Tag: political correctness

Call of Duty to snoop on players for ‘hate speech’

Games publisher Activision has announced that it will use artificial intelligence to listen in on the voice chat of ‘Call of Duty’ players and punish anyone using “hate speech” or “discriminatory language.” 

The feature was rolled out on Wednesday for US players of Call Of Duty’s ‘Modern Warfare II’ and ‘Warzone’ titles, and will be launched globally with ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III’ on November 10.

In a statement on Wednesday, Activision said that it will use a machine learning tool to “identify in real-time and enforce against toxic speech,” including “hate speech, discriminatory language, harassment and more.” 

Activision’s announcement made no distinction between private chat among teammates and public chat audible to all players in a server. Presumably, both will be subject to the same monitoring.

Call Of Duty’s code of conduct bans insults based on race, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, culture, faith, and country of origin. Players deemed to have breached this code of conduct will be punished with temporary voice chat restrictions, temporary account bans, or permanent bans for repeat offenders, Activision said.

Around 90 million gamers worldwide play Call of Duty every month. At present, Activision depends on reports from other players and text chat monitoring to weed out allegedly “toxic” conduct. According to the developer, around one million accounts have been penalized since the launch of ‘Modern Warfare II’ last October.

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NSA ORDERS EMPLOYEES TO SPY ON THE WORLD “WITH DIGNITY AND RESPECT”

THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, the shadowy hub for the United States’ electronic and cyber spying, has instructed its employees that foreign targets of its intelligence gathering “should be treated with dignity and respect,” according to a new policy directive. The directive, released this summer as internal guidance, is for the NSA’s vaunted signals intelligence, or SIGINT, division, which is responsible for covert surveillance and data collection worldwide.

“In recognition that SIGINT activities must take into account that all persons should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or wherever they might reside,” says the previously unreported directive, which was issued by NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone. 

Civil liberties experts say the PR-friendly directive is an attempt to mollify European partners and American critics amid a simmering congressional debate over whether to reauthorize the NSA’s broad surveillance authorities. Experts also pointed to the absurdity that the NSA, an intelligence agency that specializes in electronic eavesdropping including the interception of text messages and emails, could do so respectfully.

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LAWSUIT: FIRE sues to stop California from forcing professors to teach DEI

Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Each of the professors teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the California Community Colleges system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching. 

The regulations explicitly require professors to pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.” Faculty performance and tenure will be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of the government’s viewpoints. 

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The narcissism of queer theory

The museum dedicated to conserving and displaying Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, published a blog post this week about ‘queering the Mary Rose’s collection’. It promised to understand the items recovered from this 16th-century wreck, from nit combs to gold rings and paternosters, through a ‘queer lens’.

The results are ridiculous. The connections between these items and ‘queerness’ are a figment of the curators’ imaginations. Take the Mary Rose Museum’s description of a salvaged wooden mirror frame:

‘Looking at your own reflection in a mirror can bring up lots of emotions for both straight and LGBTQ+ people. For queer people, we may experience a strong feeling of gender dysphoria when we look into a mirror, a feeling of distress caused by our reflection conflicting with our own gender identities. On the other hand, we may experience gender euphoria when looking in a mirror, when how we feel on the inside matches our reflection.’

This tells us nothing about the nature of the mirror frame or the role and significance of mirrors in 16th-century England. It is an expression of contemporary identity politics.

There is no good reason for wanting to ‘queer’ this collection. The artefacts on display at the Mary Rose Museum belong to the Tudor era. They provide insight into that specific world. Indeed, the sheer difference between then and now is precisely what makes the study of history so exciting. I was living just miles from where the Mary Rose wreck was discovered in the Solent in 1971. I remember how, aged 11, my friends and I all became (fleetingly) obsessed with Tudor history. We wanted to know about the fashions, the wars and Henry’s wives. In my case, it resulted in a rather gruesome school project on torture and punishment in the 16th century. This demonstrated the truth of LP Hartley’s observation that ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’.

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‘Native American Guardians Association’ Petition To Restore Washington Redskins Name Goes Viral

A Change.org petition in support of changing the Washington football team’s name BACK to the Redskins has gone viral and is racking up tens of thousands of signatures in real time.

At the time of publication, the petition was nearing its goal of 75,000 people.

The petition was launched by an organization called the Native American Guardians Association whose stated goal is to end the “cancel culture” of Native Americans. 

NAGA spox Healy Baumgardner joined Newsmax’s Carl Higbie to discuss the groups efforts, quipping that the Washington Commanders must be getting advised by Megan Rapinoe.

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‘Identity and Justice’ scholar explores ‘structural racism in chemistry’

Critical race theory can be applied to the teaching of chemistry, according to a University of Illinois-Chicago professor.

Professor Terrell Morton is an “Identity and Justice in STEM Education” scholar who “draws from critical race theory, phenomenology, and human development to ascertain Black students’ consciousness and how it manifests in their various embodiments and actions that facilitate their STEM postsecondary engagements,” according to his faculty bio.

He held a similar job at the University of Missouri where he was brought on as a diversity hire. He was in the “inaugural cohort of Preparing Future Faculty Postdoctoral Fellows for Diversity at MU,” according to his LinkedIn profile.

He wrote in Nature that CRT can “identify tangible strategies for redressing and mitigating structural racism in chemistry.”

Professor Morton (pictured) wrote that chemistry and the science field at large “has maintained a culture that typically favours white, cisgender, middle-to-high socioeconomic status, heterosexual, non-disabled men.”

Minority students, he wrote, “must alter their presentation of themselves to be seen as someone capable of succeeding — including abandoning aspects of their home and cultural identities, having to go above and beyond to demonstrate their intellectual capabilities.”

Morton says that “is not divisive, it is not designed to shame, demonize or encourage hate, and it does not inherently produce feelings of guilt or blame” and is not taught in schools, despite the claims of conservative politicians. In fact, it is “rarely taught” even in undergraduate, according to the UIC “scholar-activist.”

There are several ways the scholar found racism embedded in chemistry. “Racial realism applied to chemistry acknowledges that the field, and science generally, exists as a microcosm of the broader society and thereby perpetuates structural racism or gendered racism,” he wrote.

“Whiteness as property,” according to Morton, explains why the contributions of black scientists are not respected. “The erasure of Black perspectives and experiences in science, historical and contemporary, normalize science as white property, perpetuating feelings of invisibility and hypervisibility for Black students.”

Morton previously gave a presentation in 2021 on “deprogramming whiteness” which made similar points as his 2023 essay.

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Bully DEI trainer paid $7,500 an hour is heard LAUGHING as she taunts beloved gay school principal driven to suicide for questioning her woke diktats – as crony who held no-whites school meetings is also identified

Disturbing new audio depicts the moment a beloved gay high school principal was shamed for standing up to an anti-racism trainer – whose bullying helped drive the teacher to suicide.  

Richard Bilkszto, 60, was found dead on July 13 after two years of emotional turmoil stemming from the encounter.

He was devastated when Kike Ojo-Thompson turned on him during a session in April 2021 after he challenged her claim that Canada – where both lived – is more racist  than the US. 

In the audio of the session, obtained by The Free Press, Bilkszto can be heard saying that maybe Canada was not ‘the bastion of white supremacy’ that Ojo-Thompson had made it out to be.

He pointed out that public schools serving Canada’s poorest students are generally better funded than their equivalents in the United States.

Ojo-Thompson turned on Bilkszto, telling him in front of all of the others gathered: ‘As white people, there’s a whole bunch going on that isn’t your personal experience. It will never be. You will never know it to be so. You will never know it to be so.

‘So your job in this work, as white people, is to believe.’

Ojo-Thompson – who was paid $7,500 an hour for eight hours of seminars – laughed in a subsequent discussion over the challenge made by Bilkszto, who was described as a deeply progressive man hailed for his focus on ‘equity’ at work. The anti-racism trainer was later branded ‘abusive’ by an official government investigation into her antics. 

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Why the diversity-industrial complex bubble burst

In my sub-40 years of existence, I’ve witnessed multiple market bubbles and collapses that in hindsight were predictable, but the warning signs of inevitable failure were obviously ignored.

People disregard the few naysayers because their desire to be a part of an in-vogue fad outweighs any common sense.

But when the bubble finally bursts, the sound of an industry defeat ultimately wakes these people up from their hypnotic belief that the good times will never end.

The latest bubble isn’t overinflated stocks being propped up by Wall Street but instead an overinflated diversity, equity and inclusion industry whose importance was pumped up by a corporate America reacting to the death of George Floyd.

Between 2019 and 2022, DEI positions skyrocketed 170%, according to LinkedIn, with much of that acceleration happening in the wake of nationwide protests and riots in 2020.

“There was an urgency and a national narrative driving that demand,” notes Jason Hanold, CEO of Hanold Associates, an executive search advisory firm.

But that demand quickly leveled, leading to a third of “diversity professionals” out of a job in 2022.

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CDC accused of ‘blurring politics and science’ over advice that suggests trans women CAN safely breastfeed — but fails to mention health risks to baby

US health officials were criticized today for advocating that trans women can breastfeed — without highlighting the health risks to the baby.

Several information pages on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website appear to endorse ‘chestfeeding’ — a term used to describe feeding an infant milk directly from the breast by trans and non-binary parents.

One section, titled ‘Health Equity Considerations’, claims ‘an individual does not need to have given birth to breastfeed or chestfeed.’

Another section in a Q&A about breast surgery, titled ‘Can transgender parents who have had breast surgery breastfeed or chestfeed their infants?’, says families may need help with ‘medication to induce lactation.’

But doctors told DailyMail.com the CDC has a ‘responsibility’ to disclose the lack of research and potential risks. One of the medications used to produce milk in biological men has been linked to heart problems in babies. They claimed the agency was blurring lines between ‘politics and science’.

The CDC did not respond to a request for comment from DailyMail.com. 

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Johns Hopkins pulls ‘lesbian’ definition after uproar over use of ‘non-men’ instead of ‘women’

Johns Hopkins University removed an online glossary of LGBTQ terms and identities this week after its definition of the word “lesbian” used the term “non-men” to refer to women and some nonbinary people and fueled an online uproar.

Screenshots of the glossary before it was taken down showed that the university defined the word “lesbian” as a “non-man attracted to non-men.” It added that while past definitions have referred to lesbians as women who are sexually attracted to other women, the “updated definition” is intended to include nonbinary people who may identify with the label.

“The LGBTQ Glossary serves as an introduction to the range of identities and terms that are used within LGBTQ communities, and is not intended to serve as the definitive answers as to how all people understand or use these terms,” Megan Christin, the university’s director of strategic communications, said in a statement Wednesday. “While the glossary is a resource posted on the website of the Johns Hopkins University Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI), the definitions were not reviewed or approved by ODI leadership and the language in question has been removed pending review.”

Christin did not respond to questions regarding when the online glossary was first uploaded.

Screenshots of the glossary sparked an online firestorm in recent days, with many women, including some lesbians, calling the definition “misogynistic” and noting that the definition for “gay man” did not use comparable language, such as “non-women.”

“Lesbian was literally the only word in English language that is not tied to man- as in male- feMALE, man- woMAN,” tennis star Martina Navratilova, who is a lesbian, tweeted Monday. “And now lesbians are non men?!? Wtf?!?”

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