Daily Archives: May 11, 2021

Three years ago my wife came to me with a stack of papers and some textbooks. Can you believe this? she asked. They are calling women birthing people. She explained that in the curriculum for her certification as a birth doula it was now de rigueur to refer to mothers with this ridiculous-sounding neologism. Itll never catch on, I told her. She disagreed.

My wife was right. When Rep. Cori Bush made headlines last week with a speech and a follow-up tweet about birthing people, the Missouri Democrat was not speaking in a vacuum. The pro-abortion group NARAL was there to explain that Bush was simply being inclusive. Nor is she the first member of Congress to refer publicly to birthing people. The ludicrous phrase is becoming ubiquitous, not just in activist circles but in the medical profession.

On the Web site of Harvard Medical School, you can read about how advancing something called maternal justice is essential for all birthing people. The National Institutes of Health, the New York State Department of Health, the apparently real California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls, the Hawaii Department of Human Services and even the city of Milwaukee all present helpful information about this hitherto-unknown category of human beings. Countless state legislators across the country have introduced bills or resolutions that include the preposterous terminology.

They should all be on their toes. You never know when yesterdays woke terminology will be considered insufficiently inclusive. The Health Resources and Services Administration corrects this oversight by referring to pregnant and birthing people, in case anyone were to make the mistake of assuming that men, in addition to being unable to give birth, cannot get pregnant. (Dont even get me started on chestfeeding, which also appears in seemingly respectable medical books.)

The rise of birthing people and chestfeeding follows a well-established pattern: Universities carry the terminology from once-fringe activist groups to the professional classes during what passes for their education. Graduates bring it with them to hospitals, law firms, big business and, of course, politics. A new consensus about apparently settled questions such as the definition of motherhood is established before ordinary Americans are even aware that new terms exist, much less that the liberal establishment wants to mandate their use.

Birthing people should be a line in the sand for all decent and rational Americans. It is not a question of so-called political correctness, which is often a simple matter of politeness. The phrase is not only an insult to mothers everywhere; it is an attack on reason itself. Everyone knows that women who give birth to children are mothers. Those who suggest otherwise are either living in a fantasy world or the kind of people who get their jollies by forcing others to say that 2+2 = 5, which is the ambition of every totalitarian.

Words mean things. We already have a name for people who give birth to children. That name is mothers. If your definition of justice requires you to invent jargon to describe things for which there are already words in every language ever observed in human history, you need to find a new one.

In a few weeks, my wife will give birth to our fourth child. We pray that everything goes well and that she and baby Sylvia are happy and healthy. It is impossible to say what our little girls life will look like in 20 years, but one thing that is absolutely certain is that she will be loved by her father, her siblings and the person who gave birth to her: her mother.

That word is not a slur.

Matthew Walther is editor of The Lamp magazine.

Twitter: @MatthewWalther

Originally posted here:

Sorry, but they're called 'mothers' not 'birthing people' - New York Post

Cancel culture, as a concept, feels inescapable. The phrase is all over the news, tossed around in casual social media conversation; its been linked to everything from free speech debates to Mr. Potato Head.

It sometimes seems all-encompassing, as if all forms of contemporary discourse must now lead, exhaustingly and endlessly, either to an attempt to cancel anyone whose opinions cause controversy or to accusations of cancel culture in action, however unwarranted.

In the rhetorical furor, a new phenomenon has emerged: the weaponization of cancel culture by the right.

Across the US, conservative politicians have launched legislation seeking to do the very thing they seem to be afraid of: Cancel supposedly left-wing businesses, organizations, and institutions; see, for example, national GOP figures threatening to punish Major League Baseball for standing against a Georgia voting restrictions law by removing MLBs federal antitrust exemption.

Meanwhile, Fox News has stoked outrage and alarmism over cancel culture, including trying to incite Gen X to take action against the nebulous problem. Tucker Carlson, one of the networks most prominent personalities, has emphatically embraced the anti-cancel culture discourse, claiming liberals are trying to cancel everything from Space Jam to the Fourth of July.

The idea of canceling began as a tool for marginalized communities to assert their values against public figures who retained power and authority even after committing wrongdoing but in its current form, we see how warped and imbalanced the power dynamics of the conversation really are.

All along, debate about cancel culture has obscured its roots in a quest to attain some form of meaningful accountability for public figures who are typically answerable to no one. But after centuries of ideological debate turning over questions of free speech, censorship, and, in recent decades, political correctness, it was perhaps inevitable that the mainstreaming of cancel culture would obscure the original concerns that canceling was meant to address. Now its yet another hyperbolic phase of the larger culture war.

The core concern of cancel culture accountability remains as crucial a topic as ever. But increasingly, the cancel culture debate has become about how we communicate within a binary, right versus wrong framework. And a central question is not whether we can hold one another accountable, but how we can ever forgive.

Its only been about six years since the concept of cancel culture began trickling into the mainstream. The phrase has long circulated within Black culture, perhaps paying homage to Nile Rodgerss 1981 single Your Love Is Cancelled. As I wrote in my earlier explainer on the origins of cancel culture, the concept of canceling a whole person originated in the 1991 film New Jack City and percolated for years before finally emerging online among Black Twitter in 2014 thanks to an episode of Love and Hip-Hop: New York. Since then, the term has undergone massive shifts in meaning and function.

Early on, it most frequently popped up on social media, as people attempted to collectively cancel, or boycott, celebrities they found problematic. As a term with roots in Black culture, it has some resonance with Black empowerment movements, as far back as the civil rights boycotts of the 1950s and 60s. This original usage also promotes the idea that Black people should be empowered to reject cultural figures or works that spread harmful ideas. As Anne Charity Hudley, the chair of linguistics of African America at the University of California Santa Barbara, told me in 2019, When you see people canceling Kanye, canceling other people, its a collective way of saying, We elevated your social status, your economic prowess, [and] were not going to pay attention to you in the way that we once did. ... I may have no power, but the power I have is to [ignore] you.

As the logic behind wanting to cancel specific messages and behaviors caught on, many members of the public, as well as the media, conflated it with adjacent trends involving public shaming, callouts, and other forms of public backlash. (The media sometimes refers to all of these ideas collectively as outrage culture.) But while cancel culture overlaps and aligns with many related ideas, its also always been inextricably linked to calls for accountability.

As a concept, cancel culture entered the mainstream alongside hashtag-oriented social justice movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo giant social waves that were effective in shifting longstanding narratives about victims and criminals, and in bringing about actual prosecutions in cases like those of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. It is also frequently used interchangeably with woke political rhetoric, an idea that is itself tied to the 2014 rise of the Black Lives Matter protests. In similar ways, both wokeness and canceling are tied to collectivized demands for more accountability from social systems that have long failed marginalized people and communities.

But over the past few years, many right-wing conservatives, as well as liberals who object to more strident progressive rhetoric, have developed the view that cancel culture is a form of harassment intended to silence anyone who sets a foot out of line under the nebulous tenets of woke politics. So the idea now represents a vast assortment of objectives and can hold wildly different connotations, depending on whom youre talking to.

Taken in good faith, the concept of canceling a person is really about questions of accountability about how to navigate a social and public sphere in which celebrities, politicians, and other public figures who say or do bad things continue to have significant platforms and influence. In fact, actor LeVar Burton recently suggested the entire idea should be recast as consequence culture.

I think its misnamed, Burton told the hosts of The View. I think we have a consequence culture. And that consequences are finally encompassing everybody in the society, whereas they havent been ever in this country.

Within the realm of good faith, the larger conversation around these questions can then expand to contain nuanced considerations of what the consequences of public misbehavior should be, how and when to rehabilitate the reputation of someone whos been canceled, and who gets to decide those things.

Taken in bad faith, however, cancel culture becomes an omniscient and dangerous specter: a woke, online social justice mob thats ready to rise up and attack anyone, even other progressives, at the merest sign of dissent. And its this the fear of a nebulous mob of cancel-happy rabble-rousers that conservatives have used to their political advantage.

Critics of cancel culture typically portray whoever is doing the canceling as wielding power against innocent victims of their wrath. From 2015 on, a variety of news outlets, whether through opinion articles or general reporting, have often framed cancel culture as mob rule.

In 2019, the New Republics Osita Nwanevu observed just how frequently some media outlets have compared cancel culture to violent political uprisings, ranging from ethnocide to torture under dictatorial regimes. Such an exaggerated framework has allowed conservative media to depict cancel culture as an urgent societal issue. Fox News pundits, for example, have made cancel culture a focal part of their coverage. In one recent survey, people who voted Republican were more than twice as likely to know what cancel culture was, compared with Democrats and other voters, even though in the current dominant understanding of cancel culture, Democrats are usually the ones doing the canceling.

The conceit that the conservative right has gotten so many people to adopt, beyond divorcing the phrase from its origins in Black queer communities, is an obfuscation of the power relations of the stakeholders involved, journalist Shamira Ibrahim told Vox in an email. It got transformed into a moral panic akin to being able to irrevocably ruin the powerful with just the press of a keystroke, when it in actuality doesnt wield nearly as much power as implied by the most elite.

You wouldnt know that to listen to right-wing lawmakers and media figures who have latched onto an apocalyptic scenario in which the person or subject whos being criticized is in danger of being censored, left jobless, or somehow erased from history usually because of a perceived left-wing mob.

This is a fear that the right has weaponized. At the 2020 Republican National Convention, at least 11 GOP speakers about a third of those who took the stage during the high-profile event addressed cancel culture as a concerning political phenomenon. President Donald Trump himself declared that The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it. One delegate resolution at the RNC specifically targeted cancel culture, describing a trend toward erasing history, encouraging lawlessness, muting citizens, and violating free exchange of ideas, thoughts, and speech.

Ibrahim pointed out that in addition to re-waging the war on political correctness that dominated the 1990s by repackaging it as a war on cancel culture, right-wing conservatives have also attempted to launch the same rhetorical battles across numerous fronts, attempting to rebrand the same calls for accountability and consequences as woke brigade, digital lynch mobs, outrage culture and call-out culture. Indeed, its because of the collective organizational power that online spaces provide to marginalized communities, she argued, that anti-cancel culture rhetoric focuses on demonizing them.

Social media is one of the few spaces that exists for collective feedback and where organizing movements that threaten [conservatives] social standing have begun, Ibrahim said, thus compelling them to invert it into a philosophical argument that doesnt affect just them, but potentially has destructive effects on censorship for even the working-class individual.

This potential has nearly become reality through recent forms of Republican-driven legislation around the country. The first wave involved overt censorship, with lawmakers pushing to ban texts like the New York Timess 1619 Project from educational usage at publicly funded schools and universities. Such censorship could seriously curtail free speech at these institutions an ironic example of the broader kind of censorship that is seemingly a core fear about cancel culture.

A recent wave of legislation has been directed at corporations as a form of punishment for crossing Republicans. After both Delta Air Lines and Major League Baseball spoke out against Georgia lawmakers passage of a restrictive voting rights bill, Republican lawmakers tried to target the companies, tying their public statements to cancel culture. State lawmakers tried and failed to pass a bill stripping Delta of a tax exemption. And some national GOP figures have threatened to punish MLB by removing its exemption from federal antitrust laws. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.

But for all the hysteria and the actual crackdown attempts lawmakers have enacted, even conservatives know that most of the hand-wringing over cancellation is performative. CNNs AJ Willingham pointed out how easily anti-cancel culture zeal can break down, noting that although the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was called America Uncanceled, the organization wound up removing a scheduled speaker who had expressed anti-Semitic viewpoints. And Fox News fired a writer last year after he was found to have a history of making racist, homophobic, and sexist comments online.

These moves suggest that though they may decry woke hysteria, conservatives also sometimes want consequences for extremism and other harmful behavior at least when the shaming might fall on them as well.

This dissonance reveals cancel culture for what it is, Willingham wrote. Accountability for ones actions.

CPACs swift levying of consequences in the case of a potentially anti-Semitic speaker is revealing on a number of levels, not only because it gives away the lie beneath concerns that cancel culture is something profoundly new and dangerous, but also because the conference actually had the power to take action and hold the speaker accountable. Typically, the apocryphal social justice mob has no such ability. Actually canceling a whole person is much harder to do than opponents of cancel culture might make it sound nearly impossible, in fact.

Its true that some celebrities have effectively been canceled, in the sense that their actions have resulted in major consequences, including job losses and major reputational declines, if not a complete end to their careers.

Consider Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, and Kevin Spacey, who faced allegations of rape and sexual assault that became impossible to ignore, and who were charged with crimes for their offenses. They have all effectively been canceled Weinstein and Cosby because theyre now convicted criminals, Kelly because hes in prison awaiting trial, and Spacey because while all charges against him to date have been dropped, hes too tainted to hire.

Along with Roseanne Barr, who lost her hit TV show after a racist tweet, and Louis C.K., who saw major professional setbacks after he admitted to years of sexual misconduct against female colleagues, their offenses were serious enough to irreparably damage their careers, alongside a push to lessen their cultural influence.

But usually, to effectively cancel a public figure is much more difficult. In typical cases where cancel culture is applied to a famous person who does something that incurs criticism, that person rarely faces serious long-term consequences. During the past year alone, a number of individuals and institutions have faced public backlash for troubling behavior or statements and a number of them thus far have either weathered the storm or else departed their jobs or restructured their operations of their own volition.

For example, beloved talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has come under fire in recent years for a number of reasons, from palling around with George W. Bush to accusing the actress Dakota Johnson of not inviting her to a party to, most seriously, allegedly fostering an abusive and toxic workplace. The toxic workplace allegations had an undeniable impact on DeGeneress ratings, with The Ellen DeGeneres Show losing over 40 percent of its viewership in the 202021 TV season. But DeGeneres has not literally been canceled; her daytime talk show has been confirmed for a 19th season, and she continues to host other TV series like HBO Maxs Ellens Next Great Designer.

Another TV host recently felt similar heat but has so far retained his job: In February, The Bachelor franchise underwent a reckoning due to a long history of racial insensitivity and lack of diversity, culminating in the announcement that longtime host Chris Harrison would be stepping aside for a period of time. But while Harrison wont be hosting the upcoming season of The Bachelorette, ABC still lists him as the franchise host, and some franchise alums have come forward to defend him. (It is unclear whether Harrison will return as a host in the future, though he has said he plans to do so and has been working with race educators and engaging in a personal accountability program of counsel, not cancel.)

In many cases, instead of costing someone their career, the allegation of having been canceled instead bolsters sympathy for the offender, summoning a host of support from both right-wing media and the public. In March 2021, concerns that Dr. Seuss was being canceled over a decision by the late authors publisher to stop printing a small selection of works containing racist imagery led to a run on Seusss books that landed him on bestseller lists. And although J.K. Rowling sparked massive outrage and calls to boycott all things Harry Potter after she aired transphobic views in a 2020 manifesto, sales of the Harry Potter books increased tremendously in her home country of Great Britain.

A few months later, 58 British public figures including playwright Tom Stoppard signed an open letter supporting Rowlings views and calling her the target of an insidious, authoritarian and misogynistic trend in social media. And in December, the New York Times not only reviewed the authors latest title a new childrens book called The Ickabog but praised the storys moral rectitude, with critic Sarah Lyall summing up, It made me weep with joy. It was an instant bestseller.

In light of these contradictions, its tempting to declare that the idea of canceling someone has already lost whatever meaning it once had. But for many detractors, the real impact of cancel culture isnt about famous people anyway.

Rather, they worry, cancel culture and the polarizing rhetoric it enables really impacts the non-famous members of society who suffer its ostensible effects and that, even more broadly, it may be threatening our ability to relate to each other at all.

Its not only right-wing conservatives who are wary of cancel culture. In 2019, former President Barack Obama decried cancel culture and woke politics, framing the phenomenon as people be[ing] as judgmental as possible about other people and adding, Thats not activism.

At a recent panel devoted to making a nonpartisan Case Against Cancel Culture, former ACLU president Nadine Strossen expressed great concern over cancel cultures chilling effect on the non-famous. I constantly encounter students who are so fearful of being subjected to the Twitter mob that they are engaging in self-censorship, she said. Strossen cited as one such chilling effect the isolated instances of students whose college admissions had been rescinded on the basis of racist social media posts.

In his recent book Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, human rights lawyer and free speech advocate Dan Kovalik argues that cancel culture is basically a giant self-own, a product of progressive semantics that causes the left to cannibalize itself.

Unfortunately, too many on the left, wielding the cudgel of cancel culture, have decided that certain forms of censorship and speech and idea suppression are positive things that will advance social justice, Kovalik writes. I fear that those who take this view are in for a rude awakening.

Kovaliks worries are partly grounded in a desire to preserve free speech and condemn censorship. But theyre also grounded in empathy. As Americas ideological divide widens, our patience with opposing viewpoints seems to be waning in favor of a type of society-wide cancel and move on approach, even though studies suggest that approach does nothing to change hearts and minds. Kovalik points to a survey published in 2020 that found that in 700 interactions, deep listening including respectful, non-judgmental conversations was 102 times more effective than brief interactions in a canvassing campaign for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Across the political spectrum, wariness toward the idea of cancel culture has increased but outside of right-wing political spheres, that wariness isnt so centered on the hyper-specific threat of losing ones job or career due to public backlash. Rather, the term cancel culture functions as shorthand for an entire mode of polarized, aggressive social engagement.

Journalist (and Vox contributor) Zeeshan Aleem has argued that contemporary social media engenders a mode of communication he calls disinterpretation, in which many participants are motivated to join the conversation not because they want to promote communication, or even to engage with the original opinion, but because they seek to intentionally distort the discourse.

In this type of interaction, as Aleem observed in a recent Substack post, Commentators are constantly being characterized as believing things they dont believe, and entire intellectual positions are stigmatized based on vague associations with ideas that they dont have any substantive affiliation with. The goal of such willful misinterpretation, he argued, is conformity to be seen as aligned with the correct ideological standpoint in a world where stepping out of alignment results in swift backlash, ridicule, and cancellation.

Such an antagonistic approach effectively treats public debate as a battlefield, he wrote. He continued:

Its illustrative of a climate in which nothing is untouched by polarization, in which everything is a proxy for some broader orientation which must be sorted into the bin of good/bad, socially aware/problematic, savvy/out of touch, my team/the enemy. ... Were tilting toward a universe in which all discourse is subordinate to activism; everything is a narrative, and if you dont stay on message then youre contributing to the other team on any given issue. What this does is eliminate the possibility of public ambiguity, ambivalence, idiosyncrasy, self-interrogation.

The problem with this style of communication is that in a world where every argument gets flattened into a binary under which every opinion and every person who publicly shares their thoughts must be either praised or canceled, few people are morally righteous enough to challenge that binary without their own motives and biases then being called into question. The question becomes, as Aleem reframed it for me: How does someone avoid the reality that their claims of being disinterpreted will be disinterpreted?

When people demand good-faith engagement, it can often be dismissed as a distraction tactic or whining about being called out, he explained, noting that some responses to his original Twitter thread on the subject assumed he must be complaining about just such a callout.

Other complications can arise, such as when the people who are protesting against this type of bad-faith discourse are also criticized for problematic statements or behavior, or perceived as having too much privilege to wholly understand the situation. Remember, the origins of cancel culture are rooted in giving marginalized members of society the ability to seek accountability and change, especially from people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, power, and privilege.

[W]hat people do when they invoke dog whistles like cancel culture and culture wars, Danielle Butler wrote for the Root in 2018, is illustrate their discomfort with the kinds of people who now have a voice and their audacity to direct it towards figures with more visibility and power.

But far too often, people who call for accountability on social media seem to slide quickly into wanting to administer punishment instead. In some cases, this process really does play out with a mob mentality, one that seems bent on inflicting pain and hurt while allowing no room for growth and change, showing no mercy, and offering no real forgiveness let alone allowing for the possibility that the mob itself might be entirely unjustified.

See, for example, trans writer Isabel Fall, who wrote a short story in 2020 that angered many readers with its depiction of gender dysphoria through the lens of militaristic warfare. (The story has since become a finalist for a Hugo Award.) Because Fall published under a pseudonym, people who disliked the story assumed she must be transphobic rather than a trans woman wrestling with her own dysphoria. Fall was harassed, doxed, forcibly outed, and driven offline. These types of cancellations can happen without consideration for the person being canceled, even when that person apologizes or, as in Falls case, even when they had little if anything to be sorry about.

The conflation of antagonized social media debates with the more serious aims to make powerful people face consequences is part of the problem. I think the messy and turbulent evolution of speech norms online influences peoples perception of whats called cancel culture, Aleem said. He added that hes grown resistant to using the term [cancel culture] because its become so hard to pin down.

People connect boycotts with de-platforming speakers on college campuses, he observed, with social media harassment, with people being fired abruptly for breaching a taboo in a viral video. The result is an environment where social media is a double-edged sword: One could argue, Aleem said, that theres now public input on issues [that wasnt available] before, and thats good for civil society, but that the vehicle through which that input comes produces some civically unhealthy ways of expression.

If the conversation around cancel culture is unhealthy, then one can argue that the social systems cancel culture is trying to target are even more unhealthy and that, for many people, is the bottom line.

The concept of canceling someone was created by communities of people whove never had much power to begin with. When people in those communities attempt to demand accountability by canceling someone, the odds are still stacked against them. Theyre still the ones without the social, political, or professional power to compel someone into meaningful atonement, but they can at least be vocal by calling for a collective boycott.

The push by right-wing lawmakers and pundits to use the concept as a tool to vilify the left, liberals, and the powerless upends the original logic of cancel culture, Ibrahim told me. It is being used to obscure marginalized voices by inverting the victim and the offender, and disingenuously affording disproportionate impact to the reach of a single voice which has historically long been silenced to now being the silencer of cis, male, and wealthy individuals, she said.

And that approach is both expanding and growing more visible. Whats more, it is a divide not just between ideologies, but also between tactical approaches in navigating those ideological differences and dealing with wrongdoing.

It effectuates a slippery-slope argument by taking a rhetorical scenario and pushing it to really absurdist levels, and furthermore asking people to suspend their implicit understanding of social constructs of power and class, Ibrahim said. It mutates into, If I get canceled, then anyone can get canceled. She pointed out that usually, the supposedly canceled individual suffers no real long-term harm particularly when you give additional time for a person to regroup from a scandal. The media cycle iterates quicker than ever in present day.

She suggested that perhaps the best approach to combating the escalation of cancel culture hysteria into a political weapon is to refuse to let those with power shape the way the conversation plays out.

I think our remit, if anything, is to challenge that reframing and ask people to define the stakes of what material quality of life and liberty was actually lost, she said.

In other words, the way cancel culture is discussed in the media might make it seem like something to fear and avoid at all costs, an apocalyptic event that will destroy countless lives and livelihoods, but in most cases, its probably not. Thats not to suggest that no one will ever be held accountable, or that powerful people wont continue to be asked to answer for their transgressions. But the greater worry is still that people with too much power might use it for bad ends.

At its best, cancel culture has been about rectifying power imbalances and redistributing power to those who have little of it. Instead, it now seems that the concept may have become a weapon for people in power to use against those it was intended to help.

Read more:

What is cancel culture? How the concept has evolved to mean very different things to different people. - Vox.com

media updates Talisa Jansen van Rensburg dives into the importance of emotional correctness in the media industry.

The media has come a long way, especially when considering the type of information that should and should not be put out into the public, the infiltration of filter bubbles and the rise of fake news. But with all of these things happening, audiences are becoming more aware of the effects certain content holds.

It is no longer about what word or phrase you decide to use, it is rather about how you are going to use that phrase or word. For example, are you calling a person overly sensitive online because you want to reach out and help them, or are you saying they are overly sensitive; aka, just stating a fact and not interested in helping that person grow at all?

This all ties into your emotional correctness, and its something that all members of the media need to be wary of when distributing their content. This is not to be confused with political correctness, which is an entirely different story.

For example, when a person says that they are part of the LGBTQ+ community, it would be incorrect to assume their sexual orientation just because they support members of this group. Instead, if you are curious, the right thing to do is to be politically correct by asking, Is your partner here to join us today?

This way, you are not assuming anyones orientation and you leave it up to the person to disclose as much or as little information that would like to share.

Emotional correctness can be viewed as the tone, the feeling, how we say what we say, the respect and compassion we show one another. This is according to Sally Kohn, one of the leading progressive voices in America. She had a TED Talk back in 2013 where she spoke on being emotionally correct in the media industry.

So, although a person might not be politically correct, they do need to act on and say everything out of a place of respect and love for others. This will lead to people actually listening to what media members have to say.

What this means is that there is no way to get a person involved in an important conversation if they are not listening to what you have to say. So, in the media industry, if you are trying to be politically correct by adding facts and data to your content, you should know that will not be enough to get people involved especially if they are not willing to hear you in the first place.

Members of the media need to shift their focus on emotional correctness by finding compassion for each other and they can do this by building strong and reliable relationships with the community they serve.

For example, Heart FM takes time to communicate with its listeners by asking them important questions in a subtle and respectful manner. This way, the radio hosts remain educated on how people are feeling about various topics within the media, such as asking people how it feels to get the new Covid vaccine, which can help those who are yet to experience it. Stating the question like they did allow them to be both politically correct and emotionally correct at the same.

*Image courtesy from Heart FM

It is essential that the people working in media understand that the role they play in informing the public is huge. Incorporating emotional correctness will allow for more people to actually become accustomed to the news you need to share with your audience.

This way, the industry will be able to get more people to listen and engage with the really important information that is being shared with the world.

What are your thoughts on emotional correctness? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below.

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The importance of emotional correctness in the media Media News - Media Update

Over one hundred years ago, two Gujaratis met in London Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Two more contrasting personalities could not be imagined and the fallout for the Indian subcontinent was contained in that epic encounter.

Some 50 years later, another set of Gujaratis would meet with consequences that were creative for Indian democracy and the Indian academy. Political scientist Rajni Kothari and sociologist Dhiru Lal Sheth came together with a few other intellectuals, to author a novel experiment that would be called The Centre (The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, CSDS) in 1964. Ashis Nandy and Giri Deshingkar would join the group later. While the sensibilities of the others were urban, Dhirubhais were distinctly rural.

In the mid-1960s Indian democracy and the Indian academy were undergoing a churning. The university system with its departmental silos was working to produceivory tower intellectuals, reproducing post-enlightenment European style knowledge and Western models, this group felt. Indian civilisation and society called for fresh understanding drawing upon its own resources.

Both Kothari and Sheth reflected on the social change that was produced in the wake of postcolonial democracy. The old picture of democracy and caste was redundant, they insisted. Louis Dumonts homo hierarchicus thesis that produced a ritual hierarchical theory of caste had given way to newer forms of exclusion. The backward castes, so called, were demonstrating a new horizontalisation of the traditional system that came from a combination of land, wealth and power. Political scientists were struggling with new characterisations. These were bullock capitalists, argued the politicial scientists Lloyd and Susan Rudolph.

Sheth argued that Indian sociology was in the grip of traditional theory and provided no room for the outcaste and the aboriginal. It had become blind to the emergence of new forms of discrimination, new refugees of development and the underclass.

The political scenario had, to begin with, been referred to as a one party dominant system by Rajni Kothari. The Congresss hegemony, however, was already eroding. The top-heavy Indian state, with its Soviet-style socialist accoutrements and dams-as-temples, was wearing thin.

Civil society was slowly coming into its own as a set of powerful non-state actors and began asking fresh questions about development and democracy. It sought to repair the rupture between knowledge and action.

Lokayan literally, dialogue of the people was launched in 1980 and brought together academics and activists, including Smitu Kothari and Vijay Pratap. It would go on to win the Right Livelihood Award, characterised as the Peoples Nobel Prize. Rajni Kothari emphasised in his acceptance speech, Lokayan operates from a basic premise arising out of its perception and understanding of the crisis of our times: that it is fundamentally an intellectual crisis, a crisis of ideas, a crisis of human knowledge, both generally but especially in the social arena.

Rajni Kothari. Photo: CSDS.in

When I joined the CSDS faculty in 2002, I was happy to become part of its old-world culture with extended lunches and discussions. Working on the steering committees of Lokayan, Lokniti and the Indian Languages Programme was an enormous learning experience. In addition, there were evening addas where real battles were fought.

Dhirubhai had an extraordinary capacity to take on political correctness. Abhay Dubey records a conversation with Dhirubhai, which refers to a visit to the Deen Dayal Research Institute in Jhandewalan the 1990s. The RSS chief was late and Dhirubhai shocked the organiser by asking where Rajinder Singh was. He deliberately used his formal name, rather than Rajju Bhayya, as the RSS leader was called by the Sangh. Further, he spoke of Golwalkar rather than Guruji and to make matters worse asked the RSS to clarify its stand on constitutional protections for minorities.

In 2010, I recall a discussion at Squire Hall, the residence of the director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study when Peter DeSouza was director and Dhirubhai was a national fellow and Gopal Guru and I were visiting fellows. The discussion began with Facebook and its addiction, with Dhirubhai insisting that this relates to pre-modern forms of community, which have been effaced by modernity.

Dhirubhai and Surabhibehn, his scholar wife and Sanskritist, asked about the love seat on which Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten were reputed to have once sat together. Gopal Guru and Dhirubhai were in good form. Dhirubhai insisted that he wanted to take D.R. Nagarajs agenda forward in showing that Dalits were using Gandhi as a red rag. Gopal Guru asserted that Dhirubhai had misread Nagarajs argument in his book The Flaming Feet. Dhirubhai countered by stating that it was Ambedkar who stood on the shoulders of Gandhi; Ambedkar was possible only because Gandhi prepared the ground. Hindus were hugely hostile to the Removal of Untouchability Act. Gandhis agenda was, of course, upper caste reform because he felt that the problem of untouchability lay there. Gopal Guru pointed out Gandhis opposition to separate electorates. To which Dhirubhai responded that Dalits benefitted from joint electorates, getting a greater share of representation than they would have got from separate electorates. This has been to their advantage to this day.

The friendship between Ashis Nandy and Dhirubhai was tensile enough to take on the latters political incorrectness. Your critique of nationalism, Dhirubhai told Nandy, has handed over Indian nationalism to the right.

Last year, as I drew the introduction to my forthcoming book The Secret Life of Another Indian Nationalism to a close, a chance encounter with Peter DeSouza guided me to his new collection of D.L. Sheths essays At Home With Democracy: A Theory of Indian Politics. Peters introduction, titled A Political Theory of Indian Democracy, I was quick to note, validated my own argument about two kinds of nationalisms but emphasises how inclusive nationalism was undermined first by the Left and then the Right.

Political Hinduism was created by the independence movement but remained on the fringes and could not get the leadership of the Hindus, Sheth argues. Hindus, in any case, did not have a political-religious identity as mokha (salvation) is individual in the Hindu world; and Hinduism has not been a congregational religion; some have argued that it has been a confederation of religions.

The idea of India Tagores famous phrase was shaped under the leadership of Gandhi, Nehru, Maulana Azad and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and embodied in the Congress. Gandhi was more Hindu than the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, whose ideas came from Europe, Sheth asserted.

He felt the inclusive idea of nationalism was undermined by Left secularists who pushed global cosmopolitanism and secularism while undermining both nationalism and religion. Sheth maintained that inclusive nationalism is vital for democracy as it offers a vision of India to the ordinary Indian that is inclusive, secular and egalitarian. The Left dominance fostered elitism and practicing Hindus developed a minority complex contrasted with the intellectual arrogance of the secularist.

With the election of Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1998 and again in 1999, Hindutva forces sought to capture the space occupied by the Congress, including knowledge and cultural institutions. The elections of 2014 and 2019 brought the era of anti-RSS/anti-Hindutva politics, which had prevailed after the assassination of Gandhi, to an end.

Alas, that I was not able to show you my book, dearest Dhirubhai, to show how much I have learnt from you. But let the dialogue continue.

Shail Mayaram is the author of The Secret Life of Another Indian Nationalism: Transitions from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana (Cambridge University Press).

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Dhirubhai Sheth and the Political Incorrectness of Being - The Wire

[Reuters]

There are a lot of interesting things going on in the United States right now. President Joe Biden has identified the causes that gave rise to the Trump phenomenon and is trying to root them out. He is doing everything in his power to win over voters who traditionally voted Democrat but were disillusioned by a sense of social stagnancy and political neglect. He is a politician who knows how to accomplish this, the kind of man the average American could have a beer with.

Biden is pushing the envelope, by American standards. His proposals for reaping more in taxes and the suspension of the Covid vaccine patents demonstrate his determination to take risks. Some believe that he has learned from the mistakes of Barack Obama, who took few risks apart from in the area of social security. Others believe that his age is a liberating factor, making him a president who cares more about his legacy than he does about his chances of re-election, even though it is not sure he would even be able to run. It is telling that Bidens people love to compare him with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who took such an enormous risk after a major crisis and built an electoral alliance for the Democrats that stood the test of time.

It is interesting that much of what the White House is trying to accomplish now had been touted by Trump but never carried out. The overhaul of Americas infrastructure is one example; both administrations admit that much of the countrys infrastructure is unacceptably old. The projects outlined in the relevant legislation will give work to thousands of Americans and give the country a much-needed facelift. Trump had made similar promises but never carried them through.

The notion of strategic independence had also been adopted by Trump but did not get very far. The belief is that America needs to stop relying on other countries, and China in particular, for the production of certain basic goods and materials. Biden has elevated this issue to one of his top policies, relying on the same economic patriotism that Trump also sought to exploit. The overall approach to China bears similarities with the previous administration though without Trumps histrionics.

The Democratic Party had been stuck in a rut, as over-the-top political correctness alienated it culturally from a large part of the American population. Biden is trying to overcome this hurdle by providing solutions to the most vital problems faced by a working and middle class that has felt increasingly insecure for many years. Whether he will succeed is an entirely different matter.

American politics is a complex game where even the most well-intentioned efforts can be scuppered by powerful interests and lobbies.

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Biden the risk-taker and Trump - Kathimerini English Edition

Amid dissension and turnover at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, an art museum of international standing, Hartford Business Journal editor Greg Bordonaro wrote the other day that the city has an "image problem," especially when compared to West Hartford, about which The New York Times recently published a report lauding, among other things, the suburb's great restaurants. (The Times seldom cares much about anything in Connecticut unless it's edible.)

But while the Times was merely patronizing, Bordonaro was profoundly mistaken. For the dissension at the art museum has no bearing on Hartford's image, and the city doesn't have an image problem but arealityproblem.

Dissension at the art museum is nothing compared to the other recent widely publicized troubles of the city.

For starters, Hartford has a "shot spotter" system that is often in the news as it monitors all the gunplay in the city. While it is a small city, Hartford has murders every month, some especially depraved, like April's murders of 3- and 17-year-old boys.

Even so, Hartford also has a cadre of political activists who want to "defund the police" and who last summer bullied Mayor Luke Bronin into cutting the police budget just before a spate of murders caused him to ask Governor Lamont to send in state troopers.

Some elected officials in West Hartford embody political correctness, but at least the town has a respectable school system, which Hartford doesn't. Even as the city's schools kept deteriorating a few years ago, Hartford put itself on the verge of bankruptcy by contracting to build a minor-league baseball stadium it couldn't afford, leading to a bailout by state government, the assumption of more than $500 million of the city's long-term debt.

Downtown West Hartford long ago superseded downtown Hartford as the hub of central Connecticut not because of the lovely restaurants lauded by the Times but because the suburb still has large middle and upper classes residing near its downtown, while misguided urban renewal in the 1960s turned downtown Hartford into an office district without a neighborhood.

Most of all West Hartford is desirable residentially because many of its children have two parents at home, while most children in Hartford are lucky if they have even one parent and so tend to live in financial, educational, and emotional poverty.

Art museums are nice but with or without them middle-class places can take care of themselves. Impoverished places can't.

Now Hartford city government is considering paying a special stipend to single mothers in the hope that it will help them climb toward self-sufficiency. Such projects in other cities have not produced impressive results even as they risk inducing more women to adopt the single-parent lifestyle when they can't even support themselves.

But Hartford can't be blamed too much, for the city's poverty is largely the consequence of state government policy -- the failure of state welfare and education policy. Hartford and Connecticut's other cities are what happens when welfare policy makes fathers seem unnecessary, relieves them of responsibility for their children, and aborts family formation, and when social promotion in school tells students they needn't learn.

Of course social promotion is also policy in West Hartford and suburbs throughout the state, but those towns have parents who compel their kids to take education more seriously.

To achieve racial and economic class integration and to reduce housing prices generally, Connecticut urgently needs to build much more inexpensive housing in the suburbs and should outlaw the worst of their exclusive zoning. But the state has an even more urgent need to stop manufacturing the poverty that has been dragging the cities down for decades.

When the cities themselves are less poor, when more of their children have fathers at home and come to school ready to learn, when their home and school environments motivate rather than demoralize them, more people will want to live in Hartford just as people now want to live in West Hartford -- and the management of the art museum won't mean any more than it means now.

To change Hartford's image -- and Bridgeport's and New Haven's -- state government has to change their reality.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer.

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Changing Hartford's sad image requires changing the city's reality - Journal Inquirer

Andrew C. Spiropoulos

Its easy these days for Republicans to feel beleaguered. Aside from losing the presidency and Congress, it feels like all of the power centers of society are arrayed against them. They already knew the press, Hollywood, most lawyers and Wall Street investment bankers, Silicon Valley and the universities are against them and have been for years. Their only solace was that their party, with few exceptions. was backed by the money and power of big corporations in legacy industries like energy, transportation, manufacturing and consumer goods.

But now, it appears, the GOP has lost the support of even these corporate titans. After some Republicans in Congress hesitated to affirm President Joe Bidens election victory, and party leaders in an increasing number of states decided to revise the voting laws in order, in their minds, to address potential abuses that threatened the integrity of the process, these corporate leaders turned on them and threatened to withdraw both campaign contributions from them personally and business from their states.

While once big business only wielded its political capital in defense of its particular interests and assiduously kept clear of messy cultural conflicts, the managers of many of our largest corporations now think nothing of taking sides always on the left in our societys most divisive conflicts, especially those involving race, sexuality and religious freedom. Some of these companies have gone so far as to threaten economic retaliation against those state governments that dare to offend the pieties of woke-ism.

Many conservatives are shocked by these developments, but they shouldnt be. Ever since the rot of political correctness hollowed out the humanities and social sciences departments of our most prominent universities, it was inevitable that the products of this intellectual sewer would bring their tendentious notions to their professions. You can never forget that most of the people who run these big corporate outfits are not entrepreneurs who made good, but university-educated managerial elites who were trained to implement the progressive dogmas they imbibed at school.

The good news is, while these people may be wealthy and culturally chic, they dont represent a lot of votes. Most middle and working-class Americans as demonstrated by Republican near-parity in Congress and majority control in state legislatures think America, despite our undeniable sins, has been predominantly a force for good and that, while we should purge those who abuse their authority, most police officers nobly serve and protect our community. I dont know about you, but if I have to choose between joining a party dominated by patronizing progressive elites or one made up of small business people, blue-collar workers and religious families, Im picking Door #2. And Im not alone. Before this year, one poll showed 57% of Republicans were satisfied with big business. That number is now down to 31%.

Republican leaders worry about losing the corporate campaign cash they are used to relying upon, but it is evident that they can raise just as much or more money from individuals. In the past quarter, for example, Republican U.S. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy raised a record $27 million from 50,000 unique donors, as opposed to the previous years $22 million from 6,000 donors. It wont be much time before the institutional shareholders who really own these companies inform their hired hands that their companies need the politicians more than they need them.

Andrew Spiropoulos is the Robert S. Kerr, Sr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Oklahoma City University and the Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. The views expressed in this column are those of the author and should not be attributed to either institution.

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Right Thinking: Republicans' corporate support eroding The Journal Record - Journal Record

On the first day of my Safety Lecture at the Tel Aviv University, a gruff older Biology professor was telling us about the importance of safety in a way that only an Israeli would: you are Israelis, so you know war, and in war, you all know that you must know your enemy. The Americans and I looked at each other with shock in our eyes. Thats because 10-20% of the hall was clearly Arab who in 1948 was the enemy and would take his quote in a very different way.

In the US, this professor would have been fired. But in Israel, there are more important things than political correctness, which certainly has its merits.

One year later, I would be attending the Kellogg-Recanati Executive MBA. This program is a jewel in the Coller Business School not just because it is a joint program with the top-ranked Northwestern University, but because it is one of the main programs that create dialogue and coexistence in the region.

This program is not just open to Israelis, it is open to everyone. This means anyone can apply, from anywhere. As a result, we have Arab and Jewish Israelis. We had Americans like me, Italians, and Japanese students. But that wasnt all, we also had a Jordanian student, who would drive from Aman for classes almost every week. Our class also included three Palestinians, one from East Jerusalem and two from Ramallah. That means nearly 10% of the class was from what could be deemed as the enemy.

The connection created in a 34-person class with each student is unique and long-lasting. Between classes, we had coffee and meals and we shared those meals together. We went to weddings together and weekend trips.

This dynamic would normally be no different than a Palestinian and Jew at the Northwestern campus, but the dynamic was completely different in Israel. Thats because, in Israel, conflict is never-ending. Every year Hamas would send rockets at Israel and Israel would respond (sometimes even when we were in class or heading out of class, and all of us would have to rush for a bomb shelter). Sometimes there would be riots and Palestinian friends would not be able to come through the checkpoint.

War is a stressful event in any country. There is a sudden feeling that everyone on the other side wants you dead and you must bind to your side because they are who will keep you alive. But becoming friends with the enemy means that we deeply care for each other as we know that we are all good people, working hard to create a better world for ourselves, our kids, and our countries. Our friends were not Hamas or Islamic Jihad, they are managers, consultants, entrepreneurs, and investors. War would threaten their lives, their businesses, and their families just as it would ours.

So whenever unrest would begin, we would see in the WhatsApp group concern from our Palestinian classmates for the friends who live near Sderot, and likewise from the class for the Palestinian friends and hopes that they are safe and well, even if they live in the lands of the enemy.

It is hard to have war with friends, this is why there are boycotts. Boycotts isolate people, cultural and academic boycotts prevent people from interacting and talking and they make violence more likely because then we are more likely to think of one another as an other and an enemy. War and eradication of the boycotts in 1930ies Germany and are at the root of the current BDS boycott, which calls for a Boycott until all lands of Israel are ethnically cleansed of Jews. But if we resist and instead create an anti-boycott, a way to see each other, and our desires for peace and co-existence and dignity and self-determination, then negotiation and peace are the only possible results.

Sam Livin was born in Soviet Union and grew up in San Diego. In 2012, he travelled the world photographing Jewish communities publishing a book called "Your Story Our Sipur." Today he continues to write about Israel and Judaism as he lives and studies business and ecology in Tel Aviv.

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War is difficult, when you know the 'enemy' - The Times of Israel

Daniel Schemer| Correspondent

MIDDLEBORO The Spring Annual Town Meeting held on April 26 has come and gone. Hopefully, it will be the last one held during the pandemic.

Roughly 90 people were in attendance, meeting the reduced quorum requirements. Most of the articles dealt with the town budget, special projects, and necessary expenditures, though the Select Board and attending residents approached each decision gingerly given the last year of economic turmoil the pandemic has brought.

There were a few human interest articles that deviated from the fiscal focus.

One of the last articles was pushed to the front of the line by special request.

Article 30 proposed renaming the intersections of Center St., North Main St., Wareham St., and South Main St. locally known as the Four Corners in honor of Norman E. Record, former Police Officer and Veteran.

The family of Record attended the meeting for the vote, which passed unanimously.

The much talked about Article 26 sought to reimburse and distribute over $53,000 to 57 high school students who had their senior trips cancelled in 2020.

As previously reported, the school district worked hard to get the involved travel company to refund the money. That company has since gone out of business. Most of the families received half the initial deposit back in August.

Attempts were made to get the insurance company to honor the claims for the rest of the refund. The School District and families have since filed claims with the Attorney General over disputes with the insurance company.

The vote itself is to authorize a home rule petition submitted to the General Court that would allow the town issue the reimbursements, which would come from Free Cash.

No one argued that students and families shouldnt be reimbursed, though there was some debate over where the refund should come from.

At least one voter asked for an amendment to change the funding source from free cash to the school department.

Town Manager Robert Nunes asked Attorney Jonathan Silverstein, acting as Town Counsel, if this was allowed.

Silverstein explained the proposed amendment was not in order because youre trying to force the school department to expend funds in a particular way, which Town Meeting doesnt have the authority.

In the end, School Committee member Teresa Farley offered: Its all semantics. We all pay taxes in town. Were paying for this.

Town Meeting voted almost unanimously to refund the families.

The Article that received the most debate and attention was Article 21. The article proposed to change all pronouns in the Town Charter to gender neutral. It was one of five articles proposed by the Town Charter Study Committee.

Committee member Paula Fay pointed out that a Select Board vote of 3-2 chose not to endorse this article. Fay defended the article against previous accusations made that it was an attempt at political correctness and erasing history, explaining the proposal is about equal representation in language and impacting the future of the town.

There is embedded gender bias in the Town Charter. Equality is not absurd or political correctness gone crazy, said Fay.

Selectmen Neil Rosenthal explained that personally, I dont think a historical document should be subjected to change.

Former Selectman Allin Frawley disagreed, arguing since it has the ability to be revised and adapt to with the times, that its a living, breathing document.

Town Planner Leann Bradley announced to the room that last June the Planning Board removed specificity based on gender from all the subdivision rules and regulations the Planning Department oversees.

Resident Jessica Chartoff reiterated the evolution of language in modern business and school settings. She concluded that the motion is a wonderful example to children that they are accepted into as a whole regardless of the pronouns they choose to use.

Numerous residents also pointed out the Town Meeting vote last October to change the Board of Selectmen to Select Board, though that is still waiting approval from the state legislature because it was a Home Rule Petition.

Town Meeting voted 63-26 in favor of applying gender-neutral language to pronouns in the Town Charter.

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Spring Town Meeting not all about numbers and budgets - SouthCoastToday.com

Probably the best news since you got your appointment for The Jab, Motherland is back, and back to its squirmingly socially embarrassed best. In case you missed the previous couple of series (which can be profitably binged via BBC iPlayer), its basically a sitcom version of Mumsnet. Am I being unreasonable to think that middle-class parenting comedy doesnt get any better than this?

Written by Sharon Horgan, Helen Serafinowicz, Holly Walsh and Barunka O'Shaughnessy, the first episode of the new run is quite a clever take on the whole Covid thing, and just the right side of good taste. Thus the gang of mums are faced with a nit pandemic, opening with the school headmistress, Mrs Lamb (Jackie Clune), doing a passing impression of Chris Whitty, complete with catchphrase next slide please and strict social distancing and hygiene guidelines to stop the spread of the parasites.

Each of the mums reacts in a warmly familiar way to the crisis. Alpha mum and uber-snob Amanda (Lucy Punch) discovers new reasons to segregate her friends/acquaintances/allies and make them keep their distance, literally as well as socially. Shes as ugly a personality as she is glamourous, though now with added post-divorce vulnerability, and Punch is still stealing most of the scenes she appears in. Single mum Liz (Diane Morgan) still couldnt give a flying breast pump about motherhood, while poor old Kevin (Paul Ready) is still overwhelmed by being a father in a womans world. Or, as he puts it: As a stay-at-home-dad, Im used to being treated like a turd in a swimming pool.

The ubiquitous Anna Maxwell Martin plays Julia, over-stressed and under-supported by hubby Paul (usually absent from the scenes), who organises a predictably boozy and disastrous home hygiene event for the mums and their kids it turns into an absolute nit show. Julia, who cannot even make it up the stairs with fatigue, is even more painfully put upon when she receives the news about her elderly mother that every baby boomer dreads: she cant live independently. Thus she finds herself the filling in an intergenerational care sandwich. Her Munchian reaction is visceral. As her mum (Ellie Haddington) patiently combs through Julias hair for nits, much as she did when she was little, Julia reassures the old lady that she wont put her in a home, yet. Its funnier than it sounds, and the Motherland team have a way of handling the worst of news in the best of humour, not least when powerhouse have-it-all mum Meg (Tanya Moodie) declares shes got a bit of breast cancer, at which even Amanda looks genuinely concerned.

As with any comedy involving Horgan, political correctness isnt always strictly observed in the melee of zingers and put downs, and I was a bit doubtful about the line its almost cool to be mental now but, like the mums themselves, they mostly get away with it. Im very glad they do.

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Motherland review: Middle-class parenting comedy doesnt get better than this - The Independent