Mark Johnson: TDSB goes out of its way to cancel Canadian history - "In its childish effort to delete historical names from its schools, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) appears to have violated its own bylaws. In February, TDSB trustees voted to rename three schools named after Sir John A. Macdonald, Henry Dundas and Egerton Ryerson. Their decision was outrageous on many grounds, one of which is that it may be in violation of the bylaw requirement that financial and budgeting information be publicly presented. Equally bad, after I reached out to TDSB trustees asking for them to comment on this apparent violation, they clammed up and have stayed silent for over a month... In addition to the bylaw breaches, the school board admitted that it did not consult a single historian as part of its renaming review. Otherwise, it would have had more accurate portraits of these men than the marred ones recently painted by ideologues. How can the TDSB determine and judge 19th-century events without the benefit of historical research? Simple: it was a sham all along, nothing more than the righteous application of a 21st-century woke purity test. It’s time to speak out. Save Our History has been formed to do just that. We’re a newly created, non-partisan, grassroots movement dedicated to preserving and celebrating our rich Canadian history by protecting the historical names of our schools. And there is much to celebrate. Save Our History works in concert with other groups such as the Canadian Institute for Historical Education , a group of notable historians who are setting the record straight and countering the false narratives that took root several years ago... All three men were ahead of their times. Were they perfect men? No. Were they great men? Yes. Should they be honoured? Yes. Sadly, the TDSB doesn’t plan to stop at these three schools. It made known its intention to rename other schools, as well. Nor is this only a Toronto issue. At least 10 other Ontario schools are named after Macdonald in various cities. Will their school boards also be divisively deleting his name from their schools? Our schools are falling apart. Precious money is needed to carry out urgent repairs, which is surely a more pressing need and appropriate use of scarce resources than name changes. Our kids deserve better schools and, equally importantly, to be proud of Canada... At a time when our country’s very existence is threatened by U.S. President Donald Trump, this is the worst possible time to give him added ammunition to question the validity of our country. If the Toronto school board were truly interested in correcting the mistakes of the past, it would start with its own. But it is likely too far gone and too far captured by revisionists to admit that renaming schools was a mistake."
Chanel Pfahl 🇨🇦 on X - "Well, I imagine someone at my new job must have found me on X/Facebook. Everything was going fine until I was abruptly fired today because "I’m not the right fit." That’s what I get for advocating for schools that are free of indoctrination, equality, free speech, etc: the inability to support myself with even a basic minimum wage job. How wonderful.
To be clear, I never once brought up my political views at work. I was competent and professional. Never given a warning about anything."
wanye on X - "For me what set the Damore case apart isn’t that he was the victim of an online mob — that was pretty routine by that point — but the way so many people, including executives at Google and many in the media, went out of their way to insist that what he had said was beyond the pale. That was era in which I had come to expect silence on these issues from people I knew to be otherwise reasonable, but the over-the-top condemnations from people who absolutely knew better were just too much to stomach."
Conor Friedersdorf on X - "What set the Damore case apart for me was that Google asked its employees to think about a matter of concern, as if they valued their input, then punished one employee for responding bc he was supposed to understand, as most did, that they did not in fact want earnest input
You can love or hate or be neutral on the substance of what Damore said and think, regardless, that employers shouldn't fire people for expressing their earnest views on matters that the employer *urged employees to grapple with*"
Lawyer Dog on X - ""When we said 'grapple' we obviously meant 'reach our predetermined conclusions' ... and the fact that you are psychologically different enough from us to not intuit this is reason enough to fire you.""
Harj Taggar on X - "Had a lot of fun going on the Social Radars! It's my first time talking publicly about customers threatening to boycott and employees threatening to quit because I didn't ban James Damore from using Triplebyte to find a new job after being fired by Google in 2017. Feels like a fever dream now."
Kelsey Piper on X - "Yeah, all right, let's talk about James Damore. It's been eight years, and I really doubt Harj (who was my boss at the time) is the only person for whom it was a formative experience. For those of you who have no recollection of any of this, either because you are wisely an offline person or because you got outraged for five minutes and then forgot all about it, James Damore was a Google software engineer who wrote a memo arguing that, while diversity and inclusion were good goals, bias was not the main reason there weren't more women in tech, and differences in personality between men and women probably explained a lot of it. There was a lot in the memo that felt like a distraction to me, or where I had a nitpick, but fundamentally it was not only basically correct (women are less likely than men to become software engineers, and this is not only because of bias), but also Damore was saying this for the sake of having a more productive conversation about how to get more women into tech, a goal that everyone around him was fervently espousing. The memo has a painful-in-hindsight quality of earnestness: "you want more women in tech, and I think you're mistaken about how to get there! if I show you some published psychology research we can actually design better means to your goal!". Anyway. The internet was outraged. He got fired from Google. And he applied to the tech hiring startup I worked at, Triplebyte, which offered background-blind screening to anyone who wanted to be a software engineer. We really believed in the mission, at Triplebyte. I think I ended up kind of badly calibrated about how earnest to expect people to be everywhere else. We found people working as janitors and line cooks and homemakers who could code, and we got them 6 figure jobs, and we were proud of it. James Damore did very well on our tests. I got assigned to write him a profile for our companies. And then people freaked out. A lot of them had the impression that he would create a hostile environment for any woman he worked with, and thought that trying to help him get a new job was tantamount to endorsing everything in his wildly controversial memo. I didn't even like the memo that much, but I was kind of horrified, because - it's one thing to get fired for talking about politics at work in a way that causes a massive national firestorm. I kind of expect that we would all get fired for that. But it is another thing entirely to get effectively blacklisted from your industry, to have people decide on the basis of your political opinions that we shouldn't even put you up on the platform and let companies decide individually whether to schedule interviews. Tech jobs were not that hard to come by in 2017 if you were really good at your job, and Damore was. Firing isn't that threatening to software engineers. Blacklisting is terrifying. I'd been at Triplebyte for like six months at this point, it was my first job after graduation, and I was honestly way out of my lane, but I made a pretty big fuss internally. (It helped that I suspected a lot of people agreed with me but I was a woman and it was safer for me to say it.) I said that we were not in the business of deciding who had good politics, that we shared this country with many people who profoundly disagreed with each other, that companies could assess for themselves if he worked respectfully with female engineers, and that we should put him on the site and let them decide. We did. And then Harj was immediately contacted by recruiters from companies we worked with that were horrified that we had. They felt that by not banning him from our platform we were endorsing his memo, that we were showing values not in line with their priorities. Harj talks about this more in the linked podcast. James Damore was egregiously wronged. To my knowledge he's a good software engineer with extremely reasonable, approximately accurate opinions about the reasons there were fewer women in software engineering, which he shared in good faith, and a lot of people who should've known better really did try to drive him out of the industry for it. It was wrong. If it is done to people on the basis of any other political opinion it is also wrong then. We need, as a society, the ability to live with disagreement, to dislike each other without trying to destroy each other, to find common ground instead of finding heretics; I believed that at Peak Woke and I believe it now."
Ro Khanna on X - "Are you going to tell him to apologize for saying "Normalize Indian hate" before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids."
Thread by @JDVance on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up. Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don't threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children.
I cannot overstate how much I loathe this emotional blackmail pretending to be concern. My kids, god willing, will be risk takers. They won't think constantly about whether a flippant comment or a wrong viewpoint will follow them around for the rest of their lives. They will tell stupid jokes. They will develop views that they later think are wrong or even gross. I made mistakes as a kid, and thank God I grew up in a culture that encouraged me to grow and learn and feel remorse when I screwed up and offer grace when others did. I don't worry about my kids making mistakes, or developing views they later regret. I don't even worry that much about trolls on the internet. You know what I do worry about, Ro? That they'll grow up to be a US Congressmen who engages in emotional blackmail over a kid's social media posts. You disgust me."
Philip Roth is not for cancelling - "‘That is no country for old men’, wrote WB Yeats. Were he still alive, the novelist Philip Roth might have said the same thing of today’s land of the woke. Roth died in 2018. But his reputation has come under increasing assault ever since by those seeking his posthumous cancellation. His identitarian critics have been attacking him for his personal life in general, and his supposed misogyny in particular. The latest occasion for attacking Roth arrived in the shape of Blake Bailey’s new book, Philip Roth: The Biography. It contains details of Roth’s affairs, his use of prostitutes and what many are interpreting as his poor treatment of women. It seems that the quality of Roth’s writing is less important to those now trying to trash his reputation than the extent to which his personal life may have violated #MeToo sensibilities... For Elison, writers are to be judged for their politics and personal life, not the quality of their work. When she writes she is sorry she ever read his books, she is effectively saying that reading Roth is wrong. And that his work should be cancelled. ‘We’re living in an age when we are tearing down statues’, she continues, and Roth’s must fall... Admittedly, amid so much puritanism today, Roth’s work certainly looks out of place. Take his masterpiece, Sabbath’s Theater. It tells the story of a depraved and outrageous anti-hero called Mickey Sabbath, who refuses to play the role assigned to him of an old man facing his sexual demise. It should be a grotesque caricature of a dirty old man. But such is the intensity of Roth’s narrative art that Sabbath’s story is turned into something deeply human and moving... I don’t think Roth will be lost. Long after #MeToo has become a footnote in the history of Western narcissism, people will still be experiencing that unique buzz that comes from reading this most vital of novelists."
Philosophy vs the culture wars - "all sides in the culture war seem to miss Mill’s central insight: that freedom – of speech, of action, of ways of living – is as much a question of atmosphere as it is of legality. Benn’s grasp of this fundamental insight allows him to identify correctly the problem of conformity: that it stunts individuals and societies and leads to a pervasive, crippling sense that one is always walking on eggshells. It is also precisely what is wrong with Twitter’s ban of Donald Trump or the shutdown of Parler. Such acts are within the letter of the legal definition of ‘free-speech rights’, but are wholly at odds with the atmosphere of free discussion. In short, Benn understands that it is the atmosphere of the culture wars that is inhibiting and restricting people."
In the midst of ‘cancel culture,’ universities create ways to encourage uncomfortable debate - The Globe and Mail - "Rhonda McEwen, president of Victoria University in the University of Toronto, said she started to notice a change in students a few years ago. She recalled a moment when students were calling for a classmate to be “cancelled” or in some way sanctioned for his views. They told her his opinions were hurtful and made them feel unsafe. “I told the students ‘I’m not cancelling anybody. He’s a student here like you are. You don’t have to agree with him, and I don’t have to agree with him, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to talk to each other,’ ” Dr. McEwan said. “The goal of university is to push your thinking to places it hasn’t been before.” In Dr. McEwen’s view, debate and disagreement should be central to the student’s experience of higher education. But recent undergraduate cohorts haven’t seemed as comfortable with that notion and struggle to mount a public counterargument when they encounter views they dislike, she said. “They don’t know how. They have no tools or skills or experience,” Dr. McEwen said. At Victoria University, administrators established a workshop on difficult conversations, where students are invited to a weekly lunch seminar to tackle controversial topics such as religion, gender identity or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Madelyn Bardell, a third-year student in ethics, society and law, said she was drawn to the seminars out of a desire to wrestle with big, difficult topics. “A lot of times we’re talking about something I don’t have a strong position on or I’m not sure about,” she said. “It’s a chance for me to work through my own thoughts.” Normally an expert introduces the topic and then facilitates a discussion. Lunch is served, which helps build a sense of connection between the students, even when they disagree, said Kelley Castle, the dean of students at Victoria University. The rules are slightly different than in a classroom setting, where implicit good behaviour or notions of civility can keep people from talking frankly, the dean said. “The only rule is that we have to be respectful of one another, so there are no ad hominem attacks, and there can be no ‘you’re stupids.’ It has to be genuinely trying to hear the best argument of your opposition,” she said. “It’s really an exercise in deep listening.”... A study published in the Canadian Journal of Educational and Social Studies this year found roughly half of student respondents at schools across Canada reported self-censoring their views in discussions with professors or classmates. Between 39 and 46 per cent of respondents said they were somewhat or very reluctant to express their views on topics such as politics, religion and sexual identity. And roughly a third of students said they were somewhat or extremely concerned about the repercussions for expressing themselves (the sample wasn’t representative, however, as it skewed more heavily female and to students in the humanities and social sciences). The responses indicate “a concerning lack of comfort of viewpoint expression on sensitive topics within Canadian university classrooms,” the authors of the paper concluded. Surveys in the U.S. have found similar results, including one at Harvard, which found only a third of the graduating class in 2024 felt comfortable expressing their views on controversial topics, The Harvard Crimson reported. At the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, philosophy professor Renaud-Philippe Garner and political scientist Brad Epperly had a sense that students didn’t seem as willing to talk openly as they once did. In response they developed a new course they called “Dangerous Ideas.” Prof. Garner said there are several potential explanations for the shift, such as the impact of smartphones or the pandemic on student development. There could also be a sense that there are “right” or “wrong” positions on certain topics and a fear that misaligning could result in social sanction. Whatever it is, he believes it’s different than it was when he was a student. “This is precisely the time in their lives where they should be allowed to toy with ideas, to ask hard questions and this shouldn’t result in ostracism or punishment,” Prof. Garner said."
Self-censorship has become the safest form of expression - The Globe and Mail - "she found a pair of sandals made of embroidered Chinese fabric and fell in love with them. But that summer, I noticed she never wore them. When I asked why, she said: “I just feel like there’s a chance I’ll offend someone.” And in that moment, I understood that my daughter was coming of age in a world radically different from the one I grew up in. A world where even a pair of shoes could feel politically charged. Where self-censorship has become the safest form of self-expression... I’ve spent my career making films about difficult subjects: Ebola outbreaks, human trafficking, the black market in human organs. None of it prepared me for a university campus. Within a day of arriving at Evergreen, a student informed me – not in anger, almost as a friendly heads-up – that I was a white supremacist. I am a Jewish woman whose mother survived Auschwitz, so “white supremacist” is not generally how I think about myself. They explained, patiently, that it wasn’t about intent. It was about the system I benefited from by virtue of being white. My intentions were irrelevant. My identity was everything. That was the start of a nearly 10-year journey. What I witnessed, on campuses across North America and Britain, was a gradual shift. The pursuit of social justice hadn’t replaced the pursuit of truth exactly. But it had taken the front seat and, in some cases, hardened into ideology. And a generation was being taught, in ways large and small, that disagreement is harm. Universities were once defined by their commitment to exactly the opposite principle... At the University of Ottawa, a yoga class was cancelled because the instructor was white and that was seen as cultural appropriation. At the University of Guelph, a student union apologized for including Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side on a playlist because it was deemed transphobic. More quietly, students and professors told me they had abandoned certain lines of inquiry altogether, fearing professional or social consequences. Words I thought I understood had been quietly redefined. White supremacy no longer referred to neo-Nazis. It referred to things like being on time, setting agendas, and believing in objectivity. Safe space no longer meant protection from physical harm. It meant protection from ideas that challenged your world view. A documentary organization I was involved with arranged an anti-oppression training session. We were shown a pyramid that started with non-inclusive language and microaggressions (eg., asking someone “Where are you from?”) at the base and ended with genocide at the top. The language of campus identity politics had also found its way into Canadian film funding applications. One asked whether I was pansexual, asexual or questioning. No box to check for “married for 30 years so it’s not quite what it used to be!” I know that identity matters, but I don’t need anyone to “do the work” to understand me – a term I heard constantly as I navigated through the world of academia. I don’t want to inhibit anyone from saying what they believe, from making a clumsy joke, from asking me questions even if they’re a little awkward. Because if every conversation is a minefield, and the slightest misstep results in banishment, it isn’t a conversation. And when honest questions get reframed as instruments of oppression, something essential is lost: the ability to disagree. The people who pay the real price are educators and the students who deserve better. Carole Hooven, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, stated on television that biological sex is binary – a position within her scientific expertise. She also made clear that gender is on a spectrum and that she was talking about biology, not identity. Within hours, her department’s diversity committee accused her of transphobia. Graduate students refused to work with her so she couldn’t teach her course. She eventually negotiated a retirement and later told me she thought about suicide. Erec Smith is a Black professor of rhetoric who disagreed, in writing, with a colleague’s argument that teaching standard English to students of colour was an act of white supremacy. He was called a white supremacist by white colleagues. He described what followed as a degradation ceremony, public humiliation designed to silence him and warn others. These are not right-wing provocateurs. They are educators who asked questions outside an increasingly narrow consensus and paid for it with their careers, their reputations and – in some cases – their mental health. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives were founded with genuinely good intentions: to open doors that had long been closed to women, people of colour, and other marginalized groups. That work mattered and still does. But in some institutions, DEI evolved from a support structure into an enforcement mechanism, less concerned with expanding opportunity than with policing thought. When the goal shifts from inclusion to ideological conformity, the institution loses something essential, including the ability to serve the very people it claims to protect. What’s alarming is not that some students shouted down speakers. Students have always been passionate. What is alarming is what the institutions did next: capitulating, apologizing and sometimes building bureaucracies that enforced one set of beliefs as the precondition for employment. The professors who stay silent don’t make the news. They just quietly change what they teach, what they research, what they say in meetings... The tools of suppression do not stay in the hands of the people who build them. That is the lesson campuses failed to learn. Universities exist to teach people how to think, not what to think. When we tell a generation that disagreement is violence, that discomfort is harm, that the correct response to an idea you find threatening is to make sure nobody else hears it, we don’t protect them. We weaken them... fear is no foundation for a democracy. Because once we decide that some ideas are too dangerous to hear, we have already conceded the argument to the people who would silence us."
John Boyne: Here’s what happened when they tried to cancel me - "Literary scandals are a little like orgies: great fun for everyone involved but rather distasteful to anyone watching from the outside. I found myself at the centre of one such bacchanal over the last week when the Polari Prize, a set of awards given to LGBT authors, published their longlist and Earth, the second of my Elements quartet, was nominated. Strangely enough, I didn’t even know until three days later when I received a phone call informing me that a transwoman judge for the First Novel Prize had stepped down in protest at my inclusion. Shortly afterwards, most of the 12 writers longlisted for that award issued statements following the jurist out the door. Social media, always a bastion of common sense and reasoned debate, erupted in outrage that I was being considered for the prize at all. I wasn’t, of course, my book was, but such a distinction is generally lost on the Twitterati. Throughout it all, I remained silent, issuing only a single statement in which, hoping to appease my critics, I invited the judges to release Earth from any further consideration should those who left, return. I did this because I know I would have loved to have been on such a list when my first book was published a quarter century ago and didn’t want them to be deprived of the excitement of their moment or sacrifice the positive effects it could have on their careers. Within the publishing industry, I think it would be fair to say that I’m known for my unswerving support of new novelists, which is why my post box is filled every week with book proofs of debuts... My olive branch was rejected, however, and a petition begun to have me exiled to Elba, which supposedly garnered 821 signatures. For a time, I called it the Loch Ness Monster of petitions – everyone had heard of it, but no one had actually seen it – but then, at last, I managed to procure a copy and realised why it had never, in fact, seen the light of day. To be polite, it lacked a certain name recognition factor. At that point, I rather lost interest in the entire business. My statement where I referred to feeling that I “didn’t want to go on” was widely misinterpreted. It did not mean that I was suicidal – for heaven’s sake, it’s not that important – it merely meant that I considered putting my pen down and doing something else with my life. With a backlist of 24 books published in 60 languages, happily I’m not exactly on the breadline, so lying on Bondi Beach sipping piña coladas with my boyfriend for the decades to come did not seem unappealing in that moment. But the truth is, I love writing too much, and have too large and loyal a readership, to walk away. The whole brouhaha ended on Monday when the Polari Prize abandoned this year’s award entirely, an interesting example of self-cancellation, to focus instead on “increasing representation of trans and gender non-conforming judges on the panels”. I don’t doubt that the founders and organisers have been put under just as much pressure over the last week as I have but this statement worries me. It suggests that gays and lesbians who do not conform to a specific gender ideology will be rooted out and excluded from future consideration, the court effectively stacked against them in this obsessive need to amplify the voices of trans people, a strange fixation considering one would get less amplification at a Metallica concert. Winning a prize isn’t of major importance to me, although, of course, it would have been nice. I’m halfway through a career that’s exceeded all my expectations, but it’s worth considering how this new emphasis might damage younger LGB writers and their right to both hold and express perfectly valid, entirely legal opinions on any subject. What saddens me most, however, is that from its dramatic opening to its disappointing conclusion, no one from the Polari Prize ever had the decency to contact me. Had they done so, perhaps a happier resolution might have been found. I don’t feel any antipathy towards the debut writers who withdrew their titles. Indeed, I had a very polite and respectful email exchange with one on Friday evening, where we explained our positions and, I think, parted amicably. That said, as someone who’s been part of this industry for 33 years and pretty much seen it all, I do think they should reflect on how they would like to be treated should their names ever be maligned, their characters misrepresented, or their words twisted out of all context. If the scolds ever come for them, I hope they receive the same support I did from other writers and the global publishing world. Honestly, my phone hasn’t been this hot since I was last on Tinder. They might also ask themselves whether they want to be known for their books or for the cartoon characters others will create in their likeness. After all, should they ever publish another book, and should that book be nominated for an award, do they really want the judges to consider anything other than the beauty of their writing, the brilliance of their storytelling, and the power of their ideas? For the record, there was never a possibility that I would withdraw. To have done so would have endorsed a mob mentality, ensuring that, going forward, all writers who made the list would be vetted by their colleagues for wrongthink... I couldn’t be a party to that; it would have been the death of ideas, a loss brought about by the raging tantrums of people who, I suspect, have not read anything with more than 280 characters for many years. We operate in the books world. We’re supposed to believe in free speech and freedom of thought. We’re meant to treat each other with respect, not look for ways to tear each other down. To value the written word and not denigrate, insult and push people to a point where those who are emotionally vulnerable might not survive their attacks. Most of us have the maturity to understand that, but it’s clear that some, particularly those at the start of their careers, still have to learn it. It’s the difference between playing the part of a decent person on social media and actually being one in real life."
