“I regard the afterlife as a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark.”
I used to be afraid of the dark, too. Then I grew up. Now, having grown up, I don’t find this fear admirable in others, or worthy of respect.
Good Reason
It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.
Page 38 of 126
Nice to see this article about a successful co-parenting situation.
SEAN BROGAN is ”enormously proud” of what he and his ex-wife, Ayela Thilo, have achieved for their family.
Divorced for nine years, they share custody of their three children, Arielle, 17, Sienna, 13, and Oliver, 11, in a ”week on week off” arrangement.
Mr Brogan agreed with the findings of the Shared Care Parenting Arrangements study that shared custody is positive for both parental satisfaction and children’s wellbeing.
”In a funny kind of way it has given the kids a sense of stability,” he said. ”They know where they’ll be at any given time, if they’ve got something coming up they see whether they’ll be with mum or dad and talk to that person about it.”
The arrangement has also improved his relationship with Ms Thilo by increasing co-operation and joint decision-making.
”We were determined to make it work for the children,” he said. ”It has certainly healed any rift we might have had. We talk regularly, we talk about school things. Another upside is that it allows the non-custodial parent time out in their week off and time to do all the things they want to pursue.”
It’s in the news because of a recent report evaluating shared care arrangements since 2006 (PDF). At that time, a new emphasis was placed on shared parenting arrangements, rather than custody.
Among the findings of the study:
This research confirms that children‘s wellbeing is optimised under certain circumstances:
- Parents are able to cooperate about the arrangements for the children
- Parents have a say in making decisions about the child
- There is relatively little conflict between the parents
- Parents believe that each parent is paying their fair share of the costs associated with raising children.
…
Overall, this research paints a relatively positive picture of shared care in terms both of parental satisfaction and children‘s wellbeing. However, it remains only a relatively small minority of parents who can share the care of the children and fewer still manage to sustain it for a substantial period of time.
I’m firmly of the opinion that a good divorce between people who are genuinely concerned about their kids and who are determined to share the parenting is far less damaging for kids than an intractable, conflict-filled marriage. I may be one of the lucky ones, but this kind of arrangement has worked well for me and my boys, who are so far thriving under the care of both their loving parents.
It’s a big ask. It requires parents to work together at a time when their will to do so may be at its weakest. But perhaps knowing that this setup is good for children would help parents to muster the ability to make shared parenting work when staying married doesn’t.
The US Drug Enforcement Agency hires a lot of translators. They’ve announced that they’re looking to hire translators for African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), or as it’s sometimes known, ‘Ebonics’.
I remember the Oakland controversy in 1996, and it’s disappointing the discussion hasn’t advanced since then. I know that people aren’t born linguists, and I’m used to people having strong feelings about standard v. non-standard dialects, but I wasn’t expecting the depth of ignorance and vitriol that I’ve seen on the Net in the wake of this announcement.
Many comments on this issue appear in a variety of English I call ‘Ivorics’. For your convenience, I’ve given a translation, with some relevant facts.
From tooslow4me67
its like blacks are’nt american.they now have a half assed mumble language the dumb pres wants to glorify.learn correct english and excel.don’t take credit for something that makes a joke of you.
Translation: AAVE is just lazy mumbling.
In fact, AAVE shows regular patterns of word-final consonant dropping, like many other varieties of English. A lot of people know about ‘aks’ instead of ‘ask’ — one feature of AAVE. Turns out that speakers of standard English used to say ‘aks’ until about the 1500s. It’s a normal process.
From an African American:
My point is . . . just about any Black person who has been around friends, family or whatever, can “translate” ebonics. It is not a separate language, it is simply people being lazy in speaking and not completing their words. It’s not like it’s Swahili or Ibo or some real dialect.
Translation: I can understand them perfectly well when they use their lazy ghetto slang.
In fact, AAVE, like any sufficiently divergent variety, may not be comprehensible to a speaker of standard English. And generating a sentence is another matter altogether. If you try to fake it, you will sound like a real jive turkey.
A commenter at the Washington Post
Have we all lost our minds? The 1996 introduction of “Ebonics” by some Oakland teachers was an attempt to get additional funding. The teachers believed that African-American students were not given their fair share of the various additional school board special funding. End of story
Translation: They’re after your money.
In fact, the controversy in Oakland was, in part, the result of an attempt to procure funding to teach SE to AAVE speakers.
From the Washington Informer
But what’s sad and ironic here is that while Ebonics continues to be vilified and ridiculed, the drug trade and criminality has forced the DEA to see it as a legitimate language. And I can’t help but think that if more school systems had done that [offered academic help to AAVE speakers] years ago, many of the suspected black drug dealers that the DEA now needs to be able to understand to put in prison might not have chosen that route.
Translation: AAVE is an on-ramp to crime.
While this author has good intentions, and I agree with the education angle, I think we underestimate the extent to which speakers of AAVE are already familiar with standard English. It’s the speakers of SE that are unfamiliar with AAVE. Speakers of AAVE are the bilingual ones, not SE speakers.
From some idiot.
In one corner, we have the ebonics apologist, Stanford linguistics professor H. Samy Alim, who said, “It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognized the legitimacy of this language, yet the authorities and police are recognizing that this is a language that they don’t understand. It really tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognizing African-American speech.”
Umm … no.
First of all, you, sir, are a proponent of ebonics, yet that quote shows your preferred version of English is pretty much indistinguishable from Winston Churchill’s. In fact, you can communicate complex thoughts to other people BECAUSE THE SCHOOLS YOU ATTENDED DID NOT TEACH YOU TO SPEAK JIVE.
If they had, you’d be screwed. In fact, you might have to be a drug dealer, since no one doing the hiring in the non-criminal world would be able to understand you.
What ignorant twaddle. He thinks AAVE isn’t capable of expressing complex thoughts, which it is. He also doesn’t seem to grasp the idea that different codes are appropriate for different situations. And he doesn’t question the wisdom of lecturing a linguist on linguistics. What a maroon.
The fact is that language changes. Eventually in any language, there will arise some variety that differs from the ‘standard’ variety. People will then consider that variety to be ‘inferior’, ‘lazy’, ‘corrupt’, or a lot of other bad names, depending on how they feel about the people who speak it. But what people don’t usually realise is that the non-standard variety isn’t just cobbled together. It has internally consistent rules of its own. The speakers aren’t trying to speak standard English and failing.
Criticising someone on the basis of their race is seen as less and less acceptable these days. But as we can see, it’s still acceptable to throw up the same old ugly caricatures on the basis of language use.
How do we go about forming opinions? As for me, when a moral or political decision comes up, I rationally sit down, weigh up the pros and cons of the options, and take the view that I think is best based on the evidence.
No, just kidding. I probably do it the other way around like everyone else. Form a snap opinion, and then hunt around for evidence to justify it. I don’t like the idea that this is how we operate, but it’s probably true all the same.
My first experience with political opinion-forming was the US election in 1972. My entire Republican family was voting for Nixon, but I thought I’d vote for McGovern. I didn’t even know what voting was. I’d seen the primaries, and I thought that when you voted, you had to go and stand next to your candidate so they could count you. There I imagined my family, standing with Nixon (with his fingers in ‘V for Victory’ pose), while on the other side of the room it was just George and five-year-old me. Why did I take the view I did? Why did they? I don’t know, but it is funny that no one in my family has changed voting patterns since then.
Sometimes my opinions lead on from prior opinions, or from values that I have, but where did they come from? I can’t say it’s anything more conscious than my ‘voting’ for McGovern all those years ago. I’ve often suspected that my opinions are based on some tendency, a leaning one way or the other that tips other decisions. But what tendency? Looking out for in-group v sympathy for out-group? Fearful or fearless? Authoritarian or democratic? Or something more primal?
New research highlights the role of simple ordinary disgust.
This is the argument that some behavioral scientists have begun to make: That a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments. Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn’t return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.
…
Psychologists like [Jonathan] Haidt are leading a wave of research into the so-called moral emotions — not just disgust, but others like anger and compassion — and the role those feelings play in how we form moral codes and apply them in our daily lives. A few, like Haidt, go so far as to claim that all the world’s moral systems can best be characterized not by what their adherents believe, but what emotions they rely on.
Primal emotions as atoms in the periodic table of our moral chemistry. Maybe these simple reactions are too simple to explain the complex range of opinions that grow out of them, but if opinion-forming goes back to something simpler, then disgust seems like a good candidate. I’ll be looking forward to more of this research.
On Election Day, I volunteered for the Australian Sex Party, handing out ‘how-to-vote’ pamphlets at polling places for a few hours. Here’s how it went.
The Oxford folks are urging, nay, imploring people to adopt a low-frequency word in their Save the Words campaign.
It’s a very attractive website, but it’s all a bit silly, really. Some words just don’t catch on, so there’s no point in trying to rescue them from obsolescence. But admit it — aren’t you glad that you could study ‘siagonology’, move about ‘roomthily’, or just act ‘vappous’ if you wanted to?
It’s bringing out the word nerd in me, I’m afraid to say.
I’m volunteering to help the Australian Sex Party. Yep, this election Saturday, I’ll be at my local polling place, handing out ‘How to Vote’ cards and answering questions.
One question I’ve already gotten is “What on earth are you helping them for?” I’ll confess, it does go deeper than the desire for a bright yellow ASP t-shirt, or to make fundy heads go asplody.
When I first heard about the Australian Sex Party, I thought, “Ha. Funny.” Then when I saw their policies, I thought, “Wait a minute. I agree with most of this.” Here are my favourite ASP policies.
To overturn mandatory ISP filtering of the Internet and return Internet censorship to parents and individuals.
The Internet filter is Labor’s idea, and it’s a shame they’re clinging to it. Even the Liberal Party has disavowed it.
To bring about the development of a national sex education curriculum as a first step in preventing the sexualisation of children.
Yes, yes, and yes. This is what prevents pregnancies (and abortions): better information and availability of contraception.
To create total equal rights in all areas of the law including same sex marriage.
Neither of the major parties has had the courage to come out in favour of this. When someone who’s an otherwise progressive thinker refuses to condone gay marriage, you know what that tells me? They’re willing to let prejudice prevail, for no good reason. And that they’re probably beholden to some religious ideology.
To enact national pregnancy termination laws along the same lines as divorce law — which allow for legal, no-fault and guilt-free processes for women seeking termination.
It’s a medical matter, not a political matter.
Overturn restrictions on aid to overseas family planning organisations that reference abortion.
Why is this even happening?
Convene a Royal Commission into child sex abuse in the nation’s religious institutions.
This should have already been done.
An Ethics course along the lines of the current NSW trial, developed by the St James Ethics Centre, to be incorporated into the national curriculum.
I love the idea of getting young people to examine secular ethics and ethical issues. Much more relevant than the bronze-age tribalism they’re currently getting.
Supports stem cell research, including embryonic stem cell research, and maintains it is a vital medical issue, not a religious issue.
Automatic yes.
The public education system should be secular in nature and not provide for any religious instruction whatsoever.
‘Religious instruction’ is an oxymoron.
Ending the tax exempt status for religions.
Cessation of tax-exempt status on all but the charitable work of religious institutions.
Religions don’t pay their fair share, and we end up paying their tax burden. Let them pay taxes like all other businesses.
To be fair, there are planks in the platform that I find uncomfortable, unappealing, or complicated.
To bring about equal numbers of women in the Parliament through enabling the Federal Discrimination Act to have jurisdiction extending to political parties.
This is worded funny. You can’t force equal numbers.
Decriminalisation, not legalisation, of purchase, possession and consumption of all drugs for personal use, such quantity to be defined as an amount equal or less than 14 day’s supply for one person.
I can’t stand drugs and don’t use them (including alcohol), but I see the value of moving enforcement to the supply side. Dealing would remain illegal.
Minors (under the age of 16) may obtain an abortion without the consent of a parent/guardian.
Touchy, but actually that’s the way it is now.
I understand the reasoning behind these positions, but I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with them. Even so, these aren’t deal-breakers for me. No one’s going to agree with every party position, and this will be more pronounced when the party takes a strong stand on issues, as does the ASP.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to a volunteer info meeting, or as they call it, ‘Slave Training‘. You have your choice of two meetings; they describe one as ‘vanilla’. I’m going to the other one! (Pictures soon.)
Americans: Don’t you wish you could vote for a Sex Party? Oh, I forgot: Republicans. Let me reword that. Don’t you wish you could vote for an unrepressed non-self-hating sex party?
© 2024 Good Reason
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments