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

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

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.

― j., Sunday, November 8, 2015 8:43 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think tho in the case of yale, that this is really _not_ a new thing? like they actually have masters of houses, etc. -- and this tradition of a camradre of faculty and students including regarding residential organization, etc. that's not a new thing, that's waaaay old-school.

and that position as i understand it is about building a good environment for students to live and learn in, and that's what its always been. so if as part of that position you oppose totally rational "try not to be hurtful to others" emails, then maybe that's not the right position for u?

(to be clear, the above starts as a reply to tracer then obv veers into a reply to others very quickly)

that would be consistent with the relative frequency of safe-space-style protests on elite slac campuses - bigger history of loko parentis, stronger commitment communicated to students that their feeling secure matters

#BLM twitter is all over that mo-story and connecting it to yale, so saying it's the 'opposite' of this thread...

The minority students at Yale are actually really explicit of what they want from their university. Not to be turned away at parties because only white girls are allowed, no harassment on squares, not feeling devalued by the authorities. And yeah, that's probably a 'new' thing at the place, but I wouldn't call it 'sensitivity'.

And are we saying that we're pro-free speech, hate speech even, but libel and slander is too much?

I know there's no 'we' here, that we're all individuals, we're all different, but above could seem like a consensus view. Which is weird, imo!

Yes, it's clear that people in this thread are pro-hate speech

Well, that was a joke from mordy, I'm aware of that, but I get the feeling a lot of people here think that hate speech should be legal? While others think that slander should not. So I'm saying, clearly nobody believes both of those things, right?

Slander has a pretty high legal bar in the US
It rarely applies to public figures and the slandered party has to prove harm, usually financial
The slander laws in UK seem crazy to me

Or I guess libel is the correct word

Frederik, are you implying that it's a bridge too far to support free speech and libel laws?

I just always wonder why all the free speech activism only revolves around racism and hate speech, and never slander and libel. It's weird. You know, Flemming Rose, the guy from Jyllands-posten, with the Muhammed cartoons, that guy is traveling all over the world and talking about the importance of absolute free speech. And back in 2008 he was suing people for libel, in connection with their reactions to the drawings.

It's just weird to me?

And of course, there is a really logical reason for why a bunch of right-wingers are defending racist speech but doesn't care about libel-laws, but apparently it would be libelous for me to talk about that logic...

US libel laws are much easier to reconcile with a strong belief in free speech than UK libel laws. That's not chauvinism -- the question of who has to prove what is central and makes a big difference.

It's definitely possible, and I've seen people try and do it. Some of them don't manage to do it to my liking (a couple of Danish philosophers defined the difference as libel being directly harmful while hate speech isn't, which seems somewhat questionable to me, when you look at what people get away with saying about races, vs individuals, in a place like Denmark).

But it's just one of those weird contradictions that pop up. Which Mordy phrased quite funnily upthread.

Hate speech isn't legal, it's just decriminalized

That was flip but as best I can imagine, "hate speech" would first have to pass a judge or jury's Potter Stewart test ("I know it when I see it") and then the plaintiff would have to be able to prove harm somehow. Otherwise criminalizing hate speech would most likely have a profound chilling effect.

A lot of countries have much stricter laws on hate speech than the US, fwiw, so Mordy's comment didn't seem like a joke to me, even if that's how it was intended. (Inciting hatred against an identifiable group is a criminal offence in Canada.)