Satire: literary or dramatic form in which human or individual vices, follies or abuses are examined, using burlesque, irony, parody, humour and caricature, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform. Stories, verses, dialogues for the Satirocene Age from Vancouver Island, Canada. (Posted by F. Jardine or guests)
Wednesday 10 March 2021
What does it mean when normality triggers panic attacks?
Sunday 7 March 2021
Insensitivity Training
Thursday 4 March 2021
Feminism and Free Speech on International Women's Day
What are you doing for International Women's Day this year?
Same as every year: being a woman.
But what is a woman? Is it about body parts?
Yes. (And mind parts.)
What do you mean “yes”?
I guess if “No Means No”, then Yes Means Yes.
But if it's about body parts, what about men who identify as women?
They aren't women, they're men experimenting with “identity”.
But they identify as women, they choose the female gender.
I don't care if they identify as hippopotami, that doesn't make them hippopotami.
That sounds trans-phobic.
I'm not saying they can't say how they feel.
What about hate?
(???) I'm against it.
What about J.K. Rowling's attack on trans-folk?
Keeping them out of women's washrooms isn't “attacking” them. Stopping them from saying their piece would be attacking them, but they can and do say their piece.
You're just being triggering.
Indeed. Trigger warning: unsafe space ahead. It's called private thoughts.
SOME FEMINISTS WHO FOUGHT FOR OUR RIGHT TO FREEDOM OF SPEECH:
Nellie McClung -- Canadian novelist, columnist, MLA, reformer and delegate to the League of Nations
Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes -- persecuted by governments and churches for spreading information to women about birth control
Many brave women in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East today -- ditto
Catherine Dawson Scott -- launched PEN International in 1921 for the protection of writers everywhere
Elizabeth Cady Stanton -- wrote The Woman's Bible, and said "... in the sunset of life … I feel it to be my special mission to tell people what they are not prepared to hear".
* * * * * * * *
It is a mistake for feminists to assume, in contrast to these free-speaking thinkers, that speech must be censored because some women (black, indigenous, queer or otherwise called "marginalized") must be protected from ideas and open discussion. In fact, women have always been at the centre of the world. In Atlantic Monthly in 1864, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "women are the real architects of society". Ironically, some today are being de-platformed by Critical Social Justice Theory. Far from marginalized, women actually made the world -- check out some examples of (centralized) women here:https://canadianteachermagazine.com/2020/10/01/who-is-marginalized/
The religious authorities of (philosopher-mathematician) Hypatia's day, they who felt it their mandate to control the speech of others ("nailing their tongues to the floor" as Antigone called it), had a gang of illiterate monks murder Hypatia in Alexandria, Egypt, in 415 AD. Her ideas were considered dangerous, evil, wrong-headed. Such judgements against open discussion need to be resisted repeatedly, since no era, including ours, is free of them.
For Hypatia's story as a dialogue, go to:
“The Life and Death of Hypatia of Alexandria”, Sundial Magazine, January 2021. https://sites.google.com/view/sundial-magazine/curios/the-life-and-death-of-hypatia?authuser=0
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Wednesday 3 March 2021
Six Books Down -- How many more to go?
The Owl and the Pussy-cat Sail the Censorship Sea
Tuesday 2 March 2021
Libraries abandon Freedom To Read, embrace Freedom To Ban
The Little Madhouse on the
Prairie
How ironic that, as Freedom To Read Week winds up in Canada, and Read Across America Day is being celebrated in the U.S., libraries are celebrating by censoring children's literature. Even old favourites like Laura Ingalls Wilder aren't immune: because some groups didn't like her “portrayals of Native Americans” the American Library Association removed her name in 2018 from its lifetime achievement award list.
Meanwhile, there have been calls to “Burn Babar” (that terrible racist white-supremacist elephant), and six Dr. Seuss titles have just been de-published by their own publisher, Dr. Seuss Enterprises. The six books in question “align with Orientalism”, says the company. Whatever Orientalism may be, we know censorship when we see it, and see it selectively applied: “... because the majority of characters in Dr. Seuss books are White, his works ... center Whiteness and White supremacy”, says the publisher, without clarifying whether books with black characters center Black supremacy, and align with Occidentalism.
Dr. Seuss books are language-teaching, literacy-inducing open-hearted comic rhymes of tolerance and universalism, presenting these things decades before the present “equity” movement of social justice warriors had even got started.
Now, Horton Hears a “Who on Earth is running the libraries these days?” Certainly not anyone who values freedom of speech. Once banned, Will the Cat In the Hat Ever Come Back?
Monday 1 March 2021
Jab-berwockying our way around the pandemic
This story is reproduced from LITERARY YARD, www.literaryyard.com, 2024/02/10 It's a common fairy-tale theme -- imprisonment in a tower ...
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"Lionized" by the literary establishment during his/her own time, many a once-popular author is now denounced for racism, sexism, ...
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'Twas the night before Christmas … In each bedroom and hall the seniors were stirring, insomniacs all, support hose was hung by the chim...
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Handicaps are not failures, and we all have some -- physical, social, educational, circumstantial. They may even signal prowess (the...