The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

"met not with tar, but with dialogue"

'hey do you like my blackface costume?'
"FUCK YOU!!!"

is about all the dialogue it deserves

i mean we've dialogued about these type of things for years. at this point everybody's position is relatively understood. and nobody dressing in such costumes is interested in dialogue, they're interested in people looking at them

bleh. I thought you wrote "this quote is NOT out of an Onion story".

i am too hung over to be online right now.

Onion-worthy.

come over -- I got tomato juice.

i mean we've dialogued about these type of things for years. at this point everybody's position is relatively understood. and nobody dressing in such costumes is interested in dialogue, they're interested in people looking at them

this is the beauty of the college freshman, they keep making more of them and none of them have ever had a day of dialoguing in their whole damn lives

I want to find the bureaucrat/administrator who came up with 'dialoguing' as a word, cover him in honey, and hurl him at a wasp hive.

kind of a tough Double Dare physical challenge but if you want that grand prize....

I think everyone should resign

i love how thoroughly unfun christakis' idea of halloween is

"everyone shut up, stop drinking, turn the music off -- we need to have a serious talk about my costume"

i think she just wants students to define for themselves what they deem unacceptable instead of having the administration dictate it. some people are allergic to anything that seems like paternalism. this might be the attitude ilx defines as "creepy liberalism" but that's where she seems to be coming from.

Ironically, many students seem pretty certain that they find her unacceptable. But that doesn't seem to worry her.

Or, y'know, she might just be racist?

please exit this world where "gentle suggestion with no threat of consequences" means "dictation"

if anything the email strikes me as the dean trying to remove any potential blame from the school in case controversy hits

I feel sad for people who don't see anything odd about a college sending out Halloween costume guidelines

xp removing potential blame was definitely part of the reasoning behind the email. another part though, i feel, was that the suggestion of paternalism sets of alarm bells for some people. "safe spaces" is a newly popular concept. it wasn't too long ago that young people pretty much always argued for less adults meddling in their affairs/telling them how to run their social lives

"hey mom, there's a girl at my school looks like this!" *pulls eyes back into squints* "chinky chinky chink!"

"son you need to understand something. i know you don't mean it but laughing at how someone looks and calling them names is hurtful"

"stop meddling in my affairs!!"

i.e. qualx majorly otm. trees you are really on the wrong road here.

Or, y'know, she might just be racist?

― Frederik B, Sunday, November 8, 2015

occam's razor slices again

wow, tracer workin a little blue today

"hey mom, there's a girl at my school looks like this!" *pulls eyes back into squints* "chinky chinky chink!"

"son you need to understand something. i know you don't mean it but laughing at how someone looks and calling them names is hurtful"

"stop meddling in my affairs!!"

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Sunday, November 8, 2015 9:45 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

university students aren't schoolchildren though, and treating them as schoolchildren is what these ppl who ascribe to the 'coddling of the american mind' viewpoint are complaining about right? I should say that the university email seems completely innocuous to me and that I think the associate master's response was wrongheaded and clumsy

xp removing potential blame was definitely part of the reasoning behind the email. another part though, i feel, was that the suggestion of paternalism sets of alarm bells for some people. "safe spaces" is a newly popular concept. it wasn't too long ago that young people pretty much always argued for less adults meddling in their affairs/telling them how to run their social lives

― Treeship, Sunday, November 8, 2015 4:32 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

please exit this world where "gentle suggestion with no threat of consequences" means "meddling in their affairs/telling them how to run their social lives"

I'm not even agreeing with her. I'm just saying that she should be allowed to have that perspective and the demands for her to apologize for it are ott

Like, she has a different line for where meddling begins than you do and the students do and also than i do. (I support the friendly reminder email ftr.) She should be able to have her own line and not be called a racist.

Occam's razor here would dictate you read her actual words instead of ascribing motives to her.

If we're pro free speech, then clearly I'm allowed to call her a racist?

Am I demanding you apologize or else step down from your job?

Am I saying you're Swedish guy named Johan? Are you drunk?

I have no idea what you're talking about right now?

If we're pro free speech, then clearly I'm allowed to call her a racist?

allowed ~by whom~?

office of speech allowances

i’m radically in favor of free speech in all circumstances including hate speech but i make a special allowance for curtailing the right of people to call other people racist which i think is over the line and particularly heinous

university students aren't schoolchildren though, and treating them as schoolchildren is what these ppl who ascribe to the 'coddling of the american mind' viewpoint are complaining about right?

it was an analogy yes so for clarity's sake we could do a reworking of that with an example from an office, with an HR email to staff. the usual suspects would roll their eyes and moan about how lame it was, what is this, the nanny state? and that's coincidentally a good way to smoke out who the dickheads are!

I should say that the university email seems completely innocuous to me and that I think the associate master's response was wrongheaded and clumsy

yes!

wow, tracer workin a little blue today

sorry, that was literally something a child i know did around their parents, who were horrified obv. all of this comes back to the thing of like, if this associate-master-just-thinkin-'baout-things-in-a-public-email-to-everyone is made slightly uncomfortable by having to take to heart the very gentle and soberly reasoned nudging about being thoughtful, that is a tiny price to pay for living on a campus where people aren't confronted by blackface and other unproblematized caricatures of themselves and their families.

I'm against most speech. This thread helped.

it's like the underlying assumption is that the intercultural affairs committee or whoever just ENJOYS sending out emails like this, regardless of actual student behavior. there's a reason these emails get sent dog!!!

xpost

If we're pro free speech, then clearly I'm allowed to call her a racist?

Unless you're slandering her, which in fact I think you are

horrible person's alright though i think

Yeah that's just garden variety ignorance not libel, so congratulations

The addling of the Danish mind

Guys mutiny wasn't good for the bounty

it's like the underlying assumption is that the intercultural affairs committee or whoever just ENJOYS sending out emails like this, regardless of actual student behavior.

actually

curious if Yale explicitly promises a "safe space" and what the legal or quasi-legal definition of it might be.

also wondering if it's really in the interest of an impersonal and heterogenous institution like a university to make such promises beyond a motive of "this'll look good in a brochure."

the very angry student in the last video did seem pretty emphatic on that point, 'home', like it was part of the local sales pitch

iirc nobody was thinking of our college dorms as that kind of home but they were fairly standard janky dorms

yeah maybe what we're seeing here in the increasing tendency for schools to provide not so much an education as a lifestyle conflicting with older vestigial models of education.

They probably don't use the term 'safe space' exactly, but universities have a duty of care, right? Never been that clear on what that means, though...

surely, and it would be interesting to trace out how and why what's expected has evolved--my intuition is that it has as much more to do with how universities market themselves and compete for students than it does with college freshman being especially sensitive these days (or maybe better put that the sensitivity in question can be as much a product of expectations as anything else).

Not that freshmen are especially sensitive more that that sensitivity is now a popular internet fetish

ryan otm. this is a debate about changing norms and expectations in higher ed.

yes and residential universities in particular have long histories of duties of care, but the impression i had in mind, having gone to a big state school in the late 90s, was that the overall… aspect… of the delivery of that care was, i dunno, institutional, in the way that food-service food is institutional. serviceable but indifferent to individual comforts.

this is story is pretty interesting. a hunger strike! not really totally connected to this thread but i'm putting it here anyway.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/06/black-grad-student-on-hunger-strike-in-mo-after-swastika-drawn-with-human-feces/

yeah that's… the opposite of this thread

man you really gotta learn some thread discipline scott