It’s been a busy year…

… for The Pompous Git. In March, he released Dr John Young’s memoir, Going Down Another Lane. On 1 July, John’s sister Heather Goodare’s Foiled Creative Fire will be publically available. Yesterday the press proof of This Gardening Life arrived from IngramSpark. In researching the many essays on science and climate change The Git penned on his old blog, he discovered the entry for when he started This Gardening Life — it was in 2002! From the same era:

Feminism is one of those words that contains an apparent self-contradiction. My free Word Web dictionary defines it as”: A doctrine that advocates equal rights for women”. Not “equal rights for people, regardless of sex, colour, marital status, age etc”. Just… women. By implication that means non-women, that is men, should not have equal rights. If it is meant to stand for “equal rights for everyone,” we already have a perfectly good word for that: “egalitarian”. So, the word feminism is either redundant, or about anything but equality, or equal rights.

The early agenda of the feminists in the 1960s and 70s was apparently a logical extension of the suffragette movement that resulted in women achieving the vote and property rights. The demands of the new movement in the early 1970s were for:

* equal pay
* equal employment opportunity
* free contraceptive services
* abortion on demand
* free 24-hour childcare

The Whitlam government in Australia, before being effectively torpedoed by the CIA, managed to introduce legislation to provide equal pay for equal work and significant moves were afoot regarding the rest. Since Australia, like the US, is a federation of states, the provision of equal pay for federal employees affected only that minority employed by the federal government. Nevertheless, the Women’s Electoral Lobby had proved itself a potent political force in a major federal election and continued to have similar effect on subsequent state elections, as well as public opinion. There were few who took South Australian, John Petch’s “lunatic fringe” label seriously. In The Git’s instance, it made him want to vote for the “lunatic fringe” on the grounds that the lunatics currently in charge were noticeably deficient by most measures!

The demand for equal pay met with considerable approval from many, if not most. Women who performed the same task as a man to the same measure of competency, logically should receive the same remuneration. The Git often made the observation at the time that if there were to be a financial reward for belonging to a particular sex, then women should be the recipients, not men. The women in his employ were more punctual, less likely to turn up to work inebriated/hungover, had fewer absences and were less inclined to leave without notice. They never achieved the same heights of performance as the best of the men, but were far more consistent from day-to-day and week-to-week. They were generally also far less demanding of my time and easier to get along with.

Sunday 1 October 2000

Relaxing…

Thought for the day:

“First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII—and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.” — Douglas Adams

More Words from the Dying

Back in October, The Git announced his intention to bring on his death rather earlier than Nature would. He explained that by refusing food and fluid would cause his ailing heart to fail within a couple of weeks. This is not suicide; it is perfectly legal. The Git’s Death Certificate will record his death as due to “natural causes”. This has not prevented some to take very great offence at The Git exercising his legal rights.

A couple of weeks ago, two policemen knocked on The Git’s door. The Git asked “What have you come to arrest me for?” expecting them to be seeking information about goings on in the neighbourhood. They informed him that they had received a report that The Git was depressed and in imminent danger of committing suicide. It took an hour to persuade them that no, The Git was far from depressed; he was in fact in a much improved frame of mind for making the decision to die early than he had been prior. Far from “committing suicide” he was merely exercising his legal right to control his own life.

While one of the policemen was persuaded that The Git was far from depressed and that he had no intention of committing suicide, the other was quite insistent that he had failed to pursue alternatives. The Git has no alternative to the medical profession that has persistently treated him with contempt. See here. While his GP would happily prescribe adequate pain-relief, he is prevented from doing so by the law. Both he and the district nurse agree that The Git’s pain would be better controlled with a daily dose of methadone, but this is utterly and completely illegal in Australia. “Only doctors authorised by the Secretary of Health can lawfully prescribe methadone. Unauthorised prescription also carries heavy penalties.” Only a doctor who is an approved methadone prescriber can prescribe methadone and only to treat heroin dependence.