You all should listen to yourselves as you want everyone else to listen.

1. We're TIRED of hearing about feminism.

2. This is BIGOTED

3. This isn't sexism; that's BIGOTED

4. It isn't Hillary, coupled with adjectives like "shrill" and "strident"

5. Insults, ranging from the scatological to the sexist plus the wish that someone with a wonderful wife and sons could have those sons dump the writer (four-letter works included)

6. There's no need for this discussion.

7. The dream machine.

8. MORE denunciations

9. Attempts, including inept economic analyses involving increase of site traffic, to invalidate the author, the editor and the site.

10. Justification by demographic other than the candidate's (although Hillary's background is still open season). To me, this sounds like a double standard.

11. Hillary should withdraw gracefully (how ladylike!).

Now, please make very sure you follow me on this: GRANTED, I am an Ivy League-educated Second Wave feminist who supports Hillary. GRANTED, like Obama and Hillary, I'm Midwestern-born. GRANTED, I am a liberal Democrat. Those are not the demographics from which I am now observing and posting.

I am observing and posting from the points of view of someone who has a Ph.D. in literary analysis (text, context, and subtext) to evaluate these posts. I am also posting from the point of view of someone who's been on the internet for almost 20 years and held my own in more than my share of flamewars.

To me, many of these posts, especially the repetitive, brief yelps, add up to polysyllabic STFU because you want people to. That is a strategy employed by sexists, but not only by them. It is also employed by people who want to argue from, or impose their own, authority when, as far as I can see it, they have no more authority than anyone else online: i.e., precisely as much as their articulacy can win for them.

What is the value of your communications? Are you achieving your goal, or are you making noise? That is not a set of rhetorical questions: it's a request for you to please consider.

As I am. Believe me, if I decide to be aggravating, you'll know. For now, I am trying to be wholly analytical.

If your candidate wins, I will be fighting beside you. But when you come up against the Republican meatgrinder, you WILL need to pay even more care not just to what you say, but how you say it.

More strategems:

1. I have WOMEN in my family, and THEY say Clinton is a poopyhead, or whatever.

2. I WANT THIS STOPPED (the entitled authoritarian, sometimes complaining about Hillary's authoritarianism, sometimes just stamping virtual feet)

3. Faux pragmatist (let's elect a candidate now, and will HRC please be good enough to drop into a lava pit)

4. I'm not calling names, but you're calling names, also known as "It's not name-calling when I do it."

5. I'm a WOMAN and HRC is a poopyhead.

I could probably do the same for HRC supports, including myself, but at this point, Obama is ahead, and the Obamabots, especially the ones of the Chihuahua bark-and-pee variety (good grief, this post has an excretory subtext: well, everyone's a critic, and I've tried to be nice, well, sort of), are going to find themselves up against some really entitled white men (and male-identified women) who aren't going to give a damn what sort of visionary special snowflakes you are online.

To whichever one of you who pretended to apologize that you weren't up to my standards and would have to yelp better, I'm not the one you need to worry about. I'm NOT voting for McCain. I tell you three times.

But that is a very practiced machine he can invoke. These verbal strategies are -not- going to cut it.

In the "it's enough talk already, shut up, stop whining, etc." department: anything that is not deference is automatically assumed to be bashing.

I'd refine that to "automatically wished to be bashing" so then there can be more use of loaded nouns and adjectives.

Is this a matter of sexism? I've heard more men than women use it. But I think it's more a matter of power: those in power have an easier time of shutting up those who are not in power or who can be verbally coerced into abrogating their power.

I'm seeing an awful lot of that. Hell, I saw a lot of that in the Bush administration(s). Usually, it was accompanied by distinctions imposed upon a perceived outgroup: the terms "victim, equity, and gender feminism" all fall under that rubric. I think they're the result of one of Hoff Summers' subsidized polemics, but I'm not sure.

A republican national convention is like a coronation. Is that truly the political process you want to show this country and the world? (Okay, I've been reading Thucydides lately. It shows.)

At this point, I'd say that the whole dialogue has less to do about the candidates than their supporters and what sort of verbal/intellectual/ethical climate in which they will conduct their discourse.

Choose carefully.