Juno News - December 06, 2019


Bureaucrats worried Jack and Jill STI poem not “inclusive” enough

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Kevin Wiener Paul John
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

175.89

Word count

729

Sentence count

56

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, but they forgot something they need. Should have wrapped it up. Oh my, now both have an STI. And the tweet was deleted a few hours later.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. You've heard that poem your entire life.
00:00:10.520 It's one of the most familiar poems that exists in the English language. But for government,
00:00:15.480 it's not enough just to let sleeping dogs lie. They had to make it about STIs. But they couldn't
00:00:21.480 even do that in a way that didn't overcomplicate it, fill it with political correctness, and make
00:00:26.900 it so that it eventually had to get pulled from circulation. This is what happened back in the
00:00:31.560 fall when Health Canada decided on Random Acts of Poetry Day to put out a little modified and not
00:00:37.440 safe for work version of the Jack and Jill poem. This is what Health Canada tweeted.
00:00:42.460 Jack and Jill did the deed, but they forgot something they need. Should have wrapped it up. Oh my. Now
00:00:48.400 both have an STI. Now it wasn't long after that that the tweet was deleted. We'll get to the reason why
00:00:54.720 in just a moment. But this tweet actually took nine bureaucrats to come together and approve it,
00:01:01.580 and there were still concerns that it wasn't inclusive enough. For example, when you translate
00:01:06.560 it to French, it doesn't rhyme and it doesn't have the same effect. So that was seen to have been a
00:01:11.100 problem. They had to create a French alternative about Paul et Pauline. Another concern is that Jack
00:01:17.440 and Jill is just a standard heterosexual couple. That wasn't going to be inclusive enough. Someone 0.96
00:01:22.800 suggested they instead make it about Jack and Max, even though Jack and Max is not the one that went
00:01:29.120 up to fetch the pail of water that everyone knows, thus defeating the purpose of this STI version of
00:01:35.340 the poem. There was a compromise that someone tried to put in there. They made their own poem that was
00:01:40.600 about a same-sex couple that never made it into circulation. Here was that one. Jack and John did the
00:01:46.220 deed. Jack had a drip he didn't heed. Should have wrapped it up. Oh my, now they both have an STI.
00:01:53.180 Now that is some raunchy stuff coming from Health Canada. That one never made it through.
00:01:56.900 I don't know what it means that Jack had a drip he didn't heed, and you know what? I'm okay not
00:02:00.480 knowing for the time being. But this is what it took. At one point, the tweet was put out to a panel
00:02:05.700 of eight bureaucrats as someone demanded a scientific assessment. They wanted to know if this was going to
00:02:12.980 be something that could get approval as scientifically and factually accurate so that they could put this
00:02:19.660 tweet into the pipeline for receiving approval, development of images, translation, and scheduling.
00:02:25.300 This is all for a tweet. Nine people going over a 24-word poem. This is how government decides it's
00:02:33.620 going to do things. Now this all comes from an access to information package from Health Canada. It was
00:02:38.700 procured by lawyer and prolific tweeter Kevin Wiener, who is kind enough to share it with me.
00:02:44.720 163 pages of documents, mostly emails, going over the Twitter schedule for Health Canada,
00:02:51.000 and back and forth on this tweet. How to make it more inclusive. At one point, they're resigned to
00:02:55.800 accept that they can't do it in French. They can't do it with a same-sex couple. So one bureaucrat from
00:03:01.040 Health Canada promises they will endeavor to do more inclusive poems in the future. But none of them,
00:03:07.380 in the course of investigating this, saw that Jack and Jill were traditionally siblings. So the fact
00:03:13.320 that Jack gave Jill an STI is problematic for a number of reasons. The tweet was pulled about an
00:03:18.640 hour after it was posted. A chain of emails came through Health Canada, wondering what to do about
00:03:24.320 it, how to respond to media inquiries. The Privy Council got involved, which is the bureaucratic arm of
00:03:29.800 the Prime Minister's office. And at one point, Health Canada promised that it would have no more poems
00:03:34.960 until after the federal election. This was just a few weeks before Canadians went to the polls.
00:03:40.860 But yes, the most complicated 24-word poem in the history of the English language, apparently,
00:03:46.100 and only an hour until it was gone. Or I guess we should say gonorrhea. For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.
00:03:51.460 OK.