Arab woman and professor in Canada cancelled by woke white mob

[bugsymalona]

Dr Rima Azar a professor of psychology at Mount Allison University in Canada has been suspended without pay for writing on a personal blog that she believes Canada isn't systematically racist. Students have since come forward to complain that Azar also refused to use They/Them pronouns.

Dr Rima Azar, a survivor of civil war, wrote on her gofundme for legal fees that she moved to Canada for democracy/freedom of expression and that she is the target of cancel culture.

Link:
nationalpost.com/opinion/jonathan-kay-a-white-mob-comes-after-an-arab-canadian-professor-in-the-name-of-anti-racism

From the article it doesn't even appear that she wrote that Canada wasn't systematically racist. It seems she wrote that it wasn't comparatively to other countries in her experience.
Similarly she didn't say Canada wasn't patriarchal, but that it was less sexist by comparison.

I mean, since when is acknowledging that some countries are less sexist or racist than others controversial?
I think women have a way to achieve equality in the UK, but our plight is comparatively small when compared to women in Saudi Arabia.
This is hardly groundbreaking stuff.

I wholeheartedly agree and thanks for straightening that up, I'm bad with language.

Well that’s one way of proving their point I suppose.

Good grief, I just find people so dumb a lot of the time.

But more seriously, I find myself wondering - why are people so very reactive about this stuff? Like, if someone like this, or a report, says, actually, the attitudes here are not so bad to outsiders at all and most people are accepting, or the systematic barriers here are not very great and disparities mostly come from other sources - why do people find that so worthy of freaking out?

Because it isn't just a disagreement about facts or even how to interpret them, you can see it in the way they disagree. It is like an existential threat.

I'd be interested in reading the original blog, but as she's been 'cancelled' I doubt that will be available.
Just as a general musing it seems to me something has happened with comprehension, analytical and critical thinking skills in the past ten years or so. Perhaps it's a product of having internet echo chambers, but since secondary school onwards I was taught to look for bias and read primary sources for myself before making my mind up about a topic. In fact, not being sure how you felt was also considered fine once you'd read the facts.
But more and more I see people making judgement on poor secondary sources and then being unable to be swayed from their position by facts.
A very clear case of this is how many people have decided JK Rowling is transphobic, despite not having read either the essay or book that led to people drawing this conclusion. People who hadn't read her novel were arguing it based on a book review of someone who also hadn't read the novel. It's absolute madness. What's happened in the past few years that a person can 'read' things in a blog that aren't there and are an odd interpretation but yet that person manages to get that person cancelled. It's chilling.

I think women have a way to achieve equality in the UK, but our plight is comparatively small when compared to women in Saudi Arabia
This is hardly groundbreaking stuff

That ties in with why the Labour Party is losing the support of voters on cultural aspects of public life- on the one hand the UK is this terrible, racist, sexist, Colonial repressor- yet why do so many immigrants want to come to such an awful country?

Sunnydale

Yes, I have really noticed this too.

There's a not very active thread in AIBU, and I've seen other similar discussions, about the priest that was let go over a sermond saying it is ok to disagree with things and important to think critically and be respectful of others views.

If you just look at the responses in these discussions - people have no idea why those things are important.

They have no idea that it is possible to discuss these ideas and engage with them intellectually as the onl reason they think abnyone might disagree is bigotry.

They have no idea that there are, or even could be good reasons to think critically about the mainstream view on such issues. (For example, is it possible, at all, to have laws that differentiate between people based on their biological sex, and under what conditions if so, and what might be the consequences of saying that it's not possible.) Like, not on the radar.

And they seem completely unaware that in recent history many ideas they hold as non-negotiable were only challenged because of people who were willing to go against the accepted view. Or that within the span of history further back that there have been completely different ways of framing the discussion which lead to very different considerations, and that this might be worth knowing something about.

I work in schools, I have really noticed a complete lack of real teaching on critical thinking. They talk about it a lot, but what they mean is teaching the right view on various topics and a pseudo-marxist, and frankly inaccurate, view of history. And making sure thy don't have one idea in their little minds that might spark a question.

I work in primary and we do teach reading comprehension but to be honest understanding the text is more important than bias. This is covered more in persuasive writing so I would expect this to be continued in secondary.

However, the impression I have got from here is secondary have become much less neutral with teachers openly pushing political stances and ideology.

In the meantime staff in my school have had to push hard just to get things like Black History and women into the curriculum, so I don't think you could ever accuse us of being too woke. There is one teacher who canvasses for labour which I find a bit uncomfortable as I am pretty sure it's against the teaching standards.

I would have expected that critical thinking and analysis of source to be a big thing. We start it in primary in ict, but to be honest it's probably a bit early for them to really comprehend it.

I just don't understand how we're getting all these young adults with such poor individual thinking skills.

MissBarbary
"That ties in with why the Labour Party is losing the support of voters on cultural aspects of public life- on the one hand the UK is this terrible, racist, sexist, Colonial repressor- yet why do so many immigrants want to come to such an awful country?"

I have asked people this on other forums, particularly discussion around Brexit, immigration, racism. Usually the people I am asking, come across as self hating and refer to others they disagree with as - racist, fascist, xenophobic, ignorant "gammons".

I would say that I do have poor critical thinking and reading skills as do most people I grew up around (family and friends). A lot of adults I know can barely read or write. I even find it hard to articulate what I know for sure. It feels a bit like being imprisoned. I don't know where to start plus I'm too exhausted to do much but survive and get by.

I think immigrants want to come here to escape poverty or war because we have it a lot easier, even the people that don't have it easy have it easier.

You seem very articulate to me @bugsymalona

@SunnydaleClassProtector99

From the article it doesn't even appear that she wrote that Canada wasn't systematically racist. It seems she wrote that it wasn't comparatively to other countries in her experience. Similarly she didn't say Canada wasn't patriarchal, but that it was less sexist by comparison.

I mean, since when is acknowledging that some countries are less sexist or racist than others controversial?
I think women have a way to achieve equality in the UK, but our plight is comparatively small when compared to women in Saudi Arabia.
This is hardly groundbreaking stuff.

😲😲😲BLASPEMER !!!!😲😲😲

Immigrants will come here for a variety of reasons.
However, it cannot be denied that immigrants

*immigrants like Malala and Hibo can do a lot more good here than their home countries.

She has blasphemed. Can't believe it has become this.

I really wish people would stop using “cancelled” in this way. People cannot be cancelled. She wasn’t cancelled. Stop using it. Let it die out as the ridiculous thing it is.

The people criticising her made a big thing out of apparently knowing better than her about racism despite the fact that they are white Canadians. Never enters their head just to think about that a bit. A lot of this seems to be that cancelling people makes you feel righteous and powerful, just by writing a couple of twitter posts or whatever from the comfort of your nice middle-class sofa.

I would have expected that critical thinking and analysis of source to be a big thing. We start it in primary in ict, but to be honest it's probably a bit early for them to really comprehend it.

This may be part of the problem. People sometimes seem to think that by pushing skills down to a lower level, the kids will learn them better, but what more often happens is that it displaces other more foundational skills, and they aren't able to really understand the higher level skills.

Bias isn't actually that difficult to understand if you are old enough. But to me it's telling that for many, the assumption is that one side is biased, or biased in the wrong way. It's not really about the distortions of viewpoint which are universal. Understanding that requires some ability to abstract however, and insight into one's own thinking processes, the ability to stand outside them to some extent. That's higher order thinking - not the highest, but not for ten year olds.

But I think the other element is that if you want to really teach and allow critical thinking, there is a real possibility that a student will come to a conclusion other than the one you want them to. Maybe about racism, or sex, or same-sex marriage, or anti-semitism, or some other hot-button topic.

People are scared of that possibility which is in itself revealing - they think that reason is dangerous.

And actually - I think what is being displaced for primary students is following a connected narrative, and then on from that, following a connected argument. Which mostly comes from listening to stories, in the earliest years - good, and morally complex ones ideally.

Talking about bias isn't helpful if you can't do that at the most basic level.

I sort of agree with primaries tackling skills too early.
But primary schools are between a rock and a hard place. The government has pushed skills earlier to compete with education systems like China, so teachers have to teach skills early as it's on the curriculum. Early fractions moving to Eyfs being s good example of this madness.
But the other factor is that children have access to concepts far too early now due to the internet and accessibility of information. Porn, extreme views and people are just accessible in a way they weren't before and hence the need to tackle it.
To go back to basics, as it were, we'd need to make a concerted societal effort to delay introduction to such topics until children are ready for them.

I think the loss of storytime is a big loss in primary, but unfortunately, with the focus on sats and league tables it's considered expendable.

I don't understand it really, we can see this approach has done no good for the American schools.

And the Asian schools just work on a totally different basis and I think you can argue their results are not all they are cracked up to be.

It's not something that's on individual teachers really though I think a lot of younger ones are missing out on critical thinking skills themselves. So they don't really understand what they are supposed to be imparting.

The problem was that people that know nothing about teaching Gove cough cough drive these changes and targets.
They want the free play based learning of the Nordic countries. They want the high achieving maths skills of China. These Sims do not mesh so you end up with children being taught in a patchy, mismatched and inconsistent way.

There's no time. No time for discussion about the world around us. No time for addressing misconceptions. No time for fostering a love of learning.

It's a mess. And likely to continue as old hands are leaving or passed over for inexperienced nqts.

It's not like kids in the Nordic countries can't do math though!

I think it's the testability they are seduced by.

But in any case, it doesn't produce children who can spot a coherent argument, much less understand the nature of bias, or notice factual historical inaccuracies.