The target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.

[topum]

This might be my favourite article of all time. I could easily mistake it for satire, like many other things in this election (including Trump actually getting the nomination). But unfortunately it isn't. I wouldn't disagree with the first sentence though. This is so good. Who needs comedy.

Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women

Robin Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Language and Woman's Place

I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.

The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around.

'It's not about emails; it's about public communication by a woman’

Full article in Time is here.

Comments

[wanderipity.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[topum.livejournal.com]

That can mean so many things ).

[beautesauvage13.livejournal.com]

Hm.  It's not entirely wrong.  Much as I do not like Hilary.  Still there has got to be a better choice then Hilary to be the voice for women. 

Athena

[topum.livejournal.com]

I think that emailgate has nothing to do with Hillary being a woman and everything to do with the outrageous things she did with that server and those emails. And I think that the article is full of hilarious stuff.

[beautesauvage13.livejournal.com]

I agree.  What Hilary did was a crime.  Trump is no saint however.  If I am not mistaken he is due to stand trial for allegedly raping a 13yr old years ago at some party a pedophile buddy of his had.  It baffles me that he is allowed to be in the position he is currently in.  Should put both Hilary and Trump in jail.  Find a more moral and intelligent person to run for president. 

But that isn't going to happen unfortunately.  We're going to be stuck with one of them for 4yrs soon. 

Athena

[topum.livejournal.com]

Calling Trump "no saint" makes you a big Trump fan in my book, ha ha. Trump is a complete disaster. That doesn't change who Hillary is though.
I am pretty sure Hillary will win. And I think the only thing to celebrate about that win will be that Trump lost.

[beautesauvage13.livejournal.com]

Trump is an orange faced toupee wearing orangutan.  He belongs in a zoo.  Not in the white house. 

He needs to be behind bars and have children point and laugh at him all day and make faces at him.  Needs zoo keepers to throw in the odd banana. I'm not a fan of zoos but Trump is one animal I wouldn't mind seeing tortured daily. 

Athena

[topum.livejournal.com]

I am not as bloodthirsty as you are, haha and would be satisfied with him just not being the US president.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

What Hillary did was not really a crime.

[topum.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that story is more bullshit than the "Everyone hates Hillary because she is a woman and a super pioneer for women's rights" storyline though.

We are getting ready for the ultimate reality show (and the only one I have ever watched) here, the US election results coverage night. The interactive maps, the whole shebang. We will all be watching it live in our community house on multiple screens, got to have fox and msnbc at the same time at the very least and we will have a couple in between these extremes too. And with all the beer on tap one can drink and all the fighting and arguing one cares to join (we have volunteers from the US from both camps here now as well republican nevertrumpers). And yeah, safe spaces are banned from our community house. We fight, we argue, than we have a drink together and do a great job as a team the next day. Micro aggressions are good for one's immune system.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

No, everyone does not hate Hillary because of sexism. Everyone hates the Clintons because they are the Clintons.

[topum.livejournal.com]

But it is not just the sound of their name that people are so uneasy with, right?

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

What is going on with Trump and the 13yo may also be garbage. She is an anonymous accuser who says she was afraid of Trump. No legitimate news site will touch an anonymous accuser with a ten foot pole. The woman's attorney was going to have a press conference, but she canceled them due to what she said was threats. The other person linked to Trump in that particular case is billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. He did go to jail for having sex with a minor.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

Colin Powell used private email. A bunch of White House emails when George W Bush was president were going through RNC servers instead of through whatever they were supposed to be using.

Government moves slowly and has some really strange practices around technology.

[topum.livejournal.com]

And it was stupid in all those cases and should be possible to investigate and criticise over and over again especially if they were presidential candidates (not many would be interested otherwise). Hardly anyone did it on her scale and with so much lying around it though. Those are not just strange practices that somehow moved slowly to that point. That took a conscious effort to set things up to avoid proper scrutiny.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

The other cases were on a similar scale or on a much larger scale. But the other cases were not investigated like this, and they were not investigated like this not just because she is a presidential candidate. There is something about the Clintons that makes the opposition party just absolutely lose their minds and attempt to investigate them until the heat death of the universe. Because they inspire this kind of attack, the Clintons will lie about what color shoes they are wearing.

[topum.livejournal.com]

Yes, constant lying and cover-ups do that to people. At certain point it makes them want to investigate and nail you.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

Also the classification system is stupid complicated.

Things can be retroactively classified. There can be things in a book that are in the public domain. And these things that were once public knowledge can become classified, but they are okay to share so long as you go find that old book and say you found it in some public source. The whole thing is really really dumb.

Here is a boring story about classified email and how it works. Here is an earlier story pointing to various classified emails. Note that the emails that were classified were classified after she had left office.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Colin Powell actually used AOL!

[topum.livejournal.com]

He probably also just sent 30k emails about yoga from there so it is all good ).

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

Hillary is sorry.

[topum.livejournal.com]

She always is. After all conceivable and inconceivable cover up scenarios are exhausted.

[rockingthemike.livejournal.com]

i just... don't get the hatred for hilary. people complain about her stance on iraq... she took a pragmatic stance at the time and while she says she may feel differently, wouldn't budge on the fact that was the decision she made at the time (that does chutzpah). people are bitching about the the emails? guess what i did today? set myself up on a date using my work email. should i? no. should she? no. do i know better? should she know better? yes. but guess what; we're both human. i could go on, but the fact the matter is, i've yet to see a convincing argument against her that doesn't involve some level of misogyny and/or sexism.

[topum.livejournal.com]

Oh boy, setting yourself up on date and doing what she did as the secretary of state are two very different things. Now let's see if you will go to the same lengths as she did to cover things up when they start investigating your use of work email to set up dates, haha. I am such a bad writer and hate writing so much that I would never even attempt the mammoth task of listing all the convincing arguments against her which have nothing to do with sexism and misogyny.

[rockingthemike.livejournal.com]

they both boil down to poor judgment. my argument is that it is absolutely impossible to be without poor judgment. if people are really that fucking wound up over her being on the ticket, they should either 1.) become card carrying members of the democratic party so they can put their say to good use, or b.) just shut the fuck up about it.

[topum.livejournal.com]

It is impossible to be without poor judgement. It is possible to criticise presidential candidates for it without being accused of sexism and misogyny. It is also possible to be with so much poor judgement that becoming a president might be problematic.

Not interested in telling people what they should do or, heaven forbid whether or when and what about they should shut up.

[rockingthemike.livejournal.com]

It is possible to criticise presidential candidates for it without being accused of sexism and misogyny.

we've seen very little valid criticism divorced of sexism this election cycle.

Not interested in telling people what they should do or, heaven forbid whether or when and what about they should shut up.

i'm not afraid to. i'm also the person who will tell people that if they don't vote, they have no right to gripe. our governments ask very little of us (by the north american perspective, pay taxes, abide by the law, vote), yet we demand so much more from our governments. the fact that both the u.s. and political parties even give us a voting right for leaders of parties is a privilege that many others will never experience. hell, the majority of the world doesn't even know what it's like to live under actual democracy. /soapbox

[topum.livejournal.com]

I have seen a lot.

I am not afraid either, I am just not interested in telling people when they have a right to gripe and when they have to or don't have to shut up.

[diejacobsleiter.livejournal.com]

Curiouser and curiouser, indeed.

But this tactics of counterattacks (changing subject and appealing to the gender) is quite common. Recent scandal in the Globe theatre developed in the same way: new chief director Emma Rice was accused of destroying the authentic theatre by pop-style experiments, she answered by massive hysterical interviews pressing only one button "I am female, hence all the criticism; they'd never say these things to a male director"...

[topum.livejournal.com]

I do not not know anything about the Globe scandal but I think there are still a hell lot of cases where sexism is indeed there and bringing it up is legit and is not "changing the subject". I just think that emailgate is definitely not one of those cases.

[diejacobsleiter.livejournal.com]

Of course, there are, and sexism still rules everywhere, thank you for opening my eyes :) (you forgot: it was my role!). But now let me open your eyes: this is a common feminist defense: any criticism (professional or personal) could be counterattacked by "ah! sexism!!!" And this IS the change of subject.

But the article you quote is a cherry on the cake...

[topum.livejournal.com]

But if you say that sexism rules everywhere then how is screaming "ah! sexism!!!" a change of subject )? it is just describing the reality then, no )?

[diejacobsleiter.livejournal.com]

But not every criticism is sexist. And sexism is generally expressed in another way: discrimination in employment, treating as just a sexual object, humiliation in private life etc. To a professional criticism, there is only one adecuate answer - still professional, staying on the subject. If you answer to a professional remark as to a sexist one, it's not very honest, it's pure and simple case of changing the subject. (Like in the case of Emma Rice and The Globe.)

But I tell you one thing secretely: I'm the only true and proper feminist. Because I love women so much!

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

The article is ridiculous. Political right-think at its worse.

Having said that, I do agree that the fuss over HRC's emails is also ridiculous. I don't see it as sexism, though. I think its motivation is sheer dislike of... HiLLARY CLINTON. She could be a man, she could be genderless and floating in the primordial ooze, and it still would have happened. Many, many Americans dislike her intensely and resent having her shoved down their throats. What's her chief "qualification" for the Presidency? That she was married to a President.

[topum.livejournal.com]

That article is full of gold.
Poor Hillary is indeed so deeply unlikable that it almost scores her points with me by now. I start thinking "Wow, being so completely unlikeable she must have had to work three times as hard as someone average to get anywhere".

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Good point. :-)