Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
tarahenley.substack.com
tarahenley.substack.com
'Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted.
It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.
To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.'
I would argue the UK BBC & US NPR are also in dire straits because of similar erosions of impartialness.
Neilsen demonstrates that the legacy media are dying fast, fewer and fewer people are tuned in as the broadcasting becomes more and more toxic. This is a good thing imo.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-busin...
But is it a good thing?
A free press can be thought of as the sensory organs of the polity. If the sensory organs are faulty, or worse are deliberately lying, then alternative sensory organs may fill in the blanks with less robust information. These days, when you read a story from mainstream sources, it's often best to say, "well, I don't know anything about this story, but it's pretty safe to assume that what I just read is either wrong or nonsense." That's really not good. It gets worse if the only alternatives are just as wrong, or just as nonsensical, and you have to apply some kind of boolean bullshit math to get some outline of what the issue even is.
The erosion of public trust isn't a short-term problem.
Tara presumably left a salaried job where her job description changed. Good for her, now the challenge is building credibility on the censorship dominated internet and staying on the right side of the big tech editorial platform gatekeepers....CDA230 where are you?
Right where it has always been, ensuring that online services are not held liable for third party content regardless of moderation choices.
If you’re referring to being banned from twitter or not appearing on the first page of google as “censorship”, then your beef is with the first amendment, not 230.
The Internet did transcend that once upon a time, except now it's just even more corporate sponsored and controlled. There is no First Amendment-type operation as, if a corporate entity wants to, they can deplatform you at the access, services, network, or financing tier, with the full support of the government.
Which wouldn't be so bad, except the government is also fully co-opted by corporate interests. We had a free market and let capitalism take over, and now we don't have a free market, neither in goods and services, nor in information.
Or how JKR on Harry Potter went from being vilified by conservative voices to the modern "She who will not be named" of Lefty HBO.
This is not whataboutism, just want to portray the scenario in a more complete light.
There were always 'stormfronters' on the internet, like the edgy kid everyone made fun of who carried around Mein Kampf in highschool. But now, all of a sudden, that kid has a bunch of new friends who have left their old cliques to start listening to this asshole.
I specify this as "legitimate" because I see the "woke activist" crowd accusing basically everything of being white supremacist.
To explain what I mean, let me start by defining a personal Overton Window. Each individual person has a range of what they, personally consider to be "acceptable ideas". I, personally, have my own politics, but I consider other views to be acceptable, even if I don't agree with them. Both Democrats and Republicans have some views that are within my personal window, but not all ideas of either side.
Society has an Overton Window when most people hold views that are within most other peoples' personal Overton Windows. For example, in 1950 there was a society-wide Overton Window on gay marriage - it was outside the personal Overton Window of, say, 98% of the population, so 98% of the people had views that fit within 98% of the peoples' personal Overton Window. That's a society-wide Overton Window.
Now it's different. Now, say, 40% of the people still have gay marriage outside their personal Overton Window. (All numbers made up on the spot, but I think they're approximately right.) But 25% of the people think that opposing gay marriage is unacceptable - it's outside their personal Overton Window. The remaining 35% are somewhere in the middle. There is no position that the majority of the people fit in. That's a shattered Overton Window.
But the people who are in media have more of a consensus Overton Window. But it doesn't match the peoples' Overton Window (then again, nothing does, because there is no consensus view).
This split - the media has a more unified view than the people do - is why so many people feel unrepresented by the media.
'critical to note that she is just recounting of her own perception of herself.'
Tara is outlining why she quit a job she couldn't do anymore because the CBC were ignoring important local stories to focus on CRT, identity politics and racialization of everything, biased reporting and click bait.
'People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority for the CBC, when local issues of broad concern go unreported. Or why our pop culture radio show’s coverage of the Dave Chappelle Netflix special failed to include any of the legions of fans, or comics, that did not find it offensive. Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as “brainstorm” and “lame.”'
Most journalists know if they get paid they are expected to promote the owner's views - the line between pr and journalism is a fine one - but that they will be promoting wholesome, useful values and information. When the owners lurch too far people leave, both writers and readers/viewers, leaving a weak core.
Once you've lied and/or lost your audience's trust it is a very hard road back. It was smart of her to get out while she still had her integrity imo
> To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my newsroom, to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book; to actively book more people of some races and less of others.
Here you can see someone "from the top" made that request and that the (taxpayer funded) employees are filling out their request. So much for "journalistic independence".
To me that, and that they are using taxpayer money to fund sitcoms and entertainment while it's one of the most profitable businesses on earth, is completely bizarre. I mean Disney and Marvel made billions just last year simply by producing content people want to watch!
> Most journalists know if they get paid they are expected to promote the owner's views - the line between pr and journalism is a fine one - but that they will be promoting wholesome, useful values and information. When the owners lurch too far people leave, both writers and readers/viewers, leaving a weak core.
At the same time they can push this ultra-liberal agenda because they aren't subjected to market forces. It doesn't matter if more and more people tune out, funding is guaranteed and comes straight from the (captive) taxpayers.
Lastly, for an "anti-racist" media, they aired content that was quite racist not that long ago, and refused to edit any of it. [0]. Maybe some races are more equal than other according to these people!
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/cbc-apology-story-of-u...
Canada has the CBC, the UK the BBC, Australia the ABC and NZ TVNZ and associated entities. None of these are Pravda, they’re all arms-length, independently run organisations.
I’m sure they’re all far from perfect (I’m happy to share my opinions on the non-CBC ones in an appropriate thread) but what media organisation is?
I agree with the majority of the linked substack in this thread, I think that the quality of CBC journalism is on a pretty clear downward trend, and I think that ignoring widespread societal issues to focus on the ultra-niche "darling of Twitter" social issues is journalistic malpractice at best.
That being said, the comparison of the CBC to Chinese state-run news broadcasting (while extremely common from conservative opinion makers in this country) is, I'm sorry, a completely childish take.
If the CBC had daily meetings where they planned on how to elect the Liberals in the next election, the most logical course of action would not to go after Conservatives, but to spend their time going after the other left-wing parties.
But, of course, that's not what happens. Why does that not happen? Because they're not a "propaganda arm" for the Liberal party, they are biased towards small L liberal viewpoints. And that difference is the difference between the CBC and a state-run propaganda program. The childishness is equating the two.
(FWIW, I know three people who work for the CBC, one of whom is a complete moron, and two of whom are good humans. All three are left-wing in their personal lives, but if any of them were in a meeting where it was discussed how to elect the Liberals in the next election, they would walk out on the spot. The idea that that happens is purely a Conservative fantasy.)
These two account for virtually nothing (unless I'm missinterpreting how seat allocation works up north). They aren't a threat.
> But, of course, that's not what happens. Why does that not happen? Because they're not a "propaganda arm" for the Liberal party
You seem to believe you have better information and political skills than their paid staff. That's a bold statement.
> but if any of them were in a meeting where it was discussed how to elect the Liberals in the next election, they would walk out on the spot. The idea that that happens is purely a Conservative fantasy.
I have no doubts that your friends aren't invited to these meetings. It's happening behind closed doors way above their paygrade.
With the utmost respect, I think an elementary understanding of multi-party democracies would be a useful first step for this discussion.
It may be instructive to look at some of the key Canadian swing ridings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Hill_(electoral_distr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchener%E2%80%94Conestoga#El... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Moody%E2%80%94Coquitlam#E... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitt_Meadows%E2%80%94Maple_Rid...
There's a reason that Canadian Conservatives have fought tooth-and-nail against any type of ranked-choice voting system. I genuinely believe that the Conservatives would not win another election in my lifetime in a ranked-choice system.
... but who signs the check?
> they're all arms-length, independently run organizations.
I have no doubts they claim to be. It's pretty convenient to have a news organization that you can claim is "independent", but that will still take commands from you. Like, for example, if you don't want a certain story to be heard. After all, you are signing the check...
Even better, because you subsidize it so much it makes it harder for truly independent medias to survive, so it becomes a single source of "truth". Because your competitor has to make money and attract viewers, while the state-backed network doesn't.
I have been exposed to easily 100x more diversity of views and ideas outside my bubble due to the CBC than I have with any corporate broadcaster. We need more of this today - not less.
Journalism requires editorial freedom, who pays the bills should have literally no impact on reporting; this is true even when with meta coverage of the publication or owner in question.
Anything else is not journalism.
And yet we all know that's not what really happens.
That’s not really what we usually mean by news, but that’s the mode being adopted by many news outlets.
National Review was founded in 1955, and is the only one of the examples you cite that even pretends to have a journalistic component (though its overtly mainly commentary); Jacobin is overtly commentary, not news; n+1 is a literary, rather than journalistic, outlet.
That's not really good examples of a novel trend in journalism.
well, that's for one very specific and notable reason alone, not because of some shifting moral landscape.
Maybe the news media are just playing out a future where every minority within a minority needs to have it's fifteen minutes of being seen and then watch the attention it receives get diverted to the next most underrepresented group until we run out of turtles.
The whole left/right division has completely lost its point. You can see it if you list the typical points of disagreement, order them from most discussed to least discussed, and look at stances from left to right:
COVID vaccines: mandate -> encourage -> offer for all -> offer for vulnerable -> ignore
Climate Change: ban plastics/meat/kids -> subsidize solar/wind -> promote nuclear -> work on mitigations -> declare hoax
Race: discriminate majority -> be color-blind -> discriminate minorities
Homeless + petty crime: tolerate -> prosecute -> punish progressively
Homeless + mental issues: tolerate -> offer treatment -> force treatment -> imprison
LGBT: set quotas + role model for kids -> allow with no special benefits -> frown upon -> criminalize
Immigration: allow arbitrarily -> set quotas -> allow high-skilled only -> ban
Abortions: allow -> allow for medical reasons -> ban
Housing: increase density -> ban foreign capital/increase rates -> develop new areas -> do nothing
We must resist it and look at specific problems and specific solutions and call bullshit on anyone trying to generalize and alienate someone based on their affiliation.
P.S. Note how impactful topics like interest rate, retirement, corporations taking place of middle class owner-operated businesses, etc. are not even on the radar.
Luckily, the organization I'm currently involved with (the SRA), while hilariously disorganized, is firmly Left.
EDIT: but i guess for you guys it might be more single-payor healthcare and reasonable taxation in which case, yeah, some things haven't changed :)
Compare that to the US with a mandatory rehiring after taking unpaid maternity (only) leave of up to 12 weeks, a complex healthcare system which causes people to go into debt, expensive college costing tens of thousands a semester, 0 (yes zero) vacation time by law, etc.
(I should note that some states goes further than that, but it's very dependent on the state and the most liberal example might be California's generous 6-week paternity policy.)
Anyone advocating any of the economic policies from Sweden I described in the US would be described in the same breath as Bernie Sanders and Fidel Castro.
For example, Danish or Norwegian immigration rules would be a perfect fit for any R president, perhaps even too strict.
What you mention used to be a typical left-wing agenda, but is increasingly being utterly forgotten by the younger generations of left-wing politicians.
I'm sorry, but what?
Within the party, they've promoted universal basic income (marxisim), state healthcare, universal education, etc. It's almost completely authoritarian marxist.
They're far left of most of Europe in terms of social policy (LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, drugs, etc) and economic (complete universal education, health, payments, work, etc)
If that's center-left what is left, exactly?
The Democrat Party is only "far left" if you believe their wildest election rhetoric and don't judge them on their actions. To call them authoritarian marxist is ridiculous when they fail time and time again to reign in corporate power and are financially beholden to that same power.
No, it doesn't, at least if you are talking about general elections since the failure of Clinton's reforms in the 1990s. Since then, it's talked about moderate mitigations of the problem of massive gaps in the healthcare system, or, more recently, simply about not continuing dismantling past progress on that issue.
Marxism - attempt to remove classes from society
The Marxism is being implemented through high taxes and redistribution of wealth via services centrally administered via government.
That seems to meet the definition.
Yes, people who support these policies are authoritarian Marxists. I'm not disparaging it, it just is what it is.
The U.S. is authoritarian and largely Marxist.
> The idea that you'd have to be a Marxist to want to centralize health insurance to reduce costs so people don't go bankrupt paying for medical care is simply propaganda.
Not propaganda, it is by definition what it is. It's not really arguable. The propaganda are the opinions on whether or not it's good. There's a fair argument it's good to make centralized healthcare, there's a fair argument against.
They had nothing better to do than draw up lists of heretics and excommunicate them.
If I was rich and wanted to take over a local government, I would channel my efforts toward dividing people on everything except economic class. Yeah, you're both poor and live in squalor next to the train tracks, but you're different races! How could you possibly get along!
IMO, most of the culture was a distraction from what really matters. People are up in arms on TV over who can claim to be a woman, but meanwhile, the concentration of wealth and economic power and worse than even the guided age.
If the bottom 50% of the population (economically) united on JUST this topic, they would see massive change - better structured education, housing, health, etc.
Instead we get what I call "hand grenades" that distract and mean almost nothing - like another biological male smashing records in a female sport and wanting to keep the medals.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there's a pattern to which peoples' issues are considered mainstream (i.e. they affect "us all") and which group's issues are considered divisive and a "distraction". But if you're in a marginalized minority group, those "distractions" may be your biggest problems every day. "Not yet" is practically the same as "no" and some folks are tired of waiting, so if you want unity you've got to build it by acknowledging those problems and support those people. Otherwise "unity" always comes at the expense of the same people.
Perfect for manipulation, extremely potent as a union buster or to kill movements like occupy wallstreet.
I think part of the issue is no one agrees on what causes it. Status-quo left says not enough taxes and social spending. SQ right says immigration, geo-arbing, and taxes too high.
Imo we actually need to be talking about interest rate interventionism, but good luck getting people to care about cash flow valuation denominators.
People — of all backgrounds — only want a stable comfortable life where they can pursue their interests and goals.
Identity/race politics are just a distraction to keep the low/middle class fighting amongst themselves while the upper classes rake in unprecedented amounts of wealth.
I believe that individuals are complex and unique and deserve to be treated as individuals instead of a member of an identity group.
I fear the day when I have to take a side in the identity/race war. In the past 2 years I have noticed that identity/race politics have entered my workplace. Luckily I haven’t had to take a side, but the day I am forced to utter a political incantation is the day I quit my job.
Almost by definition, this means the left is always trying many things (always need the next new thing) and the right is consolidating on what they perceive to be the best of the tried and true.
That being said it isn't a good look to simplify these perspectives as "the left" and "the right" as people do not really act within the confines of those labels.
The right in America understands the left quite well, but many on the left think they're trying "new" things leading to progress while the right wants to keep things the same. This is the understanding of a child and why we have political conflict in the U.S.
The most conservative stalwarts that want things to remain the same in America are government, finance, tech, media, academia and education. The cultural institutions that the left built in the 60s are the ones failing and the ones they want to conserve.
I question your assertion that you are "leftist" when you describe progressive thought in dismissive, inflammatory, right-wing terms.
I always thought the American left would really endure / have the advantage long term because of what seemed like a healthier exchange of ideas (free speech support etc).
That has changed it feels like a bit. If you don't support the cause de jour (abolish ice / defund the police / violence at protests) or other orthodoxy there really isn't a place for you.
And despite the talk of love and acceptance, the left really seems to be driven by hate and outrage now more than I remember plus a very healthy dose of hypocrisy. Ie, defund police, unless a poor person shoes up on my doorstep - then I'm calling!
AOC jetting off to florida in the midst of a massive surge in NY? The irony (she made fun of others jetting off during crisis, and florida is the anti-NY in terms of COVID approach). Newsome and his lobbyist dinner unmasked inside while ordering lockdowns? It's annoying to have such harsh rhetoric from leaders (ie, they promised to destroy any doctor who gave vaccine to anyone but the anointed few) but then relatively unprincipled action by them (they go out and party, dine, get vaccines for themselves).
I'm hoping the next generation has a good take on this.
Sounds like you're talking yourself into giving Nazis a "fair shake". Why would you do that?
Is the claim that the left is being fascist or the right is? Ie, who bum rushes someone off the stage these days - is that a left wing thing or right wing or both?
Is this claim meant to undermine my claim around the extremism now in the left and right?
I believe the current generation has a good take on this: when your identity becomes enmeshed in a political religion, the creation of differences is mandatory to support your vision.
This necessity of finding a cause or something to believe in—the need for baddies and an existential battle of good vs evil—will exist in perpetuity on the left. If there are no baddies, they must be created.
The origin of "the left" in America is a road through the Darwinian origins of Progressivism which, along with its gross support of racial anthropology, believed in a better class of men to administer a society they believed incompetent. It then moved down the meandering corridor of postmodern Marxism in academia which took as an article of faith that dishonesty was required for social change. We're now at the weapons-grade, enriched version of that belief with Wokeness where the adherents privately believe they are better people, qualified to manage society's past ills but then publicly disown the idea when confronted.
Unless the cultural left in America wants to disown over a century of believing they are superior, the orthodoxy is here to stay. There is no difference between Wilsonian progressives and the modern day woke other than transparency and visibility into the worldview.
I would argue this motivates a fair bit of the hard right too. Think of the folks fighting the "murder" of children, they come up with baddies (abortion doctors), take the law into their own hands (bombings etc). Same thing with the "stolen election". I'm not speaking about the merits of either of these issues, just that they serve to drive a similar situation on right.
This has been Christian doctrine for 2000 years: they didn't "come up with it." It's in the Didache, which is a first century document and puts abortion in the same category as pedophilia.
In contrast, there will never be a point where the left stops finding new niche epithets and specialized victims/oppressors because the Hegelian worldview requires it.
A mere 10 years ago, the idea of TERFs or people oppressing others because they didn't include pronouns would be unthinkable. Once that bridge is crossed, more bridges will inevitably need to be created. We live in a world where the left thinks thousands of unarmed black men are killed every year, when the number in 2019 was... 14 [1]
This same worldview thinks that there's a mass of white supremacists seeking to take over the country, and yet, where is the mass number of crimes that we hear about? If they were there, don't you think we'd hear about specific cases on the news, given that literally half of all unarmed black men killed by police made national news?
[1] https://www.manhattan-institute.org/police-black-killings-ho...
Not an accident, I believe. Occupy Wall Street made the billionaires and Wall Street take notice. As a consequence, they probably decided people need to be busy with something else, just in case, so they don't get any more funny ideas. Identity politics is a great one to divide people, fan anger, get more clicks and views, and at the same time get them uninterested what the billionaires and Wall Street firms are doing.
I’m glad people are starting to realize that participating in culture wars, regardless of the side, is supporting American cultural dominance.
I say this as a fairly jingoistic American, who feels American influence does much more good than harm.
Very glad this got mentioned, in all of this people have forgotten who their enemies really are: the government for some, the big corporations for other, sure as hell the real enemy is not Sam from around the block who doesn't believe in LGTBQ rights. Sam doesn't have an ounce of power, no matter how retrograde or not his beliefs are, the government and the big corporations have, lots of it.
Sam has a lot of power. We've seen over the last few decades how speech influences a lot of Sams and completely changes society. Society is the sum of all Sams and Sams have a lot of power. Sam from around the block is the Sam that used to report or burn the witches in the 1500's.
Now LGBTQ isn't necessarily the dearest topic to my heart, but freedom is and this is just one aspect of it.
Racism and bigotry are all over the place. What do we do about it? I would argue that those mindsets are not that dissimilar then those causing issues with governments and corporations.
Is there an argument from a landmark case or are you speaking gsnerally?
The way I see it, the government has more of a duty to protect free speech than it does to prevent nebulous, poorly-defined and indirect harm. Outside of these moral implications (that no speech is fundamentally harmful, that we must have the freedom to have incorrect ideas), efforts to "prevent harmful speech" always seem to hurt society and individuals when put into practice. There is always the problem of who defines what harm is (usually it's the government) and such measures exist now explicitly to prevent the government from infringing on these rights.
Also see the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...
"Expressions of hatred toward someone on account of that person's colour, race, disability, nationality (including citizenship), ethnic or national origin, religion, gender reassignment, or sexual orientation is forbidden.[1][2][3][4] Any communication which is threatening or abusive, and is intended to harass, alarm, or distress someone is forbidden.[5] The penalties for hate speech include fines, imprisonment, or both.[6]"
There's plenty of laws where there is some ambiguity and the courts and juries need to interpret them.
There are lots (most?) countries that do not have the same level of protection of free speech like the US has and it doesn't generally seem to "hurt society and individuals". If you compare the US to other modern democracies in the west it's not apparent that "free speech" with no limits is a win and there's no problem in those other countries in speaking out in general on any/many topics. You'll be stretched to find an example of hate laws abused as a way of restricting general freedoms.
Or, more directly - the Mike Ward case, where a comedian was fined for telling a joke [0].
There are other examples from the Commonwealth countries. I am grateful that our current laws prevent things like ASBOs from the UK [1] from existing here.
Further, by my reading, that "hate speech" law sounds very expansive. Just because the Canadian government isn't abusing that law the same way other countries are, doesn't mean it wouldn't be permitted under the letter of the law.
The failure in "free speech" in the US isn't actually a failure in the law, but a failure in the marketplace, where unregulated tech / social monopolies have formed and there is no proper distributed platform that people use to interact.
Otherwise, I actually think the free speech laws in the US would work - you don't counter misinformation with censorship, but with better information. This applies to "hateful" speech as well.
[0] https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/mobile/comedian-mike-ward-seeks-...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour_order
You've said this, but you haven't argued it. Sam didn't make America racist.
Sam and his like-minded allies created the Tea Party, elected Trump president, and broke into the capitol on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to prevent certification of the U.S. presidential election. He has a fair bit of power through collective action.
Measuring diversity of organisations is a good way to know if people are being excluded from opportunities based on immutable factors. It's not something you should be actively boosting by refusing to hire cis/het/white/male people and calling that equality.
A much better approach would be to say something like "oh, our company hires less black people than you'd expect based on demographic data. Where's the bottleneck? Are we discriminating in hiring, either intentionally or unintentionally? Is our industry insulated from black employees by geography, culture, perception?" Then when you know (or at least have a good idea) where the bottleneck is, you know where to intervene if it's something you're able to do. It's basically just the institutional equivalent of investigating problems based on dashboard metrics. If you have a dashboard of t1 vs t2 subscriptions and you think the ratio's wrong, you don't just start banning t1 subs to fix the metric, that's moronic.
Good "wokeness" is just egalitarianism with a systemic/holistic perspective. Bad "wokeness" is just more racism a la "two wrongs make a right".
I love and respect the arts. It’s goals are worthy. It needs to do better than this.
Don't worry, you're still the furthest to the left.
It's the others that have aligned with the priorities of mega-corporations, think tanks, and power centers - downplaying class and overplaying identity issues (and at the moment when those are the least anti-establishment and most incosequential position). Worse, they're using this as a weapon for class warfarce (against the working class, white predominantly, but they'd also openly use it against the poor black and latinos too, but they need to pretend they champion them) and a class signifier.
I'm not big on identity politics, but then I'm white. But, I also don't get why we can't allow other people to express their own valid experience without trying to shout them down.
Their (coporations and power centers) lip service towards those, their funding and support, establishment of departments and roles devoted to it, use in advertisements, mobilisation of corporate policies and law to stiffle any dissidents, constant signalling, and so on.
>But, I also don't get why we can't allow other people to express their own valid experience without trying to shout them down.
Isn't this the exact problem with modern identity politics? Shouting people down and monopolizing the discourse (usually by privileged class-wise minority, and mostly white at that) with rage-bait and conformity signaling.
Given that diversity of thought and opinion is not tolerated, authentic diversity is not the goal.
Hopefully she will stay independent, and focus on constructive reporting rather than just reactionary complaining. We see a lot of this in politics, people with what could be good ideas just getting caught up in getting upset and creating outrage about the ridiculous things the other side had done. Better to try and shift the dialog entirely rather than just complain.
That's not to say that CBC does no good journalism, but like the author of this article mentions they are a bit lacking in journalistic integrity sometimes.
https://readpassage.com/election-endorsements/
So maybe the issue is not that CBC is too Liberal, but that every other publication is Conservative, so even a neutral publication will look far left by comparison.
Again, I don't consume enough CBC content to comment how their leanings are. I just know a bit about Canadian media atmosphere in general.
>https://readpassage.com/election-endorsements/
But the source you cited seems to only include newspapers? Media companies tend to pander to their readers, and newspapers attracts... a certain type of readers. It's not surprising that most newspapers are conservative.
Our local outpost plays hideous CanCon music in the mornings and repeats the same low-information density press releases disguised as news. There is little that is combative or thought provoking and lot of self-congratulation.
I have been especially un-impressed with their lack of willingness to address the abuse of power by the RCMP at the Fairy Creek protests including the detention of one of their own videographers; their supine acceptance of the insane tar sands projects; their lack of aggression in pursuing the Trudeau administrations failure to address the horrendous mistreatment of autochthonous people people and communities.
These days I mostly read The Tyee¹ and listen to Canadaland²
1. https://thetyee.ca/ 2. https://www.canadaland.com/
That said, the author of the original article lost me when she trotted out the silly line about transgender Filipinos.
CBC is really woke though. You don't need to suffer them too much to notice that. Randomly turn on the radio while driving a few times, and you will see.
[1]: Which in its current form looks like a bland, toothless, uninspiring, "big tent" party. Roughly speaking, they only seem to win if you use irrelevant metrics like popular vote (https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/erin-otoole-conservatives-p...)
No party wins popular vote anymore (as in more than 50%). With FPTP, we are stuck with less-than ideal seats-to-votes correlation.
> No party wins popular vote anymore (as in more than 50%). With FPTP, we are stuck with less-than ideal seats-to-votes correlation.
As a side-note, I recently learned that the more unambiguous terms for this are "plurality" (more than all others) and "majority" (more than half). I think "popular vote" is also often used as a synonym for plurality, but I am not completely sure. Sorry, I am ESL :-)
I'm assuming what has happened is that, since MeToo/BLM/Trans issues and protests have become front and centre, people are talking about that more. But really, COVID is dominating the airways at the CBC too.
I can't speak for internal newsroom politics of course.
Another comment made the observation that the CBC is really the last news source that is left of centre-right with all of our other traditional media sources centre-right and slowly drifting right. Our most popular "left" newspaper, The Toronto Star, was usually taking centrist position with pro-business leanings, but it's been moving right too.
Full disclosure, I get a most of my news from the Economist or the CBC.
Personally, when I think of the recent content from CBC I remmeber reading more about climate change and reconcilation with our native history. Both of Which I think are fairly important to be informed of. But I do wish they do more investigative work.
The lens of victim/oppressor theory can apply to literally anything, and so with that tool for manufacturing the necessary ingredient of universal conflict, the news becomes anything they want it to be. It's stupid, but it works. Most of the people who use that technique even believe it, and the one rule they're taught is if you protect the narrative, the narrative protects you. I've heard reporters ask what all this concern about fake news was because they have all these objective facts, and it never landed for them that it's fake because the necessary conflict that drives the story was wholely fabricated by ideology.
I worked in print media as a freelancer just over a decade ago and knew a lot of other writers and editors, and even then CBC was seen as the partisan state organ. You have to remember that the mandate of the CBC is to create a federal narrative to hold a vast and sparsely populated country together with a coherent national identity. News is only one of its myriad projects, and it's not engaged in a mission of discovery.
What changed is milennials graduated from campuses that had been compromised by what is objectively a mass hysteria created by their professors - who themselves had previously graduated in the 90s during the first wave of what they called "political correctness," at the time, and who in turn were taught by radical boomer professors who had been indoctrinated with standard revolutionary playbooks, mesmerized by French postmodernists like Foucault and Baudrillard, and you can trace a lot of its intellectual roots back to things like the SCUM Manifesto, Weathermen, Black Panther Party, Situationists, and other cold war era soviet political projects.
No single thing happened so much as the state of the CBC is the effect of milennials being educated by two generations of carefully trained marxists to become a revolutionary corps of true believers. The rest of government is rotted through with that stuff as well. The center won't hold, and I really don't see the country intact in 15-20 years because the people running it are to weak and insincere to provide legitimacy.
CBC does lean liberal. There's idpol drama, but it predates her timeline. Honestly looks like she's manufacturing a story to push her book / substack / fishing for conservative media eyeballs, which is basically most of private Canadian media that still has money.
But being privy to too much CBC goss in my social circle, I just want to say she's full of shit simply because CBC has had drama/tensions over idpol for years. Well over 18 months ago. There is almost zero chance she's even in the realm of being "furthest left" in the newsroom hearing shit I've heard from before her first published article on her CBC profile. And given her body of work at CBC is consisted almost entirely of mediocre listicles, I can understand the desire to attention merchant over more profitable cultural wars.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/8/22823991/activision-blizz...
I'm surprised to hear that. My impression was that D&I initiatives are far more prevalent in tech/SV companies than elsewhere. I probably got that from personal experience + news about Google (Damore), Facebook, etc.
But maybe in reality D&I has become commonplace in many U.S. companies, and I just started working with tech/SV companies as that happened.
Well of course, blacks in the US are over 12% of the population and are 12% of the L5s in FAANG companies.
Which of course is not the case - less than 2% of Facebook's technical workers in the US are black, 3% of Google overall is black etc.
It's clear that diversity is not prevalent at all in Google, Facebook etc.
Is it? Keep in mind that the target hires for these companies are grads from serious CS programs. Are CS programs 12% blacks? Were they 15 years ago (when a now L5 graduated)?
It's like setting shop in Puerto Rico and favoring whites because, since Puerto Rico is part of the US and the US is ~55% white you should have that same proportion in your business.
The real question is, and that's an uncomfortable one, is why aren't we seeing enough minorities in serious CS programs.
On my team we have one Anglo American, one Cuban (me, and I consider myself white as my family is mostly Spanish, and I'm typically regarded as such by society), one Vietnamese, and one Indian. Are you really going to say that there's no diversity in this group because we lack representation from two specific continents? The fact that everyone is from different countries, thousands of miles apart isn't diversity enough? Unless "diversity" entirely a function the presence of people of African and South American descent, I fail to see how Google, Facebook, and my team are not diverse.
https://diversity.google/annual-report/representation/#metho...
It's just an artifact of hacks trying to take a culture's temperature without going outside. Tech adjacent is only notable for being full of people who will talk about it in professional areas online.
If someones circles weren't internet-heavy before Eternal iPhone September, their politics don't get associated with their circles. They're just nameless or might as well be nameless wrongthinkers on $social_media_platform and/or not posting their views to social media in the first place.
Actually, to me this shows that these discussions are really productive. Because through them we realize that perhaps we're working from different assumptions / data. That's a great stepping stone to understanding each others' views.
(Apologies if I'm misunderstanding your point.)
I think what you see on this site mostly is more of a moderate "hey can we chill out a little?" sort of response rather than an extremist alt right type of thing, though it may come across differently depending on how frustrated that person is. And yeah it can be frustrating to always feel like you are being lumped in with the group of oppressors and or bigots no matter what you do.
TL;DR I don't think most people are racist or evil.
Can you even do the types of strikes / walkouts that the tech workers do on these issues in the south and keep your jobs? Ie, the associates of an energy law firm in texas do a walkout over the lack of action by their firm on climate change?
But really it (identity politics) does touch us all in any workplace since HR in every organization aggressively enforces compliance.
On the Internet side:
I enthusiastically recommend the daily "Monocle 24" news podcast. It is very well done and regardless of what you think of Monocle magazine I would suggest that if you consumed just one world news show it should be this one.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
My policy is to refuse to give my gender or race. If everybody did this, high frequencies of "other" or "unknown" could be spun any way they want to people looking at statistics. If they aren't satisfied with this, they have to go on record clarifying exactly how they define race - which seems difficult since they're also the people who claim it's not a real concept.
It makes HR emails sound more subservient I think.
HR departments are famed for their sense of humour so I’m sure they’d be fine with it.
I expect it's probably way more appropriate in most contexts to directly ask a person what their preferred pronouns are than to ask what their gender identity is; the pronouns are what you actually need and this way you're finding them out with certainty rather than trying to guess based on some internal gender->pronoun mapping table.
It’s also a form of control in redefining the obvious. You want to just live your life? Nope, sorry, you need to consciously be aware of my preferred pronouns at all times. It’s a very narcissistic and attention seeking thing too.
Except they aren't obvious 99% of the time. They aren't even "obvious" like 60% of the time. They aren't even "obvious 99% of the time" for cis-straight (non-LGBTQ) folks.
"Hi, Sam Shepard will be on the call with you today, and will be joined by Alex VanBeckran and Kegan Marton" -- are these folks hoping to be addressed as men, or women, or non-binary? There's no way to tell, and it's kind of disrespectful to be wrong.
> It’s also a form of control in redefining the obvious.
Form of control? What on earth? It's literally just a tiny amount of human dignity. It's basically no different than being asked to address someone as "Mr. / Ms. / Mrs. / Mx." from decades prior.
> Nope, sorry, you need to consciously be aware of my preferred pronouns at all times.
It takes literally almost no extra effort, you just file it along with their name (or phone number, or timezone, etc). If you are thinking that hard about it, your probably doing it wrong.
As another commenter pointed out, in a professional setting you would ideally address these people by their proper nouns (names) and not by their pronouns. And if you're addressing more than one person, it's the gender-neutral we/they/them anyways.
I'm actually struggling to think of a business scenario where using the proper pronoun would be more professional or polite than just using someone's given name.
It works at first to just always use names and theys, but the longer a conversation goes on, the more awkward little nooks and crannies you find where it sure would be convenient to have a third-person singular pronoun for referencing the thing the person just said as you expand on it or synthesizing between statements made by multiple other participants. Maybe each one individually has a solution, but the cumulative effect of these small hitches and inefficiencies does build up.
Anyway, it's not impossible to make this feel natural, of course, and some people put in the work to master it. But there's a reason To Kill A Mockingbird stands out as a book that almost completely conceals the gender of its narrator and main character until about halfway through the story.
Yes, there's arguments both ways that broadcasting them may be virtue-signalling, but I don't think it ever is to ask someone what theirs are, especially on something like a form.
This was at one point a controversial topic. Conservatives objected to the new construct of neutral meaning "Ms" and feminists objected to "Miss" and "Mrs" because they indicated marital status. The argument being that viewing a woman's name with those titles was reducing her to an object who's worth was determined by if she was available or not to men.
edit: Not sure why this thread has gone deep into a discussion about pronouns. I don't identify as any gender and welcome any pronouns to refer to me. My humanity is the only classifier I accept. Think of my pronouns as a `void *`
Fuck that shit
If they can have custom pronouns, why can’t we?
(The answer is because it would immediately undermine the “cause” by shedding light on just how silly but also how 1984-esque the concept is.)
I would rather not give out pronouns and don’t really care how people refer to me though “they” in forums when my username is my real name does come off as a bit strange… though again, this is a trivial annoyance.
It all adds up. You can attempt to minimize it all you want but it’s like the person who nitpicks everything: “can I have 3 ice cubes? Oh when you make my sandwich can you go light on the salt? Hey I know this is your house but could you turn that music down a bit? Boy it’s cold in here… you should turn up the heat! Wow you take these vitamins? You should be taking these instead! Oh hey I know I’m obviously a girl but can you refer to me as they? I want you to have to think hard before you use my pronouns and make sure you remember each person’s custom pronouns. Wait, why are these little trivial comments bothering you? It’s not some massive festering grievance. Just deal with it it’s no big deal, it’s common decency to adhere to all of my requests. :)”
Pronoun-memers tend to claim they are more sensitive to feelings. Therefore they should be sensitive to most of the world’s feelings of general annoyance around the current pronoun meme.
"Virtue" means " Moral excellence and righteousness; goodness."
"Signaling" means "An indicator, such as a gesture or colored light, that serves as a means of communication."
So, basically if I'm morally excellent and I communicate that to you, that's a bad thing? Why is that? Is it because it makes you feel bad?
Same question about "woke". Like, "not asleep"? How is that bad?
I just feel like these terms are thoughtlessly bandied about. They're never really defined. They actually don't sound bad, but they're used in a pejorative context. It's just really strange.
Pronouns are just another step in this sequence, but it's more divisive, since it comes with a tiny little power over other employees - occupying a slightly larger slot in their attention by having them remember them. All while the wage/home price ratio keeps plummeting, and retirement at any reasonable age has gone completely off the radar.
These problems affect ALL of us, regardless of our race, gender, sexual preferences, etc. They are not divisive at all, but they are harmful to the corporate profits. So the HR and the media are doing their best to bump made-up divisive issues to the top of our priorities, so we won't notice how we are being screwed.
If you actually have a great home, friends, hobbies, and are generally happy about your life, someone using the wrong pronoun or giving you a weird look shouldn't bother you more than an unexpected rainy day. The problem is that most people that are vocal about pronouns are actually deeply unhappy, and the HR has sold them the bullshit pill that devoting your life to correcting others will somehow make you happier.
Or you could agree to disagree on pronouns, and agree to agree on pursuit of financial independence like in the good old times. Easy common goal. After all, you don't care if your colleague likes heavy metal while you love rock, as long as they can reliably answer questions that would otherwise take you days to research.
I'd argue it's the person refusing to refer to someone how they'd prefer to be referred to as being unprofessional. It's odd you use foreign names as an analogy, when refusing to pronounce someone's name correctly would probably get you a call from HR.
Blasphemy! Madness!
Heavy metal all the way, duh!
In lieu of this, and because I don't really care what pronoun is used for me, I sometimes just put "any" if it's an option to denote that I don't care.
People who hem and haw about getting pronouns wrong blow my mind of how weird this has all become
In the current climate, people want to get it right for other people because either they don't want to be an asshole, they believe it's important, they're afraid of being called out, or some combination thereof.
If you actually don't care, the easiest thing to do is just advertise that you don't care so people don't have to wonder. If you actually do care, but about how you shouldn't have to care and are trying to make a point about that, well that's something different, isn't it?
What's being asked of you is a common courtesy. Anyone that refuses this courtesy that takes so little when specifically asked for it is taking actions that speak for themselves.
You're being asked something as simple as "how do you prefer to be addressed" and you've scoured the area for all the loose dust and detritus you can find to make yourself a mountain to die on. Is it really worth it? Perhaps there are other aspects to recent culture shift that are slightly less defensible that are better targets?
I'll call you whatever you like, but if you look like and dress like a man, or your name in the company directory is "Jim," I'll use "he" if I haven't been told otherwise, and I'll think you're a bit weird if you make a big deal over it.
One place where the "pronouns in the signature" can be helpful is if your name is foreign. I work with a group of international folks and if I haven't met the person, I don't always know if a person's name is a male or female name. So then I end up referring to them by name all the time, which can be a little awkward in an otherwise informal written email.
For me? No. I imagine that someone that might deal with that 10 times a day or more might feel a bit different about it, and be tired of being in the situation of either correcting people or just letting it go because it's too tiring to deal with. I mean, I used to get that way because of my first name which has an uncommon spelling, and just correcting people writing it down for me (because otherwise I always have to worry if they search digitally where they recorded it whether their system is smart enough to do levenshtein distance or something similar to find it). I imagine it's much worse when it's something you might really care about, like gender identity, or even just people that get mistaken for the other gender often.
I'd like to think that everyone deserves the benefit of a doubt and one or more times being corrected, but some people are worse at remembering than others, and I don't see a problem with people putting preferences down, or people being asked for their own preference, especially when they think it's such an obvious thing to see.
> I'll call you whatever you like, but if you look like and dress like a man, or your name in the company directory is "Jim," I'll use "he" if I haven't been told otherwise, and I'll think you're a bit weird if you make a big deal over it.
I mean, so do I, but if Jim has corrected me once already or has registered a preference that I've seen, I should probably address them as they'd prefer, right? Anything else is just being an asshole, IMO.
> So then I end up referring to them by name all the time, which can be a little awkward in an otherwise informal written email.
They/them went out of favor a while back in English for gender neutral communication, which I think is weird, because it's super useful. I remember an English teacher in college telling me not to use it, because it was less direct and impactful. I always disagreed. I just default to you/they/them whenever I don't know specifically. It doesn't seem to cause problems, from what I can see. If someone asked me to use something else for them, I would try to remember to do so as a courtesy to them.
I agree (but honestly, if the preference is for something like "zhe" I will be rolling my eyes a bit).
> They/them went out of favor a while back
I really don't like the singular use of "they" as it was drummed into my head in 12 grades of English classes that it was wrong, and now it's a mental speedbump whenever I see it in writing.
Yeah, that's the sad thing. At some point we decided that gender neutral pronouns were less favorable, and then taught generations of people not to use them, a couple hundred years before a big cultural mixup where it would have been very useful to have. I was lucky enough to always feel it was appropriate and that the recommendations to not use it were shortsighted. This came about when there was a shift towards people saying we should use "she" instead of "he" for generically referring to a person, but that just seemed silly to me, why would we shift from incorrectly addressing roughtly 50% of the population in writing to incorrectly addressing the other roughly 50% of people, when we could just use "they" and do away with that specific pronoun problem in an accurate and even handed way?
However, it’s absolutely wrong when used as a definite personal pronoun, as it introduces new, irresolvable ambiguity where none existed before; e.g.
I just heard Tom and Harry are getting a new puppy; I just ran into them while they were walking their dog.
If you do not allow for singular definitive “they”, the meaning is clear.
If you do allow for singular definitive “they”, whose dog is it, and who did you run into — Tom, Harry, or both Tom and Harry?
The problem with “personal pronouns” is that they aren’t personal in the first place — pronouns exist exist solely for the benefit of the speaker and the listener, not the subject.
They allow for two people in a conversation to refer back to an antecedent succinctly and unambiguously. That’s all. If they can’t do that anymore, they’re just extra noise.
The type of people concerned with being addressed by the "correct" pronouns will list them without being asked, believe me. And for the other 99.9% of people, it's pretty obvious what to use.
I don't feel the need to put the pronouns as I don't care about it and find it toxic that it is being peer pressured uppon me.
I also support anyone who wants to put their pronouns in the signature or whatever. If it is something important to them then I'll respect their choice, even if they go with something silly like Xor/Xir.
No. I just want to be a human being. If you wonder about my pronouns, ask and I'll happily answer. If you get them wrong I'll happily correct you.
If you're an ass to me I'll report you to HR, but putting my pronouns at the bottom of my email isn't going to make you any less of an ass.
Like you, I also wish that pronouns weren't a big thing, but the truth is that right now society has shifted a bit to the point that it is, so rather than upset people over something I really don't care about, I just try to address people how they prefer to be addressed, while noting I have no preference and don't care if you get it wrong.
I was confused once when a doctor gave me the direction "follow him" and there was no male around. A definitely female nurse had just walked out, and that's who I was supposed to follow.
Nothing strange was going on; this happened in China. Chinese doesn't have gender distinctions in pronouns (except in the spelling...), and Chinese speakers aren't able to make the distinction consistently in extemporaneous speech.
The default is 'he', though, so I guess you're still safe from being called 'she'.
When conversing with you, your gendered pronouns aren't used. There is no gendered version of "you".
Even here in America, if you get an email from "Taylor Something" and their intranet picture is a houseplant how do you respond?
It’s only if you’re referring to them to a third person that you’ll need them.
You should still be able to refer to them with without explicitly using any pronouns even then.
It’s not. Questions about race or origin are allowed in France with some conditions; it’s a common misconception that they are prohibited. For example, it’s fine to ask which race you feel you belong to, or any similar subjective question [1, p.70].
[1]: https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/ddd_gui_...
This reminds me of "Seeing like a State" by James C Scott: attempts to simplify the world to allow generalizations about it always lose valuable detail.
I once told a friend from west India to put “Aryan” down for race, but then stopped him and apologized after I realized that was mean-funny, not funny-funny.
I was really an asshole in my 20s.
Or is that a symptom of the real issue, which is something else?
And if it is something else, is there a better thing to track?
There's a chicken and egg thing, and media can be a part of addressing the root cause. To me it seems logical that a young black woman who sees a black female CEO interviewed on TV is more likely to become a CEO herself.
Beware logic in this case. A lot of claims in social sciences seem logical, but either aren't proven at all or the alleged proof fails to replicate.
A similar logic was used to argue for banning violent video games or porn.
Lots of previously believed claims fail to replicate. One of those is "stereotype threat", which was basically taken for granted for decades and also looks logically plausible.
https://replicationindex.com/2017/04/07/hidden-figures-repli...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat
> Some researchers have suggested that stereotype threat should not be interpreted as a factor in real-life performance gaps, and have raised the possibility of publication bias. […] However, meta-analyses and systematic reviews have shown significant evidence for the effects of stereotype threat, though the phenomenon defies over-simplistic characterization.
A straw man if there ever was one. Insofar as anyone even says something like "race isn't real", the claim isn't that the concept doesn't exist. What would that even mean? The claim is that it isn't biologically grounded, or that it's socially constructed or some such.
Observe and it seems to be a real phenomenon and not just an invented opponent.
In these contexts, "race" is a stand-in for social segregation phenomena and not the Oxford dictionary defintion.
By not identifying the distribution of various discriminated-against groups, they are rendered invisible, or nonexistant when it comes to policy making. THis is fine if you are in the majority, because that is the de facto policy making consideration, but not so good if you are not represented.
Dismissing this as "spinning statistics" is a very privileged viewpoint, because it means you aren't affected by the statistics so why should you care?
In that case, either you revert to the "one drop rule" of the Old South and start classifying anyone with any non-white ancestor as a minority, or run into untenable contradictions.
Another way to look at it is there currently exists very clear discrimination practices based other vectors (income, geography, history). System racism is intersectional.
Arguing that it is "all or nothing" is another tactic to erase the existence of discrimination. This fallacy is often deployed intentionally.
It's not a majority/minority concern. The concern is whether people are counting you in order to help you or hurt you. Jews aren't so vigorously opposed to Jew-counting because they're a majority.
The push to equality (and we are not there yet) requires change and that change can be ignored unless you track it.
I’m not sure I get you here. Of course race and gender have a huge impact on a person’s life, and thus on their ideas, experiences and ability to express themselves. White men virtually never experience racism or sexism, whereas women and/or Black people are reminded about their identity every day. All women have been bothered by men in the street and all Black people have heard numerous racist comments through their life. They are so used to it they don’t even talk about it; it’s just normal. White men can’t even imagine to what extend this goes because they never experience it. People who never experience discriminations often don’t see the problem or diminish it because it’s unfamiliar to them.
So I agree that minimizing discrimination shouldn't be done, but I disagree that this is something the racial or gender majority never experiences. I agree it is wrong to live in your own privilege and unfairly judge other people, but I think experience of both sides of the experience are more universal than you suggest.
In fact I think we should emphasize the extent of the problem on all axes, as a way to make people come to the moral realization that they should judge people as individuals and not by any other group trait - because they should remember how wrong it was when someone did it to them.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/colum...
I’ve been involved with an arts-based non-profit for a long time. They do very specific type of older art. They produce it, exhibit it, encourage others to produce it, etc.
The art form is Eurocentric, with a political history that contains some small instances racism, and vast oceans of mainstream liberalism.
Every since BLM protests happened (the second time - in June 2020), they’ve been freaking out.
Suddenly they’re trying to hire as many “BIPOC” as possible, even though there aren’t many open slots.
They’re acknowledging every racial injustice under the heavens. They’re apologizing for existing (literally).
Most of all, they’re scared.
When I go to their exhibitions, every single person, is white. Occasionally a Black family will be there. Everyone in the crowd parts to allow them through. Everyone greets them - and only them.
I imagine this awkward veneration is one reason why so few Black families come.
Most of all, the leaders of this org are scared. Terrified. They don’t want to be considered “non-anti-racist.”
When speaking with others, the terror is palpable.
Edit: just to be clear this is an author specific type of performance art. Think a Bach symphony, a Wagner opera company, or a Shakespeare theater.
Identify what there is to be afraid of - it's the necessary step to moving forward.
There’s room to reinterpret the artist, but frankly interpreting this author as socially conscious has been done so many times it’s boring.
It would be like putting on a feminist production of Antigone, or a pacifist recitation of the Iliad, or an anti-racist production of Othello - not only “already done” but probably what the author intended.
The folks running the show have been avoiding actual “woke” (so hate the phrase) art for exactly this reason - already done 1000 time - and the new era demands new efforts!
Instead it’s hiring and outreach that’s gone bonkers.
Regarding communication- it isn’t that people have stopped talking. They’ve stopped listening.
Realistically, the donors are in charge. They’re the only ones listened to.
And currently the powers that be are trying very hard to find new “anti-racist” donors, preferably BIPOC donors.
I’m not sure what anyone can do about that. Other than stop donating.
What do you mean when you talk about doing an exchange with other galleries?
>What do you mean when you talk about doing an exchange with other galleries
You've been really clear at outlining some of the concerns of the artists and the economic concerns. It would be interesting to take those concerns and questions and ask for feedback from others in the community who are underrepresented. Perhaps an informal gathering of some other people in the field in the form of a structured symposium. Or just a sit-down.
One of the world's worst offenders of pushing a euro-centric history recently went full frontal and acknowledged their history (the Rijksmuseum,https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/past/slav...). Might be helpful also to seek out similar situations and how they are working through it.
Do these actually exist in their local environment or are people just afraid because of what's going on over the media networks? Forgive me, as I'm outside of where you are and I often see people being afraid of things that aren't often there.
Not sure where there fear is from. Part of it is simply not wanting to be racist, but not knowing what racism means (as a consensus definition).
The author mentioned going from most left wing to right wing without changing opinions. That’s what’s going on here … the definition of “racist” is vague so it’s better to move as far to the left as possible.
I think it’s the uncertainty over what is acceptable that’s causing fear.
Scared of criticism. Why shouldn't they be? They've created an exclusively white environment, possibly subsidized by public funds.
A lot of people in the US grew up in sundown towns, but think that the reason that there are no black people where they live is because black people didn't want to live there. They see racism how a fish sees water.
They should be relieved that it's almost over. They were victims of media trying to get the anti-Trump clicks while also being anti-Sanders, leaving them with Russian conspiracy theories (are you spreading them?) and talk about race and gender (are you a bigot and don't know it?). It'll be over once Trump fully eclipses along with public anxiety about helping him, and they'll only have had to deal with one black family.
Unfortunately, it appears fairly clear that over the past decade, a deeper cognitive dissonance is that of journalists' beliefs about their profession. Journalists seem to believe that Quality News [0] can sustain itself.
News is entertainment. Quality News loses because it commands less engagement than tweets, youtube videos, tv/movie streaming, gaming, and others.
News organizations survive now by aligning their stories with a chosen tribe (liberals, conservatives, whomever) and inflaming the base with rage rhetoric.
Unfortunately, it turns out that people don't really care about truth - it's pretty boring.
[0] Quality News defined however the particular journalist wants to define it (ethical/fair/unbiased/relevant/etc)
Source: themselves:
https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/impact-and-accountability/fin...
Can you believe it?
Yet, these money-grabbing robber barons don't provide Canadians with streaming.
There is a shitty CBC app compatible with Android TV which serves some canned videos and pictures, and a CBC News app for phones that has live news (that will Chromecast).
I say cut the taxpayer funding, or else make them deliver to Canadians the content they are paying for.
In Japan, NHK (rough analog of CBC) has a website where you can watch the actual broadcast. (Not available outside of Japan without a VPN, but that's entirel beside the point.)
CBC get $31,807,419 CAD per million capita from the government.[0]
NHK get $61.293.417 CAD per million capita from license fees.[1]
CBC may be awful compared to NHK, but your argument loses power when you have not looked up information like this.
Danish Radio gets $114.787.353 CAD per million capita from the government which is more than both the above, and they also have a great collection of shows and movies available to stream. [2]
[0]: Your link
[1]: https://www.nhk.or.jp/corporateinfo/english/publication/asse...
[2]: https://www.ft.dk/samling/20201/almdel/KUU/bilag/103/2332285...
Disney and Marvel both made billions in profits during the same time, simply by making entertainment that people want to watch! CBC now makes sitcoms on Netflix... Why do they need taxpayer funds for that?
I know that sort of announcement is not the place where she'd answer this question in depth, but that line made me curious, and I wished she had. 18 months is a very short timespan: since before the start of quarantine. What does she feel precipitated these changes at the CBC?
as a regular reader of CBC, this is the line here that resonates the most with me. If CBC was a left-wing organization advocating for tearing down the structures of power and building a more equitable society, their focus on whatever microagression is currently trending would seem a lot more honest. but their bias is overwhelmingly in favour of the governments and corporations who have built the status quo, so their articles decrying social inequities ring pretty hollow.
A saying in German is that the smarter one gives in...
To be honest, I don't really believe people that cannot see this problem are trustworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism (quote below)
In terms of numbers, about 8% of the US population is.. left. 25% is traditional conservative. And the other 67% is regular folks who in fact agree on most policy questions
From Wikipedia:
> Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), democracy, secularism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and a market economy
Civilization predates liberalism by about 7,000 years.
This creates the false drama. Instead, what the US has is two liberal parties, one trying to also appeal to a base of evangelical whites and the other trying to appeal to people who aren't white. Both are trying to pass the same liberal policies, policies that I hope you aren't trying to associate with some 67% silent majority. 67% of people aren't against antitrust enforcement or free health care.
Yes both parties have a bizarre set of priorities, conveniently avoiding the really important questions (like the two you raise)
Your movement (progressivism) has been co-opted. The same happened to the religious right a generation ago. Grifters told you that winning was the most important thing, and that politicizing identity was how to do it. Now your views have been reduced to platitudes and slogans meant to mobilize sheep and distract from real issues while the powerful plunder (as they always have). I'd say, "learn for next time," but let's be honest, it will be some other movement (likely one that rises out of opposition to this current one) that will be the next one to be co-opted, and you won't be part of it because it will be ostensibly "right wing."
Without funding, they can't stay independent of what's fashionable
By "these sorts of articles", I mean the ones that have claimed that "diversity efforts have gone too far this time." Regardless of your support or opposition to diversity, I think one would agree that these rapidly turn into unproductive, highly divisive comment sections that are out of place with the rest of HN.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
https://twitter.com/TaraRHenley
This same article is also under active discussion on two subreddits:
https://old.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/rv9kvx/tara...
https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/rv9l8v/tara_henley_...
And, yes, there are people who get really hostile with these kinds of conversations (HN is a decent-sized community, so not surprising, and it's not always the same people in every discussion so I'd like to avoid any broad brush interpretation of this remark), but I think HN is one of the last places where it is possible, online, to have difficult discussions about challenging issues. That's an incredibly important, although possibly (originally) unintended, role.
On a personal note, I value hearing different perspectives, and often come away from HN discussions feeling like I've learned something, so I am against squelching it.
FWIW, I do think that HN has a problem with downvoting minority viewpoints. I'm just not sure that's what happened here.
You keep using this phrase and I think it's disingenuous at best. Sure, there are probably people here who genuinely don't want to be around people who don't look like themselves. But I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people who you would describe as "anti-diversity" are really just sick of stuff like this, from the article.
> To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my newsroom, to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book; to actively book more people of some races and less of others.
Even if you dismiss that as hyperbole (which it is), a lot of people are wondering why so many of our politicians/institutions focus so much on dividing up the populace by race.
I draw a line connecting the prevalence and vigor of anti-diversity flame wars on HN and the lack of gender diversity on HN. The ecosystem tolerates a high baseline of hostility so long as you couch that hostility in ways which meet the letter of the guidelines.
I've often wished for an alternative to HN because of it. This place doesn't really match my punk-rock hacker ethos where the underdog and the excluded are celebrated.
I think, the way out is understanding that the current divisive ways the society is going are doomed, and that we all have a common problem to solve, and sweeping such discussions under the rug will only delay this outcome.
That is an absolutely wild series of logical leaps and generalizations, each sorely needing any kind of evidence or even intuitive explanation.
(if this were even the reality) that excluded those who didn't fit the perception of who deserved such independence or happiness
“Social democracy” seems to entail a creeping illiberalism, and I’m not sure what we admire was anything but a brief period after the start of the former but before the onset of the latter. Yet it also solved a real problem and, indeed, is the best currently-known solution to it.
Am I ever unhappy about that.
One small counterpoint: Employers enjoy a bully pulpit on these issues. Employees with legitimate concerns about their employers' stances / policies sometimes can't even discuss them without the risk of losing their livelihood.
This can create a situation where individuals perceive that "the whole world" is telling them they're wrong, and are bad people for being wrong in this way. HN's anonymous-yet-respectful forum can somewhat help with this.
If nothing else, it's encouraging to know that they're not alone, but rather in an environment where other dissenters are also silenced.
There are endless platforms that are better suited for these discussions: Gab, 4chan, and Ruqqus to name a few. "HN's anonymous-yet-respectful forum" is best preserved by not hosting these types of deeply hostile, alienating discussions.
If you know of another forum that has this quality, I'd be grateful for a link. There are large swathes of the Internet I'm ignorant about.
And for the record, Ruqqus was shut down [1], so it really doesn't even exist.
My greater point is that communities that facilitate these types of conversations typically have less inviting, more hostile cultures. There's a spectrum of course, but you can see glimmers of the type of discourse found on sites like Gab in the comment sections of anti-diversity blogs on HN. I think that an HN which plays host to more discussions about perceived issues with diversity will alienate a lot of folks who aren't entrenched in those sorts of debates and self-select for the type of discourse associated with these so-called "covens of witches." It seems to me that there's no value in sliding down that side of the spectrum for a site that's largely meant not to play host to ideological battles.
Except maybe the founding story of the US—I’m not an expert—but that was literally several waves of “witches” (many of them profoundly illiberal) taking their ball and going elsewhere, and their genetic memory of the necessity of free discourse seems to have died out by the middle of the 20th century (and was arguably missing the point as to which discourse needs to be free for decades before that). Not a bad record overall, but we’ve run out of unsettled land to go elsewhere to.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
Seems that way. Parent explicitly wrote that it's only the articles that say "they've gone too far this time" that they find at fault. This means articles with the opposite view ("yay, more of those diversity efforts"), that touch on the same subject (and thus one would assume to be equaly divisive), are ok. I'd find it impartial and ok if they didn't wish either kind on HN, but only targeting one side is icky.
But even this framing (of articles like TFA as being anti-diversity) is wrong, if not disingenuous, to begin with.
As if TFA author is a seggregationist or wants less diversity (so agreeing makes you like that too), when diversity is not what the author complains about, but rather the inverse: lamenting the litany of the same facile rage-bait identity articles to the detriment of substantial reporting.
Actual reporting which would include substantial reporting on matters of opressed identity and lack of diversity, as opposed to e.g. gaslighting readers that Dave Chappele's special was met with uniform hostility when it was a huge success, or letting huge social issues be ignored, while covering inconsequential complains...
Oh - you mean the problem is white wage slaves might have less power to exclude and discriminate against non-white wage slaves.
There was no reference to wage slavery or even race in the comment you responded to.
More accurately, it's people flagging it and also manual nerfing by @dang
Software can indeed affect subthread ranking, and moderators do that too—but certainly not for pro- or anti-diversity (or any other $divisive-topic) reasons. We downweight top subthreads for reasons like this: (1) they're too generic rather than engaging with something specific in the article; (2) they're high-indignation/low-information; (3) they're meta; (4) they're offtopic in a predictable way*. What all 4 of those categories (and there are probably others) have in common is that they tend to both get heavily upvoted and to not be interesting in HN's sense of the word. Once they get heavily upvoted, they tend to hang out at the top of the page, accruing mass and choking out more curious conversation. We try to use moderation and (to some extent) software as countervailing mechanisms to these default tendencies, because we've learned over the years that this is one of the highest-leverage things we can do to make threads more interesting. But this has nothing whatever to do with agreeing or disagreeing with the points being made.
Edit: I'm guessing you were talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29785012, which indeed got downweighted in exactly this way, because it falls into categories #1, #3, and #4 above. But not into #2, at least, which is unusual and to your credit.
* Unpredictable whimsical offtopicness, by contrast, is often interesting and we try to give it a pass. Otherwise moderation would get too predictable in its own right. I often have to remind people about that.
Instead, the approach we take to transparency is to be willing to answer specific questions when people have them. It seems to work fairly well. Not everyone is satisfied with that, but most users are, and of the ones who aren't, a nontrivial portion wouldn't be satisfied with a complete moderation log either.
They very reliably rise to the front page because this issue is endemic in the tech industry and yet people are afraid to speak out in public.
This has always been the problem with HN's stance on "this isn't a forum for political debate" or whatever. It's a way of status-quo enforcement by selectively ignoring how political tech has become these days. It's also diminishing the role HN (used to?) play in conversations within the tech industry. If everyone should go to Reddit to discuss fundamental concerns with working in tech, then why wouldn't people just replace HN with an RSS feed.
I know it's not the main goal of this site but at the same time, the usual culture here makes it interesting to see how it unfolds.
I wonder if the drop of quality from those subject is because they get flagged fast.
Anyway, sometimes I wish there was a website of the same quality as HN but for politics.
(Sadly, the consequences of the Roberts Court gutting the act demonstrate that those enforcement provisions are still very much needed today.)
My big issue with it is that the word 'equity' has an extremely important financial meaning that many of the people wielding the new usage are unfamiliar with or don't know at all. There are lots of young people who don't have 'nu-equity' and are woefully ignorant of the overwhelming influence the accounting equation and cash flow valuation has on their lives. Teaching this new vague definition of 'equity' is going to divorce so many people from ever having productive conversations about wealth. Already, lots of people I follow in finance (white and nonwhite, male and female, immigrants and natural born) are dismissing this kind of language out-of-hand.
Or, perhaps I am wrong. Maybe this new usage of equity points, in fact, to exactly the same thing as the legacy financial definition. The activists want shares and they demand them now. I have not seen anything to support this identity, but maybe the meaning isn't too far off.
Well, if that doesn't get your blood boiling...
I actually don't think it is that out of place on HN, many the top posts on Hacker News are related to politics (Joe Biden vowing different direction, Brexit, even youtube-dl facing a DMCA are all politics)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I personally think it's rather one sided, but it's clearly important to many here.
I've heard people say something similar, about how they were left-wing when they were young, but found themselves right-wing when they were older, without changing their politics, because the next generation had moved the Overton window, but it's surprising to hear of an environment where the shift happened in the space of 18 months.
I think that many people on the right imagine that identity politics is the true form of left-wing politics, and that it was invented by Karl Marx for some reason, but experiences like Tara Henley's suggest that identity politics is more like an aggressive meme that takes over the brains of some subset of people who happen to gravitate towards left-wing politics, and it perhaps has a disingenuous astroturf form which appeals to people on the right as a way to shield themselves from left-wing criticism.
She didn't say. I wish she had; I would like to know what drove the change.
So if the funding for the CBC is allocated on similars concerns, her colleagues are probably scared. That would also explain why they produced this mostly absurd list of banned words https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/words-and-phrases-comm... , a list that include violent words like brainstorm, lame, grandfathered and tribe. The CBC used to be a bastion of integrity and reason, now it is a novlang factory.
I think at its core, true workable leftism is about compassionate pragmatism: trying to make the world better for as many people as possible. What disturbs me most about the ultra-woke brand of leftism is that it isn’t pragmatic at all, to say nothing of compassionate. I believe you’re correct that what Henley describes is very similar to a meme: it’s simplistic, reductive, and easy. You can feel like you made a difference without having to do the hard work of actually making a difference.
That’s what bothers me so much about it. It’s an approach that’s primarily self-focused: venting one’s rage, posturing for the sake of boosting one’s social status. It's not really about helping other people—any more than the moral codes of right-wing religious fundamentalism are about actually being a decent person—and it definitely isn’t close to realistic as far as effectively changing anything.
High minded ideals fall to power. It’s easy to see at the local level, when black and LGBT voting blocs put the Mayor in power, the political spoils get divvied up. As time goes on you get conflict between the various stakeholders, and everyone forgets about the ideals and focuses on the street fighting. That’s why you need competitive elections.
You can be left as all get out, but if you don't speak in the stilted expected movement oriented language, and swallow the whole enchilada - and sign on to every policy no matter how worthy or good, you don't have the required pieces of flare - and even though you want the same things and would vote for 95% of the things they support, you're thought of as at least suspect if not outright as one of the enemy.
Like I have a focus on broad based poverty reduction, but because I'm not focused on poverty for urban poor people, or BIPOC people, I'm suspect in their head - I support broad based poverty reductions because they create durable electoral coalitions, just focusing on one group or another does the opposite. I have other similar "problematic" perspectives.
Outrage politics works great for winning social credit on social media, but it does very little to solve actual problems.
In all seriousness, I imagine that Henley decided that writing sponsored content for CBC wasn't a solid career, and wanted to get on that contrarianism gravy train that folks like Bari Weiss have been pioneering.
Check out the rest of the articles published under Henley's byline—they're all in the same vein: https://www.cbc.ca/life/work-money/author/tara-henley-1.4401...
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/life/wellness/can-hitting-snooze-and-taki...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/life/wellness/five-west-coast-hikes-you-p...
You can't judge a player for having a low batting average as a way to discredit their claim that the game is rigged.
The TLDR: - She claims she's not an aggrieved conservative
- She blows a bunch of right wing dog whistles
- Says she quit
- Plugs her book and new substack effort (Check out my soundslice!)
Is there a particular reason you've concluded that she's dog-whistling?
My understanding of "dog whistling" is that it's intentionally ambiguous. I.e., it's mean as a signal to a target group, while being plausibly deniable to everyone else. But the key point is that it's ambiguous.
I have heard that "discomfort is part of the process" but also that "there's always more work to do." My friend and I had "difficult conversations" about "doing the hard work" and I kept agreeing with him against my own beliefs and letting him go on about this stuff until one day he cut me out of his life anyway for not being woke enough.
I am sincerely at a loss for understanding.