Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/17/hashtag-hate-trap-censorship-freedom-expression-dapper-laughs-julien-blanc

I'm still not sure why Julien Blanc gets lumped in with this. Surely a Visa application is precisely a request for what you're doing to be assessed in terms of whether it's wanted/needed in the country you're applying to? In which case it's a legit channel for saying 'no'. If I applied for a Visa to go to the US to get paid for idk, doing 'street art' or something, I'd hardly moan about being 'banned' for not being granted one.

He'd only need the type of temporary visa bands get when they come over to play shows. Unless there's seen to be a risk that they'll abscond, they're normally granted to Americans without a second thought. The justification suggested for keeping him out is that his act is not conducive to the public good. That said, given that he has been filmed assaulting women and encouraging men to do the same, 'free speech' isn't much of a justification here. His views aren't offensive, they present an active danger to women.

As does he, obviously.

In law, an individual can be refused entry to the UK if “admitting the person may lead to a breach of UK law or public order” or “admitting the person may lead to an offence being committed by someone else”. Given the instructional content of his seminars, and the existence of footage showing Blanc assaulting women in Japan, the legal case for turning Blanc back at the border is clear.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/free-speech-must-be-defended-not-julien-blanc-s-incitement-violence-against-women

http://coreyrobin.com/2014/12/05/more-news-on-the-salaita-case/

actual effects being felt on uiuc, broader faculty pushback

if I could only tell...

the broader faculty pushback is administrative, though; they're from unit heads and chairs agreeing that the way the university handled this was fucked. some units that didn't get involved before floated no confidence votes but vocal opposition to Salaita himself squelched those. but the real issue on campus is how the administration got involved in a faculty search, and how they've claimed that civility is as important as scholarship at the U. so faculty are only now starting to unify on procedural grounds against the administration.

as is expected (minimally)

have you guys been hearing any of the state chatter about shuttering programs, shrinking offerings on the basis of enrollments/majors/graduates alone? i would expect it to touch you the least of any in the ui system, but then i've heard reorg talk ('let's just put those departments together in one big one') about my big R alma mater too, so.

there's always re-org talk; it's something deans can do to fill out their admin experience so that they can get a promotion

& aren't course offerings arranged on the basis of enrollments/majors/grads already? that's been normal at all my institutions.

but my own unit has shuffled off re-org talk & our numbers are fine so there's no present pressure to change anything, except to hire (on which re. yr revive though)

i guess yeah, i shoulda said, more that that criterion would be magnified so as to be everything. research, nil, quality, nil, distinctive service to the community, nil, requirement for a serious university to have a program in X, nil.

i had read someone at a lower-tier school in your system saying much more explicit things they'd heard from some state-ed board drone; fully online curriculum (do it or die), etc.

that drop in applications mentioned in the link is pretty unbelievable, tho. even at that level it's not like people can be turning their noses up at jobs.

ah. no, nothing like that. "flagship" & all that. it's a place with Nobel laureates & its aspirations are maximal. that affects everything. even the online stuff is extremely optional.

the drop in apps is a senior thing though (hence why I'm in this tab rather than the other, ugh)

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/12/17/huds-soda-stream-suspend-purchase/

Last fall, some members of the College Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Harvard Islamic Society noticed that the filtered water machines in certain dining halls had Sodastream labels on them. Citing discomfort with the machines and the potential of the machines to offend those affected by the Israel-Palestine conflict, the students emailed House masters and tutors to arrange a meeting with University officials to have the machines removed.

Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash ’15, a member of the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance who attended some of the subsequent meetings, said that she believed that regardless of the University’s position, the machines and their association with the disputed territory could be offensive to Palestinian students.

“I think it is neither anti-Israel nor anti-Semite to take stand against the occupation,” she said. “These machines can be seen as a microaggression to Palestinian students and their families and like the University doesn’t care about Palestinian human rights.” She added that her views should not be construed as the official club stance on the issue.

microaggression

Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash ’15, a member of the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance

the fuck you trying to do to me

good to have u back deems

Sodastream-machines obviously has nothing to do anywhere on a campus. Hopefully we can all agree on that, right? I mean, boycutting stuff made in illegal settlements is not the same as boycutting all of Israel.

dont tell me how to feel

israel already boycuts itself amirite

what does this have to do with free speech

Take it to ILAFL

Who speaks for the fizzy water making thing, who

Boycotts, hmm.

Compared with boycotting McDonalds, how much does the suggested boycott of sodastream machines help people?

I mean I'm thinking both of them, and boycotts in general, probably don't do much?

And also doomed gestures and the narcissism of small differences

tonight in a coffeeshop i heard a bro talking up the awesome benefits of sodastream all bro-like so apparently they've got some market penetration

Because just the very casualness of a consumer appliance like a sodastream machine kind of makes the boycott attempt seem ridiculous all by itself, regardless of the politics - but then, depending on what you're used to, anything can seem trivial and given, and protests about it ridiculous

The Sodastream boycott has been effective afaict. They have stopped production in the occupied territories and moved it back to Israel.

lol

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/at-law-school-is-insensitivity-grounds-for-an-objection/383882/

Law Professor Eugene Volokh recently wrote about a controversial exam question at UCLA, where he teaches. The question noted a protest in Ferguson, Missouri, where the stepfather of Michael Brown, the unarmed man killed by police, reacted to news that Officer Darren Wilson would not be charged in the killing. Overcome with anger, he shouted to a crowd of protestors, "Burn this bitch down!” Students were asked to write a memo analyzing how the First Amendment applies to such speech. Several complained. Said one UCLA student: "These kinds of questions create a hostile learning environment for students of color, especially black students who are already disadvantaged by the institution." The professor who gave the test agreed to adjust grades of test-takers who did worse on that question than the rest of their First Amendment exam.

On the other side of the country, Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk has taken to the New Yorker to express concern over her perception that students are increasingly likely to object when classroom discussion turns to rape. "Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well," she writes. "One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word 'violate' in class—as in 'Does this conduct violate the law?'—because the word was triggering."

"We now use the vocabulary of post-traumatic stress disorder—trauma, triggers, etc.—to refer to virtually any bad feelings occasioned by controversial events or expression."

I often worry about what this means for individuals who are both survivors of individual trauma and members of communities that have suffered collective trauma. I've been mugged 3 times in this city, on all occasions having been grabbed from behind on the sidewalk at night--now my heart rate spikes when I hear footsteps behind me on the sidewalk at night. That fits my (granted pretty layman's) understanding of a trigger in the traditional sense. While I can't speak to the interior of anyone else's experience and wouldn't ever try to invalidate anyone else's feelings, *I feel* a little :| when I see "being triggered" being used as a synonym for "this made me upset."

I'm in with the notion of collective trauma, but I think maybe individual survivors of trauma might be better served by unhooking these common languages from one another.

I am wary of the term "triggers" being so public. It is an Internet term, and if you use it, you feel weak, and I don't think that's a healthy persona to have on the 'net.

I'm not sure I follow you?

i'm with you on displeasure with seeing "triggered" used synonymously with "i am temporarily upset". i had a similar experience with a violent mugging (also a crazy violent dog attack) and so to me a trigger is something that instantly morphs your brain and body into a tense helpless defensive mode. i have similar thoughts whenever i overhear someone on the phone say "ugh, the bank closed early today just as i was about to walk in, ohmigod i am SO DEPRESSED NOW." not a huge deal, just annoying and it devalues the original meaning of the word, bit by bit.

It's a term from recovery groups, where gamergaters and net creeps etc. don't belong - I'm not sure it's something to be used in a more open forum - whether it's online or in a classroom. It just feels like it's giving predatory and abusive people ammunition.

I think for it to work everyone in the conversation needs to agree already that trigger warnings are a good idea

Other groups' politeness codes always look arcane and bizarre

(Should be question marks on both of those really)

We are in the 'irony stage' with certain therapeutic terms, meaning arseholes are using them either incorrectly or sardonically.

i'm starting to view "abuse discourse" as bordering on being so widespread as to be useless.

like i was reading through this: http://blog.ameliagreenhall.com/post/what-it-was-like-to-co-found-model-view-culture-with-shanley-kane

and my takeaway is "you worked with a demanding, driven asshole".

if someone says "i worked with an abuser" or "it was an abusive relationship" i expect more, in some sense, than somebody just being miserable to work with, or losing their temper or etc.

i heard someone the other day claim, in seriousness, being asked to explain something when they didn't want to was "abusive".

i don't know what's happening, how we can hope to interact like this

the problem is not concepts like abuse or triggering its that somehow i feel like for a group of people these are becoming the _only_ concepts they know how to use

Habitual yelling and requesting that she cut off her friends seem like abuse to me. My stepdad "lost his temper" a lot when were were kids, and my sister, brother, and I are all comfortable characterizing his behavior then as abuse.

If you follow the pastebins Shanley Kane is tweeting, she admits to saying things like those that weev accuses her of saying, and in her chatlog she laughs when he says someone should hit his girlfriend. I'm sure there are associates and allies of Kane's right now who are skeptical of the sincerity of her commitment to social justice; I'm sure many wonder whether, at best, she is engaging in the politics of pity, or, at worst, she is using social justice, righteous anger, and twitter beefs as mercenary means to boosting her brand.

And "being asked to explain something" can be abusive depending on the context. Being asked once is one thing; it might be innocent or it might be rude, but not abuse; being asked many times can certainly be harassing and abusive, especially if the person asking really has no right to know.

I see no communication apocalypse looming. In spite of this blip, occurring largely on the internet, of some people being more mindful of some speech and speech acts, I see no evidence in my daily life that people are having difficulty communicating.

Given that today's college students are unlikely to enter the workforce, this stuff might not change society too quickly

My stepdad "lost his temper" a lot when were were kids, and my sister, brother, and I are all comfortable characterizing his behavior then as abuse.

^^^

The act of going through the theatrical display of losing one's temper even though/because you know it will scare or hurt someone is also something abusive parents/partners/people do. Esp if it happens repeatedly.

to uh quote myself last time this subject came up

I think maybe individual survivors of trauma might be better served by unhooking these languages from one another.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, December 23, 2014 8:32 PM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that said, in the article greenhall writes:

eventually I was able to see many of the things I was experiencing - such as yelling, excuses that the yelling was just because she needed me so much, her demands that I isolate myself from my friends - as classic abuser tactics.

this is otm

yeah, having grown up with abusers, i can't say that getting punched out by a angry, drunken parent is any worse than being trapped in a corner and made to feel like human garbage. six of one...

so i checked and greenhall's "leaving" post says: "As part of my values, it was important for me to build a business which could be run sustainably, for years, with a long term goal of working only 40-50 hours a week and being able to take weekends off, and occasional vacations. However, it became clear that my co-founder had a different vision for the future of the company that wasn't compatible with those values"

So in asking someone (an equal) to work longer and getting angry when they didn't can turn into a very different story just by changing the words used to characterize it. but we knew this.

my frustration is we have this great big language and the power to actually discern lots of different sorts of situations and meanings and interactions and instead there's a desire to reach for always not just the same word but the same narrative.

i don't know if arguing about shanley as such will do any good at all but i gotta say printing a piece criticizing someone when gg and breitbart are circling the wagons is really nagl, even if its something that eventually needs to be said. i wonder if this also has to do with different ideas of the correct approaches to situations -- one that says 'lets look at what is happening in this moment first and foremost' and the other which says 'lets take a moral inventory of the parties involved as a whole and see if either side is generally decent enough to warrant unreserved support'.

I've never heard of either party or their company, but pretty much how I break it down is that Shanley tried to manipulate her business partner into behaving differently, instead of accepting her choices and deciding what to do about it. And manipulation + forceful behaviors like anger & accusations, used against someone who you know can be intimidated or fearful, is coercive.

And coercive behavior + a big power/fear disparity is an abusive dynamic, like many other cruel acts that damage the health of other ppl repeatedly over time.

Imo that doesn't make Shanley evil or irredeemable, and if she was in a relationship w someone who was harming her it doesn't surprise me that under extreme stress she didn't make awesome decisions. Duh.

so my issue (one more post and then i'll stop digging what i feel is a hole for myself) is we have all these things, ranging from actually threatening people with harm or carrying out harm to calling someone names on the internet, with other stuff like yelling at someone and making them feel bad because they're not working as hard as you or even asking that someone do something they don't want to or saying that something someone did pissed you off or talking about someone behind their back or etc. and these all in a sense fall under the word 'abuse', which then means in my mind that every possible sort of negative interaction where both people don't walk away feeling like total winners has an element of 'abuse' and this makes no sense to me.

ok so say somebody wants to make a choice and i know this person well, is my only option to accept this choice and decide what to do about it? is attempting to sway somebody necessarily something that should go by the name manipulation? and is attempting to sway somebody and being passionate about it therefore necessarily coercion and abuse? i don't see how we can have human interaction then. there's a huge rhetorical arsenal of 'i am going to attempt to change your mind' options and some are clearly a priori off limits in decent society, but i feel like a whole bunch of others shouldn't be?

if she was in a relationship w someone who was harming her it doesn't surprise me that under extreme stress she didn't make awesome decisions. Duh.

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Wednesday, January 21, 2015 4:13 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i've always been fascinated by how this dynamic replicates itself--i've only been in one relationship i'd genuinely call abusive, and that person had the most horrific childhood & adolescence of anyone i've ever met. i want to know more about why this happens the way it does.

we have all these things, ranging from actually threatening people with harm or carrying out harm

Names can be harmful, let's get that straight from the start.

which then means in my mind that every possible sort of negative interaction where both people don't walk away feeling like total winners has an element of 'abuse' and this makes no sense to me.

No, I agree that scenario wouldn't seem to make sense, but then that's not a real scenario. What is the problem with letting someone define when they have felt harmed/abused for themselves, and believing that they mean it? I know you're smarter than getting hung up on the word "abuse" itself, but let's just lay out that there's never going to be a dictionary definition that satisfies everyone and applies in all contexts, and that if you invoke it, something magical happens. So why not believe someone when she says that she has felt abused, and consider whether it requires any response from us, and if not, move on? Is there a downside?