Strawmanning my religion

So, I’m watching Glee (2×03) through the internets today and this week’s episode had some great songs, especially the Beatles number, but almost every moment that wasn’t music sucked. I felt like the whole episode was designed to strawman my religion- because of course, this week’s episode was about theism and prayer. And yes, it [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Christine Rankin to the Families Commission

You can see her defending her appointment on TVNZ Ondemand. While there is considerable reaction to Christine Rankin being appointed to the families commission, a lot of it is misguided. One of the tragedies of accepting any significant part of feminism is that it motivates you to defend women whose values greatly contradict your own, [...]

Shorter Karl Du Fresne

So, I made the mistake after returning from town today of opening the newspaper, and was within minutes of getting to the B section of the Dominion Post assaulted with the misogyny and rape-apology of a piece from Karl Du Fresne, which fortunately for those of you who haven’t read it, is not online. Here’s [...]

Would the other ex-partners please stand up?

So, I’m going to issue an ultimatum here: I don’t care whether Pauline Hanson really was photographed nude by an ex-boyfriend or not, and it has nothing to do with her being from over the ditch. But what I do care about is this: How is it not trying to dismiss her career because she, [...]

“Redefining Marriage”

Welcome to Big Gay January! This month I’m going to be focusing on a lot of GLBTQI stuff to see how that influences my writing. (And also because I’m in a very gay mood lately) Probably mostly GLB stuff because that’s what I’m most familiar with So, one of the huge success stories of the [...]

He’s a renegade

This is too cool. Maybe I’m way too geeky about codenames and the like, but I think it shows a great respect for him and understanding of his underlying character by the White House Communications Bureau.

The Right Of Reply

One meme I’ve noticed permeating its way through the more conservative parts of society recently (especially in regards to defending homophobia and inequal rights for GLBTQI people) is that freedom of speech means that backlash against what you’ve said is wrong and somehow circumvents your right to free speech. It’s fundamentally trivial to debunk this: [...]