Posts by Deborah
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Gender Genie thinks I'm a man.
Lovely post, Emma. Tell me you will be writing more, pleeeeease?
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My opinion on getting more people posting/commenting outside the liberal white middle classed straight male demographic is that they all need to harden up and post or comment more.
Okay... I'll bite.
Here's the thing. You can set up some rules so that they appear to apply to everyone, and hey, that's fair, isn't it, but they can be skewed so that in practice, some, or even many, people are excluded.
By analogy, think about suffrage. As we all know (or bloody well ought to know!), NZ was the first country in the world to extend suffrage to women. But as it turns out, various other polities granted votes to women earlier, provided they held property. So they had what looked to be a 'fair' rule for granting suffrage - all property holders could vote. Leaving aside the complexities of disenfranchising the unmonied part of the population, the effect of this rule, which seemed to apply equally everyone, was to exclude the overwhelming majority of women from voting.
So, if we set up rules of discourse in such a way that they look fair - everyone gets to be tough - but in effect a large number of people feel that they can't participate, then we have an effective exclusion of those people. Of course, they can participate, if they choose to adopt the get tough ethos, but that could well mean that they have to, as it were, leave themselves behind, and adopt a different persona for the purpose of participating in the discussion. "That's fine, dearie. You can participate, as long as you don't mind becoming exactly like everyone else around here, instead of participating as yourself."
Kapai?
One of the many good things about PAS is that the rules of discourse around here are far more civilised than on other political blogs around NZ. If I want to be shouted at and abused, just for having a different opinion, I can go over to No Minister any old time, or the threads at Kiwiblog. No thank you!
PAS has a different set of rules, defined through its practice, and through its explicit ideal of encouraging and supporting diversity. Here's what Russell said in November last year, when PAS was launched:
I’m keen to expand the pool of people engaged in online discussion and I think an atmosphere of respect is vital to that aim.
Having said all that, it is worth just having a go, especially around here, where the atmosphere is for the most part, tolerant. People will tell you if they think you are wrong, but it tends to be people saying, "I don't agree with your argument and here's why" (__pace__ my arguments above, I hope) rather than "You stupid lefty lickspittle tool of the Hulun Klark commie gummint - you're so stupid you can't even pick your own nose."
I think that's why people can get more upset over being yelled at here, which does happen occasionally, than they would over at some other blogs. It's simply becuase the ideal here is not a rugged free for all where the loudest voice can win, but an ideal of genuine exchange of ideas. So being yelled at here (a very rare ocurrence) can feel rather worse than being yelled at elsewhere.
Russell said something the other day which is reassuring - I can't recall whether he said it upstream on this thread, or somewhere else on PAS, or onmy blog or Che's - it's somewhere where this distributed discussion is taking place. Remember that it's just a discussion thread, and there will be another one along tomorrow. It's good advice that I will be taking to heart.
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That's not funny! :-)
(That's a joke, BTW.)
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I have actually tapped someone who is not white, male, middle-aged or boring
Hmmm - is this supposed to be a contrast to the existing writers? If so, you really need to have a very dull, boring writer. The existing writers are not boring at all.
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@Heather, "Weird" is just fine with me!
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Unless you mean that being female necessarily informs one's opinions, and the manner in which one expresses them?
I have a discussion about the politics of presence here on my blog. It's quite pertinent to this discussion, but I don't want to just repost the whole thing here - it's way too long for a comment.
If you come over to my place to take a look at it, could you do the decent thing and click back here so that I'm not dragging traffic away from PAS? That would be kind of unfair to mine host here.
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And it seems to me the ground covered by feminism has enlarged and become more subtle, thus making it harder to define and yet easier to be. Does that make sense?
Yes.
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I'm not keen on representation for the sake of representation, but I do think it would be good to see more women writing here.
Here's more or less where I end up on this issue, quoted from something I wrote on my own blog a couple of days ago.
I think that Public Address System suffers simply because women are not well represented there. The lack of representation from women continues in the comments - women are simply not there to nearly the same extent that men are. And I think that without women writing posts, more and more women will feel that PAS is not a place for them. They don’t need to be feminist posts per se, at all, nor posts deliberately couched as a woman’s perspective. I would find that incredibly patronising, and yeechy - back to the 1950s with women’s pages in the newspaper comprised of recipes, knitting patterns, and housekeeping tips.
Russell has said, in comments at my place, that he has a non-male, non-white, non-middle aged writer lined up. I'm looking forward to seeing who it is, and to reading their work.
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And while I'm at it, and being a galss, or two, or three, of Oyster Bay Chardonnay up (my father has a good wine cellar), I do think that there is an important parallel between the inappropriate power that police officers exercised over young women in Rotorua and districts twenty or thirty years ago, and the inappropriate use of power in Ruatoki just a few weeks ago. In both cases, I can't help think that police officers were putting uppity people in their place. So I can see why Sara wants to comment on the similarities, and to wonder why it is that in one case, the general NZ public seems to think that the exercise of police power was inappropriate (to say the least), but in the other, the exercise of police power seems to be accepted.
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And getting back to an earlier point, I think your analysis of the Louise Nicholas case was exactly right, Russell. No matter what the truth of the matter (and I'm not prepared to put my opinion in print for fear of opening this site, and myself, up to libel worries), getting a conviction was never going to be a likely outcome.
Clint Rickard should remember that he was found 'not guilty', not 'innocent'.