Interesting Links for 17-10-2016

[andrewducker]

Do men and women really have different personalities? (tags: personality gender ) Power doesn't make people bad-it just reveals their true natures (tags: power politics personality psychology ) Ironic World Standards Day (tags: world standards usa funny ) Amy Goodman Is Facing Prison for Reporting on the Dakota Access Pipeline. (tags:

Comments

[gonzo21]

The Brexiteers answer to the lack of workers prepared to do those agricultural jobs is just to put the British people to work, I literally heard a conservative MP saying they would replace the Eastern Europeans labouring in the fields with disabled British people who could work for their benefits for a change.

It's a fucking catastrophe though isn't it. I haven't seen a single piece of good news about what Brexit could bring us. Other than 'Taking back our country! Wooo!' Which I still don't know what that means.

[alitheapipkin]

Yep, I saw someone tweeting an article from the Sun suggesting unemployed people and prisoners could be sent to work in the fields. Labour camps, here we come.

Me either. And I really want to know if anyone obsessing about 'sovereignty' actually knows what they mean by it.

[gonzo21]

Then when the poor and desperate who are forced to claw in the fields start to revolt and riot, the police will be sent in to contain them. And it will be all the excuse the Tories need to really crack down on all dissent everywhere.

[andrewducker]

The thing is, I have no objection to to disabled people working, and many* people are happier when they have a job and feel like they are actively engaged in things.

But I have absolutely no faith that it will be done well, and the idea that disabled people are somewhow best suited for hard physical labour seems...unlikely to me, let alone the idea that any government intervention in this area would be done sympathetically.

*Obviously not everyone, particularly not people with mental health issues which make coping with a range of issues hard.

[brixtonbrood]

Unemployed British people with the physical ability to do manual labour doing the agricultural jobs that need doing is not a bad idea - in return for a proper minimum wage rather than as workfare. But the way the benefits system works makes it pretty much impossible - it takes so long for the system to react to a change in your income that any form of temporary work will leave you at the food bank or Wonga once it ends.

[andrewducker]

Which was precisely the problem that Universal Credit was supposed to solve, making it always worthwhile to work, by allowing you to update the system daily with any money you'd earned.

Sadly, they've completely fucked it up and taken 6 years to deliver nothing.

[hirez]

I must say that I would be somewhat concerned at the thought of a set of untrained people being let loose on a modern mechanised farm.

[nojay]

Most of the ag work being done by Polish 20-somethings living ten to a rented flat is in food processing, not actually picking potatoes out of the dirt by hand[1] in a farmer's field somewhere ten kilometres from the nearest bus stop. That sort of food processing is done in factory sheds close to a distribution centre for the supermarkets and other customers, packing the potatoes and other veg ready for the shop shelves. There's also things like greenhouse production of lettuce, tomatoes, mushrooms etc. which is more hands on but it's not the big employer.

Most of it is seasonal work though, not surprisingly. It's not any kind of regular employment and not really a living wage once agency expenses (i.e. kickbacks) for travel, protective equipment, administration etc. are factored in.

[1] I did that as a kid, back in the 1960s on a relative's farm. They didn't grow enough potatoes to justify buying a machine to harvest them and later when the Potato Marketing Board's subsidies went away they stopped growing potatoes altogether.

Do men and women really have different personalities?

[apostle_of_eris]

The article seems to say, "looks like it!", but never hints how the respective bell-curve distributions of characteristics overlap. That would help illuminate how much difference there appears to be.
"Essentialism" was one of the buggaboos of "second wave" feminism, but now that it is accepted that as many as 1% of the population may be transsexual, some sort of essentialism seems to be accepted. I haven't run into discussions of how to resolve the conflicts.

RE: Do men and women really have different personalities?

[andrewducker]

Some people accept it, some don't. Some think that it's essential in body, some in mind, some in culture.

There is no way to resolve these conflicts, because what matters to different people varies so much.

Brexit

[apostle_of_eris]

Ah that wonderful "British constitution" which everyone insists is really there except that there is no there there.

RE: Brexit

[andrewducker]

The constituion is not in a single document, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

(It bloody well _should_ be in a single document, of course.)

You can see a list of which documents make it up here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom#History