Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by version_five » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

monkeybutton wrote: post #28

I wonder where she will go after publishing her book. Postmedia? Bell media? Staying independent? The news landscape in Canada is rather limited and still consolidating. Think what you may about the CBC and its biases, its nothing compared to the National Post where the owner, Conrad Black, airs his crappy opinions.

I saw the National Post carried her article as well.

Hopefully she will stay independent, and focus on constructive reporting rather than just reactionary complaining. We see a lot of this in politics, people with what could be good ideas just getting caught up in getting upset and creating outrage about the ridiculous things the other side had done. Better to try and shift the dialog entirely rather than just complain.

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

#362

Post by coolso » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

metabagel wrote: post #328

colechristensen wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone wants to tell me pronouns they want to be referred to, sure, I’ll try to remember as long as they’re not asking for something extreme, but honestly I’m not that good with even names so… best effort. I would rather not give out pronouns and don’t really care how people refer to me though “they” in forums when my username is my real name does come off as a bit strange… though again, this is a trivial annoyan…

Yes, it's a trivial annoyance. That's the human, normal way of looking at this, not like it's some massive festering grievance as some people seem to feel.

Because it’s just another tip of the iceberg. In reality it’s a concerted effort amongst a certain group of people to add more and more trivial annoyances to normal peoples’ lives to satiate their own desire to control others who they feel don’t deserve to be able to live their lives in peace. Because misery loves company.

It all adds up. You can attempt to minimize it all you want but it’s like the person who nitpicks everything: “can I have 3 ice cubes? Oh when you make my sandwich can you go light on the salt? Hey I know this is your house but could you turn that music down a bit? Boy it’s cold in here… you should turn up the heat! Wow you take these vitamins? You should be taking these instead! Oh hey I know I’m obviously a girl but can you refer to me as they? I want you to have to think hard before you use my pronouns and make sure you remember each person’s custom pronouns. Wait, why are these little trivial comments bothering you? It’s not some massive festering grievance. Just deal with it it’s no big deal, it’s common decency to adhere to all of my requests. :)”

Pronoun-memers tend to claim they are more sensitive to feelings. Therefore they should be sensitive to most of the world’s feelings of general annoyance around the current pronoun meme.

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

#363

Post by teakettle42 » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #344

throwawayboise wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if Jim has corrected me once already or has registered a preference that I've seen, I should probably address them as they'd prefer, right? Anything else is just being an asshole, IMO I agree (but honestly, if the preference is for something like "zhe" I will be rolling my eyes a bit). > They/them went out of favor a while back I really don't like the singular use of "they" as it was drummed into my head in 12 grad…

> I really don't like the singular use of "they" as it was drummed into my head in 12 grades of English classes that it was wrong, Yeah, that's the sad thing. At some point we decided that gender neutral pronouns were less favorable, and then taught generations of people not to use them, a couple hundred years before a big cultural mixup where it would have been very useful to have. I was lucky enough to always feel…

Singular “they” isn’t wrong if the subject is indefinite in either gender or number.

However, it’s absolutely wrong when used as a definite personal pronoun, as it introduces new, irresolvable ambiguity where none existed before; e.g.

I just heard Tom and Harry are getting a new puppy; I just ran into them while they were walking their dog.

If you do not allow for singular definitive “they”, the meaning is clear.

If you do allow for singular definitive “they”, whose dog is it, and who did you run into — Tom, Harry, or both Tom and Harry?

The problem with “personal pronouns” is that they aren’t personal in the first place — pronouns exist exist solely for the benefit of the speaker and the listener, not the subject.

They allow for two people in a conversation to refer back to an antecedent succinctly and unambiguously. That’s all. If they can’t do that anymore, they’re just extra noise.

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

#364

Post by badRNG » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 10:47 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #346

badRNG wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, every comment that didn't agree with the conclusion of the article was nerfed. The top comment on this post for most of its existence immediately left the top and within seconds jumped to being the very last comment at the bottom with all the other even vaguely pro-diversity comments.

Your and others' comments criticizing the article have been heavily upvoted, so this is clearly not the case.

I think maybe my comment wasn't really clear. I know the pro-diversity comments had a lot of upvotes, what I was pointing out was that they were nerfed by a moderation tool or algorithm, not by downvotes, as evidenced from going from the top comment to the very last comment in the thread within a few seconds.

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

#365

Post by ameminator » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 10:51 PM UTC

boppo1 wrote: post #324

ameminator wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe in freedom of expression and of speech, it doesn't matter how much power Sam has, even if you disagree with what he says. I don't like or agree with white supremacists, but I consider the ACLU defense of their speech a monument to our civilization's respect of human rights.

> ACLU defense of their speech a monument to our civilization's respect of human rights. Is there an argument from a landmark case or are you speaking gsnerally?

Here is the specific case I am referencing: https://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/sk...

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

#366

Post by reallyagain » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 10:53 PM UTC

milderworkacc wrote: post #357

908B64B197 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always considered the idea of CBC to be... extremely weird. Having government approved journalists on government payroll sure sounds like something out of China, Russia or Cuba. Not a western democracy. From the article: > To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my new…

Calling the CBC “Government approved journalists on the government payroll” is an extremely misleading description of what is an overwhelmingly common situation in English speaking democracies. Canada has the CBC, the UK the BBC, Australia the ABC and NZ TVNZ and associated entities. None of these are Pravda, they’re all arms-length, independently run organisations. I’m sure they’re all far from perfect (I’m happy to…

You're running straight into an established Canadian conservative talking point. It's pushed relentlessly by private news organisations who would reap financial benefit from the CBC being defunded. These organizations also happen to be the major news and opinion source for many conservative people in this country, so there's a convenient feedback loop in place. I'm sure this is not dissimilar to the other countries listed.

I agree with the majority of the linked substack in this thread, I think that the quality of CBC journalism is on a pretty clear downward trend, and I think that ignoring widespread societal issues to focus on the ultra-niche "darling of Twitter" social issues is journalistic malpractice at best.

That being said, the comparison of the CBC to Chinese state-run news broadcasting (while extremely common from conservative opinion makers in this country) is, I'm sorry, a completely childish take.

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

#367

Post by Lio » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 10:59 PM UTC

908B64B197 wrote: post #247

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't hate the idea of explicitly stating pronouns, especially online, because I had to interact with people with particularly ambiguous names (happens often in very international environments). Even here in America, if you get an email from "Taylor Something" and their intranet picture is a houseplant how do you respond?

If you get an email directly from “Taylor” and you want to reply you won’t have use their pronouns anyway.

It’s only if you’re referring to them to a third person that you’ll need them.

You should still be able to refer to them with without explicitly using any pronouns even then.

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

#368

Post by gopher_space » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

onphonenow wrote: post #257

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #30

Except at political groups to which I belong, I am almost always the left-most person in the room. The Lefts greatest weakness is an enthusiasm for splintering over small matters of doctrine. Identity politics, tribalism over principle, virtue signaling, whatever fad this is, it's deeply hurting progress.

Max dem donor, historically very "left" as well. This is an issue on both sides in the extreme. On the right just look at what to outsiders are TINY doctrinal differences in things like faith issues - have historically driven major internal divisions. I always thought the American left would really endure / have the advantage long term because of what seemed like a healthier exchange of ideas (free speech support etc…

> And despite the talk of love and acceptance, the left really seems to be driven by hate and outrage now more than I remember plus a very healthy dose of hypocrisy.

Sounds like you're talking yourself into giving Nazis a "fair shake". Why would you do that?

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

#369

Post by dang » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

badRNG wrote: post #364

dang wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your and others' comments criticizing the article have been heavily upvoted, so this is clearly not the case.

I think maybe my comment wasn't really clear. I know the pro-diversity comments had a lot of upvotes, what I was pointing out was that they were nerfed by a moderation tool or algorithm, not by downvotes, as evidenced from going from the top comment to the very last comment in the thread within a few seconds.

Ah, ok—I was probably reading your comment through the filter of "comments supporting my view are constantly getting downvoted/flagged/suppressed on this site", which is a more common complaint (which was also making appearances in this thread).

Software can indeed affect subthread ranking, and moderators do that too—but certainly not for pro- or anti-diversity (or any other $divisive-topic) reasons. We downweight top subthreads for reasons like this: (1) they're too generic rather than engaging with something specific in the article; (2) they're high-indignation/low-information; (3) they're meta; (4) they're offtopic in a predictable way*. What all 4 of those categories (and there are probably others) have in common is that they tend to both get heavily upvoted and to not be interesting in HN's sense of the word. Once they get heavily upvoted, they tend to hang out at the top of the page, accruing mass and choking out more curious conversation. We try to use moderation and (to some extent) software as countervailing mechanisms to these default tendencies, because we've learned over the years that this is one of the highest-leverage things we can do to make threads more interesting. But this has nothing whatever to do with agreeing or disagreeing with the points being made.

Edit: I'm guessing you were talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29785012, which indeed got downweighted in exactly this way, because it falls into categories #1, #3, and #4 above. But not into #2, at least, which is unusual and to your credit.

* Unpredictable whimsical offtopicness, by contrast, is often interesting and we try to give it a pass. Otherwise moderation would get too predictable in its own right. I often have to remind people about that.

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

#370

Post by deltarholamda » Mon, Jan 03, 2022, 11:02 PM UTC

olivermarks wrote: post #244

deltarholamda wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Neilsen demonstrates that the legacy media are dying fast, fewer and fewer people are tuned in as the broadcasting becomes more and more toxic. This is a good thing imo. But is it a good thing? A free press can be thought of as the sensory organs of the polity. If the sensory organs are faulty, or worse are deliberately lying, then alternative sensory organs may fill in the blanks with less robust information. These…

By 'free press' here I think you mean state sponsored and/or corporate 'news' outlets. The internet has transcended these last century print and broadcast foundationed constructs long ago, but their owners prop up their mastheads as though they are still the top tier of 'fact checked' integrity, despite the fact they are now in some cases sloppier than the Drudge Report ever was. Tara presumably left a salaried job w…

By "free press," I mean a First Amendment-type operation. Which we probably don't really have at the moment, for the reasons (state sponsored/corporate sponsored) you state.

The Internet did transcend that once upon a time, except now it's just even more corporate sponsored and controlled. There is no First Amendment-type operation as, if a corporate entity wants to, they can deplatform you at the access, services, network, or financing tier, with the full support of the government.

Which wouldn't be so bad, except the government is also fully co-opted by corporate interests. We had a free market and let capitalism take over, and now we don't have a free market, neither in goods and services, nor in information.