“I have a mother. I had to have.
I love her whether she’s good or bad.
I love her whether she’s live or dead,
Whether she’s an angel or an old dope-head.”

I suppose the Maoist line is also that I’m only a pseudo-Pirate Queen…

Oh god. There’s an awful pseudo-echo bouncing around this blog…

Sure most Mums prefer children keep their room tidy, don’t overly body pierce or cake their faces in make-up young ages. But it is perfectly normal and healthy to do precisely those things even in the face of her opposite preference, and this is even more so the case for 20-30 year olds.

And, Adam, it is perfectly normal too for mothers to not want their offspring to leave home when they have needs that would be better met if their children stayed put. A similar process goes on, to return to where we started, when children stay at home and take advantage of the need of their mothers.

Perhaps it is mutual exploitation. But my sympathy lies with the mothers.

Pseudo-Kim.

Heh!

I suppose the Maoist line is also that I’m only a pseudo-Pirate Queen…

I have no intention of getting into a discussion of Iraq on this thread, as it has nothing to do with what I wanted to talk about.

Dream on, Kim. His tendentiousness knows no bounds.

Watch and marvel as patrickm turns Is Missy Higgins a Lesbian into an Iraq stoush…

The starting point of anybody with the slightest idea that they are progressive ought to stand firm with those Iraqi masses lesbians who are being attacked by al Qaeda, Baathists, and Shia death squads – they are all racist homophobic thugs who need to be defeated if humanity angsty singer-songwriting is to progress at all.

Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation was a pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War…

Pacifists are entitled to their peculiar views but people who are not pacifists who seek to make use of pacifism to cloud the issues involved in specific wars are beyond contempt.

When the goal is;

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

those of us who are not pacifists must do so by overthrowing tyranny and demanding democratic norms be adhered to. We are unable to cop out and pretend. Tyranny will not vanish of its own accord anymore than slavery would in the USA (when the workers of the world and their mother’s earlier stood behind the stars and stripes).

Mothers from Iraq and Britain, to the US, Denmark and Australia are grieving for those blown up for attending University or the market places because they are the wrong sect or for those defending their right to schooling and shopping.

Kim is a classic pseudo-leftist; supporting the war in Afghanistan yet failing to support the progressive mothers of Iraq against the reactionary mothers!

Some mother’s are wishing their sons and daughters well as they take on and defeat the enemies of all humanity in Iraq, others are that enemy who are certainly cheering their progeny to martyrdom.

Working class mothers throughout the world are not going to succumb to pacifism, any more than they are prepared to pay more for electricity, petrol, water and food and to cut their family’s standard of living. They will back revolution and development. They want cheaper prices and demonstrate it every day as they seek the best buys they can get.

The issues that are starkly before western supporters of Middle Eastern progressives are the issues of protracted war and the requirement for bourgeois revolution. Those who are not pacifists yet promote such a concept 70 years after the likes of Belsen made it a bankrupt position for the vast bulk of us are a sad little joke. That they are mistaken for anything to do with a fighting left, a genuine left is a brief tragedy. Such nonsense in the face of the need to conduct a war cannot last long.

The starting point of anybody with the slightest idea that they are progressive ought to stand firm with those Iraqi masses who are being attacked by al Qaeda, Baathists, and Shia death squads – they are all racist thugs who need to be defeated if humanity is to progress at all.

Cornell University is a private institution, and the American Journal of Sociology is not publicly-funded.

I understand you’re enrolled at a university. You ought to be able to access Correll’s article via a database. Go and do that, read it, and see if the methodology stacks up. I’d be happy to argue the toss on this, as I’m sure would Kim, but your arguments from ignorance are just a waste of time.

The point is that the absence would be much better paid for by other taxpayers than by an individual employer.

I’d agree, dd, but that’s policy pie in the sky in a country like this, sadly.

What a heartbreaking and tragically dyspeptic take on motherhood. If it is canonical among modern-day sociologists not to distinguish between a mother’s love and a paid employee, it is high time we had a public debate on the continuation of publicly-funded sociology “research”

Currently the employer doesn’t pay: hence the term “unpaid maternity leave”. There are the transaction costs associated with filling a mat leave position, which makes me think that Labor’s proposal to allow a second year unpaid mat leave makes sense: if you’ve already granted one year, it might make sense to grant two. If it doesn’t, you just say so. And the same with returning to work part-time.

This goes to the heart of bosses being rational. There’s nothing new about giving workers the “right” to request part-time work or another year of parental leave. Workers currently can request anything they damn well want. The only new requirement under Labor’s plan is that instead of bosses saying “No”, they would have to say “No, because…”. It forces them to act rationally or, if they already are acting rationally, to articulate it (Rationality being defined by refernece to the needs of the business enterprise, of course)

Moving beyond Labor’s plan, a better model for paid mat leave might be workers compensation. Collectively, bosses gain by having women reproduce the next generation of workers, so ideally should be prepared to support it. But there’s a free rider problem. So the idea is to pool the risk: every boss pays a premium toward a paid mat leave scheme, regardless of the number of women they actually employ. Thus reproduction is financially supported but there’s no perverse incentive for individual bosses not to hire women of childbearing age.

But Mother’s Day is irredeemably commercialied.

Labour Day, which we just celebrated in Qld, should be broadened. With less emphasis on unions/labor politicians, and more on all workers, including ‘home duties’, people injured doing work, volunteers and contractors.

The thing is, I’m not convinced that bad faith on the part of the son or daughter is the right explanation for the ‘trend’, which is what Philly implies. These culturally unacceptable symbioses are not so very simple as that. The funny thing is, personally, I felt it was bad faith to continue living at home and when I turned 21 I left. But I can’t extend my own feelings to others. Actually, I get the sense that my parents may have been happier if I’d hung around a little longer.

But yeah, not exactly representative.

Tell me, have you yourself been the victim of such “great galumping lardarses” of which you speak? If so, I hope that you find the strength to send them on their way, rather than uttering embittered injunctions against people whose lives you do not know anything about. Personally, I have never encountered such a person, and those of my peers who do live with their parents are not at all like the people you are describing. They seem to have maintained good, friendly relationships with their parents and have largely taken responsibility for their own affairs.

But this is exactly what opponents of paid maternity leave say! The problem is not that the employers are being irrational – that could be fixed easily as most businesses are pretty good judges of where a dollar comes from – but that from their individual POV they’re being all too rational. They don’t want to bear the risk of the cost of an absence so they’ll force all moms to bear it by not employing or promoting them.

Simply denouncing this as “unfair” (which of course it is) does not solve the problem – markets are not about fairness.

The point is that the absence would be much better paid for by other taxpayers than by an individual employer.

And why is getting your laundry done and meals cooked for nix, plus low rent, enough to both allow yourself to intrude on your parents’ privacy, lives and free time, as well as live safe, unadventurous, second-hand parasitic lives?