Call for topics: GE candidates' views on women's issues.

By popular demand, this farm will attempt to research and publish findings of potential general election candidates' views on women's issues, including but not limited to abortion, family maintenance, sexual assault, etc.

Should readers have particular topics of interest, and/or have leads on what you deem will be beneficial for our compilation, do let us know either in your comments or email us at farmer*dot*plantalot*at*gmail*dot*com.

#sgfeminists on Twitter.

While the animals and I hardly write here anymore (our apologies, by the way), we are still occasionally tweeting at our account. More importantly, the barn and a couple of others, including our good pals at Weekday Blues and AWARE, have for some time been sharing thoughts and links at the hashtag #SGfeminists.

Do join us in our discussions, and share your thoughts and links at #SGfeminists!

Brief Public Service Announcement

It has come to my attention that the top few phrases bringing people to this blog right now involve some combination of the various iterations of the words "fuck" and "child".

Let me point out that the reason for this is that our Magical Chicken wrote a damn fine post titled Don't Fuck Children (emphasis mine).

So whoever it is out there typing those phrases into Google, please read the aforementioned post and take the excellent advice therein.

Good grief.

MeowPwakMooMehOinkBayWoof

As our observant readers would note, things have been moving quite slowly on the Farm. The animals and I have been hard at work either prepping the fields or selling our produce at the farmers' market--we need money to keep our computers and interwebz running, so we haven't been able to complete the many half-chewed posts queued for publishing.

To make up for the lack of updates from us, but also continue some form of discourse or awareness-raising, we've finally decided to start our own Twitter account, or as we like to call it here, our MeowPwakMooMehOinkBayWoof account since none of us actually tweets. (At least not anymore.)

Links to interesting articles that we encounter during our breaks or off-work hours, and which we have no time or need to speak substantively on will be shared through twits. Small protestations, some crass, snide and ridiculously childish, on issues and news will also occur there.

Thanks for hanging around, you lovely reader!

P/S - People we owe email replies, please know that you have a place in our thoughts whenever we're at work!

ETA -
I've replaced Twitter's snazzy widget with a Blogger's plainer widget so that readers will no longer be bugged to log in to their Twitter account. Stupid bug hasn't been fixed since last year.

On Comments

Hello my lovelies,

The topic of comment moderation has come up in a recent comment thread and we here at the Barn have been having moonlit sessions to discuss how we feel about the comments we have gathered so far.

The consensus we have arrived at is that the take-down of comments can be instructive to some readers of the blog (and we want to make clear that we are engaging trolls to further our agenda, and not to feed them). Until the volume of troll-type comments becomes overwhelming, we will continue to let certain distasteful comments stand (with take-downs from us, natch), with a few exceptions that may or may not receive 'special' treatment from us. Namely:

(1)Victim-blaming will not be tolerated,

(2) There are no circumstances under which exploitation/oppression of any form is OK. Not even when it's done to a majority group. Do not try and explain why *this* time is different,

(3) If you're here to tell us that we live in a post-feminist/racist/ablist/enter-oppression-here world, you will suffer the wrath of a deleted comment and the collective hooves, nails, beaks and teeth of all the animals here at the Barn,

(4) Mansplaining stuff to our poor femininny minds, especially to suggest that our emotions are either misplaced, or should be quelled, will not be well received.

This is a blog, not a free-for-all. Don't come to us whining about your right to free speech if your comment is deleted for the above, or other reasons. Hateful and/or demeaning speech is not entitled to expression on this platform.

We basically recognise and respect that all contributors of the Barn have their personal threshold of tolerance and refined rules of engagement. Ultimately, the individual writer has every right to exercise executive power to respond and/or moderate how ever zie deems fit for hir respective posts.

Please let us know in comments how you feel about this stand and what you would like us to do differently (if there are things you would like us to do differently). We aim to make this an enjoyable place where sparkling discussions can occur and consciousnesses can be raised, and you, dear readers and commenters, are the only way through which we can achieve that. So your input truly is valuable to us.

Public Service Announcement: No To Rape Petition Ending!

Following our badly drawn friend's post on seeking immediate help for rape, I'm reminded to make a belated public service announcement.

Firstly, on behalf of all the friends on the farm, I would like to give thanks to the good people at No To Rape for both their efforts in forwarding the important cause of recognising marital rape, and giving us a blog mention.

We on the farm are very honoured to be able to forward conversations on rape culture extant in Singapore--a phenomenon that has really caught us by surprise and disturbed us when it finally reared its unabashedly ugly, misogynistic and abhorrent head since the campaign caught the attention of the Singapore blogosphere.

Secondly, No To Rape will end its petition come 30 November 2009, Monday. That's just three days left for us to spread the message! Please visit the site and sign the petition if you haven't already. (Make sure your friends, family and pets have done it too!)

I reproduce all three of their advertisement videos:





SIGN PETITION!

This is your farmer speaking.

Why hello there, stranger!

Welcome to Barnyard Chorus's blog, the little cosy place where my genetically engineered, erudite livestock will claim the soapbox to neigh, cluck, quack, oink, moo, cackle, gobble and baa discerningly about important and unimportant things.

The declining value of a good pet and the rising cost of quality feed are just fine examples of topics that may or may not be discussed.

Apart from planting rice in my padi fields, my job here is also to ensure that things run smoothly here so that these really adorable creatures can do their thing.

Well, I had better get back to work then. This barn sure isn't going to build itself!