#public backlash

[fcfvafeed]

Romeich Major Clarifies Controversial Job Fair Entry Fee as Marketing Tactic

Businessman and artiste manager Romeich Major faced criticism for announcing a $1,000 entry fee for his job fair. He has now revealed that this was merely a marketing tactic, with no attendees being charged. Major defends his approach, emphasizing...

By FCFVA News Team Romeich Major, a notable businessman and artiste manager based in Kingston, Jamaica, recently faced a wave of public criticism after announcing a $1,000 entry fee for his job fair. However, in a twist, Major has come forward to reveal that this fee was merely a strategic marketing move and was never meant to be collected from attendees. Image of Romeich Major via Google…

[xtruss]

Analysis: Is Canada Really So Immigrant-Friendly?

Trudeau’s ambitious plan to increase immigration is facing pushback from the left and right.

— By Claire Porter Robbins | Foreign Policy | August 28, 2023

A refugee arrives at the Roxham Road border crossing at the U.S.-Canada border in Champlain, New York, on March 25, 2023. Lars Hagberg/AFP Via Getty Images

Canadians like to think of their country as a nation built on immigration. Canada, the story goes, is a bastion of multiculturalism. This narrative has been refined through smug comparison to the United States and other Western countries. At first glance, it may seem that Canada is more welcoming: While other Western nations have faced heavy criticism for their migration policies, Canada has garnered a reputation as being immigrant-friendly. Since 2019, the Canadian government has resettled more refugees than any other country, with little public backlash.

So in November, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to expand immigration, it seemed like a politically savvy move. Since Trudeau took office in 2015, immigration has already increased from around 300,000 to 400,000 new residents per year. Now, Canada plans to welcome 500,000 permanent residents each year by 2025. Laid out as a way to build up the Canadian economy, which faces labor shortages and a declining birth rate, the plan prioritizes bringing in skilled immigrants. It was met with praise from major corporate advocacy groups, such as the Business Council of Canada.

Ten months later, Trudeau’s plan is facing skepticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Criticism from the far right is no surprise. But as the government has struggled to integrate and support migrants, the prospect of bringing in significantly more of them has led immigration experts and advocates to air grievances about what they see as the administration’s failings in related sectors, notably refugee resettlement and housing.

Meanwhile, public opinion on immigration has started to shift. As cost of living and housing prices stay stubbornly high, anti-immigration sentiment—long boiling—may rise to the surface.

In early 2019, controversy arose over billboards put up across the country with the slogan “Say No to Mass Immigration,” which promoted then-MP Maxime Bernier’s far-right People’s Party of Canada in the campaign for the upcoming federal election. Complaints and citizens’ petitions ultimately led the advertising company to take down the signs.

Those who complained about the billboards, including candidates from Canada’s center and left-wing parties, saw their removal as a victory for Canadian pluralism, thrown into relief by then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s xenophobic, anti-migrant policies to the south. On election day in 2019, Trudeau’s Liberal Party triumphed, while Bernier’s party received meager support.

The Liberals’ success, combined with the outcry over the far right’s weaponization of immigration, signaled to Trudeau that most Canadian voters were resolutely pro-migration. Polling seemed to back this up. The month before the election, the Environics Institute for Survey Research found that 85 percent of Canadians surveyed agreed that immigration has a positive effect on the economy, while 69 percent supported the current immigration rate.

Yet these figures obscured Canada’s long-standing challenges with diversity and inclusion. “Because Canada is pro-immigration, there’s a perception that conflates this with Canada being an open society and not being racist,” said Pallavi Banerjee, a sociologist at the University of Calgary who researches how discrimination affects young migrants’ futures.

Canada has a history of racist policies related to immigration, from the late-19th-century Chinese head tax, which forced Chinese immigrants to pay a fee when entering the country, to Quebec’s highly controversial Bill 21, a law passed in 2019 that prohibits the display of religious symbols from public servants’ attire, including crosses, turbans, kippahs, and hijabs. In one high-profile incident in 2021, Bill 21 led to the removal of a Muslim teacher from her classroom for wearing a hijab.

In a 2022 Environics survey, 46 percent of respondents agreed that “there are too many immigrants coming into this country who are not adopting Canadian values.” The term “Canadian values,” though vague, points to respondents’ desire for immigrants to assimilate. The same poll has been conducted for three decades, and while that figure has decreased from 72 percent in 1993, it still indicates that Canada has yet to fully embrace multiculturalism.

Even at current immigration levels, Banerjee said, migrants are segregated from established Canadians, limiting opportunities for them to integrate into the social fabric of their new country and thrive. According to Statistics Canada as of 2021, 41.8 percent of nonpermanent residents and 16.1 percent of immigrants who moved to Canada in the past five years lived in poverty.

The government’s failure to fully integrate newcomers has spurred skepticism of Trudeau’s new program on the left. Columnists for center and left-wing outlets have written that Canada has an “immigration elephant in the room,” referring to racism against newcomers, and that the country is “woefully unprepared for the coming immigration boom” due to funding cuts for newcomer settlement organizations, which are typically funded through a combination of federal, provincial, and private donor funds.

Advocates for refugees and other migrants are some of the loudest voices demanding reform to Canada’s immigration and settlement processes before expansion. Directors of settlement and refugee organizations, who may have otherwise endorsed Trudeau’s plans, say the system is already overloaded. Newcomers categorized as “highly skilled” have publicly complained about being stuck in a bureaucratic limbo with the immigration ministry and not receiving decisions on their residency permits for years.

Public opinion appears to have shifted as well. Even before Trudeau’s plan, anti-immigration sentiment was already worsening online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Banerjee said, as some Canadians blamed immigrants, particularly those of Asian descent, for the spread of the disease. In July, David Coletto, CEO of Canada’s Abacus polling firm, wrote on his Substack that 61 percent of Canadians polled believe that 500,000 immigrants per year is too high, including 37 percent who feel it is “way too high.” In addition, a July Abacus survey found that four in 10 Canadians polled would vote for a politician who promised to reduce immigration levels.

Now, some Canadians are conflating a different issue with immigration: the housing crisis that Trudeau has been unable to stem in his nearly eight-year tenure. In the many think pieces about immigration, commentators have complained of already overburdened services, from health care wait times to the availability of language lessons. But the most common criticism of Trudeau’s plan to expand immigration is the lack of affordable housing.

“Canada doesn’t have a refugee problem. Canada has a housing problem,” said Francesca Allodi-Ross, who runs Romero House, a nongovernmental organization in Toronto that connects migrants with people who have spare rooms. She worries about newcomers being blamed for a housing shortage that has been a long time coming.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Canada has the most expensive housing market in the G-7. Vacancy rates for rental housing are at a two-decade low, and the Royal Bank of Canada expects the country’s rental housing gap (the difference between available rental units and those seeking them) to surpass 120,000 by 2026—quadrupling today’s deficit. In early August, Stefane Marion, the chief economist of the National Bank, called on the government to revise the immigration target until housing supply could match demand, citing “record imbalance” between the two.

Meanwhile, as housing shortages threaten to affect the coming “highly skilled” migrants prioritized by Trudeau’s plan, social justice-oriented groups such as Romero House have pointed out that the government has so far neglected to provide enough housing for other newcomers who have already arrived: specifically, refugees and asylum-seekers. The government’s failure to arrange temporary housing for them was glaringly apparent over the summer, when hundreds of asylum-seekers camped outside Toronto’s emergency shelter intake center.

The way the government responds to the needs of newcomers, and especially refugees, is “very reactive—and it’s been this way for years,” Allodi-Ross said. It was only after the Toronto shelter crisis, when many media commentators questioned Trudeau’s immigration expansion program, that the municipal, provincial, and federal government committed $71.4 million to housing for refugees and asylum-seekers, and the city freed up more hotels for emergency shelter.

Directors of temporary shelters and refugee settlement programs say there is a chronic lack of state funding and support for recent arrivals. John Mtshede, the executive director of Matthew House, a shelter for asylum-seekers in Ontario’s Niagara region, said his shelter is stretched to capacity. For years, the government has repeatedly denied Matthew House’s requests for funding to develop a plot of land for additional housing. Matthew House has found its most sustainable support through private fundraising and religious groups, rather than government funding.

Like many others who work at refugee and immigration NGOs, Mtshede is frustrated with the lack of coordination between the municipal, provincial, and federal governments about who bears responsibility for housing the government’s target of a little more than 70,000 new refugees each year. “Nobody wants to take the blame for this situation,” he said.

Despite the pushback, the Liberal government appears to be doubling down and ignoring accusations that it has not funded the services required to process and settle newcomers. At a press conference in early August, a reporter asked Marc Miller, the new immigration minister, if the government would reduce the immigration targets.

“Whether we revise them upwards or not is something that I have to look at,” he said. “But certainly, I don’t think we’re in any position of wanting to lower them by any stretch of the imagination.” In the meantime, newcomers will increasingly become the fall guy for the housing crisis that has unfolded under Trudeau’s watch.

— Claire Porter Robbins is a Journalist in Calgary, Alberta, and the Founder of Btchcoin News. She has worked as an aid worker in the Middle East and in Strategic Communications for a United Nations Peacekeeping Mission.

[starlit-mansion]

there's something so poetic about coyote vs acme being the thing that causes wb's 'the producers' ass scheme of shitcanning movies for tax breaks to blow up in their face and cause them to turn to the camera, blink twice, and dissolve into a little pile of ash that their eyes fall down into with a little bounce

[bismuth-soup]

Thighs look big in this pic

[butchladymaria]

[tricksterlatte]

I've always been fascinated by fandom history, and I know I'm not the only one. It's interesting to see how fans of pop culture can create a culture of their own, and in the modern age of social media and the internet in general, that culture is as widespread as ever. Unfortunately, that also means downsides are becoming bigger as this culture becomes widespread, and it's saddening to watch, maybe even concerning.

I don't discuss these things to be preachy, especially considering how I've fallen into several of these pitfalls before, and have perpetuated some of this behavior in the past. To say otherwise would make me a hypocrite and a liar, and I firmly believe this goes for most people in any fandom. I was just thinking about this recently, and how a lot of the biggest stressors in what should be our stress relief really can be pinned mostly into a few central talking points, which I would love to discuss to know if I'm not just going crazy here

The concept of Big Name Fan has evolved into a position of authority on fandom, which does not fall to anyone regarding subjectivity. No one in a fandom is an authority except the creators themselves, who have every right to stay away from the fandoms they have birthed.

Popularity in general being conflated to intellectual authority as well, especially on websites with public stats, particularly following counts. The algorithm is no benevolent god, but people will sometimes see someone with 30k followers and think they are correct on a minor non-issue that has spiraled into discourse, especially when compared to someone with 30 followers. This also is just...a bummer when fanon evolves into perceived canon, and newcomers to the fandom can't post even innocuous meta or headcanons without it being perceived as morally/intellectually incorrect.

Monetization of fanworks, but especially zines, have led to a hypercompetitive atmosphere that only escalates the bitterness and resentment. This is not a universal problem, but many zines across all fandoms habitually accept the same artists and writers, or diminish the value of fanfic due to the limitations of physical printing. The application process has devolved into such a disheartening debacle for a majority of people I see, and the way it is often framed as "your work just wasn't good enough" when it's really about what the mods deem mass marketable will destroy just about anyone's self-esteem after repetitive rejections, and will give some frequent zine runners a false sense of final say over the community (not usually, but it can happen).

The level of distrust for anyone new attempting to start a fan project is just so depressing nowadays (and this one we sadly can blame on a few people by name, but the ones who have sent this issue spiraling still don't care and that just sucks. I feel horrible for everyone who has been tricked).

Somehow comment and anonymous asks have gone backwards from "don't feed the trolls" to "suck it up, at least you're getting comments." I have seen some of these comments people have been told to suck up. It's not okay in general. It's particularly gross when it's an anonymous hate message unrelated to the fanworks themselves, perhaps born out of resentment or bearing an ulterior motive. And some will even attack and defame character due to identity. It's not subtle. It's not okay. People should absolutely be dunked on for this, and I gotta say I'm sick of unsolicited concrit being enforced as positive either. If they didn't ask, don't give it. There's a reason a lot of fic writers some people adore suddenly go ghost, and they can't even talk about it.

Don't like, don't read has been discarded in favor of don't like, tell others don't read and also don't write. Transformative works don't have to fit into a canon or even in character mold. That's why they're transformative! It's a different type of artistic expression. If you don't like it, chances are good it simply wasn't meant for you. It's not bad. Don't shame others, god especially not for non-issues such as a t/b preference or a different gender hc, preferred haircuts, types of animal you imagine them as in another lifetime, I could list literally anything here and I bet there has been a fandom fight over it.

Exclusive yet publicly advertised community Discords that will bar you from invite if you're not one of the cool kids. I have unfortunately fallen into this trap before, and refuse to ever enable or endorse that behavior ever again. This isn't about friend groups either, it's about fandom-dedicated servers that flaunt themselves as a VIP club instead of what they are: a friend group. I also don't even know how to broach the subject of private accounts that turn into fandom tea accounts with dozens if not hundreds of followers, only for people to be angry if someone isn't exactly okay with horrific stuff being said in general, let alone about their mutuals or friends.

I know none of this will likely ever change, and tbh i'm so tired of it all, but...does anyone else know what I mean? I'm stressed out whenever I try to enjoy myself, because popularity and a strange business mindset is steadily taking over fandom spaces. I'm not saying people should stop trying to make stuff that sells, or that people universally do any of this, but fandom is evolving into a thing I'm not sure is good. idk anymore

[hubriswest]

you guys have been nice to me so here's an old canvas with some fanchild stuff

[arbitrarygreay]

Writers like to play with Alder being old-fashioned, usually with regards to courting (even though the point of the witches' Pagan background is to reject that mindset and embrace queer shamelessness, but whatever), but one aspect I have yet to see anyone acknowledge is the older attitude towards war. Abigail's beliefs about glory did not come from nowhere, she absorbed them from the role models around her, from those highest up trickling down. She walked into Alder's office in the pilot, thinking based on her past experiences with Alder that her description of Raelle would garner Alder's sympathy. Alder herself speaks of glory many times during the show, including in contexts that make it clear that it is genuinely her personal belief, not just public propaganda for morale's sake. Her rebuke to Abigail was not that Raelle could offer other things besides being a soldier, but that everyone could rise to military excellence. In her opening speech in 1x1, she says that her deal with the Massachusetts Bay Militia was that "we will win your wars". Not defend, win. An emphasis on offense, on beating the opponent. Not a maintenance of peace, but a support of active conquest. Alder may have helped the creation of the Cession, but all of that land had to be taken by the US in the first place in order for them to be able to cede it. I will grant that there are more modern phrases in both 1x1 and her speech through Wade in 1x9. "to protect and defend" "to serve and defend" "cooperation, protect, restore peace" And yet, what are those sentiments surrounded by? "wipe the Spree from the face of the earth for good" "There is no middle ground. There is only one side now." "eliminate a threat with decisive finality". And, uh, while it may be tasteless to make comparisons to recent events in our world, this literally happens right after Alder had her soldiers do the opposite of rescue hostages in favor of killing the enemy, and then lied to everyone about who were the perpetrators. This isn't Alder bashing. What I'm saying is that I want to see a portrayal of Alder in fanfic that stays true to this characterization, that she comes from an era where the horrors of war only added to the glory one gained from them, where military commanders led from the front and relished the opportunity to triumph over their opponent. Where performance on the field was the standard by which they measured their respect for others. It's okay that Xena got to have excited smiles of anticipation about her fights. Alder focused the Accords on a specific purpose, rather than allowing for any other application of their powers (e.g. manufacturing, construction, agriculture, medical), because she herself much more prefers the scourge to the plow. There is zero indication in any second of canon, especially in season 1, that Alder was tired of the fight. At most she was annoyed that others kept trying to hold her back. To her, being a soldier is empowering.

[shewhotellsstories]

It is profoundly ghoulish to use a bipolar person having a mental health crisis as an opportunity to talk about how great your fave is.

[tempesttz]

lukewarm take but is it just me or is sophieinwonderland getting worse

[hyenagurl]

finished GoT i shall reread acok next lets hope for under two months… grrm has mentioned twow twice on his blog within a month now hes never beating the “already written twow and ados and is waiting to publish them posthumously” allegations

[privateandshamefulvices]

Crazy to me that most pop history stuff about the Diamond Necklace Affair has the anti-MA backlash portrayed as just completely delusional misogynistic xenophobia, and doesn't at all mention the impact of the botched public branding of Jeanne de la Motte on public opinion.

[alwaysbewoke]

[jerichogender]

the more i read older roy comics, the more i appreciate how devin grayson writes him. i feel like she really read up on & understood the character when she did his solo & titans 1999

[msclaritea]

X-Men '97 Faces Backlash Over Non-Binary Morph, Original Creators Respond

"...The backlash against Morph's portrayal in X-Men '97 has been met with disappointment by the original creators. Julia Lewald, another co-creator, expressed her frustration, questioning whether the critics had missed the core message of the original series, which emphasized empathy, tolerance, and unity. Lewald highlighted the irony of revisiting the same issues of acceptance and inclusivity decades later. She said:

“Did we teach you people nothing? Were you not watching? Did we not figure out how to be nice to each other and how to get along? It’s very odd to feel like we are still dealing with the same issues that we were dealing with 30 years ago. It’s painful.”

Lenore Zann, the voice actor for Rogue, echoed the sentiment of spreading a message of hope and belonging through the series. She hopes that X-Men '97 will inspire viewers, particularly children, to embrace their differences and feel a sense of belonging in the world."

[titfairy]

Lada’s mom is so desperate at this point, all I can think about is that she’s going to lose everything. And I mean, everything, because she basically just betrayed Lada’s trust

She thinks she’s in control, but announcing the marriage to public without informing both Lada and dr Wisanu is such a disastrous move. The gays are flabbergasted

She can continue using “I’m doing this for the future of our business.” reason, which makes it an even more bad move imo. How can Lada and dr Wisanu work well together if their relationship start off this way? With her breaching everyone’s trust. All Lada’s mom did is ensuring life long resentment for both Lada and dr Wishnu.

This is not a strategic business move or whatever, Lada’s mom is just a rampant homophobe.

(What would she do when dr Wisanu comes out later then? lmooo)

She doesn’t realize that Lada can just leave everything behind and start a new life somewhere else. She’s an accomplished doctor by her own. What would Lada’s mom do? Sabotage her own daughter’s career?

What would the mom even do just IF:

1. Lada and Earn decide to go public with their relationship? Wouldn’t that be bad press for the hospital, especially for the mom if she gets exposed?

2. dr Wisanu realize he can just say no to the marriage too?

I don’t think the mom realize that she doesn’t have much control here tbh.