Bad News—A Review

Bad News—A Review

"In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek (where, full disclosure, she has published two of my essays), argues that elite left-wing journalists have embraced a race-based view of American inequality and abandoned any sort of class-based analysis. They’ve done this, she explains, because it largely absolves them of having to apologize for their own elite lifestyles. “The fact is,” she writes, “journalism has become a profession of astonishing privilege over the past century, metamorphosing from a blue-collar trade into one of the occupations with the most highly educated workforces in the United States. And along with this status revolution has come the radicalization of the profession on questions of identity, leaving in the dust anything commensurate to a similar concern with economic inequality…” 

“What’s interesting about it,” African American filmmaker Eli Steele tells Ungar-Sargon, “is that we’re further away from segregation and slavery than ever before. Racism on almost every metric is lower.” Among a mountain of evidence marshalled in support of this claim, Ungar-Sargon cites an article Rav Arora wrote for Quillette in which he noted that American women of Iranian, Turkish, and Asian descent all out-earn white American males. So why do America’s elite journalists see racism everywhere? Liberal and left-wing journalists and media outlets accuse working class people of racism, says Ungar-Sargon, “not for actual racism, but for things that have increasingly been lumped under the ever expanding category of what counts as racism.” These include opposition to immigration, opposition to affirmative action, and criticism of any black person.

Curiously, many African-Americans, particularly of the working class, wouldn’t fare very well in a study of racial animus. More often than not, she writes, “what they measure is insufficient liberalism on questions of race. For example, to measure the alleged racism of Trump supporters, one study determined people’s racism according to whether they support affirmative action or not, even though over half of black Americans don’t. Can something that splits the black community down the middle really measure racism?” Likewise, she cites a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll which found that 85 percent of black Americans want less immigration...

Opposition to immigration was a mainstream—nay, a left-wing—stance just a few years ago. In 2016, Democratic Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders campaigned for the presidency by denouncing the idea of open borders, deeming it “a Koch Brothers proposal” that “would make everybody in America poorer.” Today, if a member of the white working class were to express such sentiments to a reporter for the Atlantic, the Times, or NPR, he would almost certainly be branded a racist.

Ungar-Sargon reminds us that America once had a vibrant populist press which spoke up on behalf of the working class...

Alas, this model of journalism wouldn’t last, and this is where one of the villains of Ungar-Sargon’s story appears: the New York Times. She spends an entire chapter detailing how the Times, since its inception in 1851, has largely eschewed the concerns of common people in order to court deep-pocketed subscribers. The financial model of the Times has always been reliant on selling expensive advertising space to corporations that produce luxury brands. To do this, the Times has had to convince those corporations that its subscribers are, for the most part, much wealthier than the average American...

Another villain in Ungar-Sargon’s tale is Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), a Harvard-educated journalist and media critic who deplored the fact that so many of the professional journalists of his day lacked an elite education. He called these reporters “accidental witnesses” to the events of the world and complained that they were men of “small caliber,” who couldn’t be trusted to report the truth. He wanted only highly educated men to cover the news, and he wanted to make a degree in journalism from an elite institution a “necessary condition for the practice of reporting.” Lippmann, Ungar-Sargon writes, “would soon get his wish. Today, 92 percent of journalists are college educated, thanks to an extreme class chasm that has opened in America. And yet it would be a mistake to view this in the context of journalistic ethics. While the labor of distinguishing truth from fiction is a crucial part of the job of a journalist, there is absolutely no evidence that having a college degree makes one better at this…”

Ungar-Sargon cites a study from the 1930s showing that only about 40 percent of American journalists at that time possessed a college degree, and nearly 10 percent of journalists hadn’t even attended high school. She supplies a quote from Richard Harwood, a long-time reporter for the Washington Post: “In the early times, we were not only describing the life of normal people, we were participating in it. Most of the reporters came from the lower middle class, which is where the readers and most of the subjects came from too. We were more or less on the same level with the people we dealt with. We lived in the same neighborhood. Reporters regarded themselves as working class.” Ironically, the quote comes from a book by Atlantic journalist James Fallows, who these days travels the country in his own private plane in order to write about how ordinary working folk live. The days when reporters were mostly just working-class drudges themselves are long gone.

As radio, and then television, made journalism a trade that could bring national recognition to its practitioners, it began to attract a more affluent and educated workforce. “But,” writes Ungar-Sargon, “the thing that really jump-started the status revolution in journalism was the Watergate scandal, and—just as importantly—its treatment in the Hollywood film All the President’s Men. The movie suddenly made journalism seem like a very glamorous endeavor, at its peak a David and Goliath tale where plucky sexpots, played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, could bring down the most powerful—and most unpopular—man on the planet. … It created a feedback loop where better educated people became reporters, and demanded more money, whereupon even more educated people applied.”

Since then, journalists have become an elite caste. Almost all of them have at least a bachelor’s degree, whereas only about a third of Americans do. “Back in the day, Ungar-Sargon writes, “when national media outlets were dwarfed by the number of local television and radio stations, papers, and magazines, you could count on a sizable number of journalists to still be living in smaller American cities, some of them attending church and synagogue alongside their readers, viewers, and listeners. Not so today.” She writes that 73 percent of today’s internet publishing jobs are in places that voted for Hilary Clinton for president in 2016. “Those digital media jobs,” she remarks, “located in the most expensive cities in America, pay entry-level wages of $35,000–$40,000 a year. Because that’s not a living wage in these cities, more often than not, someone else is paying the rent for these young journalists. In other words, journalism is now a rich kid’s job.”

Whereas the Times used to boast about how exclusive its readership was, it now boasts about how exclusive its newsroom is. Theodore Kim, the man in charge of newsroom internships and fellowships there, boasted in a (since deleted) tweet a few years ago that he drew his interns and fellows mostly from just four universities: Columbia, Northwestern, Yale, and UC Berkeley. “In listing these schools that ‘churn out’ the ‘most consistently productive candidates,’ Kim said the quiet part out loud: He, as the gatekeeper to the internship program at the New York Times—the most desirable pathway to success in an ever more competitive field—was admitting that unless you come from the kind of background that can pay $70,000 for a vanity degree, you need not apply,” writes Ungar-Sargon (who holds a doctorate from UC Berkeley)...

New York Times columnist and co-founder of Vox, Ezra Klein, is a minor villain in Bad News. “If you’ve never heard of Vox,” writes Ungar-Sargon, “that’s probably because it’s not for you; from its inception, the site had a very specific audience in mind: young, affluent, and highly educated. … Vox’s trademark style would be a cheeky, barely concealed smugness that flatters its readers into believing that by reading the website—which, not coincidentally, would sustain all of the liberal opinions that young, affluent, educated people already hold—they can rest assured that they are among the ranks of the correct, the informed, rather than one of the stupids.” Klein and his wife, Atlantic reporter Annie Lowrey, both write frequently about the poor and the working class without evincing much understanding of either. Lowrey was one of the first elite journalists to produce an article defending the activist slogan, “Defund The Police”—a position few poor and working-class people actually support. As Ungar-Sargon notes, “[T]he abandonment of objectivity in favor of a woke moral panic isn’t really about representing black people but about pandering to white readers. It is they who are clicking on stories calling for defunding the police—a view rejected by 81 percent of black respondents in a Gallup poll.”

At the New York Times, the problem worsened during the great recession. As Ungar-Sargon writes:

Between 2008 and 2015, there were a series of buyouts at the paper, sometimes leading to hundreds of reporters at a time leaving or retiring. These reductions disproportionately cleared out senior ranks of reporters who had a more traditional view of journalism, in which a big part of the mandate, the meaning, and the fun of being a journalist was exposing yourself and your readers to other cultures and other people, and helping others to understand them. In the buyouts, these reporters were replaced by a younger generation of digital natives, some journalists, some in ancillary digital roles, who were educated at elite institutions and viewed their roles less as understanding their subjects and more as sitting in judgment over those they disagreed with.

At a 2019 meeting, one of the paper’s young reporters asked its executive editor, Dean Baquet, “I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting. Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know? Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn’t racist. I just feel like racism is everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting.” Needless to say, Baquet heartily agreed with this sentiment, and Ungar-Sargon’s book provides a graph which charts the recent exponential proliferation of the words “racist” and “racism” in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Post, and on National Public Radio. Another graph illustrates a similar recent increase in references to the pre-Civil War slave trade in those same media venues, despite the fact that said trade ended about 170 years ago.

So, where did all this come from? Ungar-Sargon contends that it started in academia, and spends a chapter describing how American universities, beginning about five decades ago, underwent “a shift away from facts and grand narratives and toward relativism.” It took several decades for this new trend to take hold of American journalism. First, all of the older journalists, who took up the trade prior to the Vietnam War era, had to die or retire. Then, major journalistic venues such as the Times and the Post had to hire only those journalists who had been educated at expensive, elite universities. After that, according to Ungar-Sargon, “All roads led to a culture war around race.”

Just as New York newspapers of the early 19th century generally ignored street crime because it didn’t much interest their upscale readers, today’s progressive media largely ignore black-on-black crime, because it doesn’t interest theirs. In Bad News, Ungar-Sargon quotes journalist Zaid Jilani, who points out that massive amounts of blood were shed in black neighborhoods across America in the summer of 2020, but this was largely ignored by the left-wing media because it was caused by other black Americans not by violent white police officers. 

Only about seven or eight percent of the people who get their news from the Times or NPR lack any college education at all, and this is by design. Media venues like to show their advertisers just how wealthy and educated their content consumers are. New York magazine boasts to its advertisers that it has 2,224,000 “affluent magazine readers monthly.” Likewise, Ungar-Sargon writes, “The Wall Street Journal reports in its media kit that four out of five readers have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and half are affluent, meaning they own liquid assets of $1 million or more. In a now-deleted media kit, the New York Times boasted a print readership who were ‘elite,’ ‘affluent,’ and ‘influential’; more likely to be millionaires, C-suite executives, or business decision makers than ‘the average affluent adult’; and claimed a median household income of $191,000, with digital readers coming in at $96,000.”

With the Times and its ilk focusing so much attention on wooing the wealthy, middle- and working-class Americans were left largely unrepresented. Into this vacuum stepped Rupert Murdoch and his minions... The channel went all in on the culture wars, abandoning the working-class’s economic interests entirely to unite rich and poor conservative Americans around the cultural front without threatening the status of its rich viewership.”

But half a loaf is better than what the liberal press has been offering working-class media consumers. As Ungar-Sargon puts it, “[I]f the working class in America is an amalgam of cultural and economic factors, the liberal media has abandoned both sides of this equation, while conservative media delivers on one of them; at least Fox News doesn’t sneer at working-class values while abandoning working-class viewers economically.”

It’s easy to understand why an upwardly mobile class of journalists might prefer to focus on race and gender issues rather than on the woes of the working class. What’s odd is that this even seems to trump solidarity with their own class of elite laborers. When Andrew Sullivan was run out of New York magazine for his heterodox views, none of his fellow writers stood up for him. In February of 2021, Donald McNeil, a longtime science reporter for the Times, was pressured to resign after it was discovered that, two years earlier, he had used a racial slur in a neutral way during a casual discussion about said slur. When McNeil took to Medium to write his side of the story, the Times covered it with a headline that read: “Ex-Times Reporter Who Used Racial Slur Publishes a Lengthy Defense.” That’s a rather cold description of a 45-year former colleague who had earned numerous awards for his reporting. 

But Ungar-Sargon reminds us that McNeil was not only backstabbed by his former employer but also by the labor union whose job it was to defend him...

In Bad News, Ungar-Sargon cites various journalists who date the current moral panic to roughly the middle of the Obama presidency, when it became clear that having a black man in the White House wasn’t going to be quite the panacea progressives hoped. Conor Friedersdorf, a reporter for the Atlantic, dates the “Great Awokening” to about 2014. He tells Ungar-Sargon, “I started writing about what people now call wokeness at least as early as 2014. It seemed to me that there was some new moral thing in the air that I did not recognize from when I was in college. I didn’t yet see it in journalism, at least not like it’s there today.” To Friedersdorf’s credit, when an outcry among the staff of the Atlantic led editor Jeffrey Goldberg to rescind a job offer he’d made to firebrand conservative writer Kevin Williamson, he objected publicly, and in the pages of the Atlantic itself.

But 2014 now seems like a long-gone era in American journalism. “Back in 2014,” writes Ungar-Sargon, “journalists were able to cover wokeness because it hadn’t yet become their own ideology.” Not any more. Thomas Chatterton Williams, a journalist who also dates the Great Awokening to the second Obama term, told Ungar-Sargon, “That’s when the idea that white supremacy is hard wired into the DNA of America began to be popularized by writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates. … I’m convinced part of why [it is happening] now is because things are better than they’ve ever been. You don’t get this level of complaint until much more fundamental concerns and obstacles have been taken care of.”

Ungar-Sargon cites the work of political scientist Zach Goldberg, who found that, from 2012 to 2016, “media outlets like the Times, the Huffington Post, and BuzzFeed began covering topics like white privilege, social justice, and institutional racism with exponential regularity…” This increase began right when the New York Times erected an online paywall to keep non-subscribers from reading its articles—a move sure to keep out lower-income readers. This meant that the Times, now more than ever, had to tailor its pages to a more educated, more affluent readership—exactly the kind of people likely to get excited by articles on intersectionality and systemic racism. “Goldberg further found that between 2013 and 2019, the frequency of words like ‘white’ and ‘racial privilege’ grew by an astonishing 1,200 percent in the Times, and by 1,500 percent in the Washington Post. The term ‘white supremacy’ was used fewer than seventy-five times in 2010 in the Washington Post and the New York Times, but over seven hundred times in 2020 alone; at NPR it was used 2,400 times,” or roughly 200 times per month!

The situation became much worse when Donald Trump entered the political arena. Executives at CBS, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, and elsewhere realized that Trump was a veritable goldmine. Once upon a time, the newsrooms and advertising departments at most media outlets maintained at least a semblance of independence from each other. But Trump’s ascent made young journalists at elite outlets want to do nothing but publish negative stories about him all day long. And this was exactly what the advertising department wanted as well, because the name Trump in an online headline pretty much guaranteed millions of clicks. “With the incentives so aligned,” writes Ungar-Sargon, “there wasn’t even really a need to break down whatever was left of the wall between advertising and editorial; it happened on its own. … It can both be the case—indeed, it is both the case—that Trump made a lot of very real mistakes as a candidate and president and that the media’s obsession with him went beyond all proportion due to an unignorable profit motive. … Trump drove sales, so Trump drove editorial.”

She notes that if you type “Trump” and “Russia” into their search engines, the Times’s website will return over 15,000 results and the Post’s website will bring up more than 27,000, despite the fact that the Mueller investigation turned up no hard evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. If you enter the phrases “opioid crisis” or “homelessness” or “income inequality” into the search engines of the Times or the Post, you’ll get a tiny fraction of the number of hits that “Trump” and “Russia” bring up. Elite journalists leaned into Trump’s alleged (and actual) wrongdoings because it gave them an excuse to focus on him and not on the problems of the white working class, whom they have largely abandoned...

We should do what we can to end the current moral panic over race, not because it distracts us from a more important battle over class, but because moral panics are bad for us in their own right. But they can be difficult to resist because they provide the allure of engagement in righteous conflict which requires very little in the way of personal sacrifice, but contributes massively to societal discord. As Ungar-Sargon writes in one of her book's many perceptive passages: “When you define racism as an omnipresent white-supremacist framework baked into the heart of our nation that can never be solved or extracted, you give people a culture war they can hammer away at forever, a perpetual cudgel against those who disagree with them, even if those who disagree with them are less affluent and less fortunate—the losers of the economic and culture war.”"

 

It's no surprise that the middle of the Obama presidency was also when gay marriage got rammed through the US Supreme Court

Of course, only Fox News and the Daily Mail can be criticised. Anyone who criticises the left wing media is a threat to democracy

 

Woke media is bad news for democracy - spiked

"When I was in my mid-twenties and working at the New York Times as a clerk, I met a grizzled old New York Post reporter called Steve Dunleavy in a bar off Times Square. He had a fearsome reputation and was loathed by the city’s liberals, but when he heard what I did for a living he was sympathetic, even kind. I don’t remember the conversation word for word, but it was along the lines of: ‘Sorry kid, you’ve arrived too late to the newspaper party.’ The days of working your way up from the bottom were gone, he suggested, and they weren’t coming back. Journalism was a game for the wealthy and the well-connected...

I worked in the US media from the late 1990s until the mid-2000s. While I had many great experiences, and learned a lot from some of the best journalists in the business, I also noticed certain flawed tendencies among some of my peers. In particular, they seemed to invent fantasy scenarios in which they cast themselves as heroes in a sophomoric battle of justice versus injustice. At the time, I thought it was mostly just a problem among a small number of young, immature reporters. But in the decades since, I watched from the sidelines as this tendency morphed into what seemed like an industry-wide personality disorder...

Bad News is a tour de force of research, historical contextualisation and sheer gumption. Ungar-Sargon punctures the noxious bubble that so many elite journalists have been operating in, and provides a devastating takedown of American media. If you still believe in the ideal of the noble, crusading journalist, this book will disabuse you...

The Times and all of its cohorts in the corporate press are no longer in the business of reporting the news. They are in the business of selling the illusion of moral exoneration to a pampered elite, like the Catholic Church selling indulgences in the Middle Ages. But I read the New York Times – I can’t possibly be racist!

‘Wokeness perpetuates the economic interests of affluent white liberals’, writes Ungar-Sargon. It allows them to preserve their own and their children’s status while still allowing them to feel ‘like the heroes of a story about social justice… vastly superior to their conservative and even slightly less radical friends’.

Bad News is full of illuminating nuggets. In 2014 just seven per cent of journalists identified as Republican. In 2015 96 per cent of journalists who made donations to a political campaign contributed to Hillary Clinton’s run for president. And despite the Times making race a central feature of the paper in recent years, it has failed dismally to gain readership among black Democrats. ‘For all its woke posturing’, notes Ungar-Sargon, ‘the Times was only able to secure the readership of 12 per cent of black Democrats in 2019, at the height of Trump’s reign’.

When I worked at the Times, it was a place where the adults seemed very much in charge. Recent events – like the debacle over Republican senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed, which led to three journalists losing their jobs, and the departure of veteran science reporter Donald McNeil, who offended a group of teenage girls – have shown that is no longer the case.

‘This younger generation’, writes Ungar-Sargon, ‘armed with their judgments and accusations of racism and sexism, became the ones wielding immense influence over their older colleagues. Insiders at the Times describe an atmosphere in which an older generation of editors and staff has completely capitulated to a younger woke generation.’

The capitulation happened, argues Ungar-Sargon, in part because it generated revenue and buzz: ‘Young journalists, dazzled by the potential to be famous and anxious to be the good guys in a drama starring themselves, discovered they could push the ideology they’d picked up at their Ivy League universities and peddle it to the acclaim of Twitter activists with millions of followers… They simply could not have found a better way to drive traffic.’

Class is the major focus of Bad News, which is forthrightly populist in its sympathies...

 

The New York Times – which was specifically launched to cater to the powerful – now reigns supreme in US media, as it has done so for over a century, getting many important stories wrong along the way. In fact, Bad News shows that the paper’s moral track record is so off it should cancel itself. It has defended wrongs, like returning escaped slaves to their masters, and it even downplayed the threat of Hitler. (For an even more devastating critique of specific Times’ journalistic misdeeds, check out The Gray Lady Winked by Ashley Rindsberg. Rindsberg digs up the Times’ original reporting of the outbreak of the Second World War, which it claims Poland started by invading Germany!)"

Links - 30th June 2023 (1 - Indigenous People: Residential Schools in Canada)

Meme - Jonathan Kay @jonkay: ""Not entirely accurate" is the new "mostly peaceful"" The Tyee @TheTyee: "When a Canadian museum tweeted something not entirely accurate about #Kamloops, denialists jumped to spread misinfo. @Niigaanwewidam and @SeanCarleton encourage all to understand how denialists spread misinfo. We all have a role to play in responding."
When the left lies, it's "not entirely accurate". When people fact check the left, it's denialism and misinformation

Canada should consider legal solution to fight residential school denialism: report - "Canada should give "urgent consideration" to legal mechanisms as a way to combat residential school denialism, said a Friday report from the independent special interlocutor on unmarked graves.  Justice Minister David Lametti said he is open to such a solution... Murray raised concerns about increasing attacks from "denialists" who challenge communities when they announce the discovery of possible unmarked graves.  "This violence is prolific," the report said. "And takes place via email, telephone, social media, op-eds and, at times, through in-person confrontations."... some countries have criminalized denial of the Holocaust during the Second World War.   The federal government followed suit last year, amending the Criminal Code to say someone could be found guilty if they wilfully promote antisemitism "by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust."   The measure does not apply to private conversations.  NDP MP Leah Gazan has also called for Parliament to legislate residential school denialism as hate speech."
The Ministry of Truth marches steadily on. When facts are offensive, they become hate facts

In Canada, Asking for Evidence Now Counts as ‘Denialism’ - "given that the originally announced radar data would have indicated to Indigenous groups and forensic investigators exactly where any suspected human remains would be lying, the passage of two years without the reported unearthing of physical evidence can only be described as a strikingly odd development. As I noted in a recent article for a British magazine, and here at Quillette, this is a subject that many polite Canadians are scared to talk about. In 2021, the assumed discovery of those 215 unmarked graves took on the quality of a sacred national narrative. Pointing out the holes in that narrative that have since developed, as I am doing here, feels like secular sacrilege.    Moreover, there’s a considerable amount of political capital at stake. During the 2021 federal election campaign, Trudeau campaigned on a promise to make amends for the murderous horrors inflicted upon Indigenous Canadians by his forebears. And Indigenous leaders, quite understandably, were happy to take the Prime Minister’s money as he did so. Journalists assured their readers, listeners, and viewers that the presumed graves offered further proof that Canada was a “genocide state,” thereby sparking all manner of new charitable initiatives, hashtags, and T-shirt campaigns. After all this, few public figures have any incentive to admit that perhaps we all might have waited for the facts before setting about the garment-rending with such gusto. Only one large Canadian media outlet, the National Post, has dared publish a full and frank analysis of how everyone got the unmarked-graves story wrong. Other outlets have either ignored the story’s denouement altogether, or have gone further by denouncing revisionism as a symptom of bigotry... Yet even as they publicly hew to the orthodox line on the unmarked-graves story, Canadian reporters and editors are now adding language that signals the growing uncertainty about what actually lies beneath the ground... The desire to protect the unmarked-graves narrative remains especially strong among Canada’s ruling Liberals, whose Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations has taken the rather extraordinary step (for a liberal democracy, at least) of instructing reporters not to report heretical facts. In early 2022, when a few writers began saying out loud how odd it was that no bodies had yet been discovered in Kamloops, the minister, one Marc Miller, denounced these Canadians as being “part of a pattern of denialism and distortion that has coloured the discourse on Residential Schools in Canada. They are harmful because they attempt to deny survivors and their families the truth.”... And yet, last month, Miller himself felt compelled to hedge awkwardly when tweeting on the two-year anniversary of the unmarked-graves story—excoriating those who make “sickening attempts” to “deny” history while also referencing the “finding of over 200 suspected unmarked graves” (my emphasis). The s-word betrays Miller’s hypocrisy: If acknowledging that those 200-plus graves in Kamloops might not actually exist qualifies someone as a “sickening” genocide denier, then Miller seems to belong on the list. Later on his thread, Miller seems to suggest that the truth of the graves’ existence is beside the point anyway, because the very act of discussing the issue “remain[s] traumatic for the community, survivors and their families.” And so writers should resist the temptation to dispute the credulous 2021 consensus, Miller tells us. Instead, he instructs journalists to assume the role of monks tasked with “reflection and contemplation of the work that remains to ensure Indigenous Peoples heal.”... Like Miller, Murray seems to regard claims of unmarked graves at Kamloops and elsewhere as morally unfalsifiable, since they are “Survivors’ truths.” She repeatedly suggests that the mere act of requesting physical evidence is, itself, evidence of denialism. On this point, Murray approvingly quotes the chief of a First Nation in western Canada who subtly addresses denialism by stating that ‘[w]hether or not unmarked graves are found, there is enough documented oral and archival evidence to say that these burials do or did exist.’ The community acknowledges that the voices of Survivors, who have first-hand accounts of what happened in Indian Residential Schools, should be prioritized over anything else...
At other points in her report, Murray goes further, suggesting that the deniers’ ranks encompass anyone who does not pledge his or her belief that residential schools were instruments of literal genocide... a person could be a “denier” without saying or writing anything at all, insofar as they had not heeded Murray’s exhortation that “each of us must stand up and speak out” in the manner she prescribes. In the long run, however, this kind of semantic analysis likely won’t matter much, since any legal effort to censor “denialism” (however that word is defined) would almost certainly be struck down by courts as an infringement on free speech. Canadian constitutional principles permit laws that ban the wilful promotion of “hatred” against identifiable groups. But no one can seriously argue that asking for evidence of unproven murder allegations, or offering dissenting theories about residential schools come close to meeting that standard."

NP View: Criminalizing speech the wrong way to address residential school legacy : canada - ""There are people who did have good experiences in residential schools. People who got an opportunity at a life because of it and who succeeded"
This would be an extreme minority if it was even true, and compared with the number of people who were abused, died, are still dealing with trauma, is an insignificant minority that is used to effectively imply residential schools aren't as bad as people think.  How fucking dare you."
""The individual student’s ability to succeed within the residential school system, and the positive difference that individual teachers and school staff made in some students’ lives, are important parts of the history and legacy of the schools and deserve recognition"
Direct quote from the Truth and Reconciliation report. You know, if it was even true."
In this thread, lots of liberals were cheering on government censorship, of course
Weird how residential school denialism doesn't include contradicting indigenous voices who said residential schools were good for them, or pretending that indigenous people never ran residential schools

Criminalizing speech the wrong way to address residential school legacy - "Given their clear disdain for free speech, it’s a suggestion that the Liberals seem fully on board with...  the label of “denialism,” an insidious term intended to draw moral comparisons with Holocaust denial, is not only directed at those who misrepresent the history of residential schools. It is targeted at anyone who challenges particular narratives. Anything that could be perceived as downplaying what happened in residential schools, even if only to affirm what the facts say, is considered offside.  Those who point out, accurately, that at least 200 suspected graves discovered near Kamloops Indian Residential School have yet to be confirmed are labeled “denialists.” They are given this label even though the Tkʼemlúps te Secwépemc First Nation itself has not confirmed whether the signatures found by the ground-penetrating radar survey of the site are in fact the gravesites of children who attended the school.  If one notes — again, accurately — that tuberculosis and other diseases were the largest killers of children in residential schools that is enough to earn one the label of denialist, despite that point being prominently discussed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  Murray’s report itself is not particularly concerned with facts or evidence. For example, she claims that “denialists” entered the Kamloops site to dig up suspected graves. “Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels,” she writes, “they said they wanted to ‘see for themselves’ if children are buried there.”  Trespassing on First Nations territory with the intention of violating a probable burial site is utterly contemptible, and very likely criminal. That is, If it happened, but there has been apparently no RCMP report and Murray does not cite any corroborating evidence to support this story. She doesn’t even tell us when it might have happened. To support her call for criminal sanctions, Murray quotes favourably Gazan’s statement that, “Denying genocide is a form of hate speech,” even though whether what took place at Canada’s residential schools meets accepted definitions of a genocide is very much a matter of debate. The TRC labelled it a “cultural genocide,” while some historians who recognize the assimilationist intention of residential schools and the resulting harm stop short of equating them with that term.  The 2019 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry also hedged by calling it a “colonial genocide,” and even that was contentious. At the time, Romeo Dallaire, who witnessed the Rwandan genocide first hand, noted that what happened at residential schools was “scandalous” and “unacceptable,” but suggested it was not the same as what happened in Rwanda, which was “a deliberate act of a government to exterminate, deliberately and by force and directly, an ethnicity or a group of human beings.” This is a reasonable view to take, and not one based in bigotry, yet here we are, four years later, having a national conversation about making changes to the Criminal Code that could very well make comments like Dallaire’s illegal. And the proposal is being embraced by prominent cabinet ministers. Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller tweeted that, “Residential School denialism” is “criminal in nature,” and Justice Minister David Lametti said he is open to “a legal solution and outlawing it.”  Given how little value this government places on robust debate, which is a long-proven route to better policy, no one should be surprised if the Liberals follow through with new curtailments on expression. It was just a year ago that the government outlawed “condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust,” which is unlikely to have a meaningful effect on antisemitism. The Liberals are also expected to introduce their much-anticipated online harms bill in the near future, which would give Ottawa greater powers to police the internet for unapproved speech.  It’s all part of a push on the part of the Trudeau Liberals to control what Canadians say in an attempt to curb misinformation and disinformation — a significant cause for concern given that this government’s propensity to label any opposition to it policies as “misinformation.”  This won’t help Canadians come to terms with the often miserable legacy of the Indian Residential School system."

Renewed calls to cancel Canada Day in wake of residential school gravesite discovery
From 2021. Fake news is good when it supports the liberal agenda  

Michael Higgins: Truth ignored as teacher fired for saying TB caused residential school deaths - "After four decades as a teacher, Jim McMurtry was fired Tuesday for daring to speak out.  He first fell foul of authorities for speaking about the Kamloops Indian Residential School and for saying things not in line with official ideology...   The long and rocky road that led to McMurtry’s dismissal hearing began in 2021 during a Grade 12 classroom discussion in Abbotsford, B.C., concerning the just announced news of 215 unmarked graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School.  A student said priests had murdered and tortured the children at the school and then left them to die in the snow. McMurtry pointed out that most children at residential schools died from disease, primarily tuberculosis.  “I wasn’t trying to be inflammatory,” said McMurtry in an interview. “It was one comment. It was not done with callousness.”  It took one complaint, and before the hour was out McMurtry was being frog marched out of the school...  A report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission highlights that this deplorable situation was well known, quoting documents in the National Archives of Canada that said: “As many as half of the aboriginal children who attended the early years of residential schools died of tuberculosis, despite repeated warnings to the federal Government that overcrowding, poor sanitation and a lack of medical care were creating a toxic breeding ground for the rapid spread of the disease.”  One would hope that this truth would be taught in every school. But that’s not the truth the Abbotsford District School Board cares about.  Its report said, “Mr. McMurtry’s personal opinions regarding residential schools were seen in contradiction to the truth and reconciliation work that is currently underway in the District.”  Apparently, McMurtry’s truth, backed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, isn’t good enough for the school district who have another, different truth.  One can almost hear the school district quoting Pontius Pilate: “What is truth?” McMurtry was suspended and then, over a year later, had the audacity to speak out about the unfairness of it all.  This, of course, got him in more trouble. Now he’s accused of “flagrant disregard” for his employer. The impact of his comments on students could be “unethical and immoral,” claimed the school district.  If only he had followed the expected “lines of communication,” as was demanded of him, he might still have a job.  But what does McMurtry know? He only holds a master’s degree in the history of education and a doctorate in the philosophy of education with a specialty in Indigenous history.  “I’m a Canadian,” McMurtry said in the interview. “I’ve a right to freedom of conscience. I don’t understand any of this. How can they do this to me?”  McMurtry said “woke dogma” was dominant in schools and needed to be challenged. “This woke indoctrination (is) as offensive as any totalitarian ideology that has ever been pushed. People use ideologies to further their own interests, this isn’t new. What is striking is that in schools they are presenting only one side.  “There’s people who believe that Canada is systemically racist and that all our ancestors were monsters. And I’m the person who is saying, ‘Well, let’s debate it. Let’s look at it.’  “Teachers are walking on eggshells on all sorts of issues. Teachers need to stop now and say, ‘Enough is enough’.”  McMurtry said he was concerned that NDP MP Leah Gazan recently announced that she wanted legislation that might target people like him.  “Now the NDP wants to have people like me labelled as denialists and guilty of hate speech,” he said."
Truth is only valuable when it advances liberal goals

Did Indian Residential Schools Cause Intergenerational Trauma? - "“TRAUMA” IS A GREEK WORD meaning wound or injury.  Its original and still current use in medicine is to describe physical injuries, such as whiplash after a car accident.  More recently, it has been widely used to describe psychological stress caused by wars and natural catastrophes, i.e. Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  An even further and more recent extension has applied the concept of trauma to whole peoples or nations, as in the phrase “historical trauma.”  Historical trauma is not a bad way to describe what happened to the original peoples of what is now Canada...  It is commonly asserted today that residential schools are responsible for the “intergenerational trauma” of Indigenous people by having cut them off from their traditional languages and cultures.  It is further said that the schools, by removing children from their parents, damaged their sense of family life, so that they were unable to become good parents when it was their turn to marry and raise families.  Thus the damage was passed from generation to generation, resulting in the ills that plague Indigenous people today: lower life expectancy, higher disease morbidity, alcohol and drug abuse, unemployment, crime, and so on.  The legacy media routinely present the thesis of intergenerational trauma from the residential school experience as if it were an established fact... one of the stories is far from heart-rending.  It concerns a woman who is now a tenured professor of public health at the University of Toronto.  She says her parents went to residential school, and she was largely raised in foster homes.  "My kids have to deal with this sort of, sometimes crazy, sometimes unstable mom, because I didn't have parents because they went to residential school," she says, adding that she didn’t like to go to parent-teacher conferences for her four children because they “evoked negative feelings.”  But by any reasonable standard, this woman’s life ought to be considered an inspiration, not a disaster.  After a difficult childhood, she earned a Ph.D. in child psychology, now holds a tenured position at one of Canada’s most prestigious universities, and seems to have successfully (she doesn’t say otherwise) mothered four children.  She would be a viable candidate for super-woman!  Whatever intergenerational traumas she claims to have suffered, they haven’t kept her from achieving extraordinary success.  Behind these superficial stories in the media lies a body of academic research, the findings of which need to be scrutinized more carefully.  There are numerous methodological reasons to be cautious about what is reported in this literature. First, with a tip of the deerstalker hat to Sherlock Holmes, there is a dog that didn’t bark.  The obvious first step in research should have been to compare the life outcomes of those who attended residential school to those who did not...   Unfortunately, almost none of this research has been done.  A golden opportunity was missed in the First Nations Regional Health Survey (RHS), carried out in the years 2008-2010...  THIS NEGLECT OF THE obvious has been typical of the Canadian research of the alleged IRS factor in intergenerational trauma... One exception is the work of Simon Fraser University economist Donna Feir, who found that Indian mothers who attended IRS had a similar socio-economic status to those who did not... at least from the 1950s onward, those who attended residential schools tended to experience an increase in height, decrease in obesity, and lesser prevalence of diabetes, in comparison to those who went to non-residential schools.  Substantial statistical acrobatics were required to tease out these results because children sent to residential school in this period tended to be shorter, fatter, and in poorer health than those who went elsewhere because the schools served in effect as refuges for abused and neglected children... at most one-third of Indian children ever attended IRS, and in most years the percentage was considerably less. There were always more students in day schools on Indian reserves, plus some who attended residential schools daily while continuing to live at home, or who went to public or Catholic schools in nearby towns, or did not go to any school at all.  And of those who did go to residential schools, many were there only briefly; the average period of attendance has been estimated at 4.5 years. Was that really enough to destroy children’s bonds with their family and traditional culture?  Other influences upon First Nations seem more important, such as the confinement to Indian reserves, which impeded economic progress, followed by extension of the welfare state, which undermined previously strong Indigenous families. In any case, the past is over and cannot be changed... Indigenous people can now do more for themselves and their children by focussing on things they can change, such as low educational achievement, family disintegration, and governance on reserves, rather than rehearsing the past."      

Two-Thirds Did Not Attend Residential School - "Commissioner Sinclair claims that the “thinking of the day” which led to the creation of the residential school system was to “Kill the Indian in the Child.” In fact, the specific phrase “kill the Indian in the child” was never used by the Canadian government at the time. It was invented by the historian John Milloy in a report he submitted to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in May 1996 entitled “Suffer the Little Children: The Aboriginal Residential School System 1830-1992.”... As the source for his claim that “kill the Indian in the child” was the Canadian government’s “thought even before the deed,” Milloy cites page 4 of D.A. Nock’s A Victorian Missionary and Canadian Indian Policy. However, the specific phrase “kill the Indian in the child” cannot be found on the page cited by Milloy, nor anywhere in A Victorian Missionary. Nor can it be found in any other document prior to 1996. It thus seems beyond dispute that the phrase “kill the Indian in the child” is Milloy’s invention, and since 1996 has been falsely and widely attributed to the Canadian government as its policy underlying the establishment of residential schools.   In fact, the Canadian government made clear at the time that the purpose of educating status Indian children in residential schools was “to develop the great natural intelligence of the race and to fit the Indian for civilized life in his own environment”... Commissioner Sinclair’s statement that nearly every indigenous child in Canada for roughly seven generations was forced to attend a residential school is directly contradicted by the Indian Act, by census and enrolment data in the Department of Indian Affairs Annual Reports, and by a plethora of other government documents...  so many Indian parents applied to have their children admitted to residential schools that some schools had waiting lists... there can be no legitimate claim that status Indian children were “forced” to attend residential schools prior to 1920, or that “every” school-age status Indian child attended a residential school during those years. THE YEAR 1920 was something of a turning-point. In that year, amendments to the Indian Act made attendance at a residential school compulsory for all status Indian children, but only if there was no day school available on their reserve... During the 1920s, the demand for places in some residential schools continued to exceed the supply...   If residential schools achieved “unacceptably poor education results,” as Mr. Sinclair alleged, what of the two-thirds of school-age status Indian children who, as we have seen, did not attend residential schools? Did they receive a superior education to that available in residential schools?  In a shocking number of cases, many of these children did not get any formal education at all"        
Of course, today liberals are for compulsory education, and many of them don't want private schools or homeschooling to exist        

Foreign Information Operations and Canada's Residential Schools - "Authoritarian regimes often use a rhetorical tactic called “whataboutism” as part of their information and influence operations, whereby negative stories in western liberal media are exploited by these regimes in order to deflect attention away from their criminal activity and human rights abuses. Whataboutism was a frequent Cold War tactic of Soviet propagandists, who would, for example, point to the mistreatment of Black Americans whenever Soviet terror and repression were mentioned by Western media and officials... China has focused on the residential schools issue as a means to distract from the Xinjiang genocide by creating a false moral equivalency between the two events... The Chinese government is distorting the issue by completely ignoring the fact that Canada has facilitated reconciliation for former students and families and admitted wrongdoing through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Additionally, Canada continues to address and make amends for past immoral action while China attempts to suppress its ongoing transgressions – including its mass human rights abuses in Tibet, Xinjiang and against Hong Kong pro-democracy activists. Chinese dialogue on the topic of residential schools may be further motivated as a defence mechanism to avoid calls by Canada to allow for immediate access to Xinjiang... Russia and Iran have exploited the residential schools issue as a mechanism to discredit the Canadian government and undermine our credibility on human rights issues...  In 2007, Russia used historical disinformation against Estonia to manufacture an ethnic conflict in the country during the Bronze Night Riots. Notably, during the COVID pandemic, Russia has promoted vaccine hesitancy in Western nations using state-controlled media and social media platforms to amplify them... A June 25, RT headline reads: “The silence on Canada’s indigenous deaths shame shows there are double standards on global human rights.” The article strategically omits the existence of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report and condemns Canada’s hypocrisy on all human rights issues"          

Kenney criticized for cancel culture remarks amid renewed residential school debate - The Globe and Mail - "A western Canadian Indigenous leader is condemning cancel culture remarks made by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, and says it reinforces a recent decision to scrap a formal working agreement with the province.  Kenney spoke Tuesday about cancel culture when asked about Calgary Board of Education trustees voting this week to immediately rename the Langevin junior high school in light of outrage following the discovery of the remains believed to be from children at the site of a former Kamloops residential school.  Hector-Louis Langevin, a former federal Conservative cabinet minister, is considered an architect of the residential school system... Kenney equated removing statues and renaming institutions with erasing from history these figures and thereby not allowing Canadians to understand, learn and grow from past actions, even those deemed reprehensible.  The Premier took issue with the focus on Macdonald, noting other federal leaders throughout Canadian history embraced racist and punitive policies, such as the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.  “If we go full force into cancel culture, then we’re cancelling most if not all of our history,” said Kenney. “Instead, I think we should learn from our history.” Grand Chief Vernon Watchmaker was critical of Kenney’s remarks in a statement Wednesday.  “The Premier’s diatribe was particularly insensitive, especially on the heels of the mass grave discovery in Kamloops, B.C.”"            

215 "Graves" - "The only “scientific” evidence was a report from a junior archaeologist, (with questionable radar expertise), operating a ground penetrating radar machine... The only other “evidence” offered were stories of secret burials that had circulated through the community. But these stories were clearly in the nature of conspiracy theories. They include stories of priests incinerating indigenous children in furnaces and hanging their bodies on hooks in barns. They also include stories of Queen Elizabeth personally kidnapping indigenous children. Simply put, these are bizarre tales, closer to children’s ghost stories than a historical record.  The fact is, there is no historical record of any Kamloops parent, or other indigenous parent from other communities served by the school, reporting that their child had mysteriously disappeared after attending the Kamloops school. Indigenous parents are no different from any other parent. They love their children, and if their child had suddenly disappeared, they would obviously raise the alarm. They would complain to their chief, the police, the newspapers, their Indian Agent, the Department of Indian Affairs, and anyone else who would listen.  Yet there was not a single report.  The other evidence all points to the fact that these stories of secret burials by priests late at night, and six-year-olds forced to dig graves, and Queen Elizabeth stealing children from their schools are just that. Stories. There is currently no credible evidence that there is anyone buried in the Kamloops IRS apple orchard."              

GUEST OP-ED: Historic septic dig casts doubt on Kamloops residential school burial site claims - "  It is important to note that it was the so-called indigenous Knowledge Keepers at Kamloops who claimed to have known that the Kamloops apple orchard was a clandestine burial site. The reason ground penetrating radar (GPR) searches were conducted was due to the Knowledge Keepers “knowings” – which derive from indigenous oral traditions (also known as “traditional knowledge”).  But what is the difference between an urban legend and a “knowing” disseminated through oral traditions? Former KIRS student, Emma Baker admitted in an interview with CTV that when she attended the Kamloops residential school from 1952 to 1956, she and her friends made up stories about graves in the apple orchard... Those lurid stories, or more likely, highly implausible urban legends, were for decades circulated by defrocked former United Church minister and debunked conspiracy theorist Kevin Annett... An anonymous architectural consultant who specializes in site inspections and goes by the moniker KamRes (short for Kamloops residential school), has built a website called Graves in the Apple Orchard featuring details of his analysis concerning survey data of the infamous Kamloops apple orchard... “…a report anonymously prepared by an architectural consultant who specializes in site inspections, which suggests that the anomalies picked up by the T’Kemlups GPR survey are likely the result of decades of ground disturbances — irrigation ditches, utility lines, backhoe trenches, archeological digs, waterlines and so on.”... It is likely that the soil disturbances caused by this 1924 septic field were picked up by ground penetrating radar and have been mistakenly interpreted as clandestine graves.  Because the Kamloops Indian Band has not released Dr. Beaulieu’s GPR report, researchers cannot verify if she knew about the 1924 septic field and drainage trenches. However, comments she has made to the media, like the one that follows, give the impression of a person not very open to alternative explanations of what she believes to be unmarked graves.  “All residential school landscapes are likely to contain burials of missing children. Remote sensing such as GPR merely provides some spatial specificity to this truth.” – Dr Beaulieu Researcher Nina Green had this to say about the developments offered by KamRes:  “KIRS had a very large septic field in 1924, and according to Kam Res, it’s under the apple orchard where Dr. Beaulieu did her GPR work. There’s no way GPR can distinguish between a filled-in septic field trench and a filled-in grave. The GPR profiles will look the same.”"

Links - 29th June 2023 (2)

Expats baulk at rising rents, as some think twice about staying in Singapore amid intensifying global talent war - "“Most of us are here on local contracts, paying our own rents, healthcare, schooling for kids, flights and so on,” he said.  This is worsened by the fact that foreigners do not enjoy subsidies like Singapore residents, while at the same time, some expat families have become single-income as a recent legislation change disallowed dependent pass holders from working, he added."

Singapore tenant slapped with 75% rent increase but landlord said he is giving her a ‘discount’ for being a ‘good tenant’ (Video) - "Horror stories surrounding surging rental prices in Singapore are becoming the talk of the town this year and this tenant’s experience just proved them right.  TikTok user Sal (@salshoult) on Tuesday posted her frustration with her landlord who increased her rent by 75% and told her that it was actually a discount since he would rent it on the open market at a 100% increased rate if she did not renew...   In the comments, Sal explained that the landlord told her she was getting the discount for being a “good tenant”, noting that she had lived in the house for four years, never missed a single rent payment, kept the house in “good condition” and was a low maintenance tenant... According to reports, the surge in rental prices recently has forced some working in Singapore to move back home.   Channel News Asia reported at least a 21% increase in all neighborhoods for 4-room flats throughout 2022.  The Urban Renewal Authority also recorded a 29.7% increase in Singapore’s average monthly rent in the central region last December."

Medieval Divorce by Combat: Guaranteeing ‘til Death do us Part’ - "Divorce by combat appears to have been a form of trial by combat. Trial by combat was part of  Germanic law  that dealt with accusations between two parties where there were no witnesses or a confession. Whoever won the duel was deemed to be right. It was essentially a legally-sanctioned  duel.  These rules for a  divorce by combat come from Hans Talhoffer’s  Fechtbuch, which was written in 1467. The book serves as an instruction manual for how duels should be fought. The book deals with many different types of duels fought with various weapons. However, the section that caught Professor Hodges and the internet's eye was the section on duels between men and women.  The man was placed in a waist-height 3-foot (1 meter) deep hole, with one hand tied behind his back while the woman was allowed to move freely. Both parties wore practical clothes, a one-piece bodysuit with stirrup legs... At the end of the day, it seems unlikely that divorce by combat was all that common. Trial by combat was not a frivolous duel used to settle a disagreement. It was a serious judicial matter with complicated rules and regulations. It is unlikely the church or the state would readily sanction many of these trials, for fear they would get out of hand."

A Store Selling Heroin, Meth, and Cocaine Just Opened in Canada - "A Vancouver man has opened the only known brick-and-mortar store in Canada and the U.S. that sells heroin, cocaine, meth, MDMA, and other drugs.  Jerry Martin, 51, opened the Drugs Store Wednesday in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood that’s long been considered ground zero for Canada’s overdose epidemic. While British Columbia has very progressive drug laws, the mobile shop is operating completely illegally. The province recently began a three-year drug decriminalization pilot project for possession of small amounts of opioids, cocaine, meth, and MDMA, but selling remains prohibited.   However, Martin told VICE News he opened the store because he wants to give people drugs that have been tested and are free from adulterants, including fentanyl. Although fentanyl, which is driving record overdoses in Canada and the U.S., is the primary street opioid that Vancouverites now use, Martin is instead selling heroin... Martin said all the drugs he’s selling have been tested at Get Your Drugs Tested, a Vancouver facility that uses a fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy machine to detect what’s in people’s drugs.   His hope is to open franchises of The Drugs Store around the country, similar to what happened with grey market cannabis dispensaries."

Manipulating the mind? DID is a social construction - "Many people are aware of the famous and controversial case of Shirley Ardell Mason, better known under the alias “Sybil” from the feature film “Sybil” and the book by the same name. Mason supposedly had 16 different personalities as a result of severe child abuse. Her situation was ultimately determined to be fraudulent after evidence was found that her psychiatrist deliberately attempted to draw out multiple personalities. The mentally unstable Mason was looking for attention and an answer to her psychiatric questions and therefore found it easy to believe that she had “multiple personalities” living inside of her, controlling her life.  Before her case received public attention with the movie and book, only 75 cases of dissociative identity disorder had been reported. Afterwards, upwards of 40,000 diagnoses have been made. This case, among several others, dramatically shaped public opinion of the disease and can arguably be called a primary cause of it...   We as a society have created this disorder. This is not to say that DID doesn’t exist, or that the patients are faking their personalities, but rather that this disorder is primarily a result of societal ideas of self. I encourage those suffering to seek help, and I believe that we should all be empathetic to their plight. However, I fundamentally believe that we are responsible for causing identity crises to become a serious mental disorder because we’ve defined them as such."
Of course, this means that social contagion is absolutely not a thing and we must respect lived experience

Higher Rent, Fewer Babies? Housing Costs and Fertility Decline - "Faster-rising rents are associated with lower fertility for all age groups...   But for home prices, the story is different. Rising home prices reduce birth rates for younger women, but for women in their upper 30s, there is actually a very slightly positive association between home prices and fertility! Higher prices reduce fertility for younger women but might increase fertility for older women. This, again, makes sense: younger women are less likely to own homes, so higher prices lock them out of getting a newer, bigger, better house. But for older women who are more likely to already own homes, higher housing prices can be a good thing, as it gives them more wealth... Bigger houses are associated with higher birth rates... More crowded housing is associated with lower birth rates... it’s possible that causation could flow either way! Maybe bad housing reduces fertility or maybe low fertility creates changes in the housing market! If nobody is having kids, maybe builders make tinier houses; if population growth is low, maybe fewer houses are built at all... There are several ways to try and untangle cause and effect. The first is to look at it from a high level: if lower fertility causes smaller, worse, or pricier housing, then low-fertility, bad-housing places should not have big gaps between desired fertility and actual fertility. That is to say, if people just didn’t want as big a family, and so builders responded with smaller homes, then low-fertility, bad-housing places should probably have about the same, or probably an even lower, gap between ideal and actual fertility as other places. But it turns out that, for the sample of 27 European countries for which I have actual and ideal fertility data, as well as housing overcrowding data, the fertility gap is actually slightly larger in more overcrowded places! Citizens of countries with overcrowded housing still want bigger families...   Two studies have actually attempted to assess whether deteriorating housing availability causes lower fertility. One study used data from England about how often localities refuse to allow new housing to be built. This creates a kind of natural experiment when two nearby, similar localities allow very different amounts of housing to be constructed. This study found, as one might expect, that when localities refuse to build houses, it causes home prices to rise, and birth rates to fall by a large amount.  A second study focuses on the United States. It used data culled from court records to identify states where “zoning” and “land use” court cases come up the most. This provides an annual time series for each state of how much each state restricts new construction. And it turns out, when states restrict construction, it reduces birth rates, especially for women in their 20s... at every stage, the housing situation for young people disfavors childbearing more than in the past, which is almost certainly a major driver of low fertility today. This is both encouraging and disheartening. It’s encouraging because the solution to high housing prices is very simple: relax zoning regulations and build more houses. But it’s also disheartening because local land use policies are often deeply entrenched and hard to change and can usually only be altered through local action"

The Meme Policeman - Posts | Facebook - "The United States subsidizes the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $649 BILLION a year"
"If you’re thinking there’s something fishy about claiming that *annual* US fossil fuel subsidies exceed the *entire* market cap for Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Marathon, Phillips 66 & ConocoPhillips, you are correct. Here’s the background on this whopper of a meme.
The US Energy Information Administration put the amount of federal fossil fuel subsidies at just $489M in FY2016 (the latest report available), down from $3.9B in 2013. This doesn’t include state and local subsidies, but it’s less than 1/1000th of the meme’s claim. In contrast, wind power had $1.3B in subsidies in 2016 (down from $6.2B in 2013) while solar had $2.2B (down from $5.8B). The entire federal subsidies for the energy industry totaled $15B, more than half of that being tax breaks/credits. Direct payments were $4.7B. Ironically, the the single largest amount of direct subsidies come from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) which assists the poor with heating and cooling. It’s doubtful those who oppose these subsidies would want that program cut. Oil Change International, not exactly a pro-fossil fuel lobby, puts the annual federal subsidy at $20.5B. They note “other credible estimates…range from $10B to $52B annually”. However, many of these include dubious subsidies like tax deductions, which exist in every industry and apply to every worker. The government taking less of your money is not a subsidy, unless one also considers mortgage, student loan and healthcare deductions as subsidies. ️So where does this meme get the outlandish $649B number from? A paper published by the IMF in 2019, which claims the world subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of $5.2T/year. But their definition of subsidy is far removed from popular understanding. Their paper claims that fossil fuels are subsidized because they are too cheap! Yes, seriously. Almost all of their subsidy calculations are based not on government grants to the industry, but on too few taxes and surcharges levied on it."

After using the term “fudge-packers”, Kingston High principal is reassigned - "Two months after he was placed on paid administrative leave after it was revealed that he’d used the term “fudge-packers” in a post on social media site Facebook, Vince DeCicco has officially resigned as principal of Kingston High School... The School Board also unanimously approved the creation of a new contracted position for DeCicco in the Teaching and Learning Department. The new position, the district said relates to testing, assessments and data.   DeCicco’s new role will pay him $115,000 a year, down from his salary of $160,000 as principal...   “Fudge-packers” is often colloquially used as a homophobic slur, but in mid-September, DeCicco said he used the term as a slight on the Green Bay Packers football team, longtime rival of the Chicago Bears, and denied intending to offend anyone in the LGBTQ community. Also in September, he said teachers and administrators should strive to be inclusive with the district’s diverse student population, and should consider whether something they say or post online could be misconstrued."

Japanese adult video actress hugs over 3,000 fans in 24-hour event in Shibuya - "Japanese adult video actress Eimi Fukada, known for her erotic films, held a 24-hour-long event where she hugged each of her fans who queued up to see her.  All 3,163 of them.  Fukada, 24, held the event in Shibuya, Tokyo, at 6pm on Aug. 27. When she made the announcement, she said she wanted to be "the most hugged woman in the world".  She ended a day later at 6pm on Aug. 28.  According to Daily Japan, Fukada only took one three-hour break and a few 10-minute breaks throughout the entire event.  She didn't have time to sleep, even at night, and by the end of the event she was "completely exhausted"... Fukada had some costume changes during the event -- she wore a traditional yukata, a bunny outfit, an "office lady" outfit and a "China dress" (cheongsam).  Participants did not have to pay for the hug, but a smartphone photo cost 1,000 yen (S$10.10). Fans could also purchase merchandise.  During the event, fans had to keep their arms by their sides or back, and refrain from returning Fukada's hug"

Terry Dinerman's answer to Is marijuana less harmful than other drugs? - Quora - "After 40 years as a Paramedic, I can say two things about marijuana users…"
    I never “worked” a marijuana overdose.
    With the advent of “Edibles” they may have eaten enough to put them into a DEEP sleep, but they never stopped breathing like the opiate/barbiturate/benzodiazapine/alcohol users would.
    A quiet, uneventful ride to the hospital for a long nap under observation was generally enough.
    Now matter how stoned they were, I was never attacked or even mildly abused by a marijuana user."

Malls in Orchard Road remain empty - "Lam Chern Woon, head of research and consulting at Edmund Tie, said possible factors causing high vacancy rates in any mall could include high rental rates and associated operating costs, making it challenging for retailers to sustain their businesses.  “The location and positioning of the mall can have a strong bearing on the footfall and profile of shoppers.  “In addition, malls with a stronger concentration of trades that face competition from eCommerce (such as fashion, home furnishing and electronics) could also come under greater pressure,” said Lam.  Hsu said both Cineleisure Orchard and The Cathay would benefit from “a redesign of their mall positioning and trade-mix strategy to appeal and relate to a new generation of shoppers post-pandemic, with a palette of engaging shopper experiences”."

Reddit: Husband puts lock on bedroom door for daily for two hours of 'quiet time' - "disaster struck when their three-year-old son spilt hot oil on his arm while their 14-year-old daughter was cooking dinner - and the wife couldn't wake up her husband in the emergency"

Mark Zuckerberg says the 'Eye of Sauron' is a loving nickname from his employees | Fortune - "From offering 17-year-old interns $6,000-a-month salaries to organizing and attending annual “Faceversaries” to celebrate employee work anniversaries, Zuckerberg has earned a reputation as an eclectic and passionate boss.  And it seems that Zuckerberg’s employees—his Metamates, as he likes to call them—have come up with a nickname that reflects their boss’s occasional intensity.  “Some of the folks who I work with at the company—they say this lovingly, but I think they sometimes refer to my attention as the Eye of Sauron”... Zuckerberg explained that when at work, he tends to direct his energy toward one area and nothing else, which may explain the intensity some of his employees feel when they fall under his attention—and the consequential sobriquet.   Although Zuckerberg assured Ferriss that the moniker is used as a term of endearment, rather than as a reference to Sauron’s role as a permanent malignant presence keeping a watchful eye over Middle-earth, the CEO did acknowledge that focusing fully on one thing or idea does not always lead to the best results."

Woman ‘killed lookalike’ to fake own death - "A woman in Germany has been accused of killing a lookalike she found on Instagram to fake her own death.  The suspect, identified as Shahraban K, is alleged to have stabbed beauty blogger Khadidja O more than 50 times, completely disfiguring her face, after luring her into a meeting in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt... Shahraban K, a 24-year-old German-Iraqi woman who is herself a beauty blogger, then allegedly tried to make it look as if she was the one who had been murdered by leaving Khadidja’s body in her Mercedes car and parking it near the flat of friend Sheqir K, who is alleged to have been an accomplice.  Local reports said even Shahraban K’s parents were fooled and identified the body as hers before an autopsy a day later threw the assumption into doubt... Prosecutors believe Shahraban K wanted to run away from trouble at home... Shahraban K, who was living in Munich, allegedly set up fake Instagram accounts and tried to arrange meetings with women who looked similar to her. She eventually found Khadidja O, a 23-year-old Albanian citizen, who lived about 100 miles away... After a post-mortem and DNA tests, it was discovered that the body was really Khadidja O, police said. Shahraban K and Sheqir K were then arrested."

Why vegetable recipes are not very spicy - "Spices are aromatic plant materials that are used in cooking. Recently it was hypothesized that spice use yields a health benefit: cleansing food of parasites and pathogens before it is eaten, thereby reducing food poisoning and foodborne illnesses. In support, most spices have antimicrobial properties and use of spices in meat-based recipes is greatest in hot climates, where the diversity and growth rates of microorganisms are highest. A critical prediction of the antimicrobial hypothesis is that spices should be used less in preparing vegetables than meat dishes. This is because cells of dead plants are better protected physically and chemically against bacteria and fungi than cells of dead animals (whose immune system ceased functioning at death), so fewer spices would be necessary to make vegetables safe for consumption. We tested this corollary by compiling information on 2129 vegetable-only recipes from 107 traditional cookbooks of 36 countries. Analyses revealed that spice use increased with increasing ambient temperature, but less dramatically than in meat-based recipes. In all 36 countries, vegetable dishes called for fewer spices per recipe than meat dishes; 27 of these differences were significant. Of 41 individual spices, 38 were used less frequently in vegetable recipes; 30 of these differences were significant. Proportions of recipes that called for >1 spice and >1 extremely potent antimicrobial spice also were significantly lower for vegetable dishes. By every measure, vegetable-based recipes were significantly less spicy than meat-based recipes. Within-country analyses control for possible differences in spice plant availability and degrees of cultural independence. Results thus strongly support the antimicrobial hypothesis."

Could Ice Cream Possibly Be Good for You? - The Atlantic - "Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. Needless to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar might actually be good for you raised some eyebrows at the nation’s most influential department of nutrition... “There are few plausible biological explanations for these results,” Ardisson Korat wrote in the brief discussion of his “unexpected” finding in his thesis. Something else grabbed my attention, though: The dissertation explained that he’d hardly been the first to observe the shimmer of a health halo around ice cream. Several prior studies, he suggested, had come across a similar effect... Pretty much across the board—low-fat, high-fat, milk, cheese—dairy foods appeared to help prevent overweight people from developing insulin-resistance syndrome, a precursor to diabetes... tucking into a “dairy-based dessert”—a category that included foods such as pudding but consisted, according to Pereira, mainly of ice cream—was associated for overweight people with dramatically reduced odds of developing insulin-resistance syndrome. It was by far the biggest effect seen in the study, 2.5 times the size of what they’d found for milk... The Harvard researchers didn’t like the ice-cream finding: It seemed wrong. But the same paper had given them another result that they liked much better. The team was going all in on yogurt. With a growing reputation as a boon for microbiomes, yogurt was the anti-ice-cream—the healthy person’s dairy treat. “Higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk” of type 2 diabetes, “whereas other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy are not,” the 2014 paper said. “The conclusions weren’t exactly accurately written,” acknowledged Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of policy at Tufts’s nutrition school and a co-author of the paper, when he revisited the data with me in an interview. “Saying no foods were associated—ice cream was associated.” But yogurt made so much more sense. In a way, it was confirmation of something that everyone already knew... Even after being spiked with sugar in the ’70s and ’80s to better suit the U.S. market, yogurt still retained its image as an elixir.  Furthermore, a growing body of literature suggested that yogurt’s health benefits might be real... Dagfinn Aune, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London and a peer reviewer of the Chen and Hu paper, said that the ice-cream effect was “similar” in magnitude to, or “slightly stronger” than, the one for yogurt... “reverse causation.”  To test this idea, Hu and his co-authors set aside dietary data collected after people received these sorts of diagnoses, and then redid their calculations. The ice-cream effect shrank by half, though it was still statistically significant, and still bigger than the low-fat-dairy effect that Harvard had publicized in 2005. In any event, if people who received adverse diagnoses cut back on their ice cream, you might expect that they’d also cut back on, say, cake and doughnuts. So shouldn’t there be mysterious protective “effects” for cake and doughnuts too? “There should be,” Mozaffarian said. “That’s why the finding for ice cream is intriguing.”... it didn’t take long for the Harvard group’s good news about yogurt to take hold as a dominant scientific narrative... Tobias, the journal editor and member of the 2025 U.S. dietary-guidelines advisory committee, called it “totally fair criticism” to ask why yogurt was played up while ice cream was played down... ice cream’s glycemic index, a measure of how rapidly a food boosts blood sugar, is lower than that of brown rice. “There’s this perception that ice cream is unhealthy, but it’s got fat, it’s got protein, it’s got vitamins. It’s better for you than bread,” Mozaffarian said. “Given how horrible the American diet is, it’s very possible that if somebody eats ice cream and eats less starch … it could actually protect against diabetes.” The “Got Milk?” crowd also loves to talk about the “milk-fat-globule membrane,” a triple-layered biological envelope that encases the fat in mammalian milk. Some evidence suggests that dairy products in which the membrane is intact, such as ice cream, are more metabolically neutral than foods like butter, where it’s lost during the churn. (That said, regular cream has an intact membrane, and it hasn’t been consistently associated with a reduced diabetes risk.) Then there is what might charitably be termed the “real-world evidence.” In 2017, the YouTuber Anthony Howard-Crow launched what Men’s Health called “a diet that would make the American Dietetic Association shit bricks”: 2,000 calories a day of ice cream plus 500 calories of protein supplements plus booze. After 100 days on the ice-cream diet, he’d lost 32 pounds and had better blood work than before he’d started pounding Irish-whiskey milkshakes... If this had been a patented drug, he continued, “you can bet that the company would have done a $30 million randomized controlled trial to see if ice cream prevents diabetes.”... once you start contemplating all the ways that cultural biases can seep into the science, it doesn’t stop at dairy-based desserts"
Trust the Science!

Love - "Today, my girlfriend's mother called me to tell me she didn't appreciate our "public amorous behaviour" at the local food court. I didn't go out all day. FML "

Intimacy: Hmmm, twins - FML - "Today, I found out my boyfriend only dates me because I look a bit like his favourite porn star. FML"

My ex, Parents and Love: Parents vs. Parents - FML - "Today, my parents met my girlfriend's parents for the first time. They not only brought along embarrassing childhood photos of myself, they'd 'accidentally' placed an intimate photo of me and my ex-girlfriend with them. That was their subtle way of telling everyone they prefered my ex. FML"

Meme - BIG MULA @1jiare: "So my girl almost died 3 facking times in my apocalypse dream cause she don't FUCKING listen. Now I'm irritated."
Phillepe Miller @philmillerz: "The male version of "you cheated in my dream""

Meme - "This is why it's called pizza
Thickness = a Radius =z
Volume = pi z^2 a
Volume = pi (zz) a"

The Washington Post on Twitter - "Exclusive: Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work nearly a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter - "This is corruption. Plain and simple. And each day that passes, the Supreme Court is looking less like a bench and more like an auction house. Thomas should resign immediately and Roberts should see to it that he does."
Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 on Twitter - "AOC broke federal campaign finance laws by concealing thousands in campaign spending and accepting impermissible gifts. She also illegally funneled campaign funds to China and her boyfriend. AOC is corrupt. Plain and simple. She should resign."
I remember when Biden defenders were claiming what Hunter did was irrelevant, since people weren't electing Hunter Biden

Why do so many Chinese international students in Canada end up back home? - The Globe and Mail - "For them, China is not just home, but a place whose embrace of modernity has created comforts not available in North America – bullet trains, lively cities with a cornucopia of eating choices – while its capital and consumer markets offer opportunity that Canada cannot match.  Chinese students like to joke about Canada as haoshan, haoshui, hao wuliao: nice mountains, nice water, very boring. China is not boring and its air and water are quickly improving, along with its salaries.  In other words, even if China grows less appealing to those outside its borders, it is becoming more desirable to many of its own... In the U.S., the National Science Foundation tracks the percentage of doctorate recipients who intend to stay. Things have changed there, too. In 2001, 91.4 per cent of PhDs from China intended to remain in the U.S. By 2019, the number had fallen to 79.3 per cent. The remainder expected to return to China...  “In Canada, your soft skills can’t really compete with native speakers. You have to know their culture, you have to know their entertainment, and you have to chat to make connections. It’s hard for us if we don’t grow up in that environment.”"

Man Running from Cops Stops to Pet Cats, Goes to Jail - "a Boca Raton man last week who, in the middle of fleeing police, stopped by a home, asked for water and the proceeded to lay down and play with the homeowner’s cats... Daniel Pinedo-Velapatino, 21, now faces a long list of charges, including burglary of an occupied dwelling, three counts of drug possession, three counts of assault, hit and run, and grand theft auto, among others."
Priorities

Florida man climbs atop playground equipment at Clearwater park, tells kids where babies come from - "Police took Otis Dawayne Ryan, 30, into custody on a charge of disorderly conduct... Ryan at first was approaching tourists and making inappropriate comments to women in an effort to get their male partners to confront him"

Florida man bitten by shark, punched by monkey (twice), struck by lightning, bitten by snake - "Erik Norrie, a man who, in his 40 years on Earth, has had run ins with monkeys, sharks, rattlesnakes and the hammer of Thor himself... he was attacked by monkeys twice, once because he wandered too close to a simian while in the Amazon. The second time was the result of a joke, of sorts, played by his wife. She locked Norrie in a cage with a small monkey, which then proceeded to bite, hit and pelt him with his own keys. His wife, Spryng, wasn't worried, though. "She took photos and giggled""

Guy In Florida Loads Car With Frozen Iguanas, They Warm Up, Come Back To Life, Cause Car Accident

Skinheads and Muslims: what they have in common / Netflix does Hitler

Skinhead: "Get the hell out of my country, you goatbanging terrorist!"
Muslim: "Convert or die, you alcohol-infused Nazi infidel!"
Blonde woman: "Whoa, stop it! We're all human, we have so much in common! Instead of fighting, let's try to unite behind our shared values!"
Skinhead: "Well, I totally hate gays and Jews."
Muslim: "Oh my god me too!"
Skinhead and Nazi: *shocked*
Skinhead and Nazi: *heart sign and thumbs up sign*
Blonde woman: *pained look, tears, heart sign and thumbs up sign*

"A Netflix Original Series. Hitler *black man*"

Links - 29th June 2023 (1 - Get Woke, Go Broke)

Woke capitalism is busily destroying itself - "If you aren’t entirely comfortable with a world of gender fluidity, it seems, you have no right to start saving any money, and even less take out a loan to buy a home.  It’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened. When companies such as Vodafone were criticised for joining the GB News advertising boycott on the channel’s launch, the complaints were angrily shouted down by some of the firms’ social media teams. Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company, has admittedly always had Left-leaning sympathies. But its Twitter account is engaged in an extraordinary row with Unilever, the company’s parent, over the question of selling ice cream in Israel.  It hardly seems to matter whether the management of these companies is comfortable with the messages being pumped out on its behalf online. It appears to have abdicated power to a tiny group of activist employees so imbued with Twitter culture that they cannot recognise the difference between social media and the real world. And it’s part of a broader problem with woke capitalism, caused by companies paying far too much attention to the views of staff, and too little of customers. Disney, for example, has found its tax status in Florida under threat after some of its employees tried to turn the Magic Kingdom into the Woke Kingdom (or Person-dom, come to think of it) by campaigning on LGBT rights. Again and again, companies are finding themselves caught up in the culture wars, often forced into particular positions in an attempt to appease their Left-wing staff.  There are two problems with that. The first is that there is no need for businesses to take a political position. If they can make a decent product at a fair price, and pay their staff and suppliers on time, that is more than enough of a social purpose. Everything else can be argued about elsewhere.  The second is that, by handing control over to junior staff, it means private sector firms are falling for an affliction more commonly seen in the public sector. They are losing the art of customer service, and forgetting that respect for other people’s views, and tolerance of a wide range of political beliefs, is just common courtesy.   They need to rein in the millennials."

Starbucks Closing Some Stores, Citing Safety Concerns in Certain Cafes - WSJ - "Starbucks Corp. said Monday that it is closing 16 U.S. stores after workers reported incidents related to drug use and other disruptions in cafes.  Starbucks said it would permanently close six stores each in the Seattle and Los Angeles areas, two in Portland, Ore., and single locations in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. by the end of the month.  The company said it received reports from workers about incidents that they said involved drug use by some customers and in some cases, members of the public, in certain locations... “We read every incident report you file—it’s a lot,” wrote U.S. operations leads Debbie Stroud and Denise Nelson in a message to U.S. employees Monday. “We cannot serve as partners if we don’t first feel safe at work,” they said, referring to the company’s term for employees. Starbucks also said that it would give store managers leeway to close restrooms, limit seating or reduce operations in response to safety concerns. The moves are part of policies aimed at addressing workers’ concerns, including about their safety on the job"
This was only 4 years after they changed their bathroom police because of "racism"

Starbucks changes bathroom policy prompted by Philadelphia arrests in 2018 - "Starbucks is modifying its open-bathroom policy that allowed anyone to use the restroom at its stores. Employees now have the option to close bathrooms if there are safety concerns... the company’s senior vice presidents of U.S. operations wrote that giving employees the option to close restrooms was one of several initiatives geared toward making Starbucks shops safer for workers and customers...  the two men cursed at the Starbucks manager and refused to leave after officers repeatedly asked them to. It also accused the men of insulting police."
How long till the next racism allegation?
If black people insult the police, it's because the police are racist

Lesbian bar shuts down one week after opening because they weren't woke enough - "Doc Marie’s is a lesbian bar that opened on July 1st of this year with the hope of bringing more inclusivity to the city of Portland. But just one week after their grand opening they were forced to shut down because of complaints that the bar was not a “safe space.” Similar to the story I wrote a few weeks ago about the queer-owned cafe in Philadelphia that was shut down by employees for not being woke enough, Doc Marie’s was cannibalized by the woke mob... Within days, Doc Marie’s found itself on the receiving end of accusations of not being inclusive enough for trans people and people of color. Despite mask mandates being lifted in Portland, patrons accused the bar of not implementing enough COVID safety measures. Patrons also claimed that Doc Marie’s had “culturally appropriative art” on the walls... the employees demanded the owners relinquish ownership of the bar and hand the business to them. The owners were given a “24-hour deadline” to adhere to the ludicrous demands.

Meme - "NETFLIX
BROWN PEOPLE HAVING GAY CHEMSEX ONTOP OF WAR GRAVES
What's the matter? Do you have some kind of problem with this? Lot what are you going to do about it?"

Netflix Has Cancelled Controversial Series After One Season - "a controversial Netflix series has now been one of the latest shows to be cancelled. It’s none other than the animated series Q-Force. Interestingly, Q-Force had a somewhat decent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes at 78%. Nevertheless, it doesn’t look like the series managed to make the executives at the major streaming platform happy with the results. It’s possible that the viewership was just too low.  The series itself had a premise that seemed to appeal mostly to the LGBTQ crowd. Specifically, the main characters of the series included a team of LGBTQ secret agents"

Netflix stock crashed more than 20% after reporting a massive loss of subscribers and Elon Musk had thoughts - "Just over a decade ago, Netflix was king.  The ability to rent movies in the mail – then the ability to stream them online – killed the giant retail video industry (RIP, Blockbuster!). At one point, internet providers were warring with Netflix because the site used a disproportionate percentage of all web traffic, putting a serious strain on the lower-tech servers and infrastructure back in the ancient era of 2010. As Netflix rose supreme, it promised that it would upset the entertainment industry by creating exclusive content directly, cutting out the Hollywood middlemen in production and the cinema to restructure film forever. But then something happened. Instead of awesome movies and TV shows, we got pedophilic "Cuties" and raunchy "Bridgerton," along with a barrage of woke crud and a few "meh" films (with maybe one good WWII film and an action flick starring Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds)... The company blamed Russia because that's the cool thing to do right now, but let's be honest.  Most of you kept watching because there was "The Office," "Parks and Rec," the Marvel Universe, and "Seinfeld," but the old-school media empire finally learned how streaming works, like your grandma who finally learned how to use Facebook when everyone stopped using it in 2018. Now, the only reason to still own Netflix is for a paltry offering of so-so shows from yesteryear (and Seinfeld). Their latest big show? A nature documentary narrated by Barack Obama... Everything is woke and gross and preachy and cringeworthy... Netflix could have changed the game and stayed king. But then it got infected with the woke mind virus, and soon it'll be a relic of the past"

Netflix Lays Off Women Of Color As Stock Plummets - "You could launch a rock into oblivion and likely land on a reason to boycott Netflix. Whether it’s the fluctuating prices, the lack of quality content, or the company’s failure to properly address anti-trans jokes made by its hired talent, the streaming platform has pissed off enough people to lose over 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. Perhaps you’re one of them, or maybe you’re about to be. In the latest round of poorly made decisions by the company, Netflix has laid off a newly hired cohort of writers for their website Tudum, most of them women of color. While many won’t find this to be surprising given the fact that Black and brown women are often the first on the chopping block at all levels of employment, this displacement is not only unjust, but immoral, as these women were hired on specifically to strengthen and diversify the team that was being built. Tudum, named after the sound of the Netflix logo, launched in December 2021 as a fandom site, promising to bring fans “behind the streams” with exclusive content relevant to popular shows such as “Bridgerton” and “Stranger Things”. But if you haven’t even heard of the website before today, you’re not alone. Several site editors are pinning the platform’s impending doom on its lean marketing efforts. On the heels of Netflix’s Q1 2022 earning reports, the company is not only being forced to recalibrate its spending costs, but has also been named “the worst performer in the S&P 500 this year”"
Liberals mock the claim that woke programming is why Netflix lost subscribers. But this shows that the company knows the truth. Of course, the cope will be to blame them for being bigoted and cutting back on the programming that the people really want to see. To liberals, companies are greedy - but not as much as they're evil (convenient excuse about lack of marketing here notwithstanding).
Ironically, the fact that they're so eager to boycott Netflix shows why pandering to the woke crowd is a losing strategy and refutes their claim that that's where the money is.

Elon Musk, Other Top Figures Praise Netflix For Cracking Down On Woke Employees - "Elon Musk and other top figures praised Netflix’s new corporate culture memo that effectively tells woke employees that the company will not censor content and that if they have a problem with something that the company is producing that they are free to go work somewhere else... the change in Netflix’s company culture appears to be in large part due to the backlash the streaming service faced from woke employees last year over its Dave Chappelle special, which the employees claimed was transphobic. The updated Netflix Culture memo includes a new section called “Artistic Expression” that states that it will not “censor specific artists or voices” even if employees consider the content to be “harmful.”... the company supports “the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with” and that “we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.”"
I saw a lot of liberals complaining that it was unreasonable to make employees work on "harmful" content. So much for do your job or get fired. Of course these are the same people who go on about "white fragility"

Netflix 'axes wokest staff' and warns others to stop meddling as profits tank - "Netflix's recent axing of 290 staff targeted many of the firm's wokest workers who are prolific social justice warriors on social media, it has been claimed.   The struggling streaming service has pulled the plug on several projects that were aimed at discussing race and LGBTQ issues, Variety reported, and axed the diverse employees working on and promoting them... Those promotional workers were assigned to work on Netflix projects Strong Black Lead, the Asian American-focused Golden, the Latino-focused Con Todo, and the LGBTQ-focused Most... Filmmaker Carly Usdin called Netflix 'a joke' and tweeted: 'Uhhh is netflix only laying off the teams associated with making and promoting content for marginalized viewers?? that's what it seems like.'  Karla Monterroso, who works to secure economic opportunities for women of color, tweeted: 'Netflix hired a powerhouse team of creators from a variety of marginalized communities and they were performing exceptionally well... Netflix has also scrapped a host of woke shows - the most famous of which is Meghan Markle's doomed animation Pearl, about a socially-conscious girl said to have been based on Meghan herself.    Other scrapped projects included Antiracist Baby and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You, two adaptions by Critical Race Theory expert Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, as well as a kids' fantasy series Wings of Fire from executive producer Ava DuVernay, and the children's film With Kind Regards From Kindergarten.   The most notable of the scrapped works was Antiracist Baby, based on Kendi's book of the same name, which had been envisioned as a series of animated vignettes set to music and intended to explore racism in America.  Netflix had previously said that the show would 'leverage the power of earwormy songs to empower kids and their caregivers with simple tools to uproot racism in ourselves and society.'  Also cancelled was a documentary written by Kendi, titled Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You, which was aimed at teens and young adults."
Get woke, go broke. Axing low performing employees and projects is a good way to return to profitability

TGIF: Conspiracy Theories and Hard Realities - "The company framed the firings as “layoffs”—but 150 people doesn’t really make a dent for a company of 11,000 people. Those 150 happen to include, just by chance, some of the most Twitter-active social justice workers in the place"

Netflix and the woke power play - "In 2018, for example, it fired one of its executives for using the n-word, even though he used it purely descriptively to talk about offensive words. The trouble with being a woke corporation is that once you go down that road, you can never be woke enough in the eyes of the truly woke...   Netflix is not alone in having its own staff attempt to censor its content. Many other media corporations have also found their woke credentials challenged by their millennial employees. Spotify faced a mini rebellion last year over some of the episodes produced by its biggest podcast star, Joe Rogan. Spotify employees complained that they found some of Rogan’s guests and content offensive, and demanded editorial oversight over his show. They threatened to stage a walkout unless they received it.   Young woke employees doubling-up as freelance censors are also busy in publishing. Penguin Random House Canada faced the wrath of fragile millennial staff members when they discovered Penguin was publishing controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson’s new book. And trans booksellers were outraged when independent bookstores received copies of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters from the American Booksellers Association. The ABA swiftly apologised for including Irreversible in its July 2021 mailout to its 750 member bookstores.  Publishing is fast becoming a career choice for ambitious would-be censors. They are particularly active when it comes to trans-related issues. One group of individuals from across publishing wrote a letter to the Bookseller, attacking ‘transphobia… in the British book industry’, and demanded that it stop publishing books that supposedly promote it.   But it is not just trans issues that are prompting internal outrage at large publishers. Earlier this year, 216 employees at Simon & Schuster in New York signed a petition insisting that it sever its ties with writers associated with the Trump administration. This included former vice-president Mike Pence, who had just signed a two-year publishing deal with Simon & Schuster.  It is clear that woke ideology has inspired some of those working in the media to demand what is, in effect, editorial control over their employers’ content. This new generation of media employees is seemingly unwilling to tolerate anything that it deems offensive. David Shelley, the CEO of Hachette Book Group, and Clare Alexander, a literary agent, told the House of Lords communications and digital committee that publishers now have to warn new recruits that they may have to work on books by people they don’t agree with... protests, like the one against Dave Chappelle, are not just motivated by identity politics. They are also a means to gain power within an elite corporation."
We were told that what was happening on college campuses was irrelevant

Netflix To Begin Displaying Political Affiliations Of Actors Onscreen | The Babylon Bee - ""you'll now know when someone who disagrees with your ideas is on the screen so you can immediately turn it off and boycott that show forever"... Netflix had confirmed that subtitles telling you when to boo because an actor with unpopular ideas came on the screen are in development."

After holding "Republicans Are Racist" sale for MLK day, a Wisconsin spice company has lost a bunch of customers and is asking others to buy discounted gift cards to make up for the loss - "CEO Bill Penzey is seriously out here trying to get his loyal brainwashed fanbase to purchase discounted gift cards in order to make up for the loss."

Meme - "MAJ. GEN. ED THOMAS I USAF RECRUITING SERVICE COMMANDER: U.S, AIR FORCE FACES RECRUITING CHALLENGES"
Stephen Wolfe @Perfinjust: "If you alienate your core recruiting demographic just to get a few purple-haired officers, you might face some problems."
Michael S. Miller @imichaelsmiller: "Maybe try being less woke."

University of Edinburgh loses £2 million in funding over 'woke' renaming of David Hume Tower - "The University of Edinburgh has seen a decrease in its cash donations by nearly £2million in the past year following it being at the centre of a woke row.  The institution saw the slump in funding following the row after it renamed its David Hume Tower over the philosopher’s alleged discriminatory comments in 1742 and slavery links.  It was also the subject of scrutiny after the social anthropology department withdrew Dr Neil Thin from teaching at the university as a senior lecturer after speaking out against the decision and was falsely smeared and hounded by student activists... 24 donations and 12 legacies to the university were “cancelled, amended or withdrawn in response to the renaming”."

Elizabeth Banks made ‘Charlie’s Angels’ to celebrate women at work - "When it comes to inclusivity in Hollywood, Banks believes that paying attention to it ultimately makes good business sense. “When you think about what has been put out in the media, it’s mostly from a cisgendered white male perspective. Everything that’s not that feels a little bit fresher and so it feels like pretty good business. I’m the audience, I want things that I haven’t seen before. My real plea is for men to have enough empathy to go see movies starring women because I’ve been asked to go see movies starring men my entire life, and I’ve happily  done so. I don’t know why men don’t return that fucking favor.”"
I wonder if she realised the contradiction, at least after her movie bombed

‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ Will ‘Scare the F*ck’ Out of Internet Trolls - "“If you’re at all enlightened, she’ll play like gangbusters. If you’re a closet misogynist, she’ll scare the fuck out of you, because she’s tough and strong but very feminine,” Miller said. “We did not trade certain gender traits for others; she’s just very strong, and that frightens some dudes. You can see online the responses to some of the early shit that’s out there, trolls on the internet. I don’t give a fuck.”"
‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ Puts Franchise on Ice, Faces $120M-Plus Loss
James Cameron on ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ Failure - "Cameron discussed his decision to return to the series in 2019 as an executive producer on “Terminator: Dark Fate.” He said that he attributes the film’s box office failure to some blind spots he and director Tim Miller missed during the creative process."
Imagine having contempt for your customers and expecting to turn a profit

Nolte: Early Numbers Show Golden Globe Ratings Hit All-Time Low - "There were no Golden Globes in 2022. The Woke Gestapo shut down the Globes after discovering their membership lacked the appropriate racial quotas. But, with much fanfare, the Globes returned to NBC last night…  And kersplatted.  All the anticipation around the return of the Globes did nothing to juice its ratings. Why? Because everyone knew — correctly, as it turned out — the Globes would spend all three of its hours proving its purity to the Woke Gestapo. In other words, the show would be no fun whatsoever."

Hollywood, where the customer is always wrong - "‘Everyone who isn’t a homophobic weirdo should go see Bros tonight!’ So tweeted Billy Eichner, writer and lead star of gay romantic comedy Bros... Unfortunately for Eichner, audiences don’t seem to have listened to his heartfelt appeal. Nor do they seem to have been moved by the film’s many rave reviews. In the end, the $22million production ranked fourth at the box office on its opening weekend, taking only $4.9million, about 40 per cent less than expected.   To explain away the flop, Eichner has placed all the blame on the filmgoing public. ‘Even with glowing reviews… straight people, especially in certain parts of the country, just didn’t show up for Bros’, he complained. The implication being that there are a lot of ‘homophobic weirdos’ out there, who are just not ready to see gay relationships on screen. It’s a fanciful charge. Never mind that films with gay lead characters have attained critical and commercial success in the past. The Birdcage, a comedy starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as a gay couple, scored first at the box office on its opening weekend – and that was over 25 years ago, long before a majority of the public came on board with gay rights. Brokeback Mountain, a drama starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as deeply closeted cowboys, received the most nominations at the 2006 Academy Awards – including for Best Picture. Any taboo over gay relationships in mainstream cinema was broken a long time ago. And there is just no evidence that audiences find such stories inherently offputting or offensive.   What audiences are tiring of, however, is films and TV shows that clumsily shoehorn woke talking points into the plot. And Bros does exactly this... ‘Remember straight people?’, says Bobby, ‘They had a nice run’. Unfortunately for Eichner, the same will not be said of Bros. Then there is the marketing and the press coverage. The Hollywood press is at pains to emphasise that Bros is a film made about gay men and for gay men. ‘Make no mistake, Bros is a very gay movie’, says one enthusiastic reviewer. ‘Billy Eichner’s very gay Bros trailer has radicalised me’, says another sympathetic critic. Instead of stressing any universal, human qualities in the story, virtually all of the coverage has put its identitarian niche to the fore. It is as if the filmgoers – made up mainly of those dreaded straights – are expected to go to the cinema in order to affirm their allegiance to an oppressed identity group... For the likes of Eichner, and the rest of woke Hollywood, this just means the audience is wrong and is not to be trusted. When the filmmaking elites take such a dim view of filmgoers, perhaps it’s no wonder their films are flopping."
We are told that not all shows are meant for everyone. Then when they flop, 'bigots' are blamed

Movie Targeting 2% Of Americans Fails At Box Office | Babylon Bee - ""Once again, straight Americans have failed the gay community at the box office – we said the movie was not for cis-hetero oppressors, and they still failed to show up!" Director and star Billy Eichner sent a series of tweets condemning straight viewers for failing to see the movie that he had specified was not for them. Industry analysts have weighed in, confirming that they do not expect global ticket sales to exceed domestic sales, since even fewer people in international audiences are part of the target audience for the film, and also since most Middle-Eastern and Asian countries announced the death penalty for anyone caught watching it."

Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "People don't watch movies as formal gestures of team support: they check out shit they want to watch. Gotta say, as an investor - it is not surprising that a rom-com w no female lead or appeal failed."
Christina Sommers on Twitter - "Romcoms are supposed to be clever and funny. The trailer tells me it’s neither."

Video Game Players Avoid Gay Characters - Scientific American - "Some players reported in the survey that they felt other players see lesbians as appealing and interesting, but that the same players voice disgust toward gay men."
We keep getting told that consumers want to see themselves represented in the media. So this is not surprising according to that logic

Facebook - ""You homophobic weirdos wouldn't see my movie, and I'm so angry, I'm going to yell at you and insult you until you see my movie!" — Great Marketing Strategies Of History... "homophobic audiences" have been turning out to see gay-centric movies for decades: "Brokeback Mountain" (2006, $83M domestic gross), "The Birdcage" (1996, $124M), "Philadelphia" (1993, $77M)... Perhaps audiences aren't all that into films reportedly featuring gay orgies, obnoxious lectures on why kids must be taught gay culture, and a denouement involving the high stakes of whether two dudes should not have sex with other dudes for three months. Also, what was the supposed audience here? Straight men don't love romcoms in the first place; women typically enjoy romances involving, you know, male-female pairings. So the pitch here was: here's a genre that only succeeds because women want to watch it, but between dudes."

Meme - "Netflix: We don't understand why we are losing subscribers at a record rate.
Also Netflix: HE'S EXPECTING"

Victoria’s Secret CEO Amy Hauk exits amid 'woke' controversies - "The once-loved brand has had a tumultuous few years with an attempted rebranding that implemented "woke" policies like removing the iconic "Angels" models as well as the yearly fashion show."

Report: 'Saturday Night Live' Ratings Nosedive Continues with New Low - "SNL has struggled with ratings as the show continues to embrace left-wing politics. While the series relentlessly ridiculed former President Donald Trump, it has gone easy on President Joe Biden by soft-pedaling his disastrous handling of the border crisis and the withdrawal from Afghanistan.   New cast member James Austin Johnson impersonated Biden in this season’s opener in a sketch that lampooned divisions in the Democratic Party, targeting Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV)."

Puss In Boots: The Last Wish Destroys Modern Hollywood - YouTube - "You know sometimes life throws us a bone from the most unlikely of directions. I mean if you told me that a sequel to a 10 year old animated spin-off from the Shrek franchise would turn out to be a smart funny charming poignant meditation on life loyalty friendship self-sacrifice aging and the inevitability of death and one of the best movies that I've seen so far this year, I'd have asked what brand of turpentine you've been drinking because I want some...  for me it actually restored a little bit of faith that we're still capable of making great animated features...  I've got to admit my main thought while watching The Last Wish was how the *** did they manage to get this made? And I don't mean that in the same way as something like Velma which genuinely made me question my faith in the human race. Unlike so many animated movies now that range from soulless homogenized corporate crap that might as well have been built on an assembly line to divisive and cynical attempts at political indoctrination, this movie has actual heart and soul to it. It feels like the writers really had something important they wanted to say and the skill and experience to get their ideas across without sounding preachy and condescending. Imagine in that in 2023"

Puss in Boots 2 Tracking To Earn More Than Ant-Man 3 Proves Guillermo del Toro's Animation Revolution is Already a Go: "That's saying something about MCU Quality"