So why do people still send us general cut-and-paste guest post offers which clearly display their lack of familiarity with our policy?

As Miranda would say: RUDE.

Miranda says that’s rude.

P.S. We’re always interested in guest posts from known friends of HaT.

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1. Quick link: Adults Who Give Children Guns
2. Friday Hoydens: new Hoyden authors!
3. Call for Guest Reviews: 2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it. ~ Abraham Lincoln

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.
often attributed to Thomas Jefferson

Amongst monticello.org’s extensive listing of spurious Jeffersonian quotations they have a nice piece of sleuthery on how this quote’s purported provenance has changed over the decades of its rhetorical deployment:

Earliest known appearance in print: 1952 [1]

Earliest known appearance in print, attributed to Jefferson: 2005[2]

This particular saying seems to be getting a huge workout at the moment in anti-Obama commentary around the web, usually with the Jefferson misattribution. I expect there’s a fair bit of overuse in anti-Gillard rhetoric as well.

I’m always struck by how often the USA’s Founding Fathers get dragged into modern political debates, often with words that were never theirs in the first place.

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1. What’s missing from local government election blurbs
2. Quickhit: Is the WA government going to try to pre-empt Stolen Wages legal action?
3. Victim-blaming by the Queensland government

Over the weekend I’ve been following some of the FTB live-blogging of the second Women In Secularism conference (aka WISC2), and enjoying the speeches of thoughtful activist women on various topics. I didn’t bother to click on anybody’s liveblogging of the welcoming speech, because welcoming speeches are all pretty much the same, right? Welcome and thank you to the attendees, here’s the speaker lineup, the vendor stalls are in the lobby and the bar’s over there – isn’t that the job of the opening speech? With a few encouraging soundbites thrown in to get the audience excited? Usually 5-10 minutes, tops?

Well, I missed something different. The opening speech was given by Ron Lindsay, CEO of the event sponsor, the Center for Free Enquiry (CFI). Ron apparently thought that all those traditional aspects of a welcoming speech were entirely superfluous for WISC2, and instead dedicated half of his 30-minute opening talk to ‘splaining privilege and how feminists were misusing the concept to silence men and how all this fed into the divisive controversy etc etc

No mention of the sustained intimidation campaigns waged against women who have pointed out that atheism/skepticism/secularism is not immune from the same sexism/racism etc as the religions they’re rejecting, and that those campaigns are specifically designed to silence those women from speaking out at all ever, not just asking them to listen in certain spaces for a short while. The lack of respect and blatant hositility demonstrated by that sustained silencing campaign was obviously far less significant to Lindsay than (surprise) how Feminists R Doin It Rong.

Lindsay bizarrely equates social justice advocates asking those who are privileged along one or more of the axes of oppression to “shut up and listen” to those who lack those privileges with women being utterly forbidden to speak in houses of worship in many religions i.e. Lindsay is equating a request for the generally dominant group who have many platforms to step back and let others lead a discussion at the front of a platform for a change with a religious taboo whereby the generally subservient social group who has no platform is forbidden to speak at all in sacred spaces.  He even explicitly labels requests for the privileged to stay quiet and step back for once as dogma.

Now don’t get me wrong. I think the concept of privilege is useful; in fact it is too useful to have it ossified and turned into a dogma.

By the way, with respect to the “Shut up and listen” meme, I hope it’s clear that it’s the “shut up” part that troubles me, not the “listen” part. Listening is good. People do have different life experiences, and many women have had experiences and perspectives from which men can and should learn. But having had certain experiences does not automatically turn one into an authority to whom others must defer. Listen, listen carefully, but where appropriate, question and engage.

I started my talk with that reading from the New Testament which unmistakably assigned women a subordinate role. Both the symbol of that oppression and the vehicle for enforcing that oppression was silence. Enforced silence is always and everywhere the enemy of truth and progress. If someone is forbidden from speaking, you are obviously not going to hear what they have to say.

As many others have already pointed out, how Lindsay thinks anybody can listen if they don’t shut up? I dunno.

As an opening speech, this effort undermines the whole purpose of the conference. Might it possibly have been an interesting addition to the speech roster somewhere in the middle of the program? Maybe. But as an opening speech from the event sponsor it’s simply bizarre, does nothing to encourage the women in attendance, and does everything to encourage the already hyper-active flying monkeys.

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Related posts:

1. The thing about intimidatory silencing tactics?
2. Deleting blog comments: exercise of Property Rights vs Free Speech
3. This is a reality, and it doesn’t go away if we don’t talk about it.

The second, shared by ChiPhilly on flickr, is hoeing into a fish:

Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a good book (or a bad one)? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? What have you created lately? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?

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1. Otterday! And Open Thread.
2. Otterday! And Open Thread
3. Otterday! And Open Thread.

Luke Pearson on the whole Delta business at AboriginalOz h/t to Cady on the Otterday thread

@ebswearspink comments on the defence of Delta by MammaMia, on her tumblr The Ramblings of that girl called Ebs

Eurasian Sensation with An Aboriginal perspective on blackface. This one dates back to the Hey Hey its Saturday controversy, but is still very relevant.

Sunili Govinnage on Mia Freedman’s comments on Delta’s tweet.

Ruby Hamad in Daily Life on When Racism becomes a white person’s issue.

Jennifer Wilson at No Place For SheepDear Clementine Ford. How I feel when you talk about me. I also need to note that Clementine has responded on Twitter to Jennifer and apologised. (TW for discussion sexual abuse)

Migrant Law on What Australia being excised from its own migration zone actually means.

Update: Racism 101: Black Face vs White Face whats the difference (speaking in theatrical terms)

Update 2: Saman Shad Why are we debating ‘blackface’ in 2013? via @horrorshowflick, @muminprogress (Saman’s Twitter handle) and @vivsmythe

Update 3: I don’t really understand how Tumblr works but anyway this is Karen Healy’s and this cartoon on Angelina Jolie is on it. Cartoon by rosalarian.

Update 4: Further thoughts from Sunili on her tumblr Calling it racist…

I’m sure there are many more that I have missed feel free to let me know in the comments. Thank you to those people on Twitter and in the media who have once again heaved a sigh, picked up their shovel and gone back to try and make a dent in the huge wall of ignorance and white privilege.

As always, read the comments on linked articles at your own peril.

ETA: lots of ableist language abounds in these links too.

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3. A few links about what is and what is not a ‘blood libel’

SPOILERS!

Star Trek: Into Darkness poster

Or as many have dubbed it, Into Whiteness.

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I’m a big fan of the Cumberbatch, and I thoroughly enjoyed his performance as the villain in the latest Star Trek movie so long as I could forget his character’s name: Khan Noonien Singh, which is a name thoroughly imbued with a racial and ethnic history far removed from that of one of the Whitest men in show-business, i.e. Benedict Cumberbatch.

Seriously? I grok how they wanted to bring in an actor that geeks already like to play the part, but what exactly would have been the problem with casting somebody like Sendhil Ramamurthy from Heroes? That the show ended in 2010 wouldn’t be a problem – geeks are famous for their attachment to long-gone canonical fandoms.


Or even a bit of a nod to the movie whose casting led to the coining of the term racebending in the first place, and cast Dev Patel (whose Last Airbender character Prince Zuko was White in the original cartoon version)?


And what about the amazing Sir Ben Kingsley (ne Krishna Pandit Bhanji)? Sure he’s getting on in years (but that never stopped Christopher Lee (LOTR, Star Wars)), and he’s been really busy in other geek movies lately(Iron Man 3, the upcoming Ender’s Game) but did they even approach him? If not, why not?

The above three actors are just off the top of my head. There’d be plenty more contenders with faces who would suit the name Khan Noonien Singh. They could always have used Cumberbatch as a different villain in this movie or the next.


As racebending.com points out,

In the original Trek, Khan, with his brown skin, was an Übermensch, intellectually and physically perfect, possessed of such charisma and drive that despite his efforts to gain control of the Enterprise, Captain Kirk (and many of the other officers) felt admiration for him.

And that’s why the role has been taken away from actors of colour and given to a white man.

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I’m late, I know, but Helen’s Mother’s Day piece got me thinking.

How did a day that grew from West Virginian Mothers’ Work Days from 1858 onwards (where mothers worked together to improve their community), and Mothers’ Friendship Days from 1865 (to promote harmony between former opponents in the Civil War), become what we celebrate now as Mother’s Day?

See the difference that apostrophe position makes? Mother’s Day is a day where you do stuff for your mum: sentimental, sweet and ultimately trivial. An inward-focussed family centred event.

Mothers’ Days were a gathering of mothers, time spent together for mutual reflection, when mothers en masse might mobilise politically, which when it occurs is rarely trivial at all. An outward-looking society-focussed event.

No wonder it was changed, but who changed it?

Anna Reeves Jarvis, anti-war and women’s rights activist

Anna Reeves Jarvis was the woman who initiated Mothers’ Work Days, where women who belonged to Mothers’ Work Day Clubs started by Jarvis around her own town met regularly for action days regarding health and sanitation. The clubs raised money for medicine, hired women to work in families with tuberculous mothers, and inspected food and milk sold in bottles. The movement spread and during the Civil War Jarvis urged the clubs to declare their neutrality and nurse/feed/clothe soldiers from both sides.

After the Civil War Jarvis’ Mothers’ Friendship Days, promoting reconciliation, were celebrated for several years. As you will see, it is at this point in history that the position of the apostrophe gets murky.

In 1870, with everyone’s memories full of Civil War horrors and appalled disbelief at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war, Julia Ward Howe (more famous as the abolitionist who penned “Battle Hymn of the Republic”) started working for a “Mother’s Day for Peace” to promote peace, motherhood and womanhood. All the sources I can find indicate that Howe used the singular possessive apostrophe, but when one reads the proclamation she wrote, the movement of the apostrophe from the plural to the singular possessive position seems odd, as the proclamation is definitely a call to mass action, and the Mother’s Day for Peace was celebrated by gatherings of women, not by women solely in the bosom of their family as occurs in today’s Mother’s Day. It’s hard, however, to find when the shift occurred, because modern writers are so casual about apostrophes. This makes the histories written of the transition between Anna Reeves Jarvis’ Mothers’ Clubs and the proclamation of a national Mother’s Day suspect, as who can we trust to be scrupulous about reproducing the apostrophes as they occurred in the original documents?

Most modern writers of any skill manage to eschew the much-mocked grocers’ apostrophe, but all one has to do is read any forum online to see people who are obviously otherwise erudite and articulate nonetheless recklessly misusing apostrophes in other cases (and also homonyms, but that can be another discourse).

When Anna Reeves Jarvis died in 1905 her daughter, Ann Marie Jarvis, vowed to honour her mother’s work.

From Wikipedia:

Her daughter Ann Marie Jarvis (May 1, 1864 – November 24, 1948) was born in Webster, Taylor County, West Virginia. Her family moved to Grafton, West Virginia in her childhood. A year after her mother’s death she held a memorial to her mother on May 12, 1907, and then went on a quest to make Mother’s Day a recognized holiday. She succeeded in making this nationally recognized in 1914. The International Mother’s Day Shrine still stands today in Grafton as a symbol of her accomplishments.

By the 1920s, Jarvis had become soured on the commercialization of the holiday. She incorporated herself as the Mother’s Day International Association, claimed copyright on the second Sunday of May, and was once arrested for disturbing the peace. She and her sister Ellsinore spent their family inheritance campaigning against the holiday. Both died in poverty. Jarvis, says her New York Times obituary, became embittered because too many people sent their mothers a printed greeting card. She considered it “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.”

What this shows is that between the Mothers’ Friendship Days of 1865 and the Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1914, common usage (or deliberately inculcated and disseminated trivialisation) had shifted that apostrophe from the power of a mothers’ collective action day to the sentimentality of honouring “motherhood”, a conveniently numinous term, and this was now enshrined in law.

In an age where very few people appreciate the distinction between its and it’s, and where people are so confused generally about apostrophes that anywhere there is an ‘s’ there is doubt, I fear that any campaign to reposition the apostrophe where it belongs is doomed to failure. But I resent the way it moved anyway.

Oh, and an exquisite alleged irony to end the life of the woman who bitterly opposed the floral industry racking up huge Mother’s Day profits:

“Anna Jarvis was confined to a nursing home at the end of her life, penniless. Her nursing home bills were paid, unbeknownst to her, by the Florist’s Exchange”

See what I mean? Look where that writer put that apostrophe for the professional association of florists! I’m so dobbing them in to Lynne Truss.

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What stood out for you in tonight’s Federal Budget?

As usual, the topic of these media-circus posts is just a discussion-starter. Please discuss any sociopolitical issue currently making the news, or highlight egregious churnalism and those far too rare instances where the MSM rises above it.

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