Catching up the blagosphere

Just catching up a bit this monday, but there is a very good quickie from I/S over at NRT on how staying together for the kids can be worse than divorce.

One with a gun or twenty with clubs

Would you prefer to have twenty people bash you to death with clubs, or one shoot you until you died? Either way you’re still hurting and dying. This principle is why I really don’t get people who say it’s okay to take away people’s rights so long as we do it by referendum- whether it’s [...]

Now who will pick it up…

I/S has a great, uncostly way to make some strides towards pay equity published over at progbills- average wage disclosure.
Any thoughts? Particularly on who should pick it up as a member’s bill?

You look hilarious

My new passtime: Laughing at guys who queue uncomfortably outside lingerie shops while their friends/partner/relatives are inside. If it bothers you so much, at least arrange to meet her/them somewhere else. Consider my L officially OL-ed.

Why Labour are also fuck-ups

So, seeing I’ve been strongly critical of national on women’s rights, let’s do a retrospective of similar areas where Labour fucked up on identity politics, political freedom and non-discrimination. I have the feeling this is going to make me temporarily popular with certain other Greens who share with me a deep distrust of Labour, and [...]

More philosophy: The Universal Right to Life

So, having been drawn into the topic of abortion lately by the comments, I want to wax philosophical1 about the antecedents to2 my beliefs about abortion.
One of the reasons I turned away from believing that abortion was largely wrong to seeing it as very difficult to understand (and eventually from there to believing that women [...]

Hey, at least we didn’t fuck things up last time

While I think they’re making things go disastrously wrong in terms of pay equity, I have a small amount of sympathy for National on Women’s Affairs. Not because they’re any good on women’s rights, (oh, they realise that they’re important, hence the $2 million funding increase for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs) but because Pansy [...]

And it’s all wasted time.

So, for those of you who don’t follow the news, we now have assurance that because the S59 amendment act is working properly, even our current government is willing to continue supporting it, and even they acknowledge the uselessness of the question.
This certainly brings up issues around our referendum process- for instance, there’s no requirement [...]

Correcting incorrect “corrections”

Bob McCoskrie of “Family Fist” fame has an opinion piece supporting the repeal of the amendment to Section 59 of the Crimes Act in the Dom Post today. It can be found online too. His piece is in response to a regular column piece by Linley Boniface, whose column is often apolitical but usually runs [...]

The conservative media: Reactionaries

Part 2 in an ongoing series. This series examines trends that lead the New Zealand media, often conceived of as a liberal institution, towards a more conservative take on some of their stories.
Last time I talked about how the media sometimes resorts to “telling stories” because a comprehensive article often is too time-, space- or [...]