An Inexplicable Dislike
At Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, a panel of journalists and media professionals declare their priorities.
The full two-and-a-half-hour video, which begins with a land acknowledgement and rumblings about “settlers” and their “racial guilt,” and “white supremacist colonial mindsets which we have internalised both collectively and individually,” can be endured here.
Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit. Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on Twitter. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
The term “hate” is used often and expansively – not only to cover threats and vividly abusive emails – “violent messages” – but also mockery and brusque corrections of factual and logical error. Even being referred to by the public as woke is presented as a basis for weeping, a form of psychological torture. Indeed, almost any kind of demurral is framed as an attempt to “silence” the journalists’ self-declared heroism, to deny them their cosmic destiny. And hence, it seems, the imperative to shut down reader-comment sections on national newspaper websites, on grounds that readers are no longer content to confine their feedback to the polite correction of typos. Throughout, the air is heavy with self-elevation, and claims of being scrupulously unbiased and “speaking truth to power” are deployed entirely without irony.
However, the more plausible explanations for why journalists may not be held in the highest possible regard remain oddly untouched. Even when Hill Times columnist and “anti-racism expert” Erica Ifill boasts that she doesn’t bother to interview white men. And the implications of a room full of statusful media professionals being fixated with the supposed pathologies of “whiteness,” and being pretentious and neurotic, and mentally uniform, and both distant from and disdainful of the concerns of the public that they claim to serve, are, needless to say, not vigorously explored.
Update, via the comments:
Sk60 adds,
As others have pointed out, these are not clueless students or random maladjusted teens. They’re statusful professionals at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Global News, The Hill Times, etc. (A Hill Times columnist, by the way, who is clearly confident that she can boast of her own overtly racist behaviour and not be challenged by any of her peers, or by any of the would-be journalists in the audience.)
And the pretentiously apologetic wretch who opens the proceedings, Allan Thompson – Mr ‘I’m white and I’m terribly sorry about it’ – is not only the head of Carleton University’s journalism programme, a supposedly “non-partisan” position, but also a failed Liberal candidate who was appointed to see how Trudeau’s Liberal Party could better connect with rural voters. Presumably on grounds that the average working person just can’t get enough pretentious self-abasement and contrived racial agonising.
And which rather underlines a problem for the scrupulously woke. As wokeness is essentially a status game, premised on signalling how superior one is, how unlike the unsophisticated, it must be difficult to feign common ground with the kinds of people one must continually disdain. Say, by calling them racists, oppressors, colonisers, and “white supremacists.”
Well, you have to wonder if it ever occurs to the clowns mouthing these rote pieties that some people will see their displays, and their claims that the rest of us are obviously, by definition, guilty bigots with “white supremacist colonial mindsets,” and all the rest of it, and find it… revolting. And contemptible.
…clowns mouthing these rote pieties…
Speaking of which, lest any “…individuals from all dimensions of diversity…” become offended or otherwise violently marginalized the University of Utah has published their Guide To Prevent Wrongthink.
I think Dimensions of Diversity was the first album of Contrived Racial Agonising.
No, no, no, no…close, but:
Band name: clowns mouthing pieties
Album: Dimensions of Diversity
Song: contrived racial agonising (Instrumental)
Might need proper capitalization, might not.
No, no, no, no…close, but:
Thanks, have to confess I am not up on the kids these days and their Woke Rock.
The Oxfordshire county council has voted to implement “climate lockdowns“, drastically restricting the rights of citizens to travel. (Found via Watts Up With That.)
Anyone in the UK have data or thoughts to offer?
I remember when the only nations that required citizens to get permission to travel were the infamous fascist and communist regimes of the 20th century.
Guide To Prevent Wrongthink.
From said guide:
I can see the interactions now.
Reporter: Just to clarify you bashed-in the victims head with a baseball bat.
Thug: Yes. They were white and deserved it because of racism and stuff.
Reporter: You poor man. Sorry, do you identify as a man? Is it okay if I quote you using that language? And are you comfortable with the information being made public?
Thug: I don’t give a f**k you racist bitch. You’re making me angry.
[ grabs reporter by the hair and hammers head into the wall ]
Reporter: I’m so sorry. Help!
The Oxfordshire county council has voted to implement “climate lockdowns“,
Sounds expensive, they should probably just glue some people to the road, there seems to be a surplus of volunteers.
I see a market for big diesel trucks rolling coal.
Heh…trying to get here from a computer that I haven’t used in a while. Googled (or some search thingy) Thompson blog. Got this:
https://www.thompsoncff.org/video-blog/
Dude. Think of the children. I keeeed, I keeeed.
I really wish people wouldn’t do that. I don’t want those people following me over here. Again, the keeed thingy.
Sooo…came here to say…I would answer this question in the affirmative..While most of the responders agree, those who don’t are rather amusing.
I would answer this question in the affirmative.
It seems to work for people who spend thousands of dollars on a Caribbean or Mexican vacation every year. I remember sitting on the remnants of rubble amongst many men armed with automatic weapons at the Athens airport waiting for my flight to Santorini in 1985. My experience is that people aren’t at all uncomfortable when they’re with the right men with guns. Anyone who says any differently is usually a posturing, progressive leftie.
I’m not comfortable with the first guard shown, heavily armed and armored while wearing his hoodie pulled up and well forward, leaving him practically zero peripheral sightlines. Stupid unforced error, and doesn’t take much imagination to see how disastrously it could go wrong.
“wearing his hoodie pulled up and well forward, leaving him practically zero peripheral sightlines”
I see a lot of young men wearing hoodies while driving, and wonder why they care so little about their peripheral vision.
University or adult childcare center?
“Obviously this is an attack on freedom of choice imposed by a tiny number of students on the wider student body, but it is also illogical,” Mo Metcalf-Fisher, a spokesman for the Countryside Alliance, a Scottish rural advocacy group, told the Scottish Farmer. “Stirling’s Students’ Union would be much better off sourcing sustainable local meat and dairy produce from Scottish farmers instead. How can an avocado flown in from South America have eco-superiority over a piece of grass fed beef from a local farm?”
University or adult childcare center?
“Notably, the Stirling University ban also comes as Scotland’s parliament is considering a citizen petition that calls for phasing in a nationwide meat ban. The petition submitted to parliament urges the government to ban meat production in the country altogether by 2040.”
The next step after banning meat production is to outlaw meat consumption. And if you are caught with more than a half pound of beef then you must be…a dealer!
Perhaps the news coverage here in the States is inaccurate, but I get the impression that Scotland is going bonkers faster than England.
How can an avocado flown in from South America have eco-superiority over a piece of grass fed beef from a local farm?”
They’re going after the importation of foods, too. But that attack is just starting to ramp up.
Was Bette Midler always insane?
“One of the most astonishing things about the woke is their high boredom threshold. They seem to have the same thoughts about the same subjects, expressed in the same language, all their waking lives. They never tire or let their vigilance down. They look at Raphael or Botticelli and see only social injustice. They are terrible bores.”
—Theodore Dalrymple
She was always a bit of a nutcase, yes. I mean more so than the usual. Gotten worse over the years, as is the custom with those people. You never noticed?
She was always a bit of a nutcase, yes. I mean more so than the usual. Gotten worse over the years, as is the custom with those people. You never noticed?
I mostly ignored her. (But then, I mostly ignore all entertainers.) I first heard of her in the 70’s and 80’s, from acquaintances who idolized her the way fanboys idolize Marvel/Star Wars/Star Trek, so from the first I associated her with psychological dysfunction. But her singing did not particularly appeal to me so I ignored her for many decades. I now wonder if there is a connection between her fans’ nuttiness and her own personality.
acquaintances who idolized her the way fanboys idolize Marvel…
I have long been suspicious both of those who squee! in enthusiasm and of the objects of their enthusiasm.
She’s a journalism professor…
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1600377292961849347
Here’s an idea, “journalists:” do your f*cking jobs.
Instalanche!
I really wish people wouldn’t do that. I don’t want those people following me over here.
I agree, and not kidding: Those Instapundit comment threads are heavy on emotion and personal abuse, and light on evidence and civility. Trolls ruin communities. They make the communities less enjoyable and less informative, and they wear out the moderators.
There were some blog fora which I used to read in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s because the commenters were there to add information to the topic at hand rather than to merely emote, but most of them degenerated into a combination of useless “I agree, you hero” and “I disagree you [obscenity]” and assorted silliness. Once that happened it was a poor use of time to scan the threads for useful information.
useless “I agree, you hero” comments
–Which is what Little Green Footballs degenerated into, when Charles and his lackeys began banning anyone who disagreed with them.
Similarly, Patterico.
Guide to.prevent wrongthink…
I read quite a lot of it, and came to one solid conclusion. That Uni is spending an enormous amount of money on Offices and Advocates and Administrators.
I think there’s a line in the US Declaration of Independence, griping about “swarms of officials” or some such.
I think there’s a line in the US Declaration of Independence, griping about “swarms of officials” or some such.
If I were to say “eating out our substance like a plague of cockroaches” would that make me a white supremacist?