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Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

tarahenley.substack.com

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Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#81
The CBC got a $1.2B in government funding in 2019-2020:

Source: themselves:

https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/impact-and-accountability/fin...

Can you believe it?

Yet, these money-grabbing robber barons don't provide Canadians with streaming.

There is a shitty CBC app compatible with Android TV which serves some canned videos and pictures, and a CBC News app for phones that has live news (that will Chromecast).

I say cut the taxpayer funding, or else make them deliver to Canadians the content they are paying for.

In Japan, NHK (rough analog of CBC) has a website where you can watch the actual broadcast. (Not available outside of Japan without a VPN, but that's entirel beside the point.)

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#82
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 99% agree with you. One small counterpoint: Employers enjoy a bully pulpit on these issues. Employees with legitimate concerns about their employers' stances / policies sometimes can't even discuss them without the risk of losing their livelihood. This can create a situation where individuals perceive that "the whole world" is telling them they're wrong, and are bad people for being wrong in this way. HN's anonymou…

>One small counterpoint: Employers enjoy a bully pulpit on these issues. Employees with legitimate concerns about their employers' stances / policies sometimes can't even discuss them without the risk of losing their livelihood. There are endless platforms that are better suited for these discussions: Gab, 4chan, and Ruqqus to name a few. "HN's anonymous-yet-respectful forum" is best preserved by not hosting these ty…

Part of my point was that HN is unusually good at keeping discussions civil, which I view as a requirement for productive discussion.

If you know of another forum that has this quality, I'd be grateful for a link. There are large swathes of the Internet I'm ignorant about.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#83

What clearly seems wrong is the requirement to fill out forms on the race and gender of people you interview, and to have quotas to control whose voice is heard based on those irrelevant traits (irrelevant relative to the individual person's life, ideas, experiences, ability to express themselves etc.) My policy is to refuse to give my gender or race. If everybody did this, high frequencies of "other" or "unknown" co…

Obligatory story beginning in 1963, where computer scientist Les Earnest explains why he always entered "mongrel" when questioned about his race: http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm

This is pretty good, thanks. TLDR: institutional adventures from a national security employee challenging the requirement to declare their race.

This reminds me of "Seeing like a State" by James C Scott: attempts to simplify the world to allow generalizations about it always lose valuable detail.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#85
post #18

I am curious what Canadians think of this argument. Does it seem true? It's hard for me, a USA resident who doesn't follow the CBC, to really evaluate.

I cannot speak about the alleged wokeness, as I don't consume enough CBC content to make an informed judgment. What I can say is that CBC is the only major Canadian media company that is not capital C Conservative, at least among English-language media. Toronto Star used to fit this description too, but they got sold to what I think is a private equity firm who has been selling off their assets, so I don't expect the…

>What I can say is that CBC is the only major Canadian media company that is not capital C Conservative, at least among English-language media. [...]

>https://readpassage.com/election-endorsements/

But the source you cited seems to only include newspapers? Media companies tend to pander to their readers, and newspapers attracts... a certain type of readers. It's not surprising that most newspapers are conservative.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#86
post #22

I'm not sure these sorts of articles provide much value on HN. By "these sorts of articles", I mean the ones that have claimed that "diversity efforts have gone too far this time ." Regardless of your support or opposition to diversity, I think one would agree that these rapidly turn into unproductive, highly divisive comment sections that are out of place with the rest of HN.

[deleted]

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#87

What clearly seems wrong is the requirement to fill out forms on the race and gender of people you interview, and to have quotas to control whose voice is heard based on those irrelevant traits (irrelevant relative to the individual person's life, ideas, experiences, ability to express themselves etc.) My policy is to refuse to give my gender or race. If everybody did this, high frequencies of "other" or "unknown" co…

>which seems difficult since they're also the people who claim it's not a real concept.

A straw man if there ever was one. Insofar as anyone even says something like "race isn't real", the claim isn't that the concept doesn't exist. What would that even mean? The claim is that it isn't biologically grounded, or that it's socially constructed or some such.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#88
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a strict egalitarian and have been doing exactly this, and always encourage others to do exactly this. I refuse to state my gender, race, class, health status, sexuality, or any other qualifier that could categorize me into being discriminated against or in favor of. Let my actions speak to the quality of my character. edit: Not sure why this thread has gone deep into a discussion about pronouns. I don't identify…

At a previous job HR directly contacted me and told me to put my pronouns on my profile. I said sure and proceeded to ignore it. Fuck that shit

I am actively looking for a new job and disqualifying companies where people have pronouns in the signature. I’ve seen it go full woke crazy, not trying to deal with that again

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#89
> It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like

Very glad this got mentioned, in all of this people have forgotten who their enemies really are: the government for some, the big corporations for other, sure as hell the real enemy is not Sam from around the block who doesn't believe in LGTBQ rights. Sam doesn't have an ounce of power, no matter how retrograde or not his beliefs are, the government and the big corporations have, lots of it.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#90
post #22

I'm not sure these sorts of articles provide much value on HN. By "these sorts of articles", I mean the ones that have claimed that "diversity efforts have gone too far this time ." Regardless of your support or opposition to diversity, I think one would agree that these rapidly turn into unproductive, highly divisive comment sections that are out of place with the rest of HN.

They very reliably rise to the front page (because people like arguing about this stuff) and then sink off again (because, I believe, the HN algorithm penalizes a low upvote-to-comment-count ratio). I predict this'll be gone in two hours...

>the HN algorithm

More accurately, it's people flagging it and also manual nerfing by @dang

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