Posts by Span .
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Ok, so we've pretty much ruled out Kiwiblog as a welcoming and pleasant place to comment, but there are other nz pol blogs out there too. I don't comment on Kiwiblog really, particularly once a thread is over about 15 comments. That's usually all it takes to jump the shark.
I spend quite a lot of time though at No Right Turn, Capitalism Bad, I See Red, Joe Hendren and others who would all benefit from more women commenting.
PA System is great, I just wish some of the rest of the blogosphere would benefit from more of the great commenters here. What could other pol blogs do to be more attractive to you, or is PA System really all you want/need? You can always do both!
Above all though, you should be doing what you want to do, not what I want you to do. I guess I'm just too excitable when faced with lots of intelligent articulate women who can say cool stuff.
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I think one of the things we can do is be encouraging, and notice and include other women when they do engage. This doesn't mean not disagreeing, far from it, too often I see women pol bloggers who start up but then their political posts get ignored by anyone who can relate to their experiences, and their non-political posts attract more interest. In a 'sphere that is so focused on hits as a measure of success, it's understandable that some give up quickly.
One of the things I am trying to do is link more to other bloggers, and although a lot of those links are to male bloggers I try whenever possible to link to women. It's one of the reasons I started doing Linky Love compilations every Friday - to start highlighting within the NZ pol blogsphere posts from within and without that aren't from the dominant discourse (white, male and right wing). I wanted more nz pol bloggers to link to others fairly so I thought I'd better do it too.
When I was in student politics I once shared at a women's forum, when I'd only been involved a year, that I found some of the women activists on my campus intimidating. One of them told me afterwards how surprised she was, she didn't think she was intimidating at all. But I can see now that it happened to me too - we became hardened by the environment to the point where we seemed not only unapproachable but also set the standard for women to engage at a stupid level (I hesitate to say stupidly high, it wasn't). Sometimes I think that reading other women's pol blogs.I think how can I ever ever write that well or be that insightful, maybe I should just give up now? I'm not arguing that we should lower our standards, but I think it's ok to show in your writing that you don't think you are infallible, maybe that would make others reading it think, I could do that too.
Another factor might be that people tend to comment on your post to express their disagreement. That's very off-putting - you get ten comments saying you are wrong and one saying you are right and pretty soon you get the impression you should just shut up already. Perhaps women, who already often tend to think we are below average at things, are more susceptible to this?
What do others think - why do you comment here but not on other political blogs in NZ? Why don't you start your own? As someone who already does both of these things I am perhaps not best placed to answer!
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What I found interesting was that using the words "she" and "hers" got you XX points, but from my quick perusal "he" and "his" didn't up your XY total. Weird.
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Ghet, you may be interested in this, on the issue of being assumed to be male:
http://www.shakesville.com/2007/04/im_a_dude.php -
Thanks for the link Tze Ming - much appreciated! I have something half written for today's blogswarm, which I hope to get up later today.
I have to say that although Public Address is a much better environment than the other bigger NZ blogs it did occur to me yesterday, when I was thinking about the blogswarm, that with your semi-departure there are no regular XX posters here. I think the XYers hold up their end well, and are obviously not anti-woman (wish I could say that in the broader nz pol blogosphere), which is great. There are more female commenters here than there are on any of the other top NZ blogs, imho. I haven't done a count or anything.
I sympathise in terms of the photo issue. I have had a death threat, and other threats of violence and rape, not during my blogging times but in previous political involvement - no matter how absurd they are they are at the least disquieting.
I'm not going to post a pic of myself on my blog anytime soon, because I don't want to be judged for my appearance rather than my writing, as well as not wanting to give stalkers any "encouragement". I've seen the vile comments attached to pictures of women posted on other blogs, and I remember well the nastiness that was spewed forth after Rodney Hide merely posted a pic of Aaron Bhatnagar and his wife on their wedding day - he had to take it down in pretty short order (some of the creepiness was about Aaron, not his wife, to be fair.) It's also why I will probably continue to avoid blog drinks, other than amongst the people who already know me in real life. I'd rather write and debate actual issues and arguments, not have to waste time and energy on defending myself from sexist attacks.
Blogging, at least the political blogging I do,seems to be different for women. I have been patronised more times than I care to remember. I've had many people assume I'm a man, particularly when I was writing mainly about left-wing stuff rather than feminist rantings - how could I possibly be female and doing what I'm doing? It's beyond some people's comprehension.
But still I find it less unpleasant than student politics, and I feel that things are starting to change for the better. Some of that change has come about, I believe, from having PA System, which is frequented by people who respect the conduct standards set by the authors, who don't blow dog whistles themselves and don't post sexist, or racist, or homophobic rubbish. Some of those commenters are cleaning up their act out on the other blogs too. Others of course maintain a weird duality that I would personally find exhausting.
Ok this is already too long, I'll stop now, but no doubt I won't be able to resist coming back ;-)
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I'm another owner. We bought about four and a half years ago, after six months of looking and missing out on more desirable properties in better areas. While I'm happy where we are, and it ticks a lot of boxes, we would have needed a lot more money, even then, to buy in the Nice Areas.
Of my friends those who have bought have been able to do so because of a windfall from various sources, as was the case for us. Without it while we would probably be in a house by now we would certainly not have been able to buy when we did, and we would now have a crippling mortgage, instead of one that is comfortably achievable.
We're also a couple, which means two incomes towards a deposit and then a mortgage - all my single friends are pretty much without hope and resigned to renting. Throw in the fact that we are both pretty frugal anyway, and in reasonably well paying jobs with no student loans, and we have everything to our advantage, i.e. we are far from typical, sadly.
I don't think too much about what we would get if we sold, because although the value of our place has gone up considerably so has the price of all the other places we might want to buy.
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Are there people around who print off auto-respond out-of-office email messages?
Sadly, yes. I work with two. Drive me batty they do.
Although it's not as bad as the time recently when we were all (like 20 of us) posted, from our Wellington office, invites and menus for a work dinner we were obligated to attend (so what was the point in sending us the menu!). Each came in a seperate envelope, stamped, to each of us, and the invite and menu were on separate pages, despite both being one side only, and even printed in colour, despite the use of only one colour (very close to black) throughout. The waste of time for the receptionist in opening each envelope alone was criminal. It's almost as if this person had never heard of email, or climate change, or saving trees, or anything.
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But almost every day I see big chunks of text being quoted by bloggers which probably exceed the width of the fair use defences.
I've often wondered about this, thanks for that clarification Steven. I don't mind so much if someone quotes my stuff, as long as they link to the original. What really really bugs me is when someone rips off something you have written and even acknowledges that you wrote it, but then doesn't provide any link whatsoever. But then I'm not paid for my words or the time spent writing them, so I imagine I might feel differently even about the quoting if I were?
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See I like how the PAS threads go all silly (in a good way) when they get really long, rather than all abusive (in a bad way). It's All Good.
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Yeah those are the threads they find the most offensive, the ones where Jordan indicates he has a life that doesn't revolve around dealing with the trolls. I've ended up in some real schmozzles in those threads. For example.
Sometimes I just can't stop the constant reverberation of the key phrase around my skull:
"What is wrong with these people?"It's as if they forget the Other Side is actually a human being. Aren't there statistics somewhere about the increasing level of dehumanisation of the enemy found in soldiers, from Boer, to WWI, to WWII, to Korea, to Vietnam? And how it correlates with increasing accuracy with your firearm? Maybe I'm making all this up, but dehumanisation is a key part of politics too (you just have to look at a history of political cartooning to see that), and now that we have forums like blogs where you can instantly attack your target we are seeing the dehumanisation trend played out in imaginary online wars with words instead of bullets.
Oh dear, hark at me getting all melodramatic of a Wednesday.