International Panda and Shakes'Sis Day!
Pandagon is back up. Go say something nice to Amanda. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.
Then go say something nice to Melissa. I'm not as regular a reader of Shakespeare's Sister as I am of Pandagon, so I'm less certain of what images might be indicative of support. I do always get a good read from Shakes, and I think the outpouring of bile, including death and rape threats that Melissa has received, is just gross and pathetic.
So Amanda got slammed for two comments she made. She's provided links to the "offending" posts. Melissa was sorta tarred with the same brush, despite having a much less pithy style than Amanda's: she used the term "Christofascist." And for this, the Edwards campaign lost a strong voice for truly progressive issues and women's issues and a kickass netroots coordinator with remarkable experience building a strong online community of progressive voices and respectful discourse on social-justice and gender issues.
With the proliferation and increasing prevalence of online writing in political discourse, I guess I was niaveley optimistic that the Web provided a forum that allowed politicians and their supporters a platform that was less subject to the difficulties of the 3-second soundbyte. After all, if someone's entire argument is up there, and not lost in the reportage, then people can check things out: we can hear the context of Howard Dean's infamous shout, or Amanda Marcotte's supposed anti-Catholic bashing.
Boy was I naive. Instead, of course, everything one posts is up there, on the Web, just waiting to be quoted out of context and cited by politicial enemies, so that one can receive DoS attacks, and threats by e-mail. Instead of looking at Amanda's post on a Catholic organization's dissemination of blatant misinformation about contraception, reactionaries fixated on her offhand irreverence. The issues were lost to the blogular equivalent of the three-second soundbyte.
The number of people crying that Amanda would never say such things about Islam, and that she male bashes is truly fascinating. Again, anyone who's read Pandagon knows that Amanda's come under fire for insensitivity to Islamic issues too (she apologized for the infamous Burhka-Photoshop incident). She's not perfect, but she's also not willing to give one mythology more credence or respect than any other, when she sees the mythology used as a justification for oppression. Furthermore, Amanda's sexual politics are some of the most respectful of both women and men I've come across. We're talking about the author of the Real Consent Manifesto, here, and someone who has repeatedly pointed out that sex is just a lot more fun for everyone when sexual relations take place in a context of mutual respect.
None of that mattered, because she said "fuck" several times, and talked about God filling the Virgin with his "hot, sticky Holy Spirit." Context was there, available for anyone to read, and that still didn't matter.
So here's a martini for Melissa, and a red panda for Amanda
and a hope for many more excellent, unflinching, outspoken blog posts, and a quick death to all trolls.
papersky pointed out in the comments to yesterday's unofficial declaration that this year's bumper crop of pandalings has resulted in a one-percent increase in the total number of giant pandas worldwide.
This post represents the personal opinions of zingerella, who is an internet persona of No Official Standing anywhere, and it no way reflects the official anything of the Edwards campaign, the feminist blogosphere, Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte, Melissa MacEwan, the Mouse or the Disco Ball. No pandas were annoyed, hurt, or damaged in the making of this blog post.