Everywhere a sign

And the sign said “Long-haired freaky people need not apply”
So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why
He said “You look like a fine upstanding young man, I think you’ll do”
So I took off my hat, I said “Imagine that. Huh! Me workin’ for you!”
– Five Man Electrical Band, Signs

Seems rather apropos given the circumstances.

I’ll admit that when I saw how badly Greg Laden had been rankled over this protest sign from a Canadian Occupy Wall Street event, I was a bit confused. What could he possibly be upset about?



The fact that he was raging about this sign in such a manner that I did not understand that he knew it was a direct response to certain memes that have permeated the media — that the Occupy movement is made up of hippies who want to smoke weed and bang the bongos, as opposed to fighting the very real class warfare that the rich have been waging on the poor for decades — kept me from seeing his point. I figured it out eventually, but if Stephanie Zvan’s post had come out first, I definitely would have gotten it a lot sooner.

The problem is one of memetics, and one of certain memes being intended to hurt people for no other reason than to silence them. The vast majority of the anti-war sentiment throughout the 60s and 70s was fomented by “punks”, “hippies”, and “anarchists”, even though none of those slurs come anywhere close to describing the people who fought that battle of ideologies on America’s behalf. The words were used to other the people who were fighting the establishment, an establishment that was more concerned with keeping the Vietnam meat grinder going for any number of cynical reasons than about the safety and security of its own country’s citizens, especially the safety of the very youths who were protesting. In point of fact, viewed through the lens of history, there’s precious little that came from the “hippie” movement that wasn’t absolutely correct — we as a species have been completely fucking up our environment for a century, rampant capitalism has produced some of the greatest injustices this world has ever seen, and we’ve been throwing our children into one meat grinder after another since Vietnam for no good reason. The military-industrial complex has become the military-industrial-governmental-corporate complex. Corporations have replaced citizens as the actual constituents of our countries. And the hippies were right about every fucking last one of these predictions.

In their posts, Greg and Stephanie are engaging in a war to own the slurs, to retake the words from the propagandists who have conflated each of these terms with some ridiculous memes which devalue everything they fought for. So hippies took drugs. Doesn’t make them any less right about any of the above predictions. So anarchists think government sucks. They’ve had a hell of a lot of examples of sucky government. So punks and freaks break traditional roles. These traditional roles need to be torn down anyway, they’re getting musty and restrictive and they aren’t serving anyone’s best interests. Well, nobody’s but the people already on top of the pile. You know, the 1%.

I’ll throw in my hat. Some people whom I otherwise respect in comments at Stephanie’s have bought into the memes that these people are somehow bad, by suggesting that they’re just whining. The thing is, this woman, in distancing herself from these types of people, is evidently buying into and helping to propagate that meme — that these kinds of people are somehow bad or unworthy of being in the dialogue. These memes are damaging and they are detrimental and they have no place in this conversation. Not only have the people in power used these slurs to delineate who’s “serious” about politics and economics and who isn’t, by drawing the “other” circle around everyone who disagrees with them that they should remain on top of an ever-growing heap of privilege, but even the people fighting this widening gulf of privilege are buying into the very same memes.

This isn’t whining. I’m not whining. Neither are Greg or Stephanie. If you want to counter the anti-Occupy propaganda, do it without also insulting everyone who made it possible to fight this fight in the first place.

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Everywhere a sign
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91 thoughts on “Everywhere a sign

  1. 2

    Oh, it’s also worth noting that Greg showed the picture to several people before writing his post, all of whom just got it. It wasn’t entirely a stretch to suggest the problem would be obvious when he posted it. Wrong, but not a stretch.

  2. 3

    Oh, I know it wasn’t a stretch, but I’d like to think I’m a good example of someone who didn’t get it because I’m simply clueless, not because I’m willfully ignoring the clues.

  3. 4

    Yeah, I got it the moment I read it. She’s saying, I’m not one of those hippy freaks, so you should listen to me, as if not being one of those hippy freaks makes your opinion more valuable. She would do well to understand that all those hippy freaks are working for a better world for her children, too.

  4. 5

    She’s saying, I’m not one of those hippy freaks, so you should listen to me, as if not being one of those hippy freaks makes your opinion more valuable.

    Huh, not how I read that sign at all. I read it much more as someone who wants to show, without putting on a suit, that the protest is about much more than…

    Ah, crap, I’m doing it too. Which I quite honestly just realized while typing this post. Crubnuggle. Stupid breaking my preconceptions.

  5. 7

    Really Jason, you missed it? Kevin O’Leary trash talking Chris Hedges? Perhaps you don’t get CBC out west… CBC received thousands of complaints about his remarks. This sign is a direct reference to those remarks. You really think it is serious? Do you think Stephen Colbert is serious too?

  6. 8

    I did not miss it. I retweeted the video when I saw Steve Thoms of Skeptic North tweet it, in fact.

    That doesn’t mean that the person saying “hey, look, I’m not one of those other freaks, and I’m here protesting” doesn’t also devalue those other freaks. Who are there protesting right beside her. Try reading the original post, Savage, instead of rushing to defend the use of slurs as slurs.

  7. 9

    I read both original posts. I commented on both original posts. Did you read the comments on either? I’m not going to copy paste my arguments. Suffice to say it’s hardly evident that this sign is meant literally, especially once given context.

  8. 11

    If it matters to you, I rather happily self identify as some of those things on the sign, especially as Stephanie defines them. That being said, I don’t think her self identifying by those labels and being offended by the sign, OR my identifying by those labels and NOT being offended is a very good argument, which is why I haven’t brought it up. The sign is neither saying “ew… hippies!” nor is she saying “Thank god I’m here, before there were only hippies!” The sign can quite easily be read as a refutation of the right’s stereotypical use of those labels. I don’t really understand why it’s so hard to get that for some people. It seems pretty clearly sarcastic to me and most other people who see it.

  9. 12

    I think your comparison is irrelevant. I think most people who see it *get* that it’s not literal judging by the many reposts I’ve seen on facebook, oddly enough mostly from Americans – including several LGBT activists.

  10. 13

    I don’t think you can say “most other people”. Though it took me a while to get what Greg was saying, because I did the same damn thing eNeMeE did. Countering a set of slurs put on people by the media by saying “look, I’m none of those slurs”, REINFORCES those slurs. It doesn’t matter if she didn’t mean offense, and I’m sure she didn’t.

    The problem is that she’s playing right into the hands of those people who have a club with which to beat protesters up. The same people who think to be serious about a protest you have to put on a tricorn hat with tea bags hanging off it, are saying that protesters on the left AREN’T serious, because they are hippies, and that hippies’ opinions don’t matter.

    Again. It doesn’t matter what she was trying for. If she was trying to refute the labels, she’s doing it the wrong way. Try reading my Owning the Slur post too.

  11. 14

    Replace each “Not a” with “Better than”. Doesn’t really change the apparent intent.
    ~~~
    Ψ! Young whippersnapper quoting a song I remember from when it was new.
    It always reminds me of the days when I worked at the Uni, and had a salesman I had talked to on the phone many times actually drop in to see me. The look on his face was priceless.

  12. 15

    Ibis: The difference with Crommunist is that, while he was inverting the labels that could be applied to him by dressing like Wall Street, he wasn’t also using the slur words and thus giving them power. Though in a way, wearing the suit is very much playing into their criticisms of Occupy Wall Street not dressing like Wall Street, it’s harder to put that into ready-to-fire silencing meme form.

    I don’t know that Greg is particularly sexist, but I see the accusations of sexism that buffet him in waves. And most of the time, it’s for stuff like this. His comment about the kid’s hat made the presumption that the baby is a girl, and actually expressed annoyance that the hat was pink for being the gender-normative color to put baby girls into. And whether the baby was a girl or not, he was playing into that particular meme and thus giving it power, making him guilty of a lesser version of the same offense. That some people got pissed at him for the hat thing but were not pissed about the sign itself, is rather telling.

  13. 16

    Sorry bout that, evilDoug. I’ll try to keep my references to the 1850’s and prior. You rummy old cove. 😉

    That’s a component of this fight too, I’ve noticed — the youth are always the largest faction protesting social injustice, and the older generation, having taken control of the reins of power, do what they can to retain that power by suggesting the youth are unfocused, undisciplined, incapable of taking the reins. They do this today with the same slurs that worked in the 1960s, evidently.

  14. 17

    ok, sure, maybe I can’t say “most”, most of what, the world’s population of 7 billion? I’ll submit that the 7,911 people who liked it on facebook and the 2968 people who shared it get it.

  15. 19

    Get it, or DON’T get it?

    That’s my point. And Greg’s, and Stephanie’s. While it’s useful that there are people in the fight who aren’t hippies and punks and anarchists and liberal nut-jobs, what about the people to whom those labels apply? Why are they worth less in this fight?

  16. 20

    As for Greg appearing sexist, the posts title “Get a clue, lady” and his scrollover caption “fuckedupwhitelady” both have a tone that suggests he doesn’t mean lady in a very nice way.

  17. 21

    Did anyone ask him whether they were meant that way, savage? Just curious. Because it’s a good example of someone interpreting a slur from a mere label, and it’s interesting that you read “not a hippie” as fine but “lady” as sexist.

  18. 23

    As for whether or not anyone asked Greg what they meant… well you would know if you had read the comments. It was certainly commented on early on, and he chose not to respond to it. If we should all ask Greg what he meant, shouldn’t we be asking Sarah Pond the same thing?

  19. 25

    Stephanie, really? It was a post on a blog. Blogging is commenting. These blogs invite comments. No one ever said there should be no commenting. You are free to make silly comments about people not commenting on blogs if that is what you wish to comment on.

  20. 27

    Stephanie, I never suggested there should be no commentary on that either. I don’t think anyone has ever suggested that. The closest I’ve come to even implying that (and implying in this context means a combination of poor reading comprehension and deliberate misinterpretation on the part of the person believing that no commenting is implied) is when Greg suggested she edit her sign to call attention to the fact she’s obviously responding to specific remarks made by a journalist. I then responded that I didn’t think she should edit her sign for him just so that he could understand her context, since it is entirely likely everyone around her did understand it and her sign wasn’t specifically protesting the American situation, but the Canadian one. Which in many ways is similar, but by no means exactly the same. Hardly a clarion call for “no commentary”.

  21. 28

    I don’t think editing the sign to point out O’Leary’s bull would help the underlying issue, either, regardless of Greg’s opinion on the matter. It would add clarity, yes, but it’s not about what Pond means. It’s not about Pond at all. The verbiage still grants that those labels are accurate in saying that she’s not one of them.

  22. 30

    Ah. FFS. Really, Greg? Trolling your own blog isn’t enough, now you gotta rile up the sexist cries here too? Because you know they won’t get anything in that comment but the dogwhistles.

  23. 31

    *sigh* Greg is saying that he knows exactly what is and what is not a slur–basically that his point in his post was to highlight that the terms on the sign were a slur by putting them in the context of other slurs. He’s even more oblique than I am sometimes.

  24. 35

    I get what you (and Greg and Stephanie) are saying. I still don’t completely buy that it’s a bad response to the media (esp. right-wing media types like O’Leary) frame:

    “You right wing assholes want to dismiss this protest on the grounds that all the people here are “easily” written off as fringe elements. Fine. You may be able to Other hippies and socialists and youths by slurring them with these names, but you can’t Other me and I stand for the same things.”

    Her intent may have missed the mark, but it doesn’t take much of a stretch to give her the benefit of the doubt. I don’t see it as much different than Crommie going to Occupy Vancouver in a suit deliberately.

    And even if we disagree on this point, Greg was totally out of line, slurring and denigrating her and coming off like a sexist jerk. I’m still upset on her behalf & don’t know when (if) I’ll go back to his blog.

  25. 36

    I would respond to savage’s inconsistency above and point out how the double-standard is being applied, but s/he thinks s/he is onto something with Greg being all sexist despite my already having pointed out exactly what Greg is doing. There is no point.

  26. 39

    I just think a lot of people are getting hysterical about this and bitching unnecessarily and generally acting like girls. One of the people I talked to about this sign is black, and that person, who sometimes uses my bathroom, agreed with me in a very articulate fashion.

  27. 40

    OK, enough with the fucking nuance and subtlety. We have a job to do let’s just do it.

    I wasn’t trolling but sometimes the hook gets stuck on a stump. Savage.sphenicus seems to be the stump. Funny, savage, that you get the very obvious sexist remark (girls) but miss the other two sexist remarks and the two racist remarks. That makes you a double sexist double racist.

    “Get a clue, lady” is not even remotely sexist, by the way.

    Anyway, no, I wasn’t really talking here about double standards, just giving examples of direct insults that one may well not intend to make. Shrew, hysteria, the articulate black guy, etc. etc. are a category of remark that is only slightly removed from “freak” or “librul” pronounced a certain way, or anarchist or lw nutjob.

    There is a spectrum of insult, a spectrum of immediate understanding/meaning and a spectrum of distance between the worst possible interpretation and what is meant.

    If you live in a genteel society and try to be at least a little thoughtful, you a) learn the words and what their deeper or historical or incidental meanings are and stop using them, and b) appreciate when being told that you’ve not done so in a particular instance. That should be obvious (though it isn’t to many, or is skilfully ignored in some cases, or labeled as reverse X-ism, etc.).

    What the lady did was LIKE that (but not exactly the same). She carried out the fallacy of neo-activism (which we also see at the root of elevatorgate by the way but maybe we should not go there just now). I’ll write a whole damn blog post on this soon enough (an empty emacs buffer awaits as we speak) but briefly it comes down to this:

    “I’m so glad I can go to Washington and march around in protest of my first world problems. I disdain those activists back in the days of the Labor/Union wars, where they threw bottles at cops and otherwise acted in a violent way, or those hippies who took over the streets of Chicago without permits and stuff. These days we know how to demonstrate peacefully”

    That’s the fallacy. The truth is that history is often ignored by modern protesters who ironically forget to check their privilege. The truth is that it took WWI vets getting gunned down by soldiers in Washington to make a world where the cops did not use machine guns to control crows, it took four dead in ohio to get the cops to put the bullets mostly aside, it took a townhouse in philly to stop the cops from bombing activists, it took Chicago to make mayors work with (sometimes) rather than against the protesters.

    The truth is, that even though we complain bitterly about a penned in group of women being maced by a dick-headed NY cop, there is almost no violence going on at all in this major multi-city protest (excepting italy which apparently got pretty violent). And do you know why? DO YOU????

    Because of hippies.

    Because of freaks

    Because of anarchists

    Because of erstwhile mobs

    Because of punks. Well, not so much but a little

    Because of left win g nutjobs

    THAT is why you can be a mom holding a baby in the middle of a protest. There. Is. No. Other. Reason.

    That sign is deeply offensive, no matter what she meant by it. The sign MIGHT be like my comment above. Or it might not be. But it NEEDS to be criticized. Have you ever had a large police flashlight rammed across your forehand repeatedly? Have you ever had to listen to your friend getting raped in the cell next door and wondering if you were next? Have you ever been chased by cops on horses. Cops on horses are the scariest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Ever. And I’ve stood in front of a firing squad and I’ve been abducted by renegade soldiers in the Congo. Those thigs happened to people before.

    To hippies, freaks, anarchists, mobs, puks, left wing nut jobs. To vagues, even.

    This lady probably didn’t mean to say that all those people before her were irrelevant, that it’s ok now because now she is here with her mom-ness validate. But she said it. That she may have used those keywords in response to a moron on Canadian TV (and I had no idea they had morons in Canada, but apparently so) is not the point.

    You don’t respond to a moron who claims that Obama is sub-intelligent because he’s black with “Well, I heard him talk once and he was pretty articulate” unless you never heard about the whole black-articulate thing, and then, if you get corrected, you learn.

    The sign is deeply offensive.

  28. 41

    Your own blog isn’t enough for you? You have to come over here and spread your crap here too?

    You are being disingenuous to say that the way you used the term “lady” in your post wasn’t sexist.

    “Don’t be so emotional, lady”
    “Learn to drive, lady”
    “Suck it up, lady”
    “Get me a sandwich, woman”
    “What’s wrong with you, woman?”
    “Give me twenty push-ups, ladies” (said to boys to denigrate them)
    “Quiet, ladies” (said to a group of men to make silence for an authority figure to speak)

    Sounds to me just like
    “Get a clue, lady”
    and
    “fuckedupwhitelady”

    Not remotely sexist. Yeah, right.

    I’m not even going to reiterate my comments about the sign because you obviously don’t want to listen to any other viewpoints.

  29. 42

    @ Jason

    Ibis: The difference with Crommunist is that, while he was inverting the labels that could be applied to him by dressing like Wall Street, he wasn’t also using the slur words and thus giving them power. Though in a way, wearing the suit is very much playing into their criticisms of Occupy Wall Street not dressing like Wall Street, it’s harder to put that into ready-to-fire silencing meme form.

    Like I said, I do get where you’re coming from. I just think that the woman’s intended statement was exactly what Crommunist’s statement was: not everyone here fits into the mould that the right-wing media is trying to present. Some people are mothers of young babies and some are gainfully employed men in suits. Both of those statements carry a subtext that the RWM labels are erroneous or insufficient. But they do not necessarily connote that the labels are *negative*.

    Some people may interpret the statements that way, and so an argument can be presented that they might be have been made with more clarity. But honestly, that calls for some calm, awareness-raising discussion, not a sexist, excessive diatribe against someone who was acting with good intentions.

    P.S. The hat thing pissed me off because Greg wasn’t satisfied with assuming that the woman in the pic (Susan Pond?) was somehow responsible for the very thing she’s protesting, but had to call her out for putting her baby in pink, which happened to assume the very thing that he was criticising *her* for (i.e. gender-normativity). That’s not what I found sexist about his post, as I’m sure you now realise.

    P.P.S.

    Because you know they won’t get anything in that comment but the dogwhistles.

    That “they” refers in part to me? Because I’m not a dog that I respond to whistles, thank you very much.

  30. 43

    Your own blog isn’t enough for you? You have to come over here and spread your crap here too?

    OK, sorry, I won’t come back. Glad to see Jason has a bouncer. Where do I get one?

    I’m not even going to reiterate my comments about the sign because you obviously don’t want to listen to any other viewpoints.

    Actually, I changed my view of the sign completely based on comments providing important additional information and perspective. Did you not notice that?

  31. 44

    Both of those statements carry a subtext that the RWM labels are erroneous or insufficient. But they do not necessarily connote that the labels are *negative*.

    No, the labels are used by the right-wingers as slurs, to dismiss the participants as not being serious or worth listening to. The intent to use it as a slur is the problem. This is exactly analogous to the way that “lady” isn’t necessarily a slur, but you’re reading intent by Greg to use it as a slur.

  32. 45

    I’m putting my comments for all three posts here, because I’m lazy.

    First about the hat: it looks like a hand-knit hat out of yarn that cost around $8 for 50g and probably took just over a ball and a couple hours to knit – relative cost anywhere from $26-$60 depending on what the knitter would take for a per hour charge for knitting and how long it took. That’s for Greg’s commenter who called it a cheap hat. Likely, it was made by a well meaning friend/relative.

    For Greg and his comment about not caring about the hat: in writing, if there’s a gun on the wall, it has to go off before the end of the story. If you mentioned the hat, it means something. If you didn’t care about it, you shouldn’t have mentioned it.

    Second, Stephanie is far more eloquent than Greg.

    Finally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FrfC6ka6Qg

  33. 46

    Your position is that by denying those labels as appropriate for her, she’s deliberately condoning their use as slurs.

    Nope. That would be why Jason said:

    Again. It doesn’t matter what she was trying for. If she was trying to refute the labels, she’s doing it the wrong way.

  34. 47

    Greg,

    While I fail to see the point in commenting further as it seems my comments are either ignored or willfully misconstrued, I will say this as you chose to directly address me as a ‘stump’ and as a ‘double sexist, double racist’. I saw your other sexist/racist comments in that comment. I thought that with all of them, including your ‘girls’ comment that you were at best trying to be what you interpret as ‘ironic'(though I have a feeling that word doesn’t mean what you think it means…), since I was fairly certain that you didn’t mean them in a literal fashion. Now that being said, perhaps I should have interpreted them literally, and I’m damn surprised Stephanie or Jason hasn’t, since everything else must be interpreted thusly. I chose not to comment on the other ones because none of the comments you made in your blog post were obviously racist, while some were obviously sexist, though you continue to deny it. I’m sure soon you’ll be saying that you were just being ‘ironic’ in the same way that you were with the baby hat. Ibis3 very clearly addressed exactly why your comment “get a clue, lady” was a sexist one, go read it again. And again. And again.

    Based on your other blog posts (as I’ve read many of them though I had never commented before) I don’t think you are generally sexist at all. I understand given some of your other posts why you would recoil and rail against that label. That being said, I think you really need to reread what Ibis3 said as well as some of the other posts on your blog recognizing the sexist nature of your remarks and realize that I am not the only woman who views those comments and the way that you used them are sexist.

    I had left the conversation as I didn’t see any way it was likely to move forward, until someone emailed me a link at lunch today to this site with a rant about the fundamentalist insistence on the literal interpretation of this sign. At which point I unfortunately made the error of looking at it again only to find out that I’m now a ‘stump’ as well as a ‘double sexist, double racist’ since I didn’t address every single comment you made. I think that this is yet another example of taking someone’s message and deliberately misunderstanding, misconstruing, and contorting it until it fits into your paradigm of what it must mean. These are tactics widely used by creationists and right-wingers so it’s disappointing to see them used by people who claim to be rational freethinkers who base opinions on evidence.

    That being said, I don’t feel like the conversation has been a waste of time. Conversations about labels are bound to be fraught with emotion and differences of opinion. It doesn’t mean that they’re not worth having. I’ve already asserted that if you insist on a fundamentally literal interpretation of this sign then it is insulting. You’ve acknowledged that there are other valid interpretations of the sign. That’s positive and progress, no? At this point though I don’t feel like the conversation is moving forward, instead it seems to be regressing into badly veiled name calling as a source of argument. I’m not very good at that type of argument and would prefer not to take part in it if that is what it is going to be.

  35. 48

    Now that being said, perhaps I should have interpreted them literally, and I’m damn surprised Stephanie or Jason hasn’t, since everything else must be interpreted thusly.

    This assumes, savage, that we care about Pond’s intent. We don’t particularly. We care that her tactic actually gives credence to the right-wing frames of those words. I’m not particularly offended by HER, but by the right-wing frames, which make those labels slurs.

    Ibis: apology accepted, and given that my reaction to his dogwhistle post was to lament the fact that the commentariat here (which you weren’t part of before that) would see it as only dogwhistles, you might easily have thought I was telling Greg to stop trolling on my post. Really, I was suggesting that the post would be interpreted as ONLY trolling, rather than also making another point — that there’s a distinct difference between words used as dogwhistle — pejoratives that obviously carry the slur meaning underneath — and words used as mere labels. Yes, Greg was upset with Pond. I might be upset in his same position, if I was a hippie, which I’m not really, not by the definition of “hippie = long-haired pot smoker from the 60s”.

    Except that I agree with every one of their stances, so I guess I am sort of a hippie in a way. The problem is all the pejorative uses of the word, and the fact that me saying “I’m not a hippie but I’m protesting” disabuses the hippies of their right to protest by making it seem like the protest isn’t really worth following until non-hippies get involved too. I’d like to defang those slurs, to retake them. To make it so that a right-winger saying someone is a hippie is just as ineffective and obviously a dogwhistle as claiming someone’s “very articulate for a black man”.

    And sorry Ibis, but you do actually respond to dogwhistles, but on a different frequency from a lot of others. For instance, you saw “lady” as a dogwhistle indicating a diminutive view of women. This isn’t to say that the word isn’t used as a dogwhistle, because it might be, with the corollary evidence being the situations you described in @41. I don’t particularly think Greg was using it that way. The “white” part of “fuckedupwhitelady” is almost certainly suggesting that she’s got some privilege. The “fuckedup” is almost certainly referring to her priorities. The “lady” is referring to her gender, and may or may not carry some pejorative use, but it’s not in general use as a slur at present to my knowledge. Certainly not as much as “woman” at the end of a command, at least.

  36. 49

    Oh. Sorry. I’m wrong. You were in the thread at 15. Wow. I even replied to you.

    Anyway, I don’t think I was specifically referring to you, but the commentariat in general. And I was right, when savage did exactly what I said would happen.

  37. 50

    My choices do not judge your’s.
    Her choices do not judge Greg’s.

    To require a “not that there’s anything wrong with that” disclaimer is to concede the battle to that those that are using the labels to divide and dismiss. Because as long as we are arguing about identities and group formation and insults, we are not discussing money and power and the future for the pinkhatted ones. This woman is on our side, and it’s offensive to suggest otherwise. That said, it’s not at all offensive to wish for better representation or want to educate a little- the criticism of her is not amiss, it just makes me impatient to see so much energy being consumed by this tangent.

    ““Get a clue, lady” is not even remotely sexist, by the way.”
    So if the lady used “Get a clue, gentleman” to you, about your sign, it would have exactly the same power structure and connotations and effects?
    It’s a patriarchy, Greg. You saying “it looks like it might rain today” to a woman is a sexist statement. Not your fault, but if you’re going to take offense at “not a hippie”, you’ve gotta own up to the reasonableness of taking offense at misogynistic meteorology mansplaining. In context, the bar for sexist statements is lower than you suppose.
    I’ll concede the rest of it as proper meta commentary (though it was too oblique for me until “hysteria”, at which point it was painfully obvious- ever think about communicating with something between the soft high whisper of a butterfly and a mallet over the head?).

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