Make this place more welcoming to Women and POC

Ok, Maysie, in that case, I'll jump in!

FWIW, I fully support Stargazer here, and the attack on her is unconscionable - especially coming from someone who wished "death by orca" to FN leaders on this board just because they don't share his view of the Olympics.

I personally find the seal hunt (as practised on the East Coast anyway) to be inhumane. But I oppose the self-righteous campaigns centred in Europe and the U.S. condemning it. It's up to the people who live by that hunt to decide. Meanwhile, the glitzy crusaders should turn their attention to the crimes committed by their own countries under such flags as NATO before shedding crocodile tears abroad.

Okay.

True confession time.

It's Sunday morning.

And on a personal level I've had an extremely difficult past few weeks. Not that that's any excuse.

AND, the biggest reveal, I didn't read the thread on the Nene Caribou hunt that E.T. linked to. Until just now. This is a dumbass rookie moderator mistake that I should have known better than to do. Fuck.

Stargazer, I apologize. I'm going to leave up my arguments and all my posts as they are, so people reading it can see what has transpired. But I stand, humbly, corrected.

So.....

Is there any way to get the thread back on track? In my irrational state of eternal optimism I will keep it open for now.

Well, technically, we don't owe animals any kind of death, but given that we have a relationship with them, I know what this means. I respect Temple Grandin a lot, and her work.

Maysie don't sweat it. I sure would not want to have your job. You can't be there 100 percent of the time, or read every thread. I certainly don't expect you to. Relax and have a good day.

I don't want to see E. T. banned, but it would be nice if he/she would calm down a bit with the f bomb. As unionist pointed out, this is not the first time.

It's true that "barbaric" is etymologically a term of bigotry (I would say essentially bigoted, but Derrideans are not supposed to say essentially). It is onomatopoeic -- it was the way that Greeks had of describing both the language of the people they first made contact with around the Black Sea and those people themselves. To the Greeks, since they couldn't understand the language, it sounded like nonsense -- "bar bar bar," Greek mockery that means something like noise or nonsense, and definitely Not Greek. I see that the wiki says the equivalent in English would be "blah blah blah," but I don't think so. Blah blah blah has content -- it means you're describing the speech of someone who's saying something you probably understand but disagree with or are bored by. Barbaric signifies a nothingness, and the Other.

Since I learned that, I've stopped using the word almost entirely. I might use it on my own bastards -- eg, I might describe the conspiracy behind the Cheney torture regime as barbaric. The word definitely jumped out at me when I read Jason Kenney's smug and cynical rewriting of Canada's handbook for immigrants -- there's a despicable document we have to revise as soon as possible.

But back to the OP: I started reading this thread because I believed I was included in the OP (I am a woman and a feminist). This is a site focused on left politics in general, and it has always been true that it has drawn a lot of people interested in electoral politics, although many others aren't. It has always drawn some people interested in foreign policy, although many others aren't. Electoral politics and foreign policy aren't the whole of politics (I'm presuming people here agree), but they are the only politics some people care about. Discussing them and debating them is often boring if you're not a wonk (I definitely feel that way about electoral politics), or it leads to pretty fierce contention. I haven't seen anything like the old Middle East threads that used to happen here -- I mean, I remember days when people sat all day pounding the keyboards at one another. I'm not sure when that stopped -- maybe everyone just got tired? Everyone figured she could write the entire debate out, all sides, in her sleep? But I digress.

Anyway, a lot of people simply withdraw when they see that kind of contention happening. I don't want to overgeneralize, but I think it is observably true that more males than females are happy to engage in it. I do not believe that people who refuse to fight are wimps; a lot of fights become stupid and boring, and not that many women have much invested in comparing sizes. Sorry if that sounds like an anti-male statement: I don't mean it that way; I love men. I'm also willing to fight when I think some point bigger than me matters, and I love foreign policy. But I don't feel the urge always to have the last word -- I think that's the kind of contention that a lot of women turn away from because they just can't take it seriously.

There are women around here who are great at electoral politics and some who are strong on foreign policy, but they are minorities and I don't see that changing soon. Maybe others could expand on why that's so.

I'm not FN, so maybe I shouldn't pipe up on that score, but E. Tamaran's reactions to Stargazer kind of shocked me. As a feminist, I am always really annoyed (usually it's just an eyeroll, though) by people who expect all feminists to think the same way about everything. I love being turned into a stereotype about as much as anyone else -- ie, not at all. And I can assure E. Tamaran that there is no lock-step think among feminists about many things, as people here must have seen a couple of months back during the more heated debates over decriminalization. Slumberjack's post seems to me a valuable historical brake on sheerly abstract commitments.

Wow. Skdadl actually posted on-topic - and rather brilliantly too. I also appreciated SJ's and jas's posts. Maybe this thread can be salvaged yet.

Skdadl, thanks for your thoughtful post.  "Barbaric" is a loaded word, I guess, and I'll try not to use it.  "Inhumane" is another problematic one.  I care very much about the English language and it frustrates me to see it mangled in the name of gussying it up in order not to offend folks.  

For example, I am a crazy or a lunatic and am proud to be so.  I also smoke.  And my support group is called Smoking Cessation for People Living With A Mental Illness.  Believe me, calling me crazy is infinitely better than calling me a person living with a mental illness.  For one thing, it sounds as though there are two of us.  

I'm on solid ground here because I'm a member of the "special" group.  I have no such entitlement when it comes to our First Nations people so I stand corrected (actually sit corrected).  Live and learn, I guess.  [Insert platitude here.]

I care very much about animal rights and I think the seal hunt is horrible and a black eye on Canada (as if we needed one).

Al-Q: could you not call women "chicks" (even while complementing them) in a thread about why babble is not more welcoming to women and POC?

Considering that various dictionaries list "uncivilized" "savage", etc. for synonyms for the term barbaric, I think it should be avoided. Even if it is being used to describe non-FN people, the connotations are that they are just like those "barbaric uncivilized savages". That is the historical context. 

The seal hunt has proven quite contentious here. I think what we have to obviously keep in mind is that there are going to be differing view of it amoung FN people and the Inuit. But, one thing to remember is that the Inuit themselves do not want simply the right to hunt seal for subsistence eating only. This is patronizing. There are Inuit business designing and selling clothes made from sealskin. It is has been a boost to their economies. It has meant that more people can stay in their communities. 

I think we need to stop with this dichotomy that no Inuit or FN person wants to hunt seal for anything other than immediate sustenance, why there is a racist view that that is all they should want or be allowed to do. 

al-Q, please don't bait by using the term "chicks" in this thread.  The rest of your post is excellent - why mar it with a term you know is going to be contentious?  Yes, some babble women occasionally use it in a cute or ironic way to identify themselves.  I think you know why it's not appropriate for you to do so, especially here.  Thanks!

LOL. In a minor way, Muffin, I know the experience. Sometimes, o' course, the two of us think we are the most interesting people we know (and we don't even have to get out of our pyjama to think so).

But srsly, I think you're right to be bothered by euphemisms. I don't know the answer to this one. You can see why nice people work up some of them in order to avoid objectifying others. The problem is, that desire to be nice above all feeds into the tyranny of the bourgeois proprieties and enables real bastards to play the same game from the opposite direction. "Enhanced interrogation techniques" and "extraordinary rendition" and "redaction" are just so much more polite, y'know, than torture, kidnapping, and censorship, and if you push a lot of people by using the harsh true words, they will write you off as an extremist, or maybe they'll do even more than that.

Telling the truth is an exceptionally important thing, even when we put it clumsily. Clumsy language is often more truthful than euphemisms ever can be. Orwell thought so, and he warned hard against the politically subversive powers of euphemism, polite lies.

Being kind is an exceptionally important thing too, though. It can be funny when you call yourself crazy the way you sometimes do, or when I do, because we've both adjusted. I'm not sure I want to give some other people permission, though.

What is frivolous for some is distinctly objectionable for others, regardless of context. It matters as well who is using the descriptive words. For example, I can't imagine the label of 'pinhead' being accepted as a matter of frivolity except among the closest of good humoured friends, and even then its probably wise to use such a term sparingly.

As I said in the previous post I made, there's a difference between women calling each other "chicks" in jest or affection, and guys calling women "chicks" in a thread about why women and people of colour don't frequent babble so much.  A newcomer would have no idea that you were sharing an in joke with skdadl, and there are lots of women out there who find "chick" degrading coming from men.  Yes, there will be the occasional feminist woman who just loves it when guys call women "chicks".

I know feminist women who jokingly call themselves and each other "bitch" too, as a term of endearment or even empowerment.  Doesn't make it okay for a guy to use such a term on babble in a discussion such as this one, even if your very best female feminist friend thinks it's cute when you call her that.

I don't know why it's so necessary to go over these extremely basic principles of feminist discussion.  Like, seriously, what year is this?  You're not a stupid person, al-Q, so I have to conclude that you're just doing this to troll and bait the moderators and posters that you know will take offence.  I'm getting sick of it.  Which is fine for me because it's my last day so at least I won't have to deal with this from the moderator end of it, thank goodness.

But you know, it sure makes me feel less and less like bothering babbling at all when I read that kind of feminist-baiting shit coupled with the injured innocence routine afterwards.

Did I mention that I'm a woman?

Sorry, Michelle. We cross-posted. I didn't mean to undermine you.

I suppose you'll conclude whatever you want, but I said in as many words that I wrote it because I thought skdadl would appreciate it. Then I went on to say how it reinforces the argument I made that women aren't as frivolous as males.

How can you construe any of this as trolling or baiting?

Not by me, we haven't.