I am very curious about the chain of events whereby the rhetoric of all of these major news sources suddenly makes a clear and deliberate shift. Because I cannot believe that each of these reporters is simply aping what someone else is doing. Not because I think they have such integrity, but because that doesn't seem efficient enough for those in power. There have to be meetings and decisions made, no? So, does someone in the gummint, I don't know, have lunch with a newspaper owner, telling him about the new linguistic strategery, who then speaks with his editorial staff, who then speak with the reporters in their units? And how does that conversation go, exactly? I keep thinking of that scene in All the President's Men where Ben Bradlee discusses Watergate with his editors and who is going to write the story and how it happened, etc. I am trying to imagine a scene like that where someone like Bradlee tells his editors that "we will now refer to all insurgents in Iraq as 'al-Qaida,' no exceptions." What would be the rationale? And wouldn't there be any questions? And if a reporter said, "no, that is simply not accurate," what would happen? And finally, if there are directives about this, maybe even written down, why doesn't this get out? I suppose I am being naive but I don't get how these things are pulled off with such ease, and why no one leaks anything about them. It makes me crazy.

http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/6292/tsathdickms0.jpg

Maybe there is hope in the blueberries.

At least there are lots of anti-oxidants.

But when Podhoretz can utter these vicious calls for genocide without being greeted by a widespread public outcry, one has to wonder how we can ever turn back from this horrific path we are all being led down, willingly or not. Once a nation accepts lawlessness and xenophobia and brute violence in place of diplomacy, all of which redounds to its citizens' detriment, can there ultimately be any outcome for that nation other than a violent internal rupture? At this point I would welcome an EU occupation of our own rogue nation.

Where is that Ignore This User function?

I am begging you.

I wonder if the assumptions about Digby's sex also have something to do with the fact that she is writing about politics? I don't have any statistics on this, but I have noticed, for example, that almost all of the people who are posted to Altercation are male (because they sign letters with their actual names). I don't know if that's an editorial bias or if it reflects the fact that most contributors are male.

But at televisionwithoutpity.com, where I have posted for some time, the posters are almost always assumed to be female. There are at least two forums that exist simply to critique TWOP, and at these forums, TWOP posters are almost invariably referred to as "she," unless the screen name is clearly male.

I don't know if the perceptions about who writes on "hard" and "soft" topics (for lack of a better description) actually reflect the reality, but it is interesting to observe what those perceptions are.

I study British women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. At that time, women writers were called names such as "Amazons" if they ventured into the realm of politics; Anna Barbauld was excoriated for her anti-war poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, and she never published again.

I don't think we have overcome assumptions about the gendered compartmentalization of knowledge.