On the one hand, I think that there probably is an argument to be made that Canada is “more racist” than the USA in certain ways, but on the other hand, I can definitely imagine that a corporate HR “diversity training” instructor would respond to any disagreement against such an assertion in a way that rises to the level of workplace harassment, so…ugh. Just an uncomfortable situation all around.
But also I think that it illustrates the extent to which most workers just kind of respond to all mandatory HR training exercises by nodding along with what the HR guy is saying, writing a “reflection” that just regurgitates the main points, and then promptly forgetting the whole thing and continuing to believe whatever they believed in the first place. Like, you need to actually engage with ideas in order to learn them, and this is very much not the purpose of such sessions. It’s a pantomime for liability reduction purposes, not a classroom.
The predictable backlash from the right rested its moral might on two claims: a statement of claim after Bilkszto filed a civil lawsuit against the TDSB in April for not defending him in that workshop; and the opinion of an insurance case manager at the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) that allowed Bilkszto to file a claim for mental stress injury in August 2021. The case manager wrote that OjoThompson’s conduct “was abusive, egregious and vexatious, and rises to the level of workplace harassment and bullying.”
This was not a finding based on a credible investigation, but government organizations are often given credulity even when not merited. In a statement on the KOJO website Thursday, Ojo-Thompson, who has done training at the Star previously, said she only heard about the lawsuit through media inquiries. “Additionally, KOJO was not part of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board insurance claim adjudication.”
At issue, based on news reports, were two statements. One, OjoThompson challenging a beloved Canadian myth by stating “Canada is more racist than the United States” and, two, “reacting with vitriol” when the former principal objected as well as “humiliating” him by calling him a “white supremacist” and a “resistor.”
The Star obtained a copy of the recording of the two sessions in question from a source who was present at the meetings. Based on it: Ojo-Thompson never said: “Canada is more racist than the United States.” She never called Bilkszto a “white supremacist and resistor.”
As Nora Loreto noted this week, the late former principal and his lawyer, whose lawsuit has not in fact been served against the school board let alone found for fact, are involved in right-wing organizing. Their characterization of anti-racism training shouldn’t be relied on for any criticism of the pratice.
i think kids online should really get back to making internetsonas instead of whatever fuckshit this is with putting their entire real faces, names, ages, and such everywhere. you’re not gonna realize how nice internet privacy is until you dont have it anymore and no chance at getting it back. make up a guy and a name and just be that online. make up conflicting details about your completely made up backstory. make a fursona or something
i saw people talking about this on THIS website, saying how it was Suspicious if you didn’t have your ostensibly real name and info on your account like. NO THAT IS WHAT IT IS FOR. be safe!! be a made up wizard!! (and sure as hell be someone your job/parents/school/we won’t find) this isn’t faced book. also, i really hate to break it to you, but that person who has full name and info on their acc ……… could also be making it up
And so it makes sense that these are now the places where fascism grows; that’s what these places were designed for. The suburbs were invented as a reactionary tool against the women’s liberation and civil rights movements. The US government, in concert with banks, landowners, and home builders, created a way to try and stop all that, by separating people into single homes, removing public spaces, and ensuring that every neighborhood was segregated via redlining. The suburbs would keep white women at home, and would keep white men at work to afford that home. These were explicit goals of the designers: “No man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist,” said the creator of Levittown, the model suburb. “He has too much to do.”
The reason Target has become the locus of today’s particular right-wing backlash is the same reason countless viral TikToks attempt to convince women that they’re at risk of being kidnapped every time they’re in a parking lot. It’s the reason why true crime is one of the most popular podcast genres in America, and why many refuse to travel without a gun by their side and shoot people if they set foot on their driveway.
[…]
It is of course true that these mass hysterias are part of an organized right-wing movement that is attacking human rights across the country—through legislation banning abortion, gender-affirming care, and books, and making it illegal for educators to teach American history accurately. But the shape this movement has taken is not coincidental; it is in fact the product of the unique shape of public life in America, or lack thereof. Suburbanites do not have town squares in which to protest. They do not have streets to march down. Target has become the closest thing many have to a public forum.
We often hear that urban areas are more liberal and suburban ones more conservative, and we’re often told that this is because of race. That may be partly true, though cities are whiter than ever and suburbs more diverse than ever. Instead, it may be that suburbanism itself, as an ideology, breeds reactionary thinking and turns Americans into people constantly scared of a Big Bad Other.
The suburban doctrine dictates that public space be limited, and conflict-free where it exists; that private space serve only as a place of commodity exchange; that surveillance, hyper-individualism, and constant vigilance are good and normal and keep people safe. It is an ideology that extends beyond the suburbs; it infects everything. Even cities, as Sarah Schulman writes in The Gentrification of the Mind, have become places where people expect convenience and calmness over culture and community. What is a life of living in a surveilled and amenity-filled high-rise and ordering all your food and objects from the Internet to your door if not a suburban life? To make matters worse, the people who have adopted this mindset do not see it as an ideology, but as the normal and right state of the world; they, as Schulman writes, “look in the mirror and think it’s a window.” So when anything, even a gay T-shirt, disrupts their view, they become scared.
personally i really like the big post of instructions to new users of tumblr that tells you first to turn off all the features that try to show you posts other people have liked, and then later says “likes are useless here” and don’t help to show things to anyone
For all that people complain about Alex Kurtzman’s alleged dictatorial habits, one of my biggest problems with the new Star Trek series is just how uncoordinated they feel. Like, it seems like every showrunner is doing their own thing, without much coordination from above, and nothing to prevent redundancy or contradiction. Within the last year and a half, we’ve had three separate plotlines about fleets of Federation starships getting hacked by AIs by using their networked interoperability against them; and then a fourth, similar plotline on Lower Decks about evil AI starships. We’ve had episodes called “Kobayashi Maru”, “Kobayashi”, and “No Win Scenario.” Within months of each other, LWD and Prodigy both did episodes with about using holodeck training scenarios to bring in continuity nods. The last season of Star Trek: Picard seems to ignore not just its first two seasons, but also the state of the Borg Collective as established by Prodigy, even as Prodigy works frantically to make its own canon match the backstory for Picard season 1. Discovery season 4 and Picard season 2 both aired plots about huge, mysterious anomalies threatening the Alpha Quadrant within months of each other. And on and on.
are these uncoordinated redundancies, or is this a small-minded vision of what is “star trek” based on rewriting one person’s half-remembered favourite episodes
Heidi and I began our week with a trip to the casting-supply store, which is in a part of the city that has tech offices, automotive specialists, and ramps to the highway. It was raining and the outside looked like a shed and the inside had none of the extra stuff art-supply stores stock near the register, like fruit-shaped erasers, botanical wrapping papers, or Frida-covered notebooks. The most recent flyer on the wall was from the 1990s. There was a young guy in a back brace for lifting, and he had a whole different take on art materials than we did, being more concerned with encasing our sculptures in polyurethane and other optimizations for frequent handling (at Burning Man?) than with our questions of surface and colorfastness, but we got what we came for, plus some other kind of wire. I also got Kelly green–powdered pigment that I did not need. I loved it there and hope the guy doesn’t see this so I can go back. I could know about the plaster store only by needing plaster. Being an artist is a good job for people who enjoy the banal.
Which brings us, inexorably, to Picard season three. Here,
Section 31—although mostly offscreen—is as evil as it’s ever been
depicted: We learn that not only did they engineer a bioweapon for use
against the Changelings back during the Dominion War, but they also
performed torturous medical experiments on Changeling prisoners of war.
The revelations presented are truly heinous—even difficult to watch—and
the entire season-long arc largely results from blowback against Section
31’s crimes against sentient life. And yet… the story pairs these revelations not only with complete legitimation of 31 as an organization, but complete acceptance
of its crimes on the parts of our ostensible heroes. Worf—you know, the
honourable guy? Whose friend, Odo, was deliberately infected with a
plague by Section 31 with the intent of using him to wipe out his entire
race? That Worf?—even calls them a “critical division of Starfleet
Intelligence.” There’s one glorious moment where Picard actually looks
sick upon hearing the extent of Section 31’s crimes; but then—arguably
in the face of thirty-five years of consistent characterization—he and
Dr. Crusher opt to compound them by executing a prisoner of war. This is
never mentioned again. Just another day at the office, I suppose. We
have, as an official, critical division of our humanist utopia of
Starfleet, an organization that openly commits war crimes… and it’s
just become part of the setting. It’s not even presented as a reason for
Jack not to join Starfleet. One wonders if it was mentioned in the
recruitment materials they gave out to the kids on Prodigy.
Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a jaw-droppingly stupid and terrible decision, rejecting the whistleblower Ian Linkletter’s claim that he was engaged in legitimate criticism when he linked to freely available materials from the ed-tech surveillance company Proctorio:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
