Although my medium, for better or worse, is words (sometimes too many, I know), I have long admired the brilliant succinctness of some editorial cartoonists; while there are several whose work I savour, preeminent in the pantheon is Theo Moudakis.
This illustrates why:
With the passing of our beloved Queen, an icon of selfless dedication we fondly thought would go on for much longer than her 96 years, mortality is on the minds of many - especially if they have 'achieved' a certain stage of life.
A friend sent me the following, which puts things into perspective, I think.
Clearly, these miscreants lack the courage of their 'convictions'. Yet the damage they do is severe.
Here are a few examples of that damage:
Prior to fleeing to Canada as a refugee, Saba Eitizaz worked for the BBC in Pakistand. She left after fielding a number of death threats from the Taliban, and landed a job at the Toronto Star, but her newfound feelings of security proved to be ephemeral:
An Aug. 4 message, using a fake name and the encrypted email service Mailfence, said several men were looking at the photos of female reporters, who were described in racist, misogynistic terms. Eitizaz was singled out as the men decided “which ones need to be silenced first.”
“So I’m just waiting for a gunshot or for somebody to show up at my place or with a firearm,” Eitizaz said. “It takes just a little bit more anger or a little bit more of a feeling that you can do this with impunity for online violence to become real-life violence.”Eitizaz is one of several Canadian journalists — nearly all of them women, many of whom are Black, Indigenous, and women of colour — targeted by an escalating hate campaign using encrypted email services. The emails drip with racial hatred and include threats of violence and rape. In at least one case, threats were directed at a reporter’s family.
Presumably because she is a woman, a Global News reporter has also been repeatedly targeted with a variety of threats and obscenities. One of the mildest is this one:.
In Ottawa, Rachel Gilmore of Global News was told in an email that “Judgment Day is coming, sweetheart. You had better make peace with your god.”
Over at one of Torstar's sister papers, things are not any different.
After two and half years of covering the COVID-19 pandemic and receiving an avalanche of hate mail laced with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories (and more references to the Nazis than she can remember), The Hamilton Spectator’s health reporter, Joanna Frketich, had come to believe nothing could surprise her anymore.
She was wrong.
The author of the email was playing at being cryptic, but it was only that. Playing.
It was filled with references Frketich knew well. The school her child went do. Her husband’s business. Their home address.
“Someone was threatening my children and my husband and my home. So that was something I’ve not really experienced ever in my journalism career,” Frketich said. “That took things to a whole new level for me. I pretty much try to ignore the personal attacks but that one did stop me in my tracks.”
Young journalists with limited time in the industry are feeling especially vulnerable:
The Spectator’s Fallon Hewitt, having been working in the industry only since 2018, has spent nearly half of her career working in an ecosystem of harassment.
Like Frketich, Hewitt said the pandemic radically and rapidly changed the tone of the kind of emails she received.
“It all seemed to actually relate to coverage I was doing about the pandemic,” she said. One particular story about a business that violated COVID-19 public health rules triggered a response so vitriolic that Hewitt joined the ranks of reports who wanted to avoid pandemic coverage.
The business owner fired off a message dripping with vulgar and sexist language.
“When this is all over, I honestly hope you rot in hell you sleazy piece of s--t. God forbid we ever cross paths,” the message said. “You should be f--king ashamed of yourself ... I hope you live a lonely miserable life!”
I won't reproduce some of the filth that has been directed at these people, but outside of the affront to human decency these cowardly notes represent, there is an even higher cost. According to an IPSOS survey, some 33 per cent of respondents have or are considering leaving the profession. As well,
[t]he vitriol has left some journalists avoiding story subjects that they fear could worsen the harassment.
It is not hard to understand how all of this has developed. Egged on by people like Donald Trump in the U.S., who labelled the press "the enemy of the state," and echoed by Trump wannabes like Pierre Poilievre and Maxime Bernier in Canada, what has become know as rage farming has found especially fertile ground amongst the disaffected, the gullible, and the just-plain stupid, all supreme cowards for the tactics they employ because they cannot accept views that run contrary to their own.
However, probably the biggest victim in all of this is democracy. While I realize there are many who disdain the MSM as being mere toadies for their owners, the fact is that newspapers, as opposed to self-selected stories on social media, provide a much larger array of news and sense of the larger world than can be found by simply following our online biases. And when journalists begin to limit the stories they cover out of fear of reactionary blowback, we are all the poorer, and less-informed, for it.
It is a question I have asked myself on an almost daily basis these past few years, and it is the question TizzyEnt asks here:
UPDATE: Here is the link to an update posted by TizzyEnt. The only thing that has changed in the video is the location where this atrocity apparently happened.
Wasn't Socrates executed for corrupting the youth?
Courting a child wearing Minnie Mouse ears sets my 'Spidey sense' tingling.
H/t The Salamander HordeWith the NDP hinting that their pact supporting the Liberals until 2025 could be under strain, a timely reminder from de Adder about the alternative:
While political hypocrisy is hardly rare, in my view Pierre Poilievre 'elevates' it to an entirely new level - new at least in Canadian politics. And while his blind followers will no doubt fail to see this, rational, reflective citizens will.
By now, most people will have heard about or seen the video in which deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland is viciously verbally assaulted by Alberta miscreant Elliott McDavid. If you haven't, I placed it on a previous post. While one cannot draw a direct link between McDavid's disgraceful behaviour and Poilievre, it is clear that the kind of reckless, divisive rhetoric favoured by the soon-to-be-crowned new leader of the CPC emboldens such heinous harassment.
A story in The Tyee quotes McDavid as saying he is proud of what he did:
“Why did I do that? Because I want the rest of the country to wake up and realize that she is a traitor to the country. She is selling out the country,” Elliot McDavid said in a phone interview Saturday.
University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley told the Tyee
he expects aggressive attacks on politicians to increase in Canada as right-wing politicians continue to engage in “rage farming” by advancing false and misleading conspiracy narratives.
But, of course, the most dangerous rage farmer, Mr. Poilievre, refuses to take any responsibility for the current rancourous landscape that he so willfully cultivates and exploits. Indeed, until he was confronted by a reporter about the Freeland incident, he offered no denunciation of it. His 'repudiation' of it, as you can see in the following video, was completely self-serving:
He refers in the above to the online abuse his wife, Anaida, has experienced, so perhaps she deserves some scrutiny. Clearly a fellow traveller and soulmate, she reminds me a bit of Lady Macbeth, Macbeth's perfect partner-in-crime:
""But screw your courage to the sticking-place and we'll not fail!"
That the rage-farmer's wife is all in with Pierre's pursuit of power at any price is evident in a recent Tweet she sent, recommending Canadians visit an extremely right-wing site trafficking in sensational headlines, love of 'freedom' and hatred for Trudeau.'
7 times Trudeau met with pedophiles, terrorists and extremists | True NorthThis kind of scurrilous recommendation by the wife of a possible future prime minister is unprecedented in Canadian politics, as far as I know. That she panders like Pierre to an angry and reactive rabble does not bode well for a return to a more civilized discourse, but perhaps helps explain some of the putative reactions she has stoked.
It is said that behind every successful man stands a woman. In this situation, it might be more accurate to say that behind every unscrupulous politician stands an equally unscrupulous wife.
They make quite the power couple, eh?
