From: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu (Muffy Barkocy)
Newsgroups: soc.women,alt.feminism,soc.men
Subject: Re: Practise what you preach? (was:what is sexist?)
Date: 18 Nov 92 17:10:55
Organization: Natural Language Incorporated
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In-reply-to: jsp@uts.amdahl.com's message of 18 Nov 92 23:08:13 GMT

In article <22lN03RHbcVf00@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> jsp@uts.amdahl.com (James Preston) writes:
[cross-posted threads]
>This may -- note I say "may" -- be a source of at least a tiny part of
>the problem here.  I have been reading all of these "what is sexist"
>(and the preceding thread) postings in soc.men.  Perhaps we all tend
>to slant our view of what is posted -- and correspondingly flavor our
>responses -- according to what newsgroup we are reading the postings
>from.

I think you are right that this is a problem.  I still do not know why
people keep cross-posting all these threads, especially since part of
the original justification for alt.feminism seemed to be that people
wanted feminist/anti-feminist talk out of soc.men.  I think the right
solution would be for people to stop cross-posting all these threads.
Of course, once they are started, people will have seen them and
responded to them from all the different groups.

>}Third, (and you may not have realized this), there is absolutely no
>}requirement on moderators of soc.feminism to be polite to idiots in
>}other newsgroups, only to be polite to idiots whose posts we receive for
>}approval.

>[...]  But more and more you're coming across as just a nasty
>individual.  Would it be possible for you to specifically cite whatever
>it was that I posted that makes you feel that the label "idiot" is
>justified?  Or have I committed some other horrible sin of misreading
>and you were not aiming that label at me?

Well, the label is aimed at any number of people who have been rather
"nasty individuals" to me.  If you do not read alt.feminism, you may not
have seen all of the nastyness.

However, the specific thing that I considered idiotic from you was when
I said "I'm not sure if I agree with this definition" (being the one
from your dictionary) and you came back with the (oh-so-non-nasty)
comment about "you don't agree with the dictionary definition" stuff.
Surely anyone who cites dictionary definitions could be expected to know
that different dictionaries define words in different ways, yes?  So
saying that I was just trying to "ignore reality" was both idiotic and
nasty.

Here's what I said and you replied:
|>}I'm not sure if I agree with this definition, but it certainly puts an
|>}interesting light on "reverse sexism," since that would have to be based
|>}on the assumption that women are superior.
|>You're not sure if you agree with the dictionary definition?  Ok, I
|>suppose you're as free to arbitrarily ignore reality as anyone.  Shall
|>I next decide that I don't agree with the dictionary definition of "table"
|>and start using that word to mean something used to write on paper?

Muffy
--

Muffy Barkocy                               muffy@mica.berkeley.edu
~Weavers' fingers flying on the loom/patterns shift too fast to be
 discerned/all these years of thinking/ended up like this/in front
 of all this beauty/understanding nothing~ - Bruce Cockburn
Newsgroups: soc.women