Concordia prof slanders Quebec accent
It’s been rumbling through social media that Concordia professor Gad Saad called the Quebec French accent an affront to human dignity.
Adding a link to the column by Marc Cassivi that H. John mentions in his comment below.
qatzelok 09:09 on 2023-08-03 Permalink
This might be an example of racism depending on the context in which he has accused “the other” of being unacceptable and inferior in some way.
Kate 09:15 on 2023-08-03 Permalink
I don’t even think it’s racism, just a prof trying to be edgy. Concordia will have to discipline him.
Faiz Imam 09:49 on 2023-08-03 Permalink
Look up his twitter.
Saad has spend years in American far right circles raging against the usual culture war topics. Feminism, LGBT issues and the end of western civilisation.
This guy should have been fired years ago for much worse comments.
This is actually the first time I’ve heard him talk about “normal” politics.
PatrickC 09:50 on 2023-08-03 Permalink
That TVA story does the annoying thing of summarizing a tweet and then reproducing the tweet itself, in fact, often a retweet. I realize they want to “document” their story with a “visual,” but really, what’s the point? It’s like those lecturers who take five minutes to read you what’s on the PowerPoint slide you’ve already read for yourself in 30 seconds.
Kate 10:25 on 2023-08-03 Permalink
I realized on noticing this was said on Joe Rogan that the professor must be right wing, since nobody that wasn’t right wing would be on that show, apparently.
Kevin 10:33 on 2023-08-03 Permalink
Joe Rogan is Larry King for people who find reading hard.
Blork 11:31 on 2023-08-03 Permalink
Not defending Joe Rogan, but it’s inaccurate to say that only right wingers go on that show.
My understanding of Rogan (I don’t listen to him, but I read commentary about him about him a fair bit) is that he is primarily a free speech absolutist and libertarian, and loves to be provocative, so right wingers naturally gravitate there. But he’s had plenty of non-right wingers on the show, such as Amy Schumer and Russell Brand (each has been on a number of times). Bernie Sanders has been on (and Rogan has suggested that he voted for Sanders).
The little bit of Joe Rogan I have heard (and/or heard about) suffers primarily from the problem of reductionism, whereby complex and nuanced ideas are stripped of their complexity and nuance in order to arrive at a suitable and easily digestable conclusion. This is why his show is so successful; because it simplifies complicated issues by taking all of the complexity out of them, thereby making them easy to understand for people with short attention spans and shallow intellectual interests and abilities.
I should add that Joe Rogan is not the only one guilty of this. Follow any comment thread on any even remotely political FB group or blog and this is what you see over and over. This is the biggest and most tragic legacy of social media if you ask me.
JaneyB 11:34 on 2023-08-03 Permalink
It seems that Saad also called Beatles songs ‘an affront to human dignity’ and stressed that he finds their songs ‘revolting’. Hmmm. The guy is a nutbar and, as Kate said above, a prof trying to be edgy. On one Rogan show, he started talking about his wife’s behaviour in the bedroom. Yipes!
Blork 13:24 on 2023-08-03 Permalink
He claims that he uses that expression frequently, for comedic effect. Yeah, we’ll I do things like that too, but when I’m talking shit F2F with my buddies and we’re all having a laugh. Does this guy not understand the difference between shit-talk with your buddies and being interviewed in the media?
Kevin 19:36 on 2023-08-03 Permalink
The standard CYA for the extreme right-wing is to say that every word out of their mouths and keyboards is a joke.
That doesn’t stop them from serving prison sentences though.
Chris 23:10 on 2023-08-03 Permalink
>I realized on noticing this was said on Joe Rogan that the professor must be right wing, since nobody that wasn’t right wing would be on that show, apparently.
Is that “apparently” a kind of sarcasm or facetiousness?
Joe Rogan has a lot of haters, usually people that have never watched or listened to anything he’s ever said (or just one clip with no context). He’s a Bernie Sanders voter, but somehow his detractors paint him as ‘extreme right wing’. It’s very strange.
H. John 01:22 on 2023-08-06 Permalink
Let’s start by saying I think two jerks, Saad and Cassivi, shared their opinions.
I find it hard to understand why most (all?) of the criticism seems to be of Saad, and none of Cassivi.
After reading Kate’s post, the article it linked to, and Cassivi’s column, I watched my first episode of Joe Rogan. There goes 3 hours and seven minutes I’ll never get back.
For the first 45 minutes they talked about a number of different issues. Saad was obviously there to sell his latest book. Every time I was sure they would go off the rails, on the many topics they covered, one or the other brought it back to a balanced point of view that I think most people here would not disagree with.
They then started talking about their vacations, Rogan visited Greece, and Saad was in Portugal.
Saad went on to say (transcription is mine):
“We just came back from Portugal. We did 16 days in Portugal. First time ever.
Really enjoyed Portugal, with the exception, apologies to all of my Portuguese listeners and fans, not a very attractive language. Brazilian Portuguese is nicer than Portuguese Portuguese
I’m stealing here, I think it was a comedian who said this, Portuguese is akin to someone having a perpetual stroke…” And so now I’m going to get hate mail from Portuguese people…”
Saad went on:
“Italian, you know, is a universally loved language, French as spoken in France, … now I’m going to upset the next group of people, Quebec French is an affront to human dignity. Yes sir. I said it. Yes. It’s horrifying.
My wife is able to switch her French, depending on whom she’s speaking with, so if she’s speaking with someone who speaks international French she’ll speak in a regular manner, not Parisian French, but like an international French.
I speak an international French ‘cause we’re from Lebanon.
When she speaks to a Quebecer she turns into a complete Quebecer, and often times I say “How did you just do that?” That sounds so inauthentic; she goes, well no, because if I speak in the regular French then it’ll come across as haughty. But that to me is so strange. If I speak with an Oxford accent with one person and then I turn into the Southern drawl with another person…”
They went on to talk about his (Saad’s) accent when he’s speaking English.
It seems this, along with the fact that a sports coach in France had been mean to Cassivi’s 11 year old son by saying he had a “funny accent”, rated a column in La Presse.
In Cassivi’s mind, Saad’s comments were so serious and “deplorable” that he saw the need to call his employer, Concordia, to find out if they held the same opinion. He doesn’t mention if he called the French coach’s employer.
He ended his column by reminding Saad he’s an immigrant, and clearly an ungrateful one. As he wrote “Cela ne change rien au mépris qu’il affiche ouvertement, sans la moindre contrition, pour sa société d’accueil.”