Ministry of Justice workers call researcher a 'bitch' in online conversation
Ministry of Justice workers call researcher a 'bitch' in online conversation
Researcher Barbara Sumner discovered the "deeply disturbing" conversation through an Official Information Act request.
Two Ministry of Justice workers are in hot water for describing a researcher as a "bitch" in an online conversation.
Academic and author Barbara Sumner made a number of Official Information Act requests as part of her PhD research into the systems around adoption. Then, in October last year, she asked for all correspondence mentioning her by name.
"Because I had felt all along that there was a resistance to everything I sent in and you know, just the sort of snottiness, I guess, of some of the responses that came in that request. I wanted to understand how they were treating me throughout the process."
One page of the response stood out among more than 100 others. A November 2022 Teams conversation between two staffers, whose names were redacted, complained about Sumner's latest request.
They described it as "a waste of time" and said it "should have been refused on the ground of substantial collation" or that the ministry should "charge her for it and get a contractor".
"our ministerial services team sucks cuz they wouldnt let us refuse, and helen didnt push back hard [sic]," one worker wrote.
"but also shes a bitch for wanting everything. does she think govt just has unlimited resources for this type of crap lol.
"like theres no public interest in our emails back and forward."
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It got me interested in her other work!
No, that's what she's trying to make you do!
Sorry, gotta break up the seriousness. Back to serious face.
I've got some limited knowledge on adoption stuff, and yeah, some pretty awful processes. I'm tempted to say it was a different time, but I'm pretty convinced we* will find out in 50 years about terrible things happening today that would horrify future generations and probably horrify current generations.
* Well maybe not us specifically, 50 years is a long time in the future
No, that’s what she’s trying to make you do!
I mean I mentioned it because it's working on me!
Wait why aren't you going to be around in 50 years? Live to 100 go on I dare you.
I have no desire to live to 100! But maybe now I know about anticholinergic burden I might be able to be a sprightly 100 year old.
I used to know a sprightly 100 year old who still lived alone in their own home. Their longevity advice was "don't eat too many takeaways"! Bet they had a low anticholinergic burden though 😃
You've got to be careful with single data points. There are also 100 years olds saying the secret to longevity is a whiskey before breakfast, and a pack of cigarettes a day to keep the bugs away.
Yeah I'm not going to let it get between me and takeaways ha ha.
Seriously though as well as being a single data point it was self-reported and I noticed it changed depending on the interlocuter - from memory they told the local paper that the secret is going to church.
I'm pretty sure the real secret behind living a really long time is some combination of genetics and statistics (as in, if you have a 0.0001% chance of living that long, if you apply this to 8B people then you get 8,000 of these people).
Definitely. Something like 2/3 of cancer is luck for example.
Our immune system is constantly euthanising cancerous cells because they happen all the time. To "get" cancer, it has to miss the cell and let it grow to be noticeable. Lots of (bad) luck involved!
However, I'd be carefully putting numbers on it. There's not really a difference between cancer appearing to be luck vs we don't understand the risk factors. I'd guess that 2/3 luck would become 1/3 over the next 50 or 100 years as we understand risk factors better. Also I'm not really sure how you quantify the amount of luck when risk factors increase the chances, rather that directly causing it. In that sense you could say cancer is 100% luck.
A doctor once pointed out to me that every time there is cell replenishment, there's a possibility of cancer. 😶
I'm recuperating from a journey at the moment and too lazy to battle the newly terible search engine capabilities to find the articles I got the number from but as I understand it cancer scientists were pointing out that around 60- something percent of cancers in the body cannot be accounted for by environmental factors (diet, pollutants etc) once you control for those risk factors. Obviously it varies by cancer type, but this was the general estimate.
I think you're right that knowledge will increase but I think chance is worth bearing in mind because I think knowledge of external risks (and internal ones, like a bunch of missing immune cells) tends to be overstated in our thinking. Someone I knew with leukemia was the healthiest most clean living person I've ever met and I got so tired of people asking me what he had done to get it.