Posts by Deborah
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Thanks, merc and Riddley. Usually I enjoy what Craig has to say, even when I disagree with it, but not today.
Having posted all that... I'm over the distress now.
And I enjoy the quick one liners between you two, and people like Juha - as someone else said somewhere, it says a great deal that most threads around here deteriorate to sheer silliness.
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It feels pretty bad to be me today.
To recap, Craig said:
I'd also note that if you really want to be petantic about 'legitimate' titles, shouldn't we be referring to the Prime Minister as Mrs Peter Davies - even though she prefers to style herself with her maiden name
When you are being pedantic, you are being correct. I called Craig on that, and said that this was a canard, and that geting married did not entail changing your name.
Craig responded by telling me that he was being sarcastic. Now I don't see any sarcasm whatsoever in what I have quoted above, so I suggested that this was a post hoc justification, and said this:
Calling Helen Clark by her husband's name, illegitimately, is a way of belittling her, even in a joke. You are using the fact that she is a woman to make a dubious joke.
You might recall that we have had a long and agonising discussion on PA this week about how women get attacked qua women.
Then Craig told me that I was stupid, and that by calling him on what he had said I was being sexist.
He followed that up this:
I'm sorry if Deborah has some reading disability
In other words, not only am I stupid, and despite the evidence on this site, of my considerable ability to read and analyse what people are saying, it must all be my fault because I can't read. That little word "if" is rather nasty: people use it when they are dogwhistling.
And to top it off, there was this:
I also do try and pay people the courtesy of not ripping what they say so far out of context - or just making shit up - it verges on psychosis.
And again, the implication is that there is something wrong with me about all this.
So I had been told that I couldn't get a joke, that I am stupid, I am sexist, I have a reading disability, that I had made up shit, and that perhaps I was suffering from some sort of psychosis.
And despite all the things that had been painfully worked about perhaps not allowing such behaviour to pass unremarked, no matter who the abuse was directed at, the one person who called Craig on this string of insults and bullying was promptly slapped down for daring to be a newcomer with an opinion:
Craig is a standup guy. Newbies and lurkers could do well to make a bit of a contribution before ripping into others.
What am I to make of all this? I have been around here since the day that PA System started up, I have tried to make interesting and constructive comments, I have spent hours this week choosing my words with such care to try to understand and explain what people are saying, and now I am sitting at my keyboard and crying because not only have I been subjected to a string of abuse, but NO ONE HERE HAS SAID ANYTHING ABOUT IT.
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Now, Deborah and Darryl, do you think I really need to put sarcasm tags around every damn thing or can I assume PA readers are smart enough to not require spoon-feeding?
Sounds like a post hoc justification to me, Craig.
Calling Helen Clark by her husband's name, illegitimately, is a way of belittling her, even in a joke. You are using the fact that she is a woman to make a dubious joke. Good one.
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And come on, Craig - after all the agonising discussion here on PA this week, are you really suggesting that as a married woman, my identity ought to be subsumed in my husband's identity?
<grumble, grumble, grumble>
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I'd also note that if you really want to be petantic about 'legitimate' titles, shouldn't we be referring to the Prime Minister as Mrs Peter Davies
What a canard.
When you plan to get married, you get a licence. On that licence, both partners indicate what name they will be known by after marriage. There is no legal requirement to change names, and no overriding presumption in law that this is what happens. Even more, it has only ever been a matter of social custom that a married woman was known as Mrs Husband's-Given-Name Husband's-Family-Name.
As for using this to attack Helen Clark - perhaps some basic civility would be in order, and you could address her by her legal name, not some name that you think she ought to have.
There was a discussion about changing names on Spanblather last week.
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Kia kaha, Manakura!
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The difference between cats and dogs?
Dogs get 50 orders a day, and they obey every one of them, slavishly.
Cats get just one order a day, and they think about whether or not they will take any notice of it, and then just carry on.
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Wow. Thank you, Finn. That has given me a lot to think about. Particularly because I have already bought into your point about the extraordinary things that men (and some women) can achieve through their single minded focus. As you say, it's a blessing. And of course, a curse. Likewise my capacity to manage many things at once, but never quite manage the focus that would lead me to personal success in one field, instead of pretty good, but no more than that, achievement in a number of fields.
Interesting points you make about how to manage the obsessives. I will have to think about those for a bit. Perhaps the two strategies, yoru pragmatism, and my call-them-on-it, need to be deployed together.
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I was so pleased to se the Anglican Bishops coming out in favour of Bradford's bill. Unlike the Catholic Bishops, who think that parents have a right to hit their children. It never occurred to me that the Catholic Church in NZ might want to get into bed with Brian Tamaki and his ilk.
Thnaks for the great post, Anke. As I have posted elsewhere, I think there is hope.
Parents only smack in the privacy of their homes. Virtually no parent smacks their child in public these days. I don't know why, but I might speculate that people know that a parent who has to smack is a parent who does not know how to parent well, and no parent wants to cope with the disapprobation that comes along with not parenting well, as shown by smacking in public.
Hopefully, that sense of disapproval of parents who smack in public might just be the beginnings of a change in sensibilities.
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especially you debs. i think we, once again, wrote the same piece (i think we need to co-author a journal article).
Yes.... it's a bit worrying. Great minds or fools?
"Debs"?!!! "Deb" if you please, or the full moniker, or even "Hey, you!"
BTW, when Che says we wrote the same piece, he means our doctoral theses. I first contacted him when he started writing interesting stuff on PA, and by comparing notes, we figured out that we had reached much the same conclusions in our theses, 'tho his was in Pol Sci tending towards Sociology, and mine was in Philosophy tending towards Pol Theory and Pol Sci. Naturally, I think that his ideas are BRILLIANT.
The interweb really is a marvellous thing.