"Don't have children you can't afford."
Well, it's a bit bloody late after the kid has been born, isn't it?
*
"Don't have children you can't afford."
Let's start at the very beginning: people have children! We're a species that reproduces! That's how the species survives!
(Things I'm not addressing: whether the world is overpopulated. Whether people in rich countries have some kind of moral duty to not have children to make up for the exponential population growth in poorer countries. Immigration vs population growth through birth. Racism.)
Adults have children. Not all adults, obviously, but lots of us. Some of us do it because we really want children! Or we really want to be mums! Or we feel social pressure! Or it just happens! The contraception fails, and the pregnant woman doesn't want to have an abortion!
Some people will engage in a lot of pragmatic decision-making before they become pregnant or knock up their partner or whatever, and they'll have thought about things like "how are we going to fund this screaming poo factory?" and "will I go insane through lack of sleep?" and "is now really the right time?" Other people will not engage in those decisions—they'll certainly make a number of other decisions, though, like "where will baby sleep?" and "oooh, tiny red shoes or tiny green ones?" Some won't be making any sort of decision to get pregnant at all, but will still be happy when they find out they are.
But none of this is the point: the point is that people have children.
*
"Don't have children that you can't afford."
Most people will never be in a position to afford private school and horse-riding lessons. That's a reality of the New Zealand economy.
Leaving arguments about whether that's a good thing aside for the moment, there are serious questions to be discussed about what sort of lifestyle a New Zealand citizen should be able to enjoy as a minimum if they so desire.*
I'd place this minimum somewhere like:
- comfortable accommodation that doesn't have major structural issues and can be heated reasonably** cheaply
- reliable access to food of the kind the individuals can and like to eat
- ability to access (some) leisure activities
- ability to travel (at least around the country)
- ability to access education and healthcare
- some other stuff, like clothes
So what all parents should be able to provide for their children, at a minimum is a roof over their heads and food and clothing and some opportunity to do fun things and some opportunity to see the country.
If there are parents in New Zealand who can't do that, I'd argue that we're failing as a society.
*
"Don't have children that you can't afford."
It's time for a bit of a chat about Bad Financial Decisions. We all make them sometimes (well, at least everyone I know has made them sometimes). For instance, just last week I spent $90 at the pub at a friend's birthday party I'd had no real intention of drinking at! I reasonably regularly blow all my spending money for the fortnight on new shoes/clothes/bits of computer hardware!
I'm still: paying my rent and bills and buying breakfast and lunch most days and paying off my student loan and paying off my bank loan and saving up (very slowly) for a house deposit and—basically I am not living on Struggle Street. This is mainly because I am 26 and single and don't have dependants and I earn above the median national salary (for a person in full-time employment)!
There are people—lots of people—in this country who earn what I earn and support a family on it. The Bad Financial Decisions they are therefore able to make without their budget cascading into the shitter are smaller, because they have higher unavoidable expenses.
And, right, the size of the Bad Financial Decisions you can make without it ruining your budget gets smaller the poorer you are, so that a (very) wealthy person can invest $30K in a dodgy finance company and lose the lot without it bankrupting them, whereas a poorer person might have to legit decide whether rice or potatos are a more economical choice this week.
And everyone's going to stuff up sometimes. You're going to have weeks where you're like, FML, I just want to get drunk on the couch, so you buy a bottle of tequila and wake up the next morning smelling of alcohol and regret. You're going to spend more than you really should on shoes, or buy the slightly more expensive (but much nicer) loaf of bread, or whatever.
Statements like "people just need to budget better" a) place an unreasonably high expectation on people, and b) ignore reality. The reality is both that it can be extraordinarily challenging to survive on a low income (and people are, by doing so, regularly making very good budgeting decisions) and that people are people and human and make mistakes.
*
"Don't have children that you can't afford."
More than just individual Bad Financial Decisions, sometimes stuff goes wrong in people's lives: they get sick, or lose their job, or interest rates go up so their mortgage payment is higher than they budgeted for, or inflation is high, or we're in the middle of a global recession, or their relationship breaks down—
Sometimes those people have children!
Nobody deserves to become sick; very few people deserve to lose their jobs; interest rates and inflation and global financial crises are largely out of the control of Average Citizen Nancy; and relationship breakdowns are by definition the fault of the parties involved but, you know, shit happens.
Even the most careful budgeter in the world won’t think of everything that could possibly go wrong in their lives; none of us can predict the future.
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Uh, yeah, but they’re here now. What are you proposing we do instead?
We’re ostensibly a civilised society.
Back in the day, unwanted children used to get left on hillsides or hit over the head with a rock; ritualised and common infanticide is found all over the world in ancient civilisations.
But we grew up as a species and produced surpluses and villages and towns and cities and city-states and nations and the UN; and now we have all these laws against leaving your children on hillsides or hitting them over the head with a rock. And it’s a good thing, too.
The effect of it is that people who produce children are expected to care for them, and if they don’t (or if they do, but they’re really crap at it), we take the kids from them and stick the parents in jail if it’s bad enough and shame everyone involved a lot.
At the same time, though, it’s not like there’s a drop-off centre where you can turn up with little Timmy, all “I’ve had him for a couple of years and he’s too expensive and ugh I really hate this parent lark, take him away.” I suspect, based totally on my own brain and not on any research or internet-based anecdotal evidence that any drop-off in levels of adoption in Western nations is connected to the availability of contraception and abortion, and also possibly to the ability of solo mothers to receive State support. But that’s an untested assumption! I also suspect that anyone who rocked up to Child, Youth and Family all “I’ve had enough of Little Timmy, take him away!” would a) not receive that much assistance, and b) be shamed for trying it.
So you’ve had a kid: you’re stuck with him or her (unless you’re going to be sufficiently abusive so as to have the kid forcibly removed from your household and/or be sent to jail, which I think we can all agree is not the sort of thing we want people to do ever.)
The moral of this section is: if society is going to require individuals to do something, and some of those individuals are going to have difficult doing that thing, society is obligated to help them.
To link all this together:
1. People have children!
2. Sometimes people with children face expenses they can’t reasonably anticipate.
3. Sometimes people’s income is inadequate for their needs.
4. Society expects people to care for their children, and makes it difficult to get rid of children (not that many people actually want to, I expect).
5. Points 1 to 4 mean together that society has some sort of obligation to make sure that people with children are able to maintain a reasonable lifestyle.
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Complaints about the cost of living in New Zealand come, obviously, from people’s dissatisfaction with the cost of living in New Zealand. I don’t think a blanket reply of “well you shouldn’t have gotten knocked up then, should you?” is a very reasonable response to this.
I also think that if a large proportion of families in New Zealand genuinely feel as though they’re unable to easily maintain the lifestyles they want, we should be talking about that. We should be talking about what a reasonable lifestyle actually is: do we expect people to be able to pack the kids in the car and go to the beach for a holiday a couple of times a year? And—and we should also be having a conversation about whether people’s lifestyle desires are reasonably attainable. Like I said earlier, most people are never going to be able to send their kids to private school or give them horse-riding lessons, and maybe that’s okay.
But, uh, I think it’s totally reasonable for a family who earns the median wage (and I am here talking about a household with one working adult) to expect to be able to have a comfortable house and enough to eat and to be able to pay the bills and buy a few luxuries, and if that’s systemically unrealistic then I think we’ve got a bit of a problem.
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Levelled, right, at single women who have children and who get their income from the state.
There’s, I don’t know, hundreds of years of history here about the purpose of marriage and the operation of wider family networks; about the Poor Laws of Elizabethan England (and similar laws worldwide); about the status of women in law (not good; let’s just take that as read); about the rise of the nuclear family and industrialisation and the effect that had on those wider family and community networks by virtue of requiring highly mobile labour; and about how we fixed some of what capitalism broke by introducing social welfare.
But for the purpose of this exercise:
1. Children are good; and
2. Parenthood is work; and
3. Children, while good, are expensive because they’re not productive and they need a lot of care.***
Parenthood is not paid work! That doesn’t make it not work! See also housework, and also the bit above about the societal obligation to do certain things.
Women who have children and who get their income from the state are doing work in raising the next generation. This is work that we should support. Do I think that living on the DPB gives people an enviable lifestyle which I would like to emulate? No. This is why accusations of teenage girls getting deliberately pregnant so they can live off the state for the rest of their lives (and so on) always makes me think that their lives must be utter shit if they possibly think that a total annual income somewhere around $24K with which they must support a child sounds like a good deal.
And even if they have gotten deliberately pregnant: uh, children are still good! Parenthood is still work!
*
“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”
Levelled at those poor people, who should clearly have got a better job before they started breeding.
I’m not going to lie, this sounds like eugenics. It also sounds like total bollocks.
The median wage/salary for those in full-time employment was, at July 2010 (according to Statistics New Zealand) $44,800. Full-time employment at minimum wage will get you $28,080 a year. There’s a lot more women in part-time employment than men, but I’ll leave that aside for the moment.
My statistical skills are a bit shite, but here goes: the median wage/salary figure is a lot higher than the median income from all sources (the latter gets skewed down by people who work part time or receive benefits).
But even assuming that only people who work full-time or who have a partner who works full-time should be able to have children, there’s still going to be an awful lot of households who have an income between $30K and $50K. The median household income from all sources (including benefits (including Working for Families)) was $64,272 per year as at June 2010. Half the households in the country have a combined income of less than that.
So is $64,272 per year enough to support a family on? What sort of lifestyle will it give? Is that lifestyle a reasonable one? What if the family is earning $44,272 per year – is that enough? Or $22,272? Remember the bit above about parenthood being work, and children being good.
Also think a little about whether you really believe that an adult’s right to choose to have a child should be in any way connected to the size of their bank balance, and then think: if this somehow became official policy, would you be in a position to determine what the magic figure was? And would you be over it?
* I'm totally down with people living off the grid if that's what they want, but I'd place a minimum standard somewhat higher.
** A note about how I use "reasonable": I'm a law student (and it's ruining my life AND my mind) so I tend to think of "reasonable" as meaning "what an ordinary person would think apt and fair in the circumstances". The effect of this is that it isn't a strict standard; to use the heating example, "reasonable" would be tied in to the person's income and the size of their dwelling.
*** I welcome any suggestions of reform of child labour laws. Seriously, drop that in any time you like.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
this turned out rather angrier than i expected
I do not understand what the problem with lifestyle beneficiaries is.
I will define "lifestyle beneficiary" for the purposes of this post as a person who, for whatever reason, chooses not to seek paid employment in such a way as to cover all of his or her expenses, who does not have any personal relationships such as their expenses are paid for by an individual (or a group of individuals) and who therefore relies on the state for an income. The term obviously usually has negative connotations, but that's what I'm going to talk about. I'm not intending to import them as subtext to this post.
I don't know if there are any good stats to suggest what proportion of beneficiaries are lifestyle beneficiaries. I'd expect it to be small, mostly because the stats I have seen seem to suggest that most people move off the DPB and the dole fairly quickly, and invalid's benefit is of course a different matter.
Anyway, I really don't see the problem.
The government of New Zealand used to explicitly follow policy aimed at full employment. This was, up until the 1980s, a fairly bipartisan thing (as I understand it), and is presumably one of the things behind Think Big and all the other grand infrastructure works of the 60s and 70s. In the 1980s, things changed, and there's been for the last 30 years a fairly bipartisan approach of laisse fair economics.
Talk all you want about whether that was a good thing or not; I think it is genuinely up for debate, at least in some areas.
One of the inexonerable consequences of moving away from state intervention to create and sustain full employment into a situation where you let the market rise and fall as it wishes is that you will end up with people who are structurally un- or under-employed. This isn't, as far as I am concerned, up for debate (and if you are a right-wing economist, you'll probably argue that it isn't a bad thing. That's genuinely up for debate too).
The structural unemployment comes from the fact that sometimes the market will have a few less jobs than people, and sometimes the market will provide a lot less jobs than people. But there are incentives to always having fewer jobs than people: it keeps wages lower, it makes the market more flexible, and blah blah blah classical economics 101.
[Someday I will talk about why I think this is so utterly shit, but today is not that day. Today is about pragmatism.]
So you now have some people who, try as they might, are not going to get or keep a job that pays their expenses. This is a problem: having homeless people dying on the streets is pretty unpleasant plus it turns out that they are people too and not some alien species who don't warrant basic human decency or care!
As a sop to these radical notions of "not being total douches" and "caring about your fellow humankind", the state provides a minimum level of income at a level designed to prevent your unemployed people from dying unpleasantly on the streets. This is not generally a level which will allow them to go on extended trips to Europe, and maybe not even to the other end of whatever island they're on, but they're probably fed and housed and reasonably comfortable. Success!
But! It turns out that not having employment makes most people feel demoralised and shit, which gets compounded by unemployed people living on state funds being told constantly that they're bludging scum who don't deserve nice things. And if they're women: that they should keep their legs closed and not have kids they couldn't afford! Because everyone who doesn't plan and budget for their relationship breaking down has failed as a human being!
Nevertheless, some people who are structurally long-term unemployed manage to find other things to do with their time (whatever those things are), such as they're no longer that motivated to spend 40 hours a week in an environment they probably don't like that much all for a (few? lot?) more dollars in their pocket.
What the fuck is wrong with that?
If you're accepting of the basic bipartisan premise of NZ economic management: that there will be unemployed people; and especially if you're defending that policy on the grounds that it provides market incentives that you agree with --- if you're doing that, where's your problem with people who take themselves out of the market entirely, thus leaving jobs for people who DO want them? And who do so for what they get on the dole, which is effectively 4/5ths of fuck all?
Why do you want some people to be unhappy all the time?
I will define "lifestyle beneficiary" for the purposes of this post as a person who, for whatever reason, chooses not to seek paid employment in such a way as to cover all of his or her expenses, who does not have any personal relationships such as their expenses are paid for by an individual (or a group of individuals) and who therefore relies on the state for an income. The term obviously usually has negative connotations, but that's what I'm going to talk about. I'm not intending to import them as subtext to this post.
I don't know if there are any good stats to suggest what proportion of beneficiaries are lifestyle beneficiaries. I'd expect it to be small, mostly because the stats I have seen seem to suggest that most people move off the DPB and the dole fairly quickly, and invalid's benefit is of course a different matter.
Anyway, I really don't see the problem.
The government of New Zealand used to explicitly follow policy aimed at full employment. This was, up until the 1980s, a fairly bipartisan thing (as I understand it), and is presumably one of the things behind Think Big and all the other grand infrastructure works of the 60s and 70s. In the 1980s, things changed, and there's been for the last 30 years a fairly bipartisan approach of laisse fair economics.
Talk all you want about whether that was a good thing or not; I think it is genuinely up for debate, at least in some areas.
One of the inexonerable consequences of moving away from state intervention to create and sustain full employment into a situation where you let the market rise and fall as it wishes is that you will end up with people who are structurally un- or under-employed. This isn't, as far as I am concerned, up for debate (and if you are a right-wing economist, you'll probably argue that it isn't a bad thing. That's genuinely up for debate too).
The structural unemployment comes from the fact that sometimes the market will have a few less jobs than people, and sometimes the market will provide a lot less jobs than people. But there are incentives to always having fewer jobs than people: it keeps wages lower, it makes the market more flexible, and blah blah blah classical economics 101.
[Someday I will talk about why I think this is so utterly shit, but today is not that day. Today is about pragmatism.]
So you now have some people who, try as they might, are not going to get or keep a job that pays their expenses. This is a problem: having homeless people dying on the streets is pretty unpleasant plus it turns out that they are people too and not some alien species who don't warrant basic human decency or care!
As a sop to these radical notions of "not being total douches" and "caring about your fellow humankind", the state provides a minimum level of income at a level designed to prevent your unemployed people from dying unpleasantly on the streets. This is not generally a level which will allow them to go on extended trips to Europe, and maybe not even to the other end of whatever island they're on, but they're probably fed and housed and reasonably comfortable. Success!
But! It turns out that not having employment makes most people feel demoralised and shit, which gets compounded by unemployed people living on state funds being told constantly that they're bludging scum who don't deserve nice things. And if they're women: that they should keep their legs closed and not have kids they couldn't afford! Because everyone who doesn't plan and budget for their relationship breaking down has failed as a human being!
Nevertheless, some people who are structurally long-term unemployed manage to find other things to do with their time (whatever those things are), such as they're no longer that motivated to spend 40 hours a week in an environment they probably don't like that much all for a (few? lot?) more dollars in their pocket.
What the fuck is wrong with that?
If you're accepting of the basic bipartisan premise of NZ economic management: that there will be unemployed people; and especially if you're defending that policy on the grounds that it provides market incentives that you agree with --- if you're doing that, where's your problem with people who take themselves out of the market entirely, thus leaving jobs for people who DO want them? And who do so for what they get on the dole, which is effectively 4/5ths of fuck all?
Why do you want some people to be unhappy all the time?
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Calm down, love - and other annoyances
I have flatted with the same two women for five and a half years now; they're my closest friends.
These facts are merely background to the point of this post, which is about language.
So David Cameron told Shadow Minister Angela Eagle to "Calm down, love" in the middle of a heated Parliamentary debate. And I can't remember who it was or where I read it, but some MP asked another (male) MP whether he had PMS.
Is this sexist, the papers ask?
In a word: yes.
This is because words have meanings, and those meanings are contextual.
*
A story about my flat:
We cook together, and thus we grocery shop together. This one time a couple of years ago, I started crying completely out of the blue in the middle of the cat food aisle.
I get PMS. I have a couple of days every month where I am consumed with impotent rage, usually directionless and a bit feeble. This month I spent a day ratty and ill-tempered at everyone I had any contact with (and some people who I didn't), and every third thought I had was "Heaven forfend you should have to [do X]."
And so on that ill-fated shopping expedition, my cycle was at its peak of rage, and I cried. I was aware at the time that the whole situation was completely absurd, so I was kind of laughing and wailing at the same time; I'm really glad the supermarket was pretty empty.
"Crying in the cat aisle" is now an in-joke in my flat for PMS-related things (and amongst a few other close friends too).
I'm totally down with this. It's an in-joke because it was so uncontrollable and random and ridiculous; and because I love these people I live with; and because we all go through PMS-related ragetastic moments; and because we're careful with it.
*
But.
*
Meaning is contextual, man. I get to make PMS jokes and explanations because it's my body and my hormones and my anger, and I know better than anyone what my cycle is about and what I'm angry about and whether my anger is at an unusual (for me) level and whether that anger is, in my opinion, justified.
Close friends get to ask me whether I'm PMS-ing because they know me well and they know a bit about my body and my hormones and my anger, and they can call me out about if they like, and I can argue with them if I like.
Acquaintances don't. Random strangers don't. Because they don't know me or those things about me, and they don't get to ever fucking determine how I should choose to frame the discussion I am having.
Why it's sexist and offensive: because a query about PMS isn't just a question about my ovarian cycle (as if that's not intrusive enough). It's a whole lot of other possible statements, including (but not limited to)—
- that the thing I'm angry about isn't worthy of being angry about
- that I'm overreacting
- that I'm being irrational
- that I'm being ridiculous
And none of these things can lead to a good place for me.
Seriously, if it is PMS then I'm probably well-aware of it already and do not need you to tell me that my body chemistry is screwing with my reason. If it's not—if it's not, then you've just nicely dismissed everything I've been arguing as an overblown rant in a beautiful ad hominem one-liner.
And if you're a dude:
I don't know if you've been living under a rock all this time, but for many many centuries women had very few rights in (English) law and society.* Our assets belonged to our fathers and then our husbands; we couldn't inherit land; it was difficult or impossible to get an education or learn a trade or run a business or, you know, act as fully autonomous human beings. Women in the late Victorian period used to get prescribed hysterectomies and clitorectomies for "hysteria". The legal definition of rape specifically excluded anything that took place within a marriage.
So feminism 101: it's not new to describe women as reactionary, hysterical, ridiculous, and incapable of reason. Those were, in fact, some of the justifications used to perpetuate the treatment of women in our society for centuries.
All that (remember that words have meanings and meanings are contextual? GOOD.) gets imported as subtext when a man tells a woman to calm down, love, or asks whether she's PMSing.
And those general societal contexts sometimes get trumped by other contexts, such as that of close friendship and grocery shopping. So, yeah, you do have to be aware of the language you're using about a group you're not part of, even if they throw those words around themselves.
*
But, you say, some people are totally down with being asked whether they're PMSing. The way I figure it, there's a range of possible reactions if it's a stranger or the opposition doing the asking:
- at one end, always finding it offensive and hurtful
- thinking the asker is a bit of a dick, in a bad way
- thinking the asker is a bit of a dick, in a good way
- finding it funny
- and at the other end, not seeing the problem
(I think you have to be aware that it's problematic (or at least that some people would find it so) to find it funny.)
And given that you're asking someone whether they're PMSing in an argument during which presumably you are the other side, and you're presumably doing so for the purpose of point-scoring, you've got to be aware that there is a point to score at all: so you at least are aware that it's problematic.
How the hell are you surprised when they get annoyed? Nice going, asshole.
* Which is what I know about, so is what I'm talking about.
These facts are merely background to the point of this post, which is about language.
So David Cameron told Shadow Minister Angela Eagle to "Calm down, love" in the middle of a heated Parliamentary debate. And I can't remember who it was or where I read it, but some MP asked another (male) MP whether he had PMS.
Is this sexist, the papers ask?
In a word: yes.
This is because words have meanings, and those meanings are contextual.
*
A story about my flat:
We cook together, and thus we grocery shop together. This one time a couple of years ago, I started crying completely out of the blue in the middle of the cat food aisle.
I get PMS. I have a couple of days every month where I am consumed with impotent rage, usually directionless and a bit feeble. This month I spent a day ratty and ill-tempered at everyone I had any contact with (and some people who I didn't), and every third thought I had was "Heaven forfend you should have to [do X]."
And so on that ill-fated shopping expedition, my cycle was at its peak of rage, and I cried. I was aware at the time that the whole situation was completely absurd, so I was kind of laughing and wailing at the same time; I'm really glad the supermarket was pretty empty.
"Crying in the cat aisle" is now an in-joke in my flat for PMS-related things (and amongst a few other close friends too).
I'm totally down with this. It's an in-joke because it was so uncontrollable and random and ridiculous; and because I love these people I live with; and because we all go through PMS-related ragetastic moments; and because we're careful with it.
*
But.
*
Meaning is contextual, man. I get to make PMS jokes and explanations because it's my body and my hormones and my anger, and I know better than anyone what my cycle is about and what I'm angry about and whether my anger is at an unusual (for me) level and whether that anger is, in my opinion, justified.
Close friends get to ask me whether I'm PMS-ing because they know me well and they know a bit about my body and my hormones and my anger, and they can call me out about if they like, and I can argue with them if I like.
Acquaintances don't. Random strangers don't. Because they don't know me or those things about me, and they don't get to ever fucking determine how I should choose to frame the discussion I am having.
Why it's sexist and offensive: because a query about PMS isn't just a question about my ovarian cycle (as if that's not intrusive enough). It's a whole lot of other possible statements, including (but not limited to)—
- that the thing I'm angry about isn't worthy of being angry about
- that I'm overreacting
- that I'm being irrational
- that I'm being ridiculous
And none of these things can lead to a good place for me.
Seriously, if it is PMS then I'm probably well-aware of it already and do not need you to tell me that my body chemistry is screwing with my reason. If it's not—if it's not, then you've just nicely dismissed everything I've been arguing as an overblown rant in a beautiful ad hominem one-liner.
And if you're a dude:
I don't know if you've been living under a rock all this time, but for many many centuries women had very few rights in (English) law and society.* Our assets belonged to our fathers and then our husbands; we couldn't inherit land; it was difficult or impossible to get an education or learn a trade or run a business or, you know, act as fully autonomous human beings. Women in the late Victorian period used to get prescribed hysterectomies and clitorectomies for "hysteria". The legal definition of rape specifically excluded anything that took place within a marriage.
So feminism 101: it's not new to describe women as reactionary, hysterical, ridiculous, and incapable of reason. Those were, in fact, some of the justifications used to perpetuate the treatment of women in our society for centuries.
All that (remember that words have meanings and meanings are contextual? GOOD.) gets imported as subtext when a man tells a woman to calm down, love, or asks whether she's PMSing.
And those general societal contexts sometimes get trumped by other contexts, such as that of close friendship and grocery shopping. So, yeah, you do have to be aware of the language you're using about a group you're not part of, even if they throw those words around themselves.
*
But, you say, some people are totally down with being asked whether they're PMSing. The way I figure it, there's a range of possible reactions if it's a stranger or the opposition doing the asking:
- at one end, always finding it offensive and hurtful
- thinking the asker is a bit of a dick, in a bad way
- thinking the asker is a bit of a dick, in a good way
- finding it funny
- and at the other end, not seeing the problem
(I think you have to be aware that it's problematic (or at least that some people would find it so) to find it funny.)
And given that you're asking someone whether they're PMSing in an argument during which presumably you are the other side, and you're presumably doing so for the purpose of point-scoring, you've got to be aware that there is a point to score at all: so you at least are aware that it's problematic.
How the hell are you surprised when they get annoyed? Nice going, asshole.
* Which is what I know about, so is what I'm talking about.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
women: making choices or making babies (it's not a binary)
I've been following the debate about abortion on the Standard plus various other blogs with interest (for starters, try the Hand Mirror's excellent series on abortion in New Zealand).
It's a difficult subject to talk about. It's fraught with a whole lot of ethics (women's right to autonomous decision-making regarding her own body; the status of a foetus; whether any other person should be involved in a woman's decision-making process) and a whole lot of politics (is there room on a left-leaning Order Paper for a bill about abortion rights and access? Can we convince the punters?). It's also deeply personal for me, a person who could become pregnant (and probably will never choose to do so).
The thing is: I think at least some of the criticisms laid against the firmly pro-choice position from other pro-choice positions are a little disingenous. Here's why:
As I understand it, the firmly pro-choice position boils down to—
1. the person most qualified to make a decision about her bodily integrity and her ability/willingness to carry a foetus to term is the woman whose body it is.
2. that woman should be able to make a decision about whether to continue carrying a foetus to term at any point during the pregnancy.
The effect of this position is abortion on demand, including late-term abortions.
Now, let's take the position I was at until this weekend, which was:
1. without reservation, a woman should be able to decide to terminate a non-viable foetus. This includes all early-stage pregnancies as well as pregnancies which are later discovered to not be viable.
2. I have difficulty in accepting that a woman who is healthy herself and whose pregnancy is at a sufficiently late stage for the foetus to be viable (without significant disabilities such would greatly reduce the child's quality or length of life once he or she has been born) should be able to choose to terminate the pregnancy. This is one of those ethical gut-reactions that I can't suppress or adequately justify.
I still have difficulty accepting 2. above. But I don't think it matters.
The firmly pro-choice position would extend the right to seek an abortion to the greatest number of women who might choose to have one, namely all of them. This would necessarily include a woman who chooses at 38 weeks to terminate her pregnancy despite being in the picture of perfect health herself and knowing that the foetus is also healthy.
I don't know that that woman actually exists. If she does, I haven't heard of her. Women who choose to terminate a pregnancy at a very late stage do so almost exclusively for medical reasons, either their own or those of the foetus. The literature I have read (which is far from exhaustive) seems to suggest that there are women who would like to abort past the current limits in NZ law, but often this is a result of having been unable to access abortion services within the current limits in NZ law.
So why I think my earlier position was somewhat disingeneous is:
1. the firmly pro-choice position extends abortion rights as widely as possible.
2. there may be hypothetical women who would exercise that right in a way that I find morally repugnant.
3. however, if the firmly pro-choice position is restricted (for example, by term limits), it would almost certainly restrict the choices of women who I accept without reservation should be able to access an abortion.
That is to say, by focussing on a hypothetical set of women I am ignoring the needs of actual women. This is not good policy-making.
The other argument I find slightly disingenous is the argument that runs:
"But what about the views of the man/boyfriend/partner/husband/parents/family/wider society? DO OUR VOICES NOT COUNT?"
The firmly pro-choice position is mainly framed as a simple "no." It may in fact be "no"; I haven't done a straw poll, nor is everybody's opinion identical (obviously).
But. Women don't exercise choice in a vacuum. That's probably one of the main points of feminism and feminist theory: that our choices are profoundly influenced by the positions we find ourselves in, and that the positions we find ourselves in may be (and often are) outside our control.
As a corollary of that, women don't make decisions in a vacuum. There's nothing about the firmly pro-choice position which excludes women who are deciding whether or not to seek an abortion from soliciting the opinions of people whose opinion they think are important, and from then considering those opinions in their decision-making process. For some women, the opinion of her partner may well be determinative.1 The point is that other people's opinions should not be determinative (or influential) if the woman exercising her right to choose does not want them to be.
So where's the problem? Most women will want to know what the feelings of their partner are, if they're in a relationship (you expect that, I think, in relationships). Many women will talk to their family, or to close friends, or to whoever they want to. Your voices will be heard! Many women will have regard to how you feel! It may take the form of consultation, where there's no requirement to actually follow what the consulted people ask for, but it will be there in many, if not most, cases.
(There'll be women who choose not to involve anybody else in their decision. And I fail to see the problem with that: they're autonomous human beings too, kid.)
1. You know, [stuff about power imbalances goes here], but I think a woman could legitimately choose to have a baby or not to have a baby because her partner wants one/doesn't want one, and I think it's absolutely that woman's right to decide for herself what factors are and are not important in her decision-making process. That's kind of what this whole thing is about, for me.
It's a difficult subject to talk about. It's fraught with a whole lot of ethics (women's right to autonomous decision-making regarding her own body; the status of a foetus; whether any other person should be involved in a woman's decision-making process) and a whole lot of politics (is there room on a left-leaning Order Paper for a bill about abortion rights and access? Can we convince the punters?). It's also deeply personal for me, a person who could become pregnant (and probably will never choose to do so).
The thing is: I think at least some of the criticisms laid against the firmly pro-choice position from other pro-choice positions are a little disingenous. Here's why:
As I understand it, the firmly pro-choice position boils down to—
1. the person most qualified to make a decision about her bodily integrity and her ability/willingness to carry a foetus to term is the woman whose body it is.
2. that woman should be able to make a decision about whether to continue carrying a foetus to term at any point during the pregnancy.
The effect of this position is abortion on demand, including late-term abortions.
Now, let's take the position I was at until this weekend, which was:
1. without reservation, a woman should be able to decide to terminate a non-viable foetus. This includes all early-stage pregnancies as well as pregnancies which are later discovered to not be viable.
2. I have difficulty in accepting that a woman who is healthy herself and whose pregnancy is at a sufficiently late stage for the foetus to be viable (without significant disabilities such would greatly reduce the child's quality or length of life once he or she has been born) should be able to choose to terminate the pregnancy. This is one of those ethical gut-reactions that I can't suppress or adequately justify.
I still have difficulty accepting 2. above. But I don't think it matters.
The firmly pro-choice position would extend the right to seek an abortion to the greatest number of women who might choose to have one, namely all of them. This would necessarily include a woman who chooses at 38 weeks to terminate her pregnancy despite being in the picture of perfect health herself and knowing that the foetus is also healthy.
I don't know that that woman actually exists. If she does, I haven't heard of her. Women who choose to terminate a pregnancy at a very late stage do so almost exclusively for medical reasons, either their own or those of the foetus. The literature I have read (which is far from exhaustive) seems to suggest that there are women who would like to abort past the current limits in NZ law, but often this is a result of having been unable to access abortion services within the current limits in NZ law.
So why I think my earlier position was somewhat disingeneous is:
1. the firmly pro-choice position extends abortion rights as widely as possible.
2. there may be hypothetical women who would exercise that right in a way that I find morally repugnant.
3. however, if the firmly pro-choice position is restricted (for example, by term limits), it would almost certainly restrict the choices of women who I accept without reservation should be able to access an abortion.
That is to say, by focussing on a hypothetical set of women I am ignoring the needs of actual women. This is not good policy-making.
The other argument I find slightly disingenous is the argument that runs:
"But what about the views of the man/boyfriend/partner/husband/parents/family/wider society? DO OUR VOICES NOT COUNT?"
The firmly pro-choice position is mainly framed as a simple "no." It may in fact be "no"; I haven't done a straw poll, nor is everybody's opinion identical (obviously).
But. Women don't exercise choice in a vacuum. That's probably one of the main points of feminism and feminist theory: that our choices are profoundly influenced by the positions we find ourselves in, and that the positions we find ourselves in may be (and often are) outside our control.
As a corollary of that, women don't make decisions in a vacuum. There's nothing about the firmly pro-choice position which excludes women who are deciding whether or not to seek an abortion from soliciting the opinions of people whose opinion they think are important, and from then considering those opinions in their decision-making process. For some women, the opinion of her partner may well be determinative.
So where's the problem? Most women will want to know what the feelings of their partner are, if they're in a relationship (you expect that, I think, in relationships). Many women will talk to their family, or to close friends, or to whoever they want to. Your voices will be heard! Many women will have regard to how you feel! It may take the form of consultation, where there's no requirement to actually follow what the consulted people ask for, but it will be there in many, if not most, cases.
(There'll be women who choose not to involve anybody else in their decision. And I fail to see the problem with that: they're autonomous human beings too, kid.)
1. You know, [stuff about power imbalances goes here], but I think a woman could legitimately choose to have a baby or not to have a baby because her partner wants one/doesn't want one, and I think it's absolutely that woman's right to decide for herself what factors are and are not important in her decision-making process. That's kind of what this whole thing is about, for me.
Monday, March 21, 2011
a defence of your right to be a doucheknob
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
1. People should know what the rights they're talking about are BEFORE they claim to have them and try to apply them to situations.
2. Law school ruins lives.
3. ???
4. Profit.
One of the things that really, really annoys me when I'm lurking in discussions is the freedom-of-expression card.
It annoys me for a lot of reasons, namely—
1. as far as I can tell, people using it are usually (in a New Zealand context) assuming a number of things about rights jurisprudence that aren't actually true. I think people get confused with the way the Supreme Court in the US seems to uphold their constitution all the time. We don't have a written constitution in the same way; specific to human rights, the rights are different, the court's definition of who can breach a right is different, and the court's ability to respond to breaches is different.
2. Freedom of expression in the New Zealand context (as per section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (BORA)) is stated simply as "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form." This is a really broad right; case law on the subject says things like "as wide a right as human thought and expression."
3. But there's more to BORA than just what the rights are. BORA only applies to acts done—
"(a) By the legislative, executive, or judicial branches of the government of New Zealand; or
(b) By any person or body in the performance of any public function, power, or duty conferred or imposed on that person or body by or pursuant to law."
(See section 3 of BORA at the link above if you don't believe me.)
That means that the right is only actionable against things done by the state. You can't enforce your section 14 freedom of expression rights against an individual you're debating with on the internet, because that individual isn't a branch of government or a person exercising public functions, duties, or powers.*
Which. Someday I'm going to actually engage in that argument with someone, saying things like "section 3 of BORA states that the Act only applies to acts done by the legislature, executive, or judiciary (or various other public sector bodies). I do not fall within that category. Therefore you have no rights under BORA as against anything I might do or say to you. I think you're thinking of the Human Rights Act, but that doesn't protect freedom of speech per se. There are protected grounds of discrimination, but your personality isn't one of them."
4. I don't think that freedom of expression, at least in the broad sense of A Thing That Is Good And Should Be Protected, stops existing because it can't be actioned or enforced in some situations. People being able to state their views openly IS a good thing, even if those views are subjectively (or objectively!) wrong.
As Voltaire said (and this gets quoted on the interwebs a LOT): "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
But—if you're going to accept that (and I think we should), then you have to go back to that niggly little first word of section 14 of BORA, "Everyone", and think about that—
(a) a defence of your right to say something is not a defence of the statement itself; and
(b) if the right applies to everyone (and it must necessarily do so to be meaningful), then that must include the right to disagree; and
(c) if you are going to make public statements about something, then surely disagreement is part of the discourse; and
(d) sometimes disagreement is painful and offensive, but then sometimes the initial statements are as well.
I'm totally unconvinced by the suggestion that public disagreement with a postion taken on an issue somehow constitutes a stifling of the original statement, or an effort to shut it down, or an infringement of the original speaker's right to free speech. If anything I think that public disagreement upholds the right by validating the original speaker's right to take a position, even if it is objectionable to the respondant.
5. But I don't think that the above is necessarily what people mean when they cite their rights under BORA. Often the subtext is that you're a PC Nora-No-Friends who can't take a joke, and you want to shut them down so that we can all live in an idyllic world of sunshine and rainbows (but not the gay kind).
In which case I think the correct answer is probably to ask them why they find disagreement so hurtful and dangerous.
(There is in that last point a really interesting debate about intent, but I think at the point you're citing BORA to back up whatever you've said, you (a) are now aware that people have found it offensive, and (b) might well have known that people would find it offensive before you said it. Also I'm not willing to talk about intent and how I think it plays into debate until I've thought about it a lot, lot more.)
*Though it'd be really interesting to see what would happen if you were having a debate with, say, a Minister of the Crown online, and they tried to shut you down.
1. People should know what the rights they're talking about are BEFORE they claim to have them and try to apply them to situations.
2. Law school ruins lives.
3. ???
4. Profit.
One of the things that really, really annoys me when I'm lurking in discussions is the freedom-of-expression card.
It annoys me for a lot of reasons, namely—
1. as far as I can tell, people using it are usually (in a New Zealand context) assuming a number of things about rights jurisprudence that aren't actually true. I think people get confused with the way the Supreme Court in the US seems to uphold their constitution all the time. We don't have a written constitution in the same way; specific to human rights, the rights are different, the court's definition of who can breach a right is different, and the court's ability to respond to breaches is different.
2. Freedom of expression in the New Zealand context (as per section 14 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (BORA)) is stated simply as "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form." This is a really broad right; case law on the subject says things like "as wide a right as human thought and expression."
3. But there's more to BORA than just what the rights are. BORA only applies to acts done—
"(a) By the legislative, executive, or judicial branches of the government of New Zealand; or
(b) By any person or body in the performance of any public function, power, or duty conferred or imposed on that person or body by or pursuant to law."
(See section 3 of BORA at the link above if you don't believe me.)
That means that the right is only actionable against things done by the state. You can't enforce your section 14 freedom of expression rights against an individual you're debating with on the internet, because that individual isn't a branch of government or a person exercising public functions, duties, or powers.*
Which. Someday I'm going to actually engage in that argument with someone, saying things like "section 3 of BORA states that the Act only applies to acts done by the legislature, executive, or judiciary (or various other public sector bodies). I do not fall within that category. Therefore you have no rights under BORA as against anything I might do or say to you. I think you're thinking of the Human Rights Act, but that doesn't protect freedom of speech per se. There are protected grounds of discrimination, but your personality isn't one of them."
4. I don't think that freedom of expression, at least in the broad sense of A Thing That Is Good And Should Be Protected, stops existing because it can't be actioned or enforced in some situations. People being able to state their views openly IS a good thing, even if those views are subjectively (or objectively!) wrong.
As Voltaire said (and this gets quoted on the interwebs a LOT): "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
But—if you're going to accept that (and I think we should), then you have to go back to that niggly little first word of section 14 of BORA, "Everyone", and think about that—
(a) a defence of your right to say something is not a defence of the statement itself; and
(b) if the right applies to everyone (and it must necessarily do so to be meaningful), then that must include the right to disagree; and
(c) if you are going to make public statements about something, then surely disagreement is part of the discourse; and
(d) sometimes disagreement is painful and offensive, but then sometimes the initial statements are as well.
I'm totally unconvinced by the suggestion that public disagreement with a postion taken on an issue somehow constitutes a stifling of the original statement, or an effort to shut it down, or an infringement of the original speaker's right to free speech. If anything I think that public disagreement upholds the right by validating the original speaker's right to take a position, even if it is objectionable to the respondant.
5. But I don't think that the above is necessarily what people mean when they cite their rights under BORA. Often the subtext is that you're a PC Nora-No-Friends who can't take a joke, and you want to shut them down so that we can all live in an idyllic world of sunshine and rainbows (but not the gay kind).
In which case I think the correct answer is probably to ask them why they find disagreement so hurtful and dangerous.
(There is in that last point a really interesting debate about intent, but I think at the point you're citing BORA to back up whatever you've said, you (a) are now aware that people have found it offensive, and (b) might well have known that people would find it offensive before you said it. Also I'm not willing to talk about intent and how I think it plays into debate until I've thought about it a lot, lot more.)
*Though it'd be really interesting to see what would happen if you were having a debate with, say, a Minister of the Crown online, and they tried to shut you down.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
to the middle class (of which I am a member)
My father and I talk about politics. We do this instead of talking about anything else, really - it's very definitely a family trait to get angry instead of sad, and politics almost always provides something to get angry about. Today I rang him and after a couple of minutes of the regular pleasantries (how are you? What've you been up to?) there followed almost an hour of arguing back-and-forth about Where the Left Is and/or Should Be Going, and What's With The Lack of Fight? Good times, man.
And one of the things we've been chatting about a lot lately is how bad we are at selling our policies to the Average New Zealander, when this should be easy because the Average New Zealander would clearly be a lot better off if they got paid more and weren't in so much debt and weren't treated as disposable by their employer.
So we got onto unemployment, viz:
1. It's pretty high at the moment.
2. Youth unemployment is near 20%, which is an unmitigated social disaster.
3. The Government is talking about raising the pension age.
4. The Government is also talking about forcing solo parents back into work (as in, accept this job or your benefit gets cut)
... it doesn't seem logical to me to be forcing older people to stay in work for longer and/or forcing active parents into the workforce when you have real problems in that people are finding it really tough to enter the workforce at all for the first time in their life.
Also worth noting is that you can't receive the unemployment benefit if your partner is in work. So from the Government's point of view, a family that goes from two incomes down to one when one partner is made redundant doesn't matter - that person doesn't affect the unemployment stats. And if that person stays unemployed (maybe childcare costs are prohibitive, so the family makes the choice to have a stay-at-home parent for a few years), then if and when a job comes available and is taken up by a solo parent desperate for a job - any job - so the kids don't starve, the stats look even better.
Of course, yes, yay paid employment in most cases, though if you do basic reading on benefits and poverty you'll learn about the cost of working (economic and social) and - insert the complications I'm not talking about here.
But you can sell welfare policy as:
HAVE SOME BASIC COMPASSION FOR YOUR FELLOW HUMANS, DICKWAD!
or
IT'S A SAFETY NET WHICH IS THERE FOR YOU TOO. DICKWAD!
or
YEAH, SO I THINK YOU NEED A LESSON ON HOW INSURANCE WORKS. MORON.
and you can also sell it as:
- an acceptance that a glut of workers will drive wages down (as in, Economics 101!)
plus
- an acceptance that workers aren't really in a position to be able to bargain as well as employers can (as in, Reality 101!)
plus
- the creation of a situation where people are forced to take jobs they know aren't really suitable because otherwise they face starvation/having their kids taken away from them/homelessness/as you will
plus
- stay-at-home parents in 2-parent households not really figuring in official stats all that well (and there's a lot of women's issues stuff here, which I'll leave to people who talk WAY more eruditely on the subject than I)
creates a situation where the stay-at-home parent may find it really fucking hard to get a job as good (read: well-paid) as the one they had when they do reenter the workforce, and this has flow on effects which negatively impact the lives of the middle classes, like:
- not being able to pay off the mortgage
- not being able to look forward to a comfortable retirement
- not being able to pay the kid's uni fees
- not being able to go on that overseas holiday
And maybe the answer to that litany of woes should be: cry more! Other people have it worse off than you! But I don't think it's a particularly satisfactory one: I don't think paying off the mortage and travelling a bit et cetera should be outside the reach of the dreams of people who are supposedly relatively well-off in our society. I also think that it can be really hard to properly empathise with people, and sometimes it's easier to explain stuff by applying its effects to your own situation, even if that doesn't quite get across the full horror of having to go to the foodbank because you also had to buy your kid a pair of shoes that week.
The choice to not work for several years because you're raising children is not a bad one.* I think that people who make that choice should be able to do so comfortably. I don't think people who are raising kids should be forced to choose between losing their entire income in the form of government benefits or taking on a poorly paid, casual, and marginalised job that really doesn't provide them with financial security. Or, you know, forced to give up on economic aspirations, no matter how small or large or trivial or major, because you can't save for retirement and raise the next generation at the same time.
*By which I mean: raising children is a difficult thing to do, and it should be far more valued in society than it is - we should be applauding women for looking after small children, not insinuating (or saying outright) that they're all a bunch of bludging slappers who got wot they deserved.**
**Not to say that choosing to be in paid work isn't okay as well. Just. Fuck me, can't women make ANY choices without being dogpiled for it?
And one of the things we've been chatting about a lot lately is how bad we are at selling our policies to the Average New Zealander, when this should be easy because the Average New Zealander would clearly be a lot better off if they got paid more and weren't in so much debt and weren't treated as disposable by their employer.
So we got onto unemployment, viz:
1. It's pretty high at the moment.
2. Youth unemployment is near 20%, which is an unmitigated social disaster.
3. The Government is talking about raising the pension age.
4. The Government is also talking about forcing solo parents back into work (as in, accept this job or your benefit gets cut)
... it doesn't seem logical to me to be forcing older people to stay in work for longer and/or forcing active parents into the workforce when you have real problems in that people are finding it really tough to enter the workforce at all for the first time in their life.
Also worth noting is that you can't receive the unemployment benefit if your partner is in work. So from the Government's point of view, a family that goes from two incomes down to one when one partner is made redundant doesn't matter - that person doesn't affect the unemployment stats. And if that person stays unemployed (maybe childcare costs are prohibitive, so the family makes the choice to have a stay-at-home parent for a few years), then if and when a job comes available and is taken up by a solo parent desperate for a job - any job - so the kids don't starve, the stats look even better.
Of course, yes, yay paid employment in most cases, though if you do basic reading on benefits and poverty you'll learn about the cost of working (economic and social) and - insert the complications I'm not talking about here.
But you can sell welfare policy as:
HAVE SOME BASIC COMPASSION FOR YOUR FELLOW HUMANS, DICKWAD!
or
IT'S A SAFETY NET WHICH IS THERE FOR YOU TOO. DICKWAD!
or
YEAH, SO I THINK YOU NEED A LESSON ON HOW INSURANCE WORKS. MORON.
and you can also sell it as:
- an acceptance that a glut of workers will drive wages down (as in, Economics 101!)
plus
- an acceptance that workers aren't really in a position to be able to bargain as well as employers can (as in, Reality 101!)
plus
- the creation of a situation where people are forced to take jobs they know aren't really suitable because otherwise they face starvation/having their kids taken away from them/homelessness/as you will
plus
- stay-at-home parents in 2-parent households not really figuring in official stats all that well (and there's a lot of women's issues stuff here, which I'll leave to people who talk WAY more eruditely on the subject than I)
creates a situation where the stay-at-home parent may find it really fucking hard to get a job as good (read: well-paid) as the one they had when they do reenter the workforce, and this has flow on effects which negatively impact the lives of the middle classes, like:
- not being able to pay off the mortgage
- not being able to look forward to a comfortable retirement
- not being able to pay the kid's uni fees
- not being able to go on that overseas holiday
And maybe the answer to that litany of woes should be: cry more! Other people have it worse off than you! But I don't think it's a particularly satisfactory one: I don't think paying off the mortage and travelling a bit et cetera should be outside the reach of the dreams of people who are supposedly relatively well-off in our society. I also think that it can be really hard to properly empathise with people, and sometimes it's easier to explain stuff by applying its effects to your own situation, even if that doesn't quite get across the full horror of having to go to the foodbank because you also had to buy your kid a pair of shoes that week.
The choice to not work for several years because you're raising children is not a bad one.* I think that people who make that choice should be able to do so comfortably. I don't think people who are raising kids should be forced to choose between losing their entire income in the form of government benefits or taking on a poorly paid, casual, and marginalised job that really doesn't provide them with financial security. Or, you know, forced to give up on economic aspirations, no matter how small or large or trivial or major, because you can't save for retirement and raise the next generation at the same time.
*By which I mean: raising children is a difficult thing to do, and it should be far more valued in society than it is - we should be applauding women for looking after small children, not insinuating (or saying outright) that they're all a bunch of bludging slappers who got wot they deserved.**
**Not to say that choosing to be in paid work isn't okay as well. Just. Fuck me, can't women make ANY choices without being dogpiled for it?
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
stick it to the (wo)man
So, in brief lots and lots of words:
*As an aside: if your policy, personal or political, ever relies on people not fucking in situations where it is likely that people will want to fuck, your policy is stupid.
For this reason, the statement that people should not have children they cannot afford, aside from being an utterly disgusting statement of privilege and assumption, is just so mind-bogglingly stupid it blows my mind. Children are a logical consequence of sex, and if it ever gets to a point where heterosexual sex, sans totally effective contraception, does not reliably, across the species, result in offspring -- we are so totally -- I'm trying to think of an adjective here...
- the Government explicitly wants to get more beneficiaries in work. Don't get me wrong: this is a laudable aim. Most people who subsist on state benefits would like to have more money, and most of them would like to get it through paid employment.
- the Government wants to cut funding to education, including early childhood education. To some extent, I do sympathise with the view that early childhood education is basically daycare by another name. But whatever it's called, it's the place where a lot of kids go when their parents or guardians are at paid work, and where some kids go when their parents or guardians aren't at paid work.
- cutting funding to early childhood education will have the direct result of increasing the amount of money parents and guardians pay in hand to the centres. This is because the cost of running the centre doesn't suddenly decrease just because their income from one source has fallen.
- this will in turn decrease the marginal income of working parents and guardians. That is, the sum of "net income" minus "costs associated with working" will be a smaller figure.
- costs associated with working aren't, of course, limited to childcare. Other costs include transport, work-appropriate attire, and any work equipment. And I think these costs are reasonable enough, just as I think that parents paying part of the cost of their small children's daycare needs is fair enough.
- but childcare is a really, really high cost for a lot of people. Not everyone is in a position to rely on other family members to take on childcare so that they can enter paid employment. Not everyone has family. Not everyone has family in the same city. Not everyone has family who are appropriate carers for small children.
- and children are a social good. I mean, obviously they are also people -- and perhaps someday I will write about why I think people owe each other some care -- but they're an investment (trite, I know) into what this society will be able to support in 25 years.
- so the idea that parents should bear sole responsibility for raising and providing for their children doesn't really work for me. I'm going to personally benefit from there being qualified doctors in 40 years, so I should bear some responsibility for making sure that there are children to get there.*
- getting back to where I was going with this: it is contradictory to have an explicit policy to encourage people back into work and then create stumbling blocks that you know full well will make employment difficult in some cases and impossible in others.
*As an aside: if your policy, personal or political, ever relies on people not fucking in situations where it is likely that people will want to fuck, your policy is stupid.
For this reason, the statement that people should not have children they cannot afford, aside from being an utterly disgusting statement of privilege and assumption, is just so mind-bogglingly stupid it blows my mind. Children are a logical consequence of sex, and if it ever gets to a point where heterosexual sex, sans totally effective contraception, does not reliably, across the species, result in offspring -- we are so totally -- I'm trying to think of an adjective here...
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
there are a lot more skeletons in the great closet of humanity than you'd think
So I should know better than to read comment threads on Stuff.co.nz; they only make me angry. I read a few of the comments on today's article about Phil Goff's plan for tax should Labour win the next election, and honestly a few was enough.
Because every single one of these threads ends up in a cagefight about interest-free student loans and omg how totally unhelpful and useless history degrees are. And everybody talks very earnestly about how hard they work (and I have no reason to doubt that) and how it's unfair that they have to pay as much tax as they do and/or pay so much child support and/or don't receive enough child support (children: they cost money). But then! Interest-free student loans and history degrees rear their ugly head. Again.
Universities are, of course, meant to be bastions of learning, stalwart defenders of truth against all the forces that want to suppress it.
This is, of course, largely bullshit.
Universities are not about truth. They're not (in my humanities-driven experience) about questioning whether things are true at all. If they were, there wouldn't be 2 departments in one faculty, one of which teaches that people are ultimately rational and will act reliably in their own self-interest and one of which teaches how to get people to buy the things you make even when what you're producing is crappy. Independent thought isn't nearly as encouraged or as valued as everyone pretends.
And maybe that's okay.
And I digress.
Universities have always taught humanities subjects. For a very long time, history meant ancient history: Latin, Greek, the Roman empire. People went to university for much the reason they do now: to spend a few years becoming even more educated after finishing school. Sons of particular social strata went almost by default, unless they showed especial interest in another career or were especially dim. The rest of us didn't go at all.
For most of humanity, literacy didn't exist as there was no written language. I don't doubt that people learnt a lot of skills anyway.
For most of the time that there has been written language, most of humanity - almost all of humanity - has been illiterate. The real change in accessibility to written language, and therefore to information that wasn't known by anyone you knew in person, was the printing press (at least in Western Europe. My rest-of-the-world history is very shaky). Even so, it took the Enlightenment and a bunch of other shit happening before educating the poor became popular. Sometime after that, governments started legislating for free compulsory primary school education.
Most people still left school at ages we would now consider Far Too Young. They still went out and got jobs and were fully productive members of society. This is because, actually, for most jobs an education past 14 or so was kind of... useless. There are very few things you need to know calculus for. Or geometry, or Latin. People went into apprenticeships if they were going into a trade, or they got a job as a shop assistant or a clerk or anything else you can imagine. Society continued to flourish.
And it got richer, and suddenly levels of education that were barely imaginable a generation ago were open to most citizens of the wealthier nations. So people went to university, and they got history degrees.
And as degrees became less and less about proof that you came from the right sort of family, they became less and less of value on a CV. Because it has always been true that an Arts degree is not of a lot of practical value in day-to-day employment for most of the people who have them. ALWAYS.
Does this mean that the state should stop subsidising education in subjects it doesn't see as having practical value? Or, conversely, does that mean it should do a better job at subsiding skillsets it does see as having a lot of practical value (I'm thinking of the trades here)?
And does the lack of obvious correlation between the education you receive at university and the job you do now mean that your education has no value? I work in administration, and the critical analysis skills I learnt in Philosophy papers have proved to be very useful in my job, even though I can't explain how and Philosophy is, like, the go-to Department of Uselessness whenever people want to get their rant on (along with Art History).
Just--
1. If people have a right as such to an education, to what extent should a state fund it so that it is realistically accessible?
2. Does it depend on the content of that education? How do you know in advance what will be useful? Does it depend on who's making the judgement (at a societal level, or at an individual level)?
3. If the behaviours of a group of people will be predictable over time, should we be studying that in order to avoid the certain unwanted and predictable consequences of certain actions? (In other words: should we not be studying the mistakes of history?)
And a little more provocative--
4. Do people have a right as such to an education? What form does it take, and what is its scope?
5. What makes some forms of knowledge more useful than others? What's a working definition of "useful"? (Art is a social good.)
And finally--
7. History is written by the victors. What would happen if nobody read what they wrote?
Because every single one of these threads ends up in a cagefight about interest-free student loans and omg how totally unhelpful and useless history degrees are. And everybody talks very earnestly about how hard they work (and I have no reason to doubt that) and how it's unfair that they have to pay as much tax as they do and/or pay so much child support and/or don't receive enough child support (children: they cost money). But then! Interest-free student loans and history degrees rear their ugly head. Again.
Universities are, of course, meant to be bastions of learning, stalwart defenders of truth against all the forces that want to suppress it.
This is, of course, largely bullshit.
Universities are not about truth. They're not (in my humanities-driven experience) about questioning whether things are true at all. If they were, there wouldn't be 2 departments in one faculty, one of which teaches that people are ultimately rational and will act reliably in their own self-interest and one of which teaches how to get people to buy the things you make even when what you're producing is crappy. Independent thought isn't nearly as encouraged or as valued as everyone pretends.
And maybe that's okay.
And I digress.
Universities have always taught humanities subjects. For a very long time, history meant ancient history: Latin, Greek, the Roman empire. People went to university for much the reason they do now: to spend a few years becoming even more educated after finishing school. Sons of particular social strata went almost by default, unless they showed especial interest in another career or were especially dim. The rest of us didn't go at all.
For most of humanity, literacy didn't exist as there was no written language. I don't doubt that people learnt a lot of skills anyway.
For most of the time that there has been written language, most of humanity - almost all of humanity - has been illiterate. The real change in accessibility to written language, and therefore to information that wasn't known by anyone you knew in person, was the printing press (at least in Western Europe. My rest-of-the-world history is very shaky). Even so, it took the Enlightenment and a bunch of other shit happening before educating the poor became popular. Sometime after that, governments started legislating for free compulsory primary school education.
Most people still left school at ages we would now consider Far Too Young. They still went out and got jobs and were fully productive members of society. This is because, actually, for most jobs an education past 14 or so was kind of... useless. There are very few things you need to know calculus for. Or geometry, or Latin. People went into apprenticeships if they were going into a trade, or they got a job as a shop assistant or a clerk or anything else you can imagine. Society continued to flourish.
And it got richer, and suddenly levels of education that were barely imaginable a generation ago were open to most citizens of the wealthier nations. So people went to university, and they got history degrees.
And as degrees became less and less about proof that you came from the right sort of family, they became less and less of value on a CV. Because it has always been true that an Arts degree is not of a lot of practical value in day-to-day employment for most of the people who have them. ALWAYS.
Does this mean that the state should stop subsidising education in subjects it doesn't see as having practical value? Or, conversely, does that mean it should do a better job at subsiding skillsets it does see as having a lot of practical value (I'm thinking of the trades here)?
And does the lack of obvious correlation between the education you receive at university and the job you do now mean that your education has no value? I work in administration, and the critical analysis skills I learnt in Philosophy papers have proved to be very useful in my job, even though I can't explain how and Philosophy is, like, the go-to Department of Uselessness whenever people want to get their rant on (along with Art History).
Just--
1. If people have a right as such to an education, to what extent should a state fund it so that it is realistically accessible?
2. Does it depend on the content of that education? How do you know in advance what will be useful? Does it depend on who's making the judgement (at a societal level, or at an individual level)?
3. If the behaviours of a group of people will be predictable over time, should we be studying that in order to avoid the certain unwanted and predictable consequences of certain actions? (In other words: should we not be studying the mistakes of history?)
And a little more provocative--
4. Do people have a right as such to an education? What form does it take, and what is its scope?
5. What makes some forms of knowledge more useful than others? What's a working definition of "useful"? (Art is a social good.)
And finally--
7. History is written by the victors. What would happen if nobody read what they wrote?
Thursday, January 13, 2011
On the subject of industrial action
Some things:
- a lockout is not a strike
- work-to-rule is not a strike
- if your employees working to the rules of your organisation would result in a lower output than you have contracted yourself to provide then your rules are stupid
- do not expect sympathy from me when you brag about a 20% annual return on investment and yet aren't willing to give your workers a 10% payrise over three years without fucking them over in other ways
- do not expect sympathy from me when you are getting $160,000 in ratepayer subsidy daily to run your transport system (which cannot be run to the rules of your organisation)
- private provision of essential national systems is really stupid and doesn't work
- this is because the government cannot let those systems fail
- at the same time, a government buyout of the system is expensive
- private service providers are not stupid, and know that the system cannot fail
- private service providers are profit-driven
- this provides an incentive for them to run those systems at a level just above that which would force the government to buyout the system in order to keep it running
- this is one of the reasons why, for example, the rail system, the public transport systems, and the telecommunications infrastructure in this country are so faily
- (I admit there are exceptions)
- if you are more concerned about how much you personally pay for a service than you are about the ability of the people who provide that service to earn a decent wage, then you deserve that they show you exactly the same amount of concern: that is, not a bit of it
- there are many people who are not paid decent wages
- this fact is not a sign that the people who earn slightly more than those people (a) should earn less or (b) do not deserve a payrise
- this is, instead, a sign that the people who are not paid decent wages should be paid more
- all this applies to working conditions as well
- no seriously, we in offices rely on low-paid people in service industries far more than they rely on us
- no seriously, we in offices are probably entirely irrelevant to the continual operation of the community
- we should maybe stop bitching then and be grateful that we do not have to work on public holidays or deal with our shitty, entitled asses
Saturday, January 8, 2011
So forget all your duties, oh yeah
- It seems like I read on the internet every month or so that people should not be jealous of the rich, or about how tax cuts favour them.
- However, trickle-down economics? Really? We're riding that old horse again? I thought that the lack of general evidence in support of that set of theories might've killed the beast, but it has risen again and taken the form of that nice bloke who lives round the corner whom you'd just love to have a beer with.
- I just don't fathom the logic: investment/saving is better than consumption (or at least all the literature says so), except from the view of the businesses, who are completely fucked if people stop buying their crap. Investment (unless it's totally bullshitted financial derivitaves completely unconnected from any real product or service) is entirely worthless if you don't have a consumer base. But we get told we need to spend less money! Except then we need to support New Zealand industry! What the fuck?
- Semi-relatedly, there's no real correlation between "amount of effort/skill/knowledge it takes to do a task" and "amount one gets paid for it": which we know because, for example, parents don't get paid; there's also less correlation between "rarity of skillset" and "amount one gets paid" than you might expect.
- The whole "poor people just need to work harder" wank falls down pretty much as soon as the point above is acknowledged.
- So right-wingers turn to "working smarter" instead. Which, yes: it is a much better life choice to be an executive than a professional cleaner; the latter is not an easy job. But there are very few executive positions compared to low-wage positions: even if every person in the latter category applied themselves, most would still miss out.
- And then we turn to "most important to the economy", which is allegedly the reason why John Key doesn't want us to be jealous.
- Respectfully I submit that "most important to the economy" has very little correlation to "amount one gets paid"—
- 1. economies are founded on the people within them:
- these people need to, at a minimum, survive, and probably also need to be able to earn enough to feed and clothe themselves and get shelter and have enough left over to buy some luxuries:
- so the most important functions in society are the ones that provide these things; and by any reasonable analysis these things are provided at the level of the actual exchange of money for goods or services—the Board of Directors or executive floor has very little to do with whether one can buy bread at a supermarket. And they probably have very little to do, actually, with how the bread got to the supermarket and how much it costs; these decisions are made lower-down in the chain of command:
- I don't think that professional work is utterly unnecessary, or even mostly unnecessary. Executives do sometimes make good choices, and they probably have a better success rate (or at least are better at creating a profit) than people without that particular skillset.
- but business continues even in the absence of contemporary corporate management, and we know this because the contemporary corporation grew out of small businesses, in much the same way as the common law grew out of individual policy decisions (or judgements, if you like) made by individual judges in a court of law:
- business does not, however, continue without its workforce. The pretence that it does: that people who wear nametags are replaceable units of economic productivity to be discarded at will, whereas people who have their names on buildings are all honourable and hardworking [men]—well.
- Maybe I'm just jealous because my name isn't on a building.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Biting the hand that pays us inadequately
Youth jobless rate soars to 19.4%
What I said—at comment #72 on the article, is—
@Will #21: "Set the minimum hourly youth wage slightly above what a weekly unemployment benefit works out as when divided by 40."
For the record, the weekly unemployment benefit is $180.74 gross for a single adult not living at home (it's less for adults aged 18 and 19 who still live with a parent). People under the age of 18 are, of course, not entitled to the unemployment benefit.
$180.74 divided by 40 works out to be $4.52 per hour. That is 35.47% of the current minimum wage. Living expenses are of course variable, but there is a limit to how cheap things get; for example, the cheapest room I can find as of today in Wellington is $75/week plus expenses of $20 to $25/week. A very frugal person could perhaps manage to keep their food costs below $25 or $30 a week.
What people continually forget in this debate is that many, if not most, of the people who earn minimum wage or close to it a) do not work full-time even if they would like the hours, b) do not have secure or stable hours, and c) are in fact invested in their source of income. It is this last that bears repeating: people rely on their source of income to sustain them.
If the income people earn through paid work is not enough to live on, the state will step in to make sure that the person survives. I think it would be a fair assumption that most of the people on the dole in our major cities also receive accommodation supplements or subsidised accommodation or a combination. If people are earning, through full-time work, only slightly more than what they would receive on the dole, then they will probably need additional income from the state.
... which effectively means that we the taxpayers would be subsidising employers who are too cheap to pay their staff a decent wage. Awesome! My tax dollars at work!
***
There's a lot more that could be said here. I'd expect most people replying to my comment (if anyone did) to talk about the market a lot, and how people wouldn't take jobs that don't pay them enough money, and to that I would say:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's what the unemployment benefit is for!
But people can upskill so that they can get better jobs in the future!
But all my youth staff members EVER have been totally crap.
I was an apprentice in 1975 and I earned youth rates and it was fine. Kids these days. Don't know how lucky they are. Flat in a 3-bedroom house with insulation? LUXURY.
But we should incentivise employers taking on youth workers!
***
I kind of try, in my posts about politics, to keep calm and carry on. But underneath the bullet points and the attempts at well-formed arguments is a deep well of rage, and it goes something like this:
When you tell me that some people are only worth $2 an hour*, in a city where the cheapest flat I could find (on a cursory skim) costs $75 a week, plus expenses, plus food, plus transport and clothing and so on... when you tell me that, what you are telling me is that some people aren't worth being able to live in a house and eat until they are no longer hungry and have running hot water.
And when you tell me that, I don't have to listen to anything else you say: you're a worm, and yours is the sort of thinking that causes revolutions.
* As some disgusting fuckbag said in a Stuff.co.nz comment thread one day...
What I said—at comment #72 on the article, is—
@Will #21: "Set the minimum hourly youth wage slightly above what a weekly unemployment benefit works out as when divided by 40."
For the record, the weekly unemployment benefit is $180.74 gross for a single adult not living at home (it's less for adults aged 18 and 19 who still live with a parent). People under the age of 18 are, of course, not entitled to the unemployment benefit.
$180.74 divided by 40 works out to be $4.52 per hour. That is 35.47% of the current minimum wage. Living expenses are of course variable, but there is a limit to how cheap things get; for example, the cheapest room I can find as of today in Wellington is $75/week plus expenses of $20 to $25/week. A very frugal person could perhaps manage to keep their food costs below $25 or $30 a week.
What people continually forget in this debate is that many, if not most, of the people who earn minimum wage or close to it a) do not work full-time even if they would like the hours, b) do not have secure or stable hours, and c) are in fact invested in their source of income. It is this last that bears repeating: people rely on their source of income to sustain them.
If the income people earn through paid work is not enough to live on, the state will step in to make sure that the person survives. I think it would be a fair assumption that most of the people on the dole in our major cities also receive accommodation supplements or subsidised accommodation or a combination. If people are earning, through full-time work, only slightly more than what they would receive on the dole, then they will probably need additional income from the state.
... which effectively means that we the taxpayers would be subsidising employers who are too cheap to pay their staff a decent wage. Awesome! My tax dollars at work!
***
There's a lot more that could be said here. I'd expect most people replying to my comment (if anyone did) to talk about the market a lot, and how people wouldn't take jobs that don't pay them enough money, and to that I would say:
- Obviously there are far more people than there are jobs, hence the unemployment rate being so high (there are people who aren't working and who avoid being in paid work for whatever reason, but... not that many).
- The unemployment benefit provides an absolute pittance, but it may be useful in figuring out a bottom line of "the least amount of money a person can survive on".
- The minimum wage acts as an absolute bottom figure of what employers can pay their staff.
- It influences the wages above it, too - so if the minimum wage for young people falls (which I believe can only affect new hires), we can reasonably expect wages in industries where a lot of young people get hired onto the minimum wage to generally fall over time, or to not keep up with inflation.
- In this way, the minimum wage itself partly determines what the market rate is.
- You just have to remember that people have to have an income or they will die. Therefore in the absence of any state control as to the lowest amount that income is, they will take what they can get, because they have to have an income or else they will die.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's what the unemployment benefit is for!
- ... yes. But I thought we all agree that generally it's better for people to be working in paid employment than being on the unemployment benefit?
- #6 is really more about the inherent disparity of power between employers and potential employees. People need jobs (largely) more than jobs need them.
- And if the market for a retail staff member in Wellington city is $13.50/hr, and you need a job, and the only jobs which you are capable of getting is in retail, then... good luck trying to persuade the boss that you're really worth $15. Like, maybe you'll get a payrise once you've been working for a while... but payrises are usually made in proportion to whatever the starting wage was (see #4!).
But people can upskill so that they can get better jobs in the future!
- That's not going to do much about their income situation now, is it?
But all my youth staff members EVER have been totally crap.
- Well, that's clearly not true of all youth employees ever over the entire country. Perhaps you need a better hiring process? Perhaps you're a totally crap employer (it could happen to anyone, really).
- There's also a lower minimum wage for people who have just entered into the job market, which should have allowed a bit of breathing space while you trained them up.
I was an apprentice in 1975 and I earned youth rates and it was fine. Kids these days. Don't know how lucky they are. Flat in a 3-bedroom house with insulation? LUXURY.
- Awesome, I'm glad you had a cool apprenticeship! A quick google search doesn't disclose to me any helpful statistics from 1975. Wouldn't you like to know how average youth rates stacked up against a) the unemployment benefit at the time, b) the adult minimum wage, c) the median wage, d) the average wage and e) some data about the cost of living? I KNOW I WOULD.
But we should incentivise employers taking on youth workers!
- Yes.
- I don't think we should create a situation where the behaviour that is incentivised is taking on young workers just because they're cheaper.
- I realise that taking on people who don't have a good employment history (or any employment history) is a risk.
- But taking on any employee is a risk. As the old adage goes, people rise to their natural level of incompetence. This leads to some awful dullards in senior and middle management (as I have myself experienced in all my previous jobs). It also makes for bad typists, engineers, machinists, teachers, neurosurgeons, baristas, barristers, and plumbers. Incompetence isn't limited to people in unskilled work! People in well-paying jobs aren't, on average, more intelligent or capable than people in jobs that don't pay well.
- The fact of that risk isn't a good enough reason to allow you to not pay people fairly. You want to work in a risk-free profession? Get a different job!
***
I kind of try, in my posts about politics, to keep calm and carry on. But underneath the bullet points and the attempts at well-formed arguments is a deep well of rage, and it goes something like this:
When you tell me that some people are only worth $2 an hour*, in a city where the cheapest flat I could find (on a cursory skim) costs $75 a week, plus expenses, plus food, plus transport and clothing and so on... when you tell me that, what you are telling me is that some people aren't worth being able to live in a house and eat until they are no longer hungry and have running hot water.
And when you tell me that, I don't have to listen to anything else you say: you're a worm, and yours is the sort of thinking that causes revolutions.
* As some disgusting fuckbag said in a Stuff.co.nz comment thread one day...
Inaugural post
This is intended to be a blog for me to ramble on about theoretical politics. I've no idea how often I'll manage to post to it, or if anyone will read it---but should you stumble upon it accidentally, hi!
A bit about me: I'm a New Zealander, I'm fiercely interested in politics, I'd describe myself as left-wing but don't necessarily think that means much, and I like analysing things. I really don't take criticism of my ideas as criticism of me (unless it's coupled with personal attacks); but I also think that people who make ad hominem attacks or who avoid the crux of the debate to suit their own opinions are doing themselves a serious disservice. I really want to know what makes people believe that their opinions are right, and I enjoy deconstructing ideas to see what makes them tick (or if they tick at all).
For various reasons, I don't intend to talk about current politics or politicians much, if at all. Of course what I'm talking about will be informed by what's going on in the news---but I think there's a number of really good sources of discussion for that, and what I really want to be doing is poking about what I believe.
An example of what I believe: there is no such thing as a good idea that doesn't work in practice. At best, an idea which doesn't work in practice has the potential for being a good idea if a lot of research, testing, and analysis is done. (This sort of thinking makes me spectacularly bad at idealist politics of any kind. I always always always want to know how things are going to work in practice, right down to details about how and where and who by information will be held after the form is sent in. Idealism, when I've encountered it, usually focusses on big-picture stuff, and I don't like plans in soft focus.)
Should this blog get any sort of traffic at all: please don't be a dick in the comments. If you think what you're writing could be construed as dickish, try to reframe it in a way that doesn't imply anyone is an ignorant buffoon with the charm and style of dirty linoleum, or refrain from commenting. Meanwhile, I'll try to respect people's arguments even if I vehemently disagree with them---though you should know that the best kind of respect I can give an argument is to test it (this goes for my own).
A bit about me: I'm a New Zealander, I'm fiercely interested in politics, I'd describe myself as left-wing but don't necessarily think that means much, and I like analysing things. I really don't take criticism of my ideas as criticism of me (unless it's coupled with personal attacks); but I also think that people who make ad hominem attacks or who avoid the crux of the debate to suit their own opinions are doing themselves a serious disservice. I really want to know what makes people believe that their opinions are right, and I enjoy deconstructing ideas to see what makes them tick (or if they tick at all).
For various reasons, I don't intend to talk about current politics or politicians much, if at all. Of course what I'm talking about will be informed by what's going on in the news---but I think there's a number of really good sources of discussion for that, and what I really want to be doing is poking about what I believe.
An example of what I believe: there is no such thing as a good idea that doesn't work in practice. At best, an idea which doesn't work in practice has the potential for being a good idea if a lot of research, testing, and analysis is done. (This sort of thinking makes me spectacularly bad at idealist politics of any kind. I always always always want to know how things are going to work in practice, right down to details about how and where and who by information will be held after the form is sent in. Idealism, when I've encountered it, usually focusses on big-picture stuff, and I don't like plans in soft focus.)
Should this blog get any sort of traffic at all: please don't be a dick in the comments. If you think what you're writing could be construed as dickish, try to reframe it in a way that doesn't imply anyone is an ignorant buffoon with the charm and style of dirty linoleum, or refrain from commenting. Meanwhile, I'll try to respect people's arguments even if I vehemently disagree with them---though you should know that the best kind of respect I can give an argument is to test it (this goes for my own).
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