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

lol

https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/my-mizzou-story-was-hijacked-by-conservatives

http://www.amherstsoul.com/post/133122838315/amherst-uprising-what-we-stand-for

this is excellent:

http://chronicle.com/article/When-Free-Speech-Becomes-a/234207

Consider the structure of the events at Yale. After the Intercultural Affairs Committee sent its original email, Erika Christakis opposed it — not merely its content, but the very act of their issuing it. The students then opposed her opposition — alleging that she ought not to have spoken as she did, given her position as associate master of Silliman College. And many pundits have, in turn, opposed their opposition — holding that the students ought not to be protesting thus. So far, so similar; these speech acts are on a par not only constitutionally, but also insofar as each opposes the one aforementioned.

Given these symmetries, why the markedly different reactions? Part of it is that, when people lower down in social and institutional hierarchies criticize the speech acts of those higher up, it often reads as insubordination, defiance, or insolence. When things go the other way, it tends to read as business as usual.

or maybe it's that christakis didn't ask the dean to lose his job over sending the initial email.

there's a huge difference between trying to suppress speech and arguing against it - that's the problem

The notion of freedom of speech tends to be ambiguous. It is used to refer to both the political right it enshrines, and the ethical ideal it embodies. The former is guaranteed in this country by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Together with the 14th Amendment, this means that nobody’s right to express himself or herself may be interfered with by the government. (The few exceptions to the rule — unprotected speech — include acts like falsely claiming "fire!" in a crowded theater, "fighting words," slander, and hate speech.)

maybe this is the problem. they don't realize that hate speech is protected speech in the US.

yeah I winced at that

maybe this is the problem. they don't realize that hate speech is protected speech in the US.

― Mordy, Friday, November 13, 2015 3:12 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

did you read the kelefa piece i also posted in this thread

(no, obviously)

you realize you're only helping his position by your complete inability to do anything but cast aspersions, right?

i've read this piece before but i just looked over it again

Waldron is unimpressed by the “liberal bravado” of free-speech advocates who say, “I hate what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” In his view, the people who say this rarely feel threatened by the speech they say they hate. Unfettered political expression came to seem like a bedrock American value only in the twentieth century, when the government no longer feared radical pamphleteers.

this seems to be the intellectual bedrock of the argument for more rigorous social policing of speech, right? i can only speak from my personal experience but i am a member of a minority group and i have read + heard legal hate speech in the US against my minority group that has literally made my blood run cold and given me nightmares. that said: i believe the US' commitment to free speech is intricately linked to its freedom of press and religion and I think these 3 freedoms are what has made the US the home of a little less than half of my minority group worldwide. it would be terrible to win the battle over suppressing speech and then lose the war that ultimately guarantees our freedoms.

I have also had anti-pot activist nightmares

mot <3

idk seems to me if a person was saying 'boys will be boys' about blackface & they're in charge of a residence hall or whatever they probably aren't very good at their job & students would be right to react without it being a free speech issue ffs

That paragraph overstates things (Jefferson overturned the Alien and Sedition acts of 1798 on First Amendment grounds) but look at what was enacted during WWI in response to Communism:

During the patriotic fervor of World War I and the First Red Scare, the Espionage Act of 1917 imposed a maximum sentence of twenty years for anyone who caused or attempted to cause "insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States." Specifically, the Espionage Act of 1917 states that if anyone allows any enemies to enter or fly over the United States and obtain information from a place connected with the national defense, they will be punished.[47] Hundreds of prosecutions followed.[48] In 1919, the Supreme Court heard four appeals resulting from these cases: Schenck v. United States, Debs v. United States, Frohwerk v. United States, and Abrams v. United States.[49]

In the first of these cases, Socialist Party of America official Charles Schenck had been convicted under the Espionage Act for publishing leaflets urging resistance to the draft.[50] Schenck appealed, arguing that the Espionage Act violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. In Schenck v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Schenck's appeal and affirmed his conviction.[51] This conviction continued to be debated over whether Schenck went against the right to freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.[52] Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., writing for the Court, explained that "the question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."[53] One week later, in Frohwerk v. United States, the court again upheld an Espionage Act conviction, this time that of a journalist who had criticized U.S. involvement in foreign wars.[54] Both of these cases show that the government can overrule The Bill of Rights with certain acts like The Espionage Act of 1917. It all depends on what was done to put the United States in danger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Speech_critical_of_the_government

deej, what is your point? if she said something far more heinous everyone would agree she should be fired therefore we should support the students in dragging the line of what constitutes heinous fireable speech to the pt where her email would constitute grounds for dismissal?

Holmes' dissents later became the basis for what how fed courts interpret the First Amendment iirc

They're not demanding that she be fired as professor, just step down as house master, right? Which I don't necessarily agree with but if you feel she's not fulfilling her duties as house master it's a reasonable request.

Heinous fireable speech or being bad at your job as house master? If her job is to protect the students well being and creates safe residence for them and she's instead antagonizing some at the behest of others it seems clear she's just not very good at her job as house master and it's not really a question that her continued work there might be worth questioning, ppl are fired for way less all the time

One also said she was "disgusting" iirc.

I don't see this as being about free speech in a legal sense. It's a debate about social norms. The activists want really restrictive norms, such that the dean's mildly worded email would be seen to be on a continuum with racism, to the point where one's job could be put in jeopardy. I guess I think a culture that functions that way sounds shitty, like the default would always be to interpret people's words in the least charitable way possible.

I mean: neither of us really knows the actual dynamic and we're just speculating on it bc of anxieties about "social justice warriors" wanting to "silence" those they disagree with, but it's completely conceivable that there's nothing unreasonable about the students' concerns!

Wow some students feel offended [at an innocuous email] and you think that means she is bad at her job and should be fired. Your employment hinging on the offenses taken by an undergraduate student is pretty much a zero security job.

i hear the toaster in her hall is full of crumbs

the "innocuous email" is the one she responded to!

You can't think of any situation in which a person's sensibility regarding race might make them a bad fit for that job?

I think what's weird about the current campus youth movement, to the extent that it really exists, is that it looks a lot like an anti-authoritarian movement, but actually seems to be calling for the establishment of a better, more righteous authority -- us and our fair unbreakable social norms, not you and your bullshit unbreakable social norms.

Also it should be mentioned that the email was met with immediate backlash and had few vocal supporters. It didn't really do much damage. It seems to me that the activists already won on the ground of offensive costumes being understood to be uncool by the Yale community. What they seem to want is not change but total deference to their new consensus, which seems less reasonable.

Btw, want to restate I think the activists are right to want to discourage ppl from wearing offensive costumes. My issue has to do with their disproportionate response to someone who lightly objected to elements of their position

So your concern TWU is that the people upset about the "just a bit of blackface, be cool" housemaster is that they're not being radical enough

it's not that weird - left-wing totalitarianism has always had a campus cache. xxp

deej you've basically ducked the question in twelve different ways which is essentially why i stopped replying to you before. do you believe that this email deserves to get this woman fired?

and if not - does threatening someone's job over something that they said that is inoffensive constitute an attempt to suppress speech that disagrees w/ you?

@ treesh her response email is such a troll, "if you respond to this and disagree then you're overreacting by definition"

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/194874/person-up-yale-students

That is one way of looking at it; the other way is that the students' position boils down to "society's assumptions and rules expect us to be [X] and we want to force society to recognize and acknowledge that we are [ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ]"

They are not looking to overthrow American society as it currently exists; they are demanding that society accepts their input as being as valid and important as the input from the demographic that has largely defined its parameters and actors over the past two and half centuries.

^ this piece argues that the yale protesters "aren't radical enough." It's not a weird position. They want institutional muscle to back up their worldview.

Sorry xp

People in all kinds of jobs say things in emails that make the boss think, "this person isn't right for our organization" literally every day. They're not a team player, they're not working well with others, they are not knowledgeable. Whatever. If your job is housemaster, and you say things that seem to reflect negatively on your ability to do your job well, of COURSE it's fireable. Not every time coworkers or customers complain = they should be fired...but sometimes it does mean that, which is why customers or coworkers or students complain

That this is controversial at all is a red herring

I think what's weird about the current campus youth movement, to the extent that it really exists, is that it looks a lot like an anti-authoritarian movement, but actually seems to be calling for the establishment of a better, more righteous authority -- us and our fair unbreakable social norms, not you and your bullshit unbreakable social norms.

This is the gist of Freddy deBoer's argument, at least a piece of it: students seeking administrative redress when administrators shouldn't be their friends.

That's Freddy's ex post facto rationalization of being annoyed by student protesters IMO but maybe I'm just "casting aspersions"

x-post In a sense, Deej, yes -- "you aren't fit to be my mom" vs. "fuck this shit, none of you people are my mom". But I still think the conservative backlash is a bigger threat to humanity at this point.

That's Freddy's ex post facto rationalization of being annoyed by student protesters IMO but maybe I'm just "casting aspersions"

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Friday, November 13, 2015

I'm not a fan of his but I'm quoting a piece he wrote in September, way before this shit.

I'm kinda glad I had whiskey with dinner and then vomited all over this thread because it made me realize I have some shit to unpack about this stuff in general. Some insufficiently examined conclusions / assumptions about campus protests based on my own college experience AND I think I learned some wrong lessons from growing up and going to school in the southeast, i.e. some institutional racism is just unfixable, so worry about other stuff if you can, shit like that.

I think J0rdan's piece on Gawker about this was actually very good btw

thank you tomboto

this is excellent:

http://chronicle.com/article/When-Free-Speech-Becomes-a/234207

― goole, Friday, November 13, 2015 4:04 PM (2 hours ago)

this is by far the best thing i've read on the yale thing, thanks for linking

I thought it was pompous bullshit and I really don't like that particular use of the term "violence" but as above I have some attitudes I bring to the table.

I liked this comment from an LGM thread:

This, by the by (which I sort of posted on below) is a liberal/leftist split that goes back literally to before most of us were born, in which the liberal position is “Listen, you guys are angrily and hastily jettisoning what I consider to be core societal values in pursuit of laudable goals” and the leftist position is “Those core societal values are being wielded as a cudgel against oppressed groups, and as such their value is negative. And by starting this intraleft argument out in public you only strengthen conservatism, which would love to be having a conversation about whether we’re actively dangerous or simply wrong.”

Paris attacks end coddling (maybe Ozymandias plan?):

Judith Miller ‏@JMfreespeech 4h4 hours ago
Now maybe the whining adolescents at our universities can concentrate on something other than their need for "safe" spaces…

makes sense -- she listened to Bush administration whining about Saddam for a year

Bush "kept us safe" too

https://twitter.com/SteveKrak/status/665294956987179008

ffs