Exactly. I'm not going to make a song and dance about it, I'm just going to quietly avoid you.
As a tiny part of the Marxist plague that is sweeping the globe, I oppose it in principle.
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IMPORTANT // Please look after your loved ones, yourself and be kind to others. If you are feeling that the world is too hard to handle there is always help - I implore you not to hesitate in contacting one of these wonderful organisations Lifeline and Beyond Blue ... and I'm sure reaching out to our PRE community we will find a way to help. T.
Exactly. I'm not going to make a song and dance about it, I'm just going to quietly avoid you.
As a tiny part of the Marxist plague that is sweeping the globe, I oppose it in principle.
How exactly is trans Marxist? Or is it just that lefties are more accepting of peoples' freedom to be themselves.
DS
Undermining western civilisation.
I hope the day never arrives when you lot have to admit you've been clueless dupes, but it's not looking good.
No, because that day gets further away all the time. You want a dupe, how about all those folk who reckoned Trump would make a good Pres?
Still don't get why you have a problem with other people living their lives the way they want to.
DS
He did well for three and a bit years, under duress.
I don't. Provided they don't interfere with mine.
Eh, they're all part of the same loose alliance. Civilisation-haters.
You can throw in statue wreckers, drug legalisers, terrorists etc. All miserable sods who want to inflict their misery on you.
Fair call. He wasn't rounded enough to deal with the virus. He's a businessman, not a statesman.
No. He is an egotistical bully. Always has been, some just haven't seen it until recently.
And there is much evidence to suggest he isn't a good business man, just someone who received a big inheritance.
Wrong thread tho.
Kooks.
BBC advises all staff to use trans-friendly pronouns (paywalled)
Matthew Moore
The Australian
July 10, 2020
The next time the BBC director-general opens his inbox, he may well have received an email from “Huw Edwards, he/him”, or “Laura Kuenssberg, she/her”.
The broadcaster is encouraging all staff to start including their pronouns in their email signatures, as part of a drive to make transgender and non-binary colleagues feel more welcome.
The new advice, posted on the official BBC intranet, applies to all the corporation’s employees, whether they identify as male, female or non-binary. Adding pronouns at the bottom of emails is a “small, proactive step that we can all take to help create a more inclusive workplace”, the guidance states.
Many trans and non-binary people have started introducing themselves with their preferred pronouns – including “they/them” – so people know how they wish to be addressed.
Encouraging everyone in an organisation to do the same raises awareness of gender diversity and helps to ensure that trans and non-binary people do not feel marginalised, campaigners argue. More than 400 BBC employees, 2 per cent of the total, identify as transgender, according to internal surveys.
The guidance suggests that all 22,000 people working at the national broadcaster should update their email signatures with their pronouns of choice. “It lets colleagues know your pronouns and shows that you respect other people’s too. It’s really simple,” the document states. BBC staff are urged to “help to create a culture where everyone feels comfortable introducing themselves with pronouns”.
The BBC is not the first British employer to adopt the policy. Last year Virgin announced that it was adding an optional pronouns field to its corporate email signatures. “Getting someone’s pronoun right can feel like a very small gesture, but it can mean the world,” Sir Richard Branson wrote in a blog publicising the initiative.
There is no robust data on the number of trans people in Britain, although the government estimates the figure at between 200,000 and 500,000. The 2021 Census is expected to include a question on gender identity.
A BBC spokeswoman said: “The BBC isn’t requiring anyone to do anything; there is simply a staff article on our intranet that talks about gender identity at work and the use of pronouns. This topic is a live issue in many workplaces.”
BBC advises all staff to use trans-friendly pronouns (paywalled)
Matthew Moore
The Australian
July 10, 2020
The next time the BBC director-general opens his inbox, he may well have received an email from “Huw Edwards, he/him”, or “Laura Kuenssberg, she/her”.
The broadcaster is encouraging all staff to start including their pronouns in their email signatures, as part of a drive to make transgender and non-binary colleagues feel more welcome.
The new advice, posted on the official BBC intranet, applies to all the corporation’s employees, whether they identify as male, female or non-binary. Adding pronouns at the bottom of emails is a “small, proactive step that we can all take to help create a more inclusive workplace”, the guidance states.
Many trans and non-binary people have started introducing themselves with their preferred pronouns – including “they/them” – so people know how they wish to be addressed.
Encouraging everyone in an organisation to do the same raises awareness of gender diversity and helps to ensure that trans and non-binary people do not feel marginalised, campaigners argue. More than 400 BBC employees, 2 per cent of the total, identify as transgender, according to internal surveys.
The guidance suggests that all 22,000 people working at the national broadcaster should update their email signatures with their pronouns of choice. “It lets colleagues know your pronouns and shows that you respect other people’s too. It’s really simple,” the document states. BBC staff are urged to “help to create a culture where everyone feels comfortable introducing themselves with pronouns”.
The BBC is not the first British employer to adopt the policy. Last year Virgin announced that it was adding an optional pronouns field to its corporate email signatures. “Getting someone’s pronoun right can feel like a very small gesture, but it can mean the world,” Sir Richard Branson wrote in a blog publicising the initiative.
There is no robust data on the number of trans people in Britain, although the government estimates the figure at between 200,000 and 500,000. The 2021 Census is expected to include a question on gender identity.
A BBC spokeswoman said: “The BBC isn’t requiring anyone to do anything; there is simply a staff article on our intranet that talks about gender identity at work and the use of pronouns. This topic is a live issue in many workplaces.”
I'd make a quiet formal complaint to HR that I regard the unsolicited sharing of mental illness as confronting.
Seeing as the guidance would have originally come from HR, do you expect the response to be
A) provision of extra training for you to help confont any inner demons with using the T word
B) a 2nd office memo that using pronouns is optional and it remains acceptable to use someone's name
C) a suggestion to use babe for everybody because you should be more like an early 20th century baseballer
D) overwhelming support from HR by placing your complaint in the bin
E) eh. HR ordering a cheese sandwich
Seeing as it's all about feelings, I expect my feelings to come first, second and third. How dare HR make such a decision without consideration for my feelings! I feel that they should have a better feel for the feelings of others, and they should feel ashamed.
A Letter on Justice and Open Debate
Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
| Elliot Ackerman Saladin Ambar, Rutgers University Martin Amis Anne Applebaum Marie Arana, author Margaret Atwood John Banville Mia Bay, historian Louis Begley, writer Roger Berkowitz, Bard College Paul Berman, writer Sheri Berman, Barnard College Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet Neil Blair, agent David W. Blight, Yale University Jennifer Finney Boylan, author David Bromwich David Brooks, columnist Ian Buruma, Bard College Lea Carpenter Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus) Nicholas A. Christakis, Yale University Roger Cohen, writer Ambassador Frances D. Cook, ret. Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project Kamel Daoud Meghan Daum, writer Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis Jeffrey Eugenides, writer Dexter Filkins Federico Finchelstein, The New School Caitlin Flanagan Richard T. Ford, Stanford Law School Kmele Foster David Frum, journalist Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University Atul Gawande, Harvard University Todd Gitlin, Columbia University Kim Ghattas Malcolm Gladwell Michelle Goldberg, columnist Rebecca Goldstein, writer Anthony Grafton, Princeton University David Greenberg, Rutgers University Linda Greenhouse Rinne B. Groff, playwright Sarah Haider, activist Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern Roya Hakakian, writer Shadi Hamid, Brookings Institution Jeet Heer, The Nation Katie Herzog, podcast host Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College Adam Hochschild, author Arlie Russell Hochschild, author Eva Hoffman, writer Coleman Hughes, writer/Manhattan Institute Hussein Ibish, Arab Gulf States Institute Michael Ignatieff Zaid Jilani, journalist Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts Wendy Kaminer, writer Matthew Karp, Princeton University Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative Daniel Kehlmann, writer Randall Kennedy Khaled Khalifa, writer Parag Khanna, author Laura Kipnis, Northwestern University Frances Kissling, Center for Health, Ethics, Social Policy Enrique Krauze, historian Anthony Kronman, Yale University Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University Mark Lilla, Columbia University Susie Linfield, New York University Damon Linker, writer Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Steven Lukes, New York University John R. MacArthur, publisher, writer | Susan Madrak, writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer Greil Marcus Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center Kati Marton, author Debra Mashek, scholar Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago John McWhorter, Columbia University Uday Mehta, City University of New York Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University Yascha Mounk, Persuasion Samuel Moyn, Yale University Meera Nanda, writer and teacher Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Olivia Nuzzi, New York Magazine Mark Oppenheimer, Yale University Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer George Packer Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita) Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – Camden Orlando Patterson, Harvard University Steven Pinker, Harvard University Letty Cottin Pogrebin Katha Pollitt, writer Claire Bond Potter, The New School Taufiq Rahim Zia Haider Rahman, writer Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin Jonathan Rauch, Brookings Institution/The Atlantic Neil Roberts, political theorist Melvin Rogers, Brown University Kat Rosenfield, writer Loretta J. Ross, Smith College J.K. Rowling Salman Rushdie, New York University Karim Sadjadpour, Carnegie Endowment Daryl Michael Scott, Howard University Diana Senechal, teacher and writer Jennifer Senior, columnist Judith Shulevitz, writer Jesse Singal, journalist Anne-Marie Slaughter Andrew Solomon, writer Deborah Solomon, critic and biographer Allison Stanger, Middlebury College Paul Starr, American Prospect/Princeton University Wendell Steavenson, writer Gloria Steinem, writer and activist Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Harvard Law School Kian Tajbakhsh, Columbia University Zephyr Teachout, Fordham University Cynthia Tucker, University of South Alabama Adaner Usmani, Harvard University Chloe Valdary Helen Vendler, Harvard University Judy B. Walzer Michael Walzer Eric K. Washington, historian Caroline Weber, historian Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers Bari Weiss Sean Wilentz, Princeton University Garry Wills Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer Robert F. Worth, journalist and author Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Matthew Yglesias Emily Yoffe, journalist Cathy Young, journalist Fareed Zakaria |
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
When the lefties are arcing up, you know that something's rotten in the state of Denmark.
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