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The Forum > Article Comments > Nation moved - father and son reunited > Comments

Nation moved - father and son reunited : Comments

By Warwick Marsh, published 16/9/2010

The whole nation has been moved by the story of a brave and resolute father who set out to find his little boy lost.

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Houellebecq,

Interesting perspective. It is not a nice feeling seening ones gender criticised and I can understand why women can get defensive about it, as do some men.

Sadly generalizations are made especially about men ;), but the truth neither gender has the monopoly on being either bad or good.

Ages ago when I heard that marriage oppressed women, I was keen to find out why. To this day I am still searching for anything concrete, mostly it is a matter of perspective. If one sees marriage as being oppressive then that is all one will see.

Relationships can be good or bad for both genders, but as Myrna Blythe wrote, the media is busy selling unhappiness to women.
Posted by JamesH, Wednesday, 22 September 2010 11:03:59 AM
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The women-as-victim brand is like coke, it's so well established, people call cola 'coke'. I go up to the counter at KFC and ask for a coke, even when they only sell Pepsi.

The men-as-victim brand is Pepsi, forever trying to get some attention but everybody really likes coke better;
It's the real thing.

Pepsi tried to be the choice of the new generation, but really, everyone still likes coke. The brand will never be usurped, it was first into the market and no matter how good Pepsi could taste, most people will only ever like coke.

So, antiseptic is trying to at least give the kiddies a chance to try Pepsi. But he keeps mentioning it in comparison to coke you see. Free Kick for Coke.
Posted by Houellebecq, Wednesday, 22 September 2010 11:55:31 AM
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Houellebecq, I think you're quite wrong. I don't give a toss whether the women posters here are "on my side" or not. I similarly don't give a toss whether the males are. I'm simply fed up with the discussion always devolving to the kneejerking of would-be victims.

I have never claimed to be a victim, but that's because I won't allow myself to be one. The thing about victimhood is that it's demeaning. It implies that one is incapable of acting to help oneself. As a basic principle, Government should only get involved when citizens are incapable of making their own arrangements, yet the way so much of Australia's social welfare state has been structured, it takes great determination to avoid it. It is a badly broken system because it uses tax dollars to administer the distribution of other tax dollars, when the whole thing could be simplified by simply collecting fewer tax dollars in the first place and abolishing the redistributive dinosaur that has evolved.

From http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/about_us/facts.htm :

Centrelink is in the top 100 of Australian companies in terms of size and turnover, and distributes $86.8 billion in social security payments on behalf of policy departments. Centrelink:

* has 6.84 million customers
* pays 10.43 million individual entitlements and records more than 6 billion electronic customer transactions each year
* administers products and services for more than 20 government agencies
* employs more than 27,000 staff
* has more than 1,000 service delivery points ranging from large Customer Service Centres to small visiting services
* received 33.7 million telephone calls
* grants 2.7 million new claims each year.

As a guide, personal income tax in 2009 amounted to a total of just over $125 billion, so that means that Centrelink is redistributing just under 70% of all of that, a great deal going straight back into the same hands from whence it came and costing the taxpayer some $2.8 billion, or roughly the amount of money that is transferred via child support. A large number of people would be freed up to work in the expanding minerals sector, .
Posted by Antiseptic, Wednesday, 22 September 2010 12:03:43 PM
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JamesH that was one of the best posts I've seen you make - well reasoned and without bias.

The "all men are bastards" and "all women are victims" is only the extreme end of the spectrum, most of what happens sits in the middle with the pendulum swaying slightly one way or the other on the various issues.

All I can say as a woman is I am sick of being put in the position by some, as having responsibility for some men's behaviours by the way I dress, or what I wear, or because I wasn't forceful enough, or because I was too forceful, or friendliness was mistaken for attraction.

Most of the time people can make themselves clearly heard but sometimes, and it is those times that count, reason and commonsense does not prevail and some intervention might be required. Such as in the other thread on sexual harassment or in child custody matters where men have been disadvantaged merely because they are not the mother.

I just want people to step up to the plate and take responsibility and that goes for both men and women.

Egalitarianism by its nature means that each has to give ground and maybe because of traditional expectations occasionally one group may have to give more ground than the other if the pendulum was too far set in favour or at the disadvantage of the other.

It is easy to take offence in these debates as JamesH said, no-one likes their gender being generalised or demonised. Ultimately our behaviour and our legislature should seek to get the best outcomes. It comes not down to gender but to individual responsibiity and choices.
Posted by pelican, Wednesday, 22 September 2010 12:18:37 PM
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Well we have evolved from the story at hand about one man, one woman, and one child into the world's issues. Now the NIS-4 has already been picked apart and again you are only looking at the summary report. As proven by several bloggers the NIS-3 report and summary are quite different. You cannot look at say murders for example in several cities and determine that a city in Arizona with a population of 10,000 which had 10 murders per year is safer to live in than say a city in California with a population of 100,000 with 50 murders. Yes the larger city had more murders, but the per capita rate is less in the large city, meaning that it is probably safer to live in the large city.

The same rings true for abuse. In some reports which do not take into consideration the amount of time spent by women caring for children, versus that of men caring for children it is said that women abuse more. But if you take into consideration the fact that women are with children more, the abuse rates skyrocket for men.

As far as the poster who said what does who cares for the child before divorce have to do with anything - it has EVERYTHING to do with it. This is what the child has known. Expert after expert has stated that when parents go through divorce that a child's life is going to change and as parents we should make this transition as easy and simple as possible. Hence we should allow this child to continue on as much as possible in the life with the caretaker he or she has known.

But the time for regrets is not after everything is said and done. You should have been a part of your child's life from day one. And no it is not gatekeeping when a woman does things a certain way, it is called mothering. This is the problem. Motherhood is being pathologized and that is sad. Motherhood is more natural than fatherhood.
Posted by AbuseVictims, Wednesday, 22 September 2010 1:08:57 PM
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Why thank you! Pelican.

Our biases and prejudices sadly are not only influenced by our own make up, but by life experiences and what we read or hear.

There is an interesting discussion going on about the americanization of mental illness, and the american interpretation of the signs and sypmtoms of mental illness is changing the perspective in other countries.

Hence what before was not seen as a problem, now becomes a problem.(rightly or wrongly)

Take this a step further, what was once seen as normal and acceptable in relationships can over a period of time becomes abnormal.

The bombardment of negative articles about relationships, must have a huge impact, in that for some people it will influence their perspective on their relationship in a negative fashion.

Some people are highly suseptible to these influences.

I think it Nina Funnel who blamed boys for the fact that girls were having brazileans. Just maybe it is actually girls who influencing each other. As far as I know boys still do not have that much access to that area of a womans/girls body.
Posted by JamesH, Wednesday, 22 September 2010 1:24:27 PM
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