Age binnegan

The No advocates all say that a Yes majority will inevitably lead to boys wearing dresses and dogs and cats living together.
I'm reminded of the old English analysis:
" The Principle of the Wedge is that you should not act justly now for fear of raising expectations that you may act still more justly in the future -- expectations which you are afraid you will not have the courage to satisfy. A little reflection will make it evident that the Wedge argument implies the admission that the persons who use it cannot prove that the action is not just. If they could, that would be the sole and sufficient reason for not doing it, and this argument would be superfluous.
 The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do an admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case, which, ex hypothesi, is essentially different, but superficially resembles the present one. Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time."
That's from Microcosmographia Academica, in 1908.  Little has changed.

Give me that old time religion

I entirely agree with Julie Szego  (Age, 9/9/16) that in a secular society like ours we shouldn't tolerate religously-based body-shaming clothing practices.  I do, however, have some difficulty understanding why covering up the bits that Jehovah wants covered is OK and only covering up the extra bits that Allah wants covered is wrong. Let's have some consistency; if we're going to say that god's handiwork should be exposed to the sun without shame, let's listen to Apollo and start with trousers.

Age, written in water

John Hattie suggests that a teacher with an ATAR of 57 will have 40-50% of their students brighter than them.  This is beyond ridiculous.  Leaving aside the obvious bias of a government that wants to defy the market by getting better teachers without paying more for them and an educational system that wants to blame its failures on bad students rather than rotten teaching, ATARs are not a simple measure of intelligence, whatever that is.  Your ATAR depends, among other things, on your class, your motivation, your school, your family, and your luck on the day, and any suggestion that it’s an unchangeable lifetime sentence is both stupid and cruel.