Clip taken from the YouTube video of the Elbows Up T.O. Public Meeting - original post from earlier today found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/50501Canada/s/U7jyMoggwj I have to share the most impa...
Already hashed this out with another poster. If you look through it, there’s a link to articles where university profs were admitting that it was an equity issue, and that they’d failed boys.
As far back as 2007, when the vaccine came in, there was evidence it’d help men / boys out with HPV related cancers and issues. Some of the studies explicitly stated that they should be doing more work to highlight the situation for groups such as gay men, who were left out of the whole ‘herd immunity’ concept altogether when it came to the govt policies and initial roll outs. These studies and the gender-biased implications that were noted, were ignored while the government made the vaccine free for girls. They only looked at cervical cancer, and with those blinders they only funded it for girls. Until boys/men started protesting more, and people pointed out that male rates of various HPV related issues were far higher than that of girls, because ‘duh’ vaccines, and the policies slowly started changing.
If things like historic approaches to heart attack treatments, having things like symptoms only track what “male” symptoms look like, is systemic sexism against women – then this is easily an example of system sexism against men. And again, there’s third party sources of univ profs cited in Canada’s national news agency in the other discussion thread, supporting this statement, so its not just some rando online alone making this assertion. I don’t really care to debate it more.
Ya ya ya I get that. I already deleted my comment before you responded, guess this app lags.
My issue with this is that, with all the ways the medical community has failed women over the centuries, and still does, I just don’t understand why you’re focusing so heavily on the one time recently that boys were left behind.
Do you advocate for equitable medical studies and treatment when girls are left behind, too, or is it just to prove a point?
Women generally have enough advocates already. They have over 5 years more average life expectancy than men, yet the media is flooded with women’s health care needs/concerns. There are reasons why the right-wing message is appealing to so many men these days, and it isn’t because they’re doing great – just looking at the statscan info on university grad demographics, where white guys were around 20%, white girls were around 30%, and asians were around 50%, and I gotta wonder why we keep treating the white guys as a privileged group. The data doesn’t support it so much anymore. Just because one group was treated poorly in the past, it doesn’t justify treating others poorly in the present – especially as that generation has/had no say in the matter that they’re being punished for.
That said, yes, when an equity issue is raised that impacts women, I’m staunchly in favour of having it addressed. I mean, heck, I highlighted gay men as a group that was specifically screwed by the move, which isn’t ‘typical’ cis white right wing guy speech. I like to think myself more an egalitarian in that sense.
I just feel like your anger is directed in the wrong place here. DEI related initiatives aren’t the cause for men being left behind.
Often men are left behind because capitalists find them easier to exploit. The rhetoric that it’s because women are being favoured is false, and i can think of plenty of examples, medically and otherwise, but pushing that rhetoric onto young men to sow resentment towards women and therefore division within the working class is very intentional on the ruling class’s part.
If we can get this back on the rails for a moment:
Was your initial point that Angus bringing up DEI related initiatives in relation to Canada won’t help get the attention of young men?
If so, I don’t disagree, because as I mentioned before, using that rhetoric is a pointed distraction from the class divide, and there was a reason the right was able to seduce young men.
I’m not great at articulating myself, but I have found a video that possibly better explains the reason why
An ‘ok’ video, but it misses a lot of the Canadian context of DEI and CRT stuff, much of which has been institutionalized for decades. It’s too focused on recent trends with influencers and US politics.
I’d typed up a big description of that missed context, references/links to the Charter/Employment equity act/supreme court rulings and all that, but it was just so, so long. And based on experience, pointless to explain in online discussions.
I will say though that when I bring these sorts of things up, a big reason I think this is such an issue is that I do think there are inherent bias’s and issues in systems. However I’m more concerned with broader economic class disparities then racial ones – people with dental issues and low income have it rough and deserve a hand; it’s not helping to specifically target low income seniors support programs as though being a ‘senior’ makes you more worthy of help/govt funds. The implementation of DEI has basically been weaponised by the upper class to refocus the anger of the lower classes against one another, rather than against the super wealthy, and that men/white men have specifically been isolated “from the rest”. You can put out a corporate policy saying hiring needs to be done through an inclusivity lens, and it allows you to give jobs to just the upper class minorities and discriminate without hesitation against the lower class majority: a third generation millionaire trust fund minority race woman with barely passing skills, is more worthy of employment in the eyes of the govt than a higher skill lower class background white guy quite explicitly with how the govt handles its hiring. Putting a focus on supporting women and minority rights, gives the facade of permission to ignore inequalities that exist between economic classes of men, or people in the broader aggregate. The government/elites don’t need to fund / maintain safe third spaces for most of the unwashed masses, if they can sell the idea that only a minority of the population needs those sorts of privileges. They can fund woman specific outreach and support programs, and half ass the opioid crisis for a decade or two while its victims are 75% men. As long as you can get the lower classes focused on racial/gender issues, it’s a lot easier to cut the top income tax bracket from 70% down to 38%. It’d be interesting to see a study on the correlation between DEI/CRT programs and broader income inequalities between the top % earners in the country over the past few decades - they’ve definitely both been on an increasing trend since the 80s, when Canada started doing DEI due to the charter.
The videos note on Bernie – and Bernie’s comments post election about how the democratic party has become too mired in identity politics that it had turned its back on the working class of the country – are apt. But, by the guidelines that the Government of Canada puts out, expressing this sort of sentiment is racist – if you’re concerned more with broad economic inequality/class without respect to racial lenses, the guides say you’re racist. To me, it’s the same sort of insanity as the people who say you have to support what Israel’s doing in Gaza at the moment, or else you’re an anti-Semite/Nazi/terrorist. You can both condemn Hamas, and also condemn Israel’s genocidal actions: but the dominant power structure / elites set up the discussion as though there are only two teams/positions, then force people into one of the two camps, and proceed to make them fight one another. It’s unproductive in terms of getting a sane / human rights encouraging / life benefiting resolution to the conflict/discussion. It’s good in theory, but in practice it’s anti-progressive/anti-egalitarian. Sorta like how most people view communism – ok in theory, but in practice it’s pretty well always been a tragedy.
I agree with most of your points here and had to give you an upvote for this one.
The last bit about how some things are “good in theory/not in practice” is a phrase I’ve heard a lot, but it often ignores the systematic structures in play to actively prevent those things from working in practice.
Take communism for example. Cuba was very near being functional and working in practice, if it weren’t for the west actively interfering in it to ensure it didn’t work and that this [anti-communist] rhetoric would be viable. Good in theory/not in practice just lacks nuance imo, but i understand what you’re getting at and we don’t need to get into it as you’ve gone into plenty of depth already and I don’t feel like discussing it further.
Thanks for getting back on track, I feel like people (including myself!) were misunderstanding your initial point but I feel like this comment represents it better.
Already hashed this out with another poster. If you look through it, there’s a link to articles where university profs were admitting that it was an equity issue, and that they’d failed boys.
As far back as 2007, when the vaccine came in, there was evidence it’d help men / boys out with HPV related cancers and issues. Some of the studies explicitly stated that they should be doing more work to highlight the situation for groups such as gay men, who were left out of the whole ‘herd immunity’ concept altogether when it came to the govt policies and initial roll outs. These studies and the gender-biased implications that were noted, were ignored while the government made the vaccine free for girls. They only looked at cervical cancer, and with those blinders they only funded it for girls. Until boys/men started protesting more, and people pointed out that male rates of various HPV related issues were far higher than that of girls, because ‘duh’ vaccines, and the policies slowly started changing.
If things like historic approaches to heart attack treatments, having things like symptoms only track what “male” symptoms look like, is systemic sexism against women – then this is easily an example of system sexism against men. And again, there’s third party sources of univ profs cited in Canada’s national news agency in the other discussion thread, supporting this statement, so its not just some rando online alone making this assertion. I don’t really care to debate it more.
Ya ya ya I get that. I already deleted my comment before you responded, guess this app lags.
My issue with this is that, with all the ways the medical community has failed women over the centuries, and still does, I just don’t understand why you’re focusing so heavily on the one time recently that boys were left behind.
Do you advocate for equitable medical studies and treatment when girls are left behind, too, or is it just to prove a point?
Women generally have enough advocates already. They have over 5 years more average life expectancy than men, yet the media is flooded with women’s health care needs/concerns. There are reasons why the right-wing message is appealing to so many men these days, and it isn’t because they’re doing great – just looking at the statscan info on university grad demographics, where white guys were around 20%, white girls were around 30%, and asians were around 50%, and I gotta wonder why we keep treating the white guys as a privileged group. The data doesn’t support it so much anymore. Just because one group was treated poorly in the past, it doesn’t justify treating others poorly in the present – especially as that generation has/had no say in the matter that they’re being punished for.
That said, yes, when an equity issue is raised that impacts women, I’m staunchly in favour of having it addressed. I mean, heck, I highlighted gay men as a group that was specifically screwed by the move, which isn’t ‘typical’ cis white right wing guy speech. I like to think myself more an egalitarian in that sense.
I just feel like your anger is directed in the wrong place here. DEI related initiatives aren’t the cause for men being left behind.
Often men are left behind because capitalists find them easier to exploit. The rhetoric that it’s because women are being favoured is false, and i can think of plenty of examples, medically and otherwise, but pushing that rhetoric onto young men to sow resentment towards women and therefore division within the working class is very intentional on the ruling class’s part.
If we can get this back on the rails for a moment:
Was your initial point that Angus bringing up DEI related initiatives in relation to Canada won’t help get the attention of young men?
If so, I don’t disagree, because as I mentioned before, using that rhetoric is a pointed distraction from the class divide, and there was a reason the right was able to seduce young men.
I’m not great at articulating myself, but I have found a video that possibly better explains the reason why
Ignore the clickbaitey title, it’s actually quite a good video
An ‘ok’ video, but it misses a lot of the Canadian context of DEI and CRT stuff, much of which has been institutionalized for decades. It’s too focused on recent trends with influencers and US politics.
I’d typed up a big description of that missed context, references/links to the Charter/Employment equity act/supreme court rulings and all that, but it was just so, so long. And based on experience, pointless to explain in online discussions.
I will say though that when I bring these sorts of things up, a big reason I think this is such an issue is that I do think there are inherent bias’s and issues in systems. However I’m more concerned with broader economic class disparities then racial ones – people with dental issues and low income have it rough and deserve a hand; it’s not helping to specifically target low income seniors support programs as though being a ‘senior’ makes you more worthy of help/govt funds. The implementation of DEI has basically been weaponised by the upper class to refocus the anger of the lower classes against one another, rather than against the super wealthy, and that men/white men have specifically been isolated “from the rest”. You can put out a corporate policy saying hiring needs to be done through an inclusivity lens, and it allows you to give jobs to just the upper class minorities and discriminate without hesitation against the lower class majority: a third generation millionaire trust fund minority race woman with barely passing skills, is more worthy of employment in the eyes of the govt than a higher skill lower class background white guy quite explicitly with how the govt handles its hiring. Putting a focus on supporting women and minority rights, gives the facade of permission to ignore inequalities that exist between economic classes of men, or people in the broader aggregate. The government/elites don’t need to fund / maintain safe third spaces for most of the unwashed masses, if they can sell the idea that only a minority of the population needs those sorts of privileges. They can fund woman specific outreach and support programs, and half ass the opioid crisis for a decade or two while its victims are 75% men. As long as you can get the lower classes focused on racial/gender issues, it’s a lot easier to cut the top income tax bracket from 70% down to 38%. It’d be interesting to see a study on the correlation between DEI/CRT programs and broader income inequalities between the top % earners in the country over the past few decades - they’ve definitely both been on an increasing trend since the 80s, when Canada started doing DEI due to the charter.
The videos note on Bernie – and Bernie’s comments post election about how the democratic party has become too mired in identity politics that it had turned its back on the working class of the country – are apt. But, by the guidelines that the Government of Canada puts out, expressing this sort of sentiment is racist – if you’re concerned more with broad economic inequality/class without respect to racial lenses, the guides say you’re racist. To me, it’s the same sort of insanity as the people who say you have to support what Israel’s doing in Gaza at the moment, or else you’re an anti-Semite/Nazi/terrorist. You can both condemn Hamas, and also condemn Israel’s genocidal actions: but the dominant power structure / elites set up the discussion as though there are only two teams/positions, then force people into one of the two camps, and proceed to make them fight one another. It’s unproductive in terms of getting a sane / human rights encouraging / life benefiting resolution to the conflict/discussion. It’s good in theory, but in practice it’s anti-progressive/anti-egalitarian. Sorta like how most people view communism – ok in theory, but in practice it’s pretty well always been a tragedy.
I agree with most of your points here and had to give you an upvote for this one.
The last bit about how some things are “good in theory/not in practice” is a phrase I’ve heard a lot, but it often ignores the systematic structures in play to actively prevent those things from working in practice.
Take communism for example. Cuba was very near being functional and working in practice, if it weren’t for the west actively interfering in it to ensure it didn’t work and that this [anti-communist] rhetoric would be viable. Good in theory/not in practice just lacks nuance imo, but i understand what you’re getting at and we don’t need to get into it as you’ve gone into plenty of depth already and I don’t feel like discussing it further.
Thanks for getting back on track, I feel like people (including myself!) were misunderstanding your initial point but I feel like this comment represents it better.