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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38191 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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So the Canadian Green Party had a meltdown over "misgendering". . No good deed goes unpunished in the land of fringe party circular firing squads; their attempt to be inclusive by having pronouns (but mistakenly picking the wrong ones) has become a firestorm.

It all started at a Sept. 3 media event in Vancouver kicking off the party’s leadership contest. In a Zoom appearance, Interim Leader Amita Kuttner was identified using a caption bearing the pronouns “she/elle.”

Of course, there is the standard "it made me feel unsafe" stuff. All of the leadership came together to harshly criticize this and the President - a volunteer- resigned cause she felt scapegoated, regardless of the apology.

The statement from the leadership candidates:

“The September 3 incident was but the latest in a number of similar behavioural patterns that Dr. Kuttner has faced throughout their tenure,” it read.

I'm sort of bemused how they frame this as some sort of pattern of racism, like calling a black person a slur or making jokes about women coders (they even use the term "harassment" at one point)

When the reality is that this person has deliberately chosen an atypical set of pronouns that will naturally cut against how most people over 5 have learned to use those things and so will naturally get misgendered sometimes.

This just solidifies in my mind that this entire thing will generally breed confusion and then conflict. That may even the point.

Of course, the political opportunism immediately follows:

Amidst all this, Kuttner launched a fundraiser last Wednesday intending to spite Jonathan Kay, an editor with Quillette and occasional National Post columnist. Kay had tweeted that the misgendering controversy sounded “exactly like satire,” prompting Kuttner to ask supporters to donate $68,000 to counter Kay’s “hate.”

As of press time, the fundraiser has pulled in $226.69, $10 of which was donated by Kay himself.

The President laments not only not being able to get anything done to the hysterical claims of harm but it being used to basically marginalize and remove her and other party figures:

Despite my best efforts to take us forward and find solutions, I am constantly distracted by claims of harm. I have spent much time trying to work beyond naming, blaming and shaming, and have called for restorative processes – yet these things continue to evade me because I find resistance to change.

Claims of harm have been weaponized in political attempts to remove people from the party. That is the truth of it. Federal Council was told that I caused harm to the interim- Leader. There was no evidence presented. I was excluded from Executive Council meetings that were organized without my knowledge. Briefly I was subjected to much harm and disrespect, and in the interest of the GPC I chose to not make this public to avoid harm or disrepute from coming to the GPC. This is evident in all our recorded meetings.

Reminds me of that article recently about how charities and organizations can't get work done with woke employees who are constantly attacking each other.

TBH, the Green Party - despite what some people want it to be - is an utter mess and small party nonsense like this isn't surprising.

The problem is that it's unclear it'll stay small party nonsense. The problem is not just this norm being spread, but that it is being enforced by both hate speech and discrimination law (probably why "safety" and "harassment"* have been so emphasized)

* BTW: I recall Jordan Peterson argued that we would end up in a place where misgendering would lead to these sorts of claims. He was told it would never happen because it was about continued misgendering. To that I say: that's bad enough + this case doesn't bode well for that position. It was a single incident, there was an immediate apology and it still became a huge fracas. Dreher's Law of Merited Impossibility hasn't struck yet, but it's looming.

Keep in mind that this is the same party that spent hundreds of thousands last year forcing out Annamie Paul after she made statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that, while anodyne by any standards, weren't sufficiently anti-Israel for the rest of the party leadership.

Eh, I think that's underselling Paul's position. Her chief-of-staff was saying that all Green MPs have to be Zionists, and she was backing him.

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