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

Thinking about media perception is important and should always be part of strategy. But there's always an extent to which the neoliberal media will be neoliberal. All things being equal, it will always prefer order, police, football, authority, whiteness. It will seize on any slip up. Anything "activist" has to be 3x as pure and clean and careful in order not to get trashed or ignored.

I might feel more passionate about this if I didn't think that a lot of college degrees* were utter garbage.

*probably doesn't apply to Yale

we are building something big here, people!

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/us/racial-discrimination-protests-ignite-at-colleges-across-the-us.html?_r=1

coddle this, bitches!

even smith college is getting into the act. good old smith.

kind of dreaming about SEC football teams going on strike for voting rights legislation.

TS coddling vs swaddling
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-swaddled-generation/2015/05/19/162ea17a-fe6a-11e4-805c-c3f407e5a9e9_story.html

the messaging for the yale march is interesting

http://blavity.com/8-photos-from-yales-historic-march-of-resilience/

college administrators love to talk about 'resilience' and 'grit' these days

Thankfully football has gotten involved so people will start to take things seriously now. /s

does the involvement of football teams devalue these protests?

i would say the opposite

Devalue them in the eyes of sports-hating lefty snobs*? Probably. Devalue them in the eyes of business-minded university administrators? Exactly the opposite.

*"sports-hating lefty snobs" may be a strictly rhetorical construct not actually found in reality

http://www.thestate.com/news/nation-world/national/article44046114.html

SC paper, 'Why the last few days at Mizzou have college administrators everywhere scared'

(bc college sports)

hit them where it hurts, the wallet

I think it's brilliant that the football players have gotten involved -- they have ridiculously outsized leverage based on the very fact that they are exploited.

their leverage doesn't come from being exploited, their leverage comes from the fact that more people care about mizzou's football record than about who is chancellor

yes but they only care about that because of the way the athletes have been being exploited

they'd probably still care more about it even if schools just fielded modest little extracurricular teams, OR if schools paid their athletes

but still

Their leverage comes from the fact that they are hugely valuable to the university and yet given little in return, so the U has much more to lose than they do if they strike.

yeah, that's millions of dollars lost if a team doesn't play. it's a billion dollar business. probably. i just made that up. sounds right.

okay, NEARLY a billion.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2015/03/11/ncaa-financial-statement-2014-1-billion-revenue/70161386/

if schools paid the athletes and the team threatened to boycott, the effect would be the same. for most people their state universities are football teams w/ some classes attached. more people would be able to tell you who their state school's quarterback is than their state school's chancellor.

otm. now this reaches people outside the university system

If schools paid the players then the talk in the media would be all about breaking contracts and blah blah blah

pretty sure people would side w/ just dropping the chancellor, who cares what random old white dude gets to be the guy who begs rich people for money all day, let's talk about next year's 5 star recruits

xp that's more or less what a lot of it has been about anyway re the mizzou players, keyes, but w/ an overlay of 'they should be grateful'

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/race-and-the-free-speech-diversion

"During the debates over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Senator J. Lister Hill, of Alabama, stood up and declared his opposition to the bill by arguing that the protection of black rights would necessarily infringe upon the rights of whites. This is the left-footed logic of a career Negrophobe, which should be immediately dismissed. Yet some variation of Hill’s thinking animates the contemporary political climate. Right-to-offend advocates are, willingly or not, trafficking in the same sort of argument for the right to maintain subordination. They are, however, correct in one key respect: there are no safe spaces. Nor, from the look of things, will there be any time soon."

i can't remember if that was linked already or not. but it's good on the diversionary tactics going on.

xp that's more or less what a lot of it has been about anyway re the mizzou players, keyes, but w/ an overlay of 'they should be grateful'

― j., Thursday, 12 November 2015 16:22 (11 minutes ago) Permalink

The idea that D-IA football scholarships give "poor minority students a chance to go to college" is a particularly insidious lie, or perhaps a 1/4 truth.

this topic gets the most specious analogies. i think there are some important differences between opponents of the Civil Rights Act and right-to-offend advocates (which just means people who are pro free speech). if you bought that analogy you'd have to consequently say that banning offensive speech is morally equivalent to passing the Civil Rights Act. does anyone on the left really believe that?

The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered. The enlightenment principles that undergird free speech also prescribed that the natural limits of one’s liberty lie at the precise point at which it begins to impose upon the liberty of another.

this is horrific

not sure only certainly people are "pro free speech". everyone uses that language.

the phrase "free speech" has been abused by both the right and the left in this debate. The first amendment only prevents the government from infringing your speech. It doesn't say Yale can't have a code of conduct, or that you can't complain to your dean about being bullied, or that someone can't discourage you from wearing Halloween costumes designed to humiliate and mock others, and it ALSO doesn't differentiate between the rights of different groups based on power. I agree with the sentiment that the freedom to challenge power is more important than the freedom to mock, but this has little to do with the first amendment.

maybe i misunderstand but "The enlightenment principles that undergird free speech also prescribed that the natural limits of one’s liberty lie at the precise point at which it begins to impose upon the liberty of another," seems to be claiming that the principles that undergird free speech only allow free speech as long as it doesn't impose on someone's right to not be offended aka it is trying to limit free speech. i thought most people would agree that free speech exists within the natural limits of one's liberty whether it offends or not.

I don't know how to locate or decipher an "enlightenment principle." But nothing in the constitution or US law prevents students from demanding action from their university in response to harassment and intimidation, nor prevents the university from responding.

that quote kind of loses me at "precise point"

xxp mordy the construal (as you know) is that speech can become harmful and thus impose on another's liberty

and that therefore such speech should be banned

what speech being banned are we talking about here? or is this purely hypothetical?

I'm inclined to agree w Tombot re: priorities here (which is maybe why I have v little to say on this thread)

it sounds to me like he's claiming that free speech does not protect any speech that offends someone else (thus the idea that right-to-offend speech is not covered by enlightenment values of free speech)

i take "impose upon the liberty of another" to mean something more serious than just being offended.

what then? what speech is currently legal that he believes we should make illegal and why should i be in favor of curtailing any more speech than we already do?

No one has actually raised "making illegal" any speech afaik

another thing about that qutoe. i don't see much discussion about what the enlightenment's values are, or why they would matter. it seems like something strictly for academics, as they probably are the only ones who decide the current course of 'the enlightenment project' anyway

i guess the way you're reading that sentence is that enlightenment principles undergird the law that upholds free speech as well as a kind of separate ethics of speech and while offensive speech violates the latter the author doesn't necessarily mean it should alter the former? bc that seems like a problematic distinction in that if free speech laws are an ethics issue, and you're undermining those ethics, you're just going to end up with a question of why this is legal anyway.

i don't see much discussion about what the enlightenment's values are, or why they would matter.

see this entire thread and the other one!

is that what's going on here?

well it's not Kant and Foucault but...

ryan do u think of foucault as particularly embedded in an enlightenment values discourse?

i thought this thread was about Atlantic articles on trigger warnings

Mordy: his essay "What is Enlightenment?" (a response to Kant's of the same title) is becoming a pretty standard text. It's well worth reading.