Tag: cancel culture

Laval University Professor Suspended for Questioning Covid Vaccines for Children

A professor at Laval University (Université Laval) in  Quebec City has  been suspended without pay for two months for questioning the benefits of COVID vaccines for children. Microbiology and immunology Professor Patrick Provost sent out an email soliciting a discussion on the issue and raising his concerns. He has now been disciplined for merely raising such issues by a university that has discarded any semblance of academic integrity and free speech. According to The Suburban, the controversy began as a conference of Réinfo COVID, “a collective of nurses, physicians, scientists, and citizens seeking to generate debate about how the pandemic has been handled by the government.”Provost asked his colleagues “to share their views with the public” on these issues. Provost also wrote in a June Quebecor Media piece that the COVID-19 “was very real” but asked “was it as significant as reported?” He argued that there was evidence of only five individuals under age 40 dying of the disease and challenged the need for the Canadian government’s vaccine mandates and passports.

As with the university, Quebecor Media quickly yielded to a mob of critics and removed Provost’s remarks. Journal de Québec Editor-in-Chief Sébastien Ménard said that Provost’s points “were inaccurate or could mislead the public.” Notably, Ménard did not seem compelled to address the alleged inaccuracies in the comments or Provost’s basis for raising his concerns.

Ménard did not seem to entertain the possibility that the media can be a place for the exchange of such ideas, including a rigorous debate challenging Provost’s assertions. Instead, the solution, once again, was censorship.

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Cancel Culture is “Beneficial for Social and Racial Justice”, Says Training Course for Academics at 100 U.K. Universities

Cancel culture has “benefits”, academics at almost 100 U.K. universities have been told as part of an anti-racism course. The Telegraph has the story.

The Open University has devised a training programme titled Union Black, backed by £500,000 of Santander investment, which offers teaching staff lessons including “white people have a responsibility to solve the problem of racism”.

Academics taking the course are urged to become “active allies” in advancing racial justice, course materials reveal, and taught about the advantages of “cancelling” people and institutions.

Material in one online module states: “In relation to racial/social justice, cancel culture has been shown to realise benefits.”

Examples of these benefits in the material include “holding people or entities accountable for immoral or unacceptable behaviour” and “promoting collective action to achieve social justice and cultural change through social pressure”.

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Reddit user banned for quoting Metallica album

A Reddit user was permanently banned for mentioning the title of an album by the metal band Metallica called Kill ‘Em All.

Reddit cited its rules against threatening violence.

The ban was highlighted in a post in the Metallica subreddit. The user posted a video highlighting the censorship, with screenshots showing that the account was banned for threatening violence.

“You’ve been permanently banned for violating Reddit’s rule against threatening violence in the following content,” the first screenshot in the clip reads. “Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not threatening or encouraging violence against people or animals. We don’t tolerate any behavior that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual, groups of people, places or animals.”

The account was banned because of a comment in a post in the Megadeth subreddit. The post asked for opinions on the “Best Debut Album of the Big 4.” The banned account commented: “Kill ‘Em All was definitely what originally brought many people into the metal community. I’d say, from an objective standpoint, it would have to be Kill ‘Em All.”

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Marxist Reset: Federal “Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force” (Yes, Really) Announces The US Will Rename 660 Mountains, Rivers, and landmarks to Remove “Racist” Language – More Surely to Come

For Marxism to take hold, everything that came before it must be burnt to the ground, according to the standards of today’s radical leftists. No matter the historical background, if it does not serve the purposes of the Great Reset’s dystopian agenda, it must be torn down to the ground. Even if it’s something as simple as a name.

This has been proven across the culture, from iconic food brands like Aunt Jemima, which is no more – to Sports, where the Cleveland Indians have gone the way of the dodo – across all areas, the illiberal left is on a crusade to cancel anything that poses any sort of threat to its narrative, usually by employing the standard “racist” ballyhooing.

Well, that’s exactly what has happened once again, however, this time, it’s on a much larger scale.

This past month, a recently created federal task force that solely focuses on “derogatory geographic names” announced that the US will be renaming a whopping 660 mountains, rivers, and other landmarks in order to remove all traces of “racist” language.

The upcoming changes signify the first cuts that the Biden Regime will make at the behest of the newly formed task force, which is operating within the US Department of Interior (DOI) under the Secretary of DOI Deb Haaland.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, Haaland and the DOI published a list of proposed names for the designated sites in a press release last month. The statement also announced the establishment of the 13-member “derogatory geographic names” task force that includes members from several different federal agencies.

The changes will completely eliminate the use of the word “squaw” – a highly common landmark name in the South West – in the naming of any place in the US. According to the task force, the term, which means “an Indigenous woman of North America,” per Merriam Webster, is a “derogatory” and racist term that should not be allowed in polite society.

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Canceling All Things Russian ‘A Warning Sign’

A current trend to cancel all things Russian, even Tchaikovsky concerts, is a warning sign because it’s the same kind of thinking used during the totalitarian Soviet Union and can lead to more harm, according to Gary Saul Morson, a Northwestern University professor who has studied Russian literature and thought for decades.

“This should be a warning sign when you start thinking that because President [Vladimir] Putin does horrible things in Ukraine, we have to stop listening to Tchaikovsky,” Morson told NTD’s “The Nation Speaks” program on Mar. 26. “What’s going on here? How far can such thinking go?”

“To me, it’s reminiscent of exactly how the Soviets thought. They certainly divided the world into all good and all bad. And so, literally anything you did that hurt your enemy was good. And that was the basis of their morality,” said Morson. “It is what led to the horrors of Soviet behavior to killing millions of people.”

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The New York Times Admits That ‘America Has a Free Speech Problem’

The New York Times published a terrific editorial on Friday that takes note of “America’s free speech problem” and points to both right-wing legislation and cancel culture—enforced by an uncompromising strain of progressivism—as culprits.

“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,” wrote The Times.

The editorial includes a predictable (and mostly well-deserved) condemnation of conservative attempts to legislate away uncomfortable discussions about sex and race in schools. But it stands out for directly attacking the left’s censorship impulse.

“Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech,” wrote The Times. “Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.”

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Yuri Gagarin’s name censored from Space Symposium conference

The first man in space, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, has been stripped of his honours by the Space Foundation, which censored his name “in light of current world events.”

The organization, which runs its annual Space Symposium conference in Colorado Springs, sees attendance of top-level representatives from the international space community, including 160 space companies, 100 speakers, and thousands of participants.

In a now-deleted note, highlighted by Futurism, the Space Foundation said that it was removing Yuri Gagarin’s name from its annual “Yuri’s Night” and replacing it with “A Celebration of Space: Discover What’s Next” at the conference.

“The focus of this fundraising event remains the same — to celebrate human achievements in space while inspiring the next generation to reach for the stars,” the deleted note stated.

The move was made in solidarity with Ukrainian people amid Russia’s “special military operation” in the country, and perhaps a “need to do something,” as several other organizations and corporations have done in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the International Cat Federation banned Russian cats from participating in its international competitions, calling the attack on Ukraine an “unprecedented act of aggression.”

It’s worth noting that Ukraine, like Russia, was a part of the USSR, which Gagarin represented. Indeed, Ukraine’s Chernihiv Stadium was renamed Yuri Gagarin Stadium by the Soviets and continues to be referred to as such.

“It’s a rather dubious show of solidarity with the Ukrainian people, especially considering that Gagarin worked for the USSR, a completely different country from modern day Russia. And the icing on the cake? Ukraine actually appears to be rather fond of Gagarin and his monumental achievement,” noted Futurism.

“Erasing the name of the first person to ever fly to space while supposedly celebrating ‘human achievements in space’ is bad enough,” the space and technology publication continued. “But doing so in line with the milquetoast trend of disavowing all things Russian, including famous composers and food products, amid the country’s current invasion of Ukraine is just outrageous.”

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