Sunday 28 July 2013

Grrrrrrr!

Anger, oh how often you have visited me lately, let me count some of the ways:

  • The frequently women-hating reaction to Labour daring to suggest that they make take some deliberate, transparent and necessary structural steps towards lifting their number of women MPs.  
  • Trevor Mallard baiting another MP in the House by calling him "cougar bait."
  • People who don't lay out their arguments properly and then don't come to the meeting to discuss the issue so you never really know where they stand before you make the decision.
  • Changing a law because some state agencies broke it and the solution to that problem is somehow to make it legal, with the consequence that a whole heap of people who should have privacy no longer will.
  • Promulgation by supposed lefties of the antiquated idea that women are precious flowers who should not be sullied by the putrid compost of politics and the stale water of being politicians or something like that, this metaphor is tortured enough already without actually trying to get it to make sense.
  • Reflecting on how unfair and wrong and conservative New Zealand's abortion laws and provision actually are, yet again.
  • Cancer.  Always.  
  • The increasingly dirty SkyCity pokies for convention centre deal.  
  • Doctors who want to be GPs but don't want to prescribe contraception.  It's your JOB, yo.
Ok, enough ragey bullet points from me - what's angrifying you?







8 comments:

Deborah said...

All of the above, Julie.

Also, from the same sort of space as Mallard's "cougar bait" comment, Shane Jones' comment about geldings. I've yet to work out whether he was referring to women, or referring to men who listen to women.

Julie said...

Thanks Deborah - the gelding thing confused and appalled me too. Are women just men without testicles? Biology and evolution suggest that actually XX is the default state of bodies and XY a mutation, but whatever. Quite apart from the whole more than two genders, women are not inferior forms of men, etc etc. Jones has done his chips with me.

A friend tweeted me this an Argh-maker for her. http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/8974254/Gender-pay-gap-also-exists-among-children

AlisonM said...

Thanks Julie. Where to start? I keep creating new documents with little notes at the top that outline what I'm going to look into and write/blog/journalise about When I Have Time (2014)... The folder, "Article Ideas", is rather full. If I had to pick one thing right now that makes me angry, it would be ignorance (both wilful and not) of history, and not just re the abortion struggle (as one might think given my current book thing), but particularly the history of this country. I feel it feeds so much that is destructive in our political life. What an amorphous thing to feel angry about, huh.

Danielle said...

I've been blocking updates from certain people on FB recently because the slew of sexist, slut shaming "funny" pictures they share make me want to wring some necks. Note some of these people are women. Blech.

The Pakeha Party shebang is still rarking me off because rednecks are still going on about it on FB.

God I really just need to stop going on that infernal website.

Anonymous said...

Main source of anger at the moment: whenever I hear the government say that extending paid parental leave is too expensive... I've got a baby due in the new year, and given my partner is still paying back a student loan, we're going to struggle to get by on just one income. Extended paid parental leave would make a big difference. And assuming retirement age is at least 68 by 2055, I'll have more than 40 years of paying taxes to make up for the cost. It's such a no-brainer. And superannuation costs $10 BILLION a year. That's literally 100 times the cost of extending paid parental leave an extra 3 months. ARGH.

- Elley

Frank said...

What's pissing me off?!?!

* How the blankety-blank-blank can Key be so unfeasibly popular with the Great Unwashed despite all the shit swirling around him???

* Why do quasi-fascist supporters of the National Party rabbit on about supporting the GCSB Bill - and then sign their messages with a f*****g pseudonym?! (More on that on the DAILING BLOG, maybe tomorrow)

* How can the Nats get away with turning NZ into a Little Soviet Republic, Surveillance State with such little fuss - whilst Labour got slammed and pilloried as a "Nanny State" for daring to suggest we have more efficient shower heads?!?!

* When did evil aliens from the Fifth Dimension abduct Paula Bennett and replace her with an emotionless, conniving, nasty duplicate?!

* Peter Dunne. Why? *facepalm*

That'll do for now. Can't let my blood pressure get too high these days...

J said...

Can you refer me to any sources or a blog post about what's wrong with our abortion laws please? I've been hanging out on Jezebel a lot have been thinking that ours are pretty great, at least by comparison - but I'm now looking for NZ feminist resources because I know little about NZ feminist discourse (I'm new to this whole topic really) - and this is a prime example of how clueless I am.
Thanks

J (I'll sign up properly once I can think of a screen name. I always take such decisions too seriously)

Julie said...

Hi J, We have a list of links to some of the abortion posts here, including covering the inadequacies of the current law, here.