Posted in economics, motherhood, politics, teenagers, Uncategorized on December 17, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
Spend it on mental health, according to this very interesting policy research. In terms of government expenditure, it is both super cheap and leads to super impressive outcomes.
What gives you best future outcomes? Spending money on the mental health of mothers and schooling systems that focus on the emotional health of children (especially in high school).
(And I suspect some of the income inequality effects in this research are crowded out by work intensification lifestyle effects).
Posted in economics, fatherhood, motherhood, separation, Uncategorized on December 11, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
Good arguments here from Cristy Clark in Overland as a response to Deveny’s ‘financial abortion’ article.
To start with, this argument completely ignores the rights of the child. According to articles 7–9 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, all children have the right to know and have a connection to their parents. Exceptions are provided for situations where ‘separation is necessary for the best interests of the child’, but a man’s desire to avoid child support payments doesn’t qualify. Even in cases when separation is warranted, it is rarely permanent in nature, leaving the door open for personal growth and renewed connection.
But the main problem with Deveny’s argument is that it buys into the neoliberal narrative of individual choice by completely ignoring the broader structural issues that fundamentally constrain women’s choices. The reality is that too many pregnant women already face a stark decision to undergo a medical termination or to risk a life of increased poverty and structural discrimination. While some women will opt to have an abortion (which, by the way, is still a criminal offence in much of Australia), termination should not be the only available option for women to avoid systematic disadvantage.
Just as we should fight for the rights of those women who want access to safe, accessible and affordable abortion, we should also be fighting for the rights of women who instead choose to carry their pregnancies to term. If not, we are punishing women for not having an abortion when a man wanted them to, and that reeks of the kind of coercive control that has no place in the feminist movement.
Posted in ableism, economics, feminism, feminist motherhood, GLBTI, motherhood, motherhood bliss, re-partnering, sex of the icky parental kind, Uncategorized on November 27, 2016 | 1 Comment »
I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.
[Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.
I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.
Perhaps it’s the word radical that needs rethinking. But what could we angle ourselves toward instead, or in addition? Openness? Is that good enough, strong enough? You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows. And the thing is, even you don’t always know.
From Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.
Posted in economics, politics, Uncategorized on November 23, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
What fantasy is Trump giving his supporters the liberty to consider? What secret have they been hiding from themselves?
Trump seems to awaken something in them that they feel they have, until now, needed to suppress. What is that thing? It is not just (as I’m getting a bit tired of hearing) that they’ve been left behind economically. (Many haven’t, and au contraire.) They’ve been left behind in other ways, too, or feel that they have. To them, this is attributable to a country that has moved away from them, has been taken away from them—by Obama, the Clintons, the “lamestream” media, the “élites,” the business-as-usual politicians. They are stricken by a sense that things are not as they should be and that, finally, someone sees it their way. They have a case of Grievance Mind, and Trump is their head kvetcher.
In college, I was a budding Republican, an Ayn Rand acolyte. I voted for Reagan. I’d been a bad student in high school and now, in engineering school, felt (and was) academically outgunned, way behind the curve. In that state, I constructed a world view in which I was not behind the curve but ahead of it. I conjured up a set of hazy villains, who were, I can see now, externalized manifestations, imaginary versions of those who were leaving me behind; i.e., my better-prepared, more sophisticated fellow-students. They were, yes, smarter and sharper than I was (as indicated by the tests on which they were always creaming me), but I was . . . what was I? Uh, tougher, more resilient, more able to get down and dirty as needed. I distinctly remember the feeling of casting about for some world view in which my shortfall somehow constituted a hidden noble advantage.
From George Saunders’ “Who are all these Trump supporters?” in The New Yorker.
Posted in arguments with your partner, economics, feminism, motherhood sux, politics, Uncategorized, work and family (im)balance on November 15, 2016 | 3 Comments »
And it was published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Have you ever run with a baby? You’re up, you scoop, you leap. Bone against bone, you and the baby in your arms knock against one another. But within two of your running strides, the baby knows to fold herself into you, she tucks under your chin and presses against your chest. Two strides, heart pounding, and you both find flight.
Babies must know, somewhere primitive in them, how to be held by someone running. Because two strides and the instinct awakens, they’re suddenly weightless in your arms, moulded against you.
Posted in economics, individualism, race/anti-racism, Uncategorized on October 23, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
This, “How American politics went insane” in The Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch is the MOST interesting political article I’ve read in years, and it has broad application to the chaos of Australian politics, too. I don’t agree with it all.. but it’s right about many, many aspects and it’s a difficult conclusion to sit with. Thrillingly challenging.
Parties, machines and hacks may not have been pretty, but at their best they did their job so well that the country forgot why it needed them.
Posted in economics, politics, stillness, Uncategorized, work and family (im)balance on October 23, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
our society is currently gripped by a pervasive ideology of work. It is continuously preached to us as the pinnacle of human virtue. If you’re not doing superhuman stints at the office then something is wrong with you. And don’t even mention the word unemployed … that’s blasphemy.
The most worrying facet about the ideology of work is this: we are obliged to toil even when it’s not really necessary in concrete, economic terms. Appearing super-busy becomes more about fulfilling a societal expectation than doing something useful to society.
From Peter Fleming’s “The way to a better work-life balance? Unions, not self-help” in The Guardian.
