needs neglected and stopped women coming forward, the author of a landmark government review said.
The independent report by Baroness Stern was commissioned by the government last year in response to ongoing concerns over the level of rape cases resulting in convictions. But in an interview with the Guardian, Stern said that while they remained important, the conviction rate was “not the be all and end all”.
Stern suggested the figure of 14% – the estimated proportion of reported rapes that end in a conviction for that crime or another related offence – was “not dramatically low” compared to other crimes. Of the cases that get to court, 58% result in a conviction. Stern said that figure was a sign that the system was “working very hard” and was never going to be considerably higher under the current legal system.
“We have probably put so much emphasis on the criminal justice process … that the actual needs of the human being who’s suffered this appalling violation come second,” she said. “What I’ve tried to suggest is that they should at least be equal.” Better victim care would help improve the conviction rate because fewer people would drop out of the process, she added.
But some campaigners said that the recommendation effectively let the criminal justice system off the hook, when women were still receiving “shocking” treatment. “What she’s proposing is to cover up what’s happening in the criminal justice system just at the time when women are finally getting the truth out,” said Ruth Hall of Women Against Rape.
The government should continue highlighting the low proportion of reported rapes that end in a successful prosecution, despite a review’s claim that focusing on the 6% rate was detrimental to victims, the solicitor general, Vera Baird, said today.
Baroness Stern’s independent report into how rape complaints are handled called for politicians and campaigners to stop quoting the 6% figure. Stern said the way it had been used was “extremely unhelpful” and misleading, because it suggested there was little chance of attackers being found guilty in court. The fact that 58% of cases that reached court resulted in a successful prosecution was more relevant, Stern said.
Campaigners accused her of missing the point that many rape complaints never get to court, often because of problems with the police and prosecution system. Baird said she too thought the reports-to-convictions rate remained important.
“I do have reservations about ceasing to refer to the widely used 6% figure, which reflects the percentage of reports that produce a conviction,” she said. “Although we don’t count any other offence in this way, it is particularly meaningful as it reflects the high number of rape victims who drop out before they get to court. We really need to focus on that group, as Baroness Stern herself says.”
A former Children’s Court magistrate says she is dismayed by a decision to reunite two young girls with their father, a registered sex offender.
A Family Court judge in Hobart has ruled that the girls must visit their father every second weekend provided another adult is present in the home overnight.
The father involved in the case has been convicted of accessing child pornography and possessing child abuse products. He will remain on the sexual offenders register for at least another year.
But the judge has declared that it is in the best interests of the girls, aged eight and 10, that they spend time with their father, who cannot be identified.
He says there needs to be a lock on the girls’ bedroom door as the “father acts impulsively from time to time and that the children need some protection from him, especially at night”.
He says there needs to be a lock on the door? And he still instructs that they must stay overnight?
Via Becky at Happy Bodies comes this ad from Calvin Klein, which Becky ran into at Hulu while watching “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”.
Trigger warnings on this: threatening – like the kind of street harassment that feels like it’s just about to turn into rape.
Description: a black and white montage of young buff men in briefs appear. Some of the men are filmed from slightly below centre, and they are staring straight at the camera, posturing aggressively, in some cases moving actively toward the camera. Each instance of “dick” (or perhaps “cock”; it can be difficult to tell which is being used) or “fuck” is mostly bleeped out, with a red “x” in front of the man’s mouth.
– ““Rich” thinks that Jesus wanted his people to advocate for the freedom of poor people to suffer and die in poverty. That the government that represents them and acts on their behalf should NEVER do the things he asked them to do directly. I want you to help the poor – but not collectively! You must not join together to effectively help them! That would be socialism, which I ABHOR!
Somehow, providing decent education or healthcare for poor children becomes “suppressing the masses”. It’s a bizarre, sociopathic worldview. And one that hurts real people.”
– “But it all still reminds me of the time I was working for a man who neurotically hated women and chose me to be his token Well-Treated And Respected Woman so when Human Resources came to investigate multiple allegations of gender discrimination and harassment, he could hold up my employee file as an example of just how good he treated gals when they actually deserved it. (Yes, I was the one who started the complaints. I’ve never been very smart about taking advantage of a good thing for me at the expense of others.)
Let’s be excited for Kathryn Bigelow. But don’t think this means Hollywood is opening up to women. They just recognized a cheap, easy Grand Gesture they could make that might help silence the opposition.”
Disclaimer/SotBO: a link here is not necessarily an endorsement of all opinions of the post author(s) either in the particular post or of their writing in general.
This article in The Australian by Rosemary Neill is more a report on the lay of the land than a way forward but what it does do is spell out nicely the latest split to occur in feminism. Once again the split is about sex (oh how we feminists have visited that ground a few hundred times before), only this time it involves the objectification of children rather than women. More specifically, it is the split between those feminists who think something is very amiss with marketing aimed at young girls these days and those feminists who think that worrying about the sexualisation of children symbolises a sneaky resurrection of female purity obsessions.
You probably know that I do not find myself in the middle ground on this debate. In fact you could summarise my opinion as believing that there are those who can see the bleeding obvious and those who haven’t had to shop for clothes fora pre-teen girl lately. Unfortunately, taking this side in the media debate I have found my views are more often than not represented by feminists (and others) I don’t much agree with. It can be hard to barrack for your side in a panel debate when your side are the guest wowsers and they’re busy knee-jerking and finger-wagging their way through otherwise valid points.
But surely there is a way of slamming the sexualisation of children without robbing young women (or even children) of their sexuality. I know, maybe for starters we could stop compressing children’s and adult’s identities in this debate, maybe we could resist commercial ventures to collapse childhood into a very sexualised and commodified adolescence? Maybe fully-informed agency in a fourteen year old is very different for a four year old?
Today, it’s Walter who is crash-tackling others’ complacency. She has noticed that even among her educated peers, parents are embracing gender stereotypes – girls love ballet, boys love the biff – a reflection, she reckons, of how biological determinism is making a comeback. In the second half of Living Dolls, she documents the resurgence of the view that genes and hormones can explain away everything from gender inequality in science and politics to girls’ apparent fascination with pink.
She says she is shocked by the rise of such ideas in the 21st century, even though many are based on old stereotypes rather than sound new science: “I am very uneasy about the way that the media has sort of pounced on biological determinism as the [scientific] consensus, when it isn’t.”
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages has withdrawn the birth certificate they had granted to Norrie May-Welby, stating “Sex Not Specified”.
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