For help, advice and discussion about stuff not related to aviation. Play nice: no religion, no politics and no axe grinding please.
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By MichaelP
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1885688
Today I remarked upon a post on my FB.
A friend’s sister was being married, and there she was in her marriage Kimono...
The friend lives in Canada where the media is often anti men especially white anglo saxons.
Not many Canadians get married these days.
In Japan she would be pressured to marry, in Canada she is pressured to be independent. Neither are reasonable options, people should decide from their own hearts.

Canada has a confusion of many different orientations.

Equality in Canada is to be equal to a man, and not complementary.
It’s a disaster mitigated by migration of ethnicities for whom marriage and family is still important.

I think society is taking a very dangerous path, it will reduce populations in the rational community while benefiting the religious community.
Fair is fair, I agree with a lot that has been done to equalise, and I’ve done my bit to train and encourage the fairer sex (if I’m allowed to write that) to be pilots.
But fairness should not run to “positive discrimination” as it sometimes does in Canada.

Mao tried to make China gender neutral, all wearing the same uniforms, girls with short hair cuts, everyone in blue or olive trousers and shirts.
It didn’t work.
Chinese women are mostly feminine, dress well, and even so they decide whether they can be bothered with men or not. They don’t have to dress like men to live in a politically correct society.
70% of white Canadian men choose to marry Asian women.
#1885689
@Cessna571 - you're right about the intended inclusivity and I've got no problem with it.

Not all sailors sail and not all soldiers fight (well, they do after a few beers but that's by the by) so I suppose not all aviators aviate. It's a shame they couldn't find a term which didn't suggest they did, though.
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By nallen
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1885691
Cessna571 wrote:
nallen wrote: (Me, I've been quietly making the texts I edit for a living as gender neutral as possible for the last 30 years.)


This is the bit I don’t understand tbh.

We have someone at work who does this.

Edmund Hilary was a man, I don’t get why he shouldn’t be referred to with male pronouns?



Quite right; it would absurd to refer to him otherwise. But that is not what is at issue.

<Slight thread drift, inspired by your choice of Hilary: James Morris [he], was the journalist on the 1953 Everest expedition; later Jan Morris [she]. >
kanga liked this
#1885714
MichaelP wrote:..

Equality in Canada is to be equal to a man, and not complementary.
...


.. and Canada is (has been since 1857) bilingual at Federal level (and in New Brunswick), with one of the languages having an inflected grammatical gender system :wink:

[There were official Federal style guides for writing 'gender-inclusive' French documents, as I had to when embedded in DND/MDN; but there were often convenient circumlocutions. In this context Le/La pilote was easier than L'aviateur/trice but one would have to careful to add competent(e) after it if apposite :?

Inuktitut (with official status in Nunavut and some parts of other Provinces/Territories including Nunatsiavut which encompasses Goose Bay), I'm pleased to say, has no grammatical gender :)

In some majority anglophone parts of Canada, including MichaelP's BC I assume, even Federal officials may forget their francophone obligations. One of my Quebecois francophone (but fluently bilingual) colleagues was very indignant (and rightly) when arriving at Vancouver Airport from the US to find that the Customs/Immigration official could not serve him in French, and had to fetch a colleague.

Equally, I heard of an anglophone Cree member of the RCMP in Ontario who could get extra pay the higher the French proficiency she could demonstrate in tests although she rarely used it, but got paid nothing extra for being fluent in Cree which she used regularly :? And no, not in my repertoire .. ]
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By skydriller
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1885723
A4 Pacific wrote:
By the way, if that’s the first time you’ve heard the term ‘aviator’ ... then get on board. No longer does it mean just aircrew, but the term ‘aviator’ has now replaced the generic term of ‘airman’ to bring right up to date the way we should describe all of our personnel in a modern and appropriate manner.
In which dictionary is the term aviator defined in the way the RAF would like it to be defined?


It certainly isnt the first time Ive heard the word, but it is the first time anyone has suggested that anyone in the RAF is now an Aviator. Sorry, but an "Aviator" is not just anyone in the RAF, it is a term to denote anyone that flies and/or operates an aeroplane, RAF, Navy, Army or Civilian.

I dont really understand what was wrong with the generic "Airman" which could have been extended to also use "Airwoman"... but hey, I guess that isnt logical enough...

Regards, SD..
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By johnm
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1885726
Not wokery but political correctness and that is still a scourge in the UK . The two terms are not synonymous
#1885734
Loco parentis wrote:Here's me thinking that Wolfe defeated Montcalm and the French and captured Canada for the British !


<lengthy history nerdery, but on implicit request :oops: >

That was 100 years earlier. At the end of that conflict ('Seven Years War'), the Treaty which settled it included a provision that the rights of francophones in all of mainland British North America plus PEI (thus, incidentally, excluding the island of Newfoundland, a separate Colony) to use the language for all purposes would be fully guaranteed by the British Crown, providing that those francophones swore fealty to the Crown. Some francophones in 'Acadie' (roughly, New Brunswick) refused to accept the provision and chose to remain under French sovereignty (in some US mythology, were 'expelled by the brutal British') by emigrating to then French Louisiana; there the Acadiens became known as Cajuns. They were rather betrayed when France sold the territory to the US ('Louisiana Purchase'), whereupon they lost all their language rights, and quite a few migrated back to NB preferring British to US rule! BNA then encompassed Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI, Lower Canada (which became ~Quebec), Upper Canada (which became ~Ontario), BC, and 'the North West Territories' (encompassing the whole of the rest, much then uncharted). That language (and Catholic rights; infra) guarantee was carried forward in the British North America Act, 1857, creating Canada as an internally self-governing Federation (effectively, the first Dominion).

Incidentally, the same Treaty awarded full civil rights in those territories to Roman Catholics (who were mostly then francophone), the first place in the British Empire guaranteeing those rights. It also conceded continuing French sovereignty over St Pierre et Miquelon (islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence), which are still an Overseas Department of France, and fishing rights for their inhabitants in the Gulf. The Western coast of Newfoundland is still called 'the French Shore' by some Newfoundlanders. Also, after Yorktown (1782), one of the first acts of the newly independent State of New Hampshire was formally to rescind any putative rights of their francophone and Roman Catholic citizens. The latter provision had to go after the US Constitution (with its 'freedom of religion' Amendment in the Bill of Rights), but the loss of French language rights there (and in Vermont and New York) persists to this day, although there are still sizable francophone communities in all of them (and Northern Minnesota).

Gradually the NWT were further divided into new Provinces and Territories, and the border with the US (disputed in many areas for a long time, to the South and with Alaska) was gradually agreed in several further Treaties after the War of 1812. Newfoundland did not join Canada until 1949.

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By TheFarmer
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1885746
I totally agree.

It’s one thing to use the correct terminology, and a totally different thing to bow down to the woke brigade who just like to be offended by quite literally everything.

And in this day and age, someone only has to say they’re offended by something, and a process/phrase/custom that’s been in place quite happily for hundreds of years has to be changed in an instant, for fear of being sprawled all over social media and the tabloids.

It’s starting to get on my mammaries/pectorals.
#1885774
When I joined women were in a separate force - the WRAF - and until fairly recently were still labelled out with (W) added to ranks. Thankfully as time has gone on all this has gone.

The next generation RAF will warfight very differently and the people and skills we need are developing quickly; it won’t be large numbers of people sitting round airbases in uniform that is for sure. We simply can’t afford to disenfranchise large parts of our people / potential recruits, so a lot is changing.

Whether this term is the right one, dunno, but if it means we keep and attract some good people then I’m not going to bother much.

A lot of the same people who predicted the sky would fall in when we allowed beards will probably not feel the same…
G-BLEW, kanga, nallen liked this
#1885777
TheFarmer wrote:..to bow down to the woke brigade who just like to be offended by quite literally everything. ..


personally, I've never met any such. On tabloid front page headlines which scream about some absurd alleged wokery taking unreasonable offence at something, further investigation of the story has suggested to me that no one has actually claimed to be offended by anything; however, someone has suggested that someone else might be unreasonably but 'wokely' be offended, and that was the reason for some entirely reasonable (to me) action. Obviously, others' experiences may be different :roll:
johnm liked this
#1885780
MattL wrote:A lot of the same people who predicted the sky would fall in when we allowed beards will probably not feel the same…


Now that is just plain wrong. I've got a beard at the moment and I look like a right scruffy barsteward. Unfortunately, I have only two possible looks: clean shaven or street drinker. I think that influences how I feel about beards.

I've been out of the RAF for a very long time now. Last time I was on a station I kept pointing out that people weren't wearing ties. I think if I went past a Junior Aviators Mess now with beards and so on, I'd probably have some kind of episode. :D
Rob P, MattL liked this
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