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

Sybil Lamb, too, but her audience is even smaller.
Xp

i'm thinking of a fictional equivalent of that german movie about the woman with the sore butt. that movie was completely insane. and better than fight club. i kinda hated fight club. can't think of the name of the movie now though...i saw it on netflix. and i don't know if a woman wrote it.

tt promises to be that person when she finishes her first novel

Wetlands!

i got to read kathy acker when i was a kid but who do weird kids now get to read?

Good question. Weird kid tumblr?

wait, a woman wrote the book! maybe she is the future:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Roche

shriver is so obviously a hack btw, beneath contempt

https://scdn.nflximg.net/images/4743/12184743.jpg

sounds like the writer of animorphs has a good gross-out body horror thing going on http://www.bogleech.com/animorphs.html

"And speaking of screaming, there's an ant that accidentally ends up morphing into a human in a later book, and when something with only the experiences of an ant finds itself with a relatively vast new sense of being in an incomprehensible new environment, screaming is all it can do."

the Wetlands author wrote another book that seems like it could be good too. and amazon led me to this which looks cool:

https://www.amazon.com/Unclean-Women-Girls-Alissa-Nutting/dp/0984213325/ref=pd_sim_14_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CT8M0WMJV3FNKFT8Y349

i'll start a thread on ILB or something though. don't need to clutter this thread up a ton.

Wetlands trailer looks great, surprised I haven't heard about this.

it's well worth watching and also completely excruciating! i loved it.

What's excruciating about it?

there are just scenes that are painful to watch.

there is one scene toward the end that i actually had to hide my eyes for. and yet it is not a horror movie.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/10/the-most-popular-office-on-campus/504701/

As student enrollment increases and stigma subsides, the demand for counseling will presumably continue to rise. Blaming this crop of students for being less resilient will be a popular diatribe, but it shouldn’t be, Locke emphasized. In fact, it undermines a decade’s worth of work by counselors, psychologists, and student advocates who have strived to not only bring mental health to the forefront of public debate, but to reassure students that there is no shame in struggling—that experiencing mental distress is not a sign of weakness. “If anything,” Nguyen said, “this is what makes us stronger and makes us more resilient: the fact that I’m fighting for these resources.” The result of validating mental health in the culture of schools is that faculty, bystanders, and friends have intentionally led sufferers to the centers that promise to help them. “We need,” Locke said, “to follow through on that promise.”

http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/29616/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-halloween-email-led-to-a-campus-firestorm--and-a-troubling-lesson-about-self-censorship/2016/10/28/70e55732-9b97-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html?postshare=4841477870473408&tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.19967b799d04

let's argue about this again

My feeling is that if some idiots want to dress up in racist costumes, feel free to ridicule them, criticize them, take their picture and shame them. It's the appeals for rule making and punishments by authorities that rub me the wrong way.

i think the kids were probably right to see in christakis' email a reactionary mindset hiding behind her liberal arguments -- cf. her mention of "absent fathers" in the wapo article -- but i still think their response to the email was over the top and even frightening. some professors are a bit conservative and don't "get it" -- doesn't mean they are demons

like, they should have been criticized -- i am pro arguing, even loudly and self-righteously -- but the whole looking for institutional redress for something that was worded in such an abstract way was really odd. it's interesting to me how quickly things changed: the activists i knew when i went to college in the late 00s would never think that someone should be punished formally for objecting to cultural appropriation theory. actually i remember some of them wearing appropriative costumes now that i think about it.

I can't be bothered to read the latest Here's a shot as being an old asshat about whatever it is:

Kids need to have their ass handed to them on an semi-arbitrary basis or they won't feel like their politics make a difference, and they won't have stories for how a fight went south for no reason that one time. A campus is a campus. Sloppy, lazy, stupid application of authority is half the point of a college administration's job.

Rub some dirt on it! Walk it off! When it matters, you'll remember how to fight. Grumble harrumph cough cough

A reminder, because it's nowhere in that self-rigteous article, that Erika Christakis held the position of Associate Master at Stillman College. It was really her job to create a good community for the students, and she failed at that miserably. Like, objectively failed. That's the job the students were protesting, not her as a professor (everything I've read about her academic writings sound absolutely horrid, though, lol)

When you use the word "objectively" in this context it loses all meaning. Objectively failing at that job would mean that students were physically harmed under her watch (which, AFAICT, didn't happen?). The fact that some (many?) students were unhappy with her is the very definition of subjectivity.

let's argue about this again

no

No, schwantz, she was also meant to foster a good community, and she caused such an uproar that she's still writing about it a year later. Do you think that's subjectively bad?

Yes Fred, any objective observer would agree with your fucking opinion

Fostering a good community doesn't (necessarily) mean "going along with whatever the mob demands." The fact that anyone disagrees with you means it's subjective.

That someone whose job it is to foster a good community shouldn't cause the biggest fight in years?

So communities shouldn't have arguments? You are ridiculous.

fred, vehement uproar and disagreement would be objective evidence of her failure to create a good community only if the success or failure of the entire community were solely and exclusively in her power to control, which, given the innate limitations of individuals to control the thoughts and actions of anyone other than themselves, is objectively impossible.

yep, no way to predict that acting like a giant tool would cause a mess. three dimensional chess man

somehow I am not convinced that your saying she "acting like a giant tool" should be considered as "objective evidence" of anything. it sounds suspiciously like an opinion.

i only read playboy for the objectivity

shockingly enough, all playboy has in it nowadays are the articles. it couldn't compete with the internet amateurs.

It's very far from being just the internet competition. It's difficult to imagine many people getting excited by most of what they've been doing for the last few decades.

feel like it doesn't really live up to its name anymore (for playboys)

i feel like a lot of these matters can be somewhat fairly described with the cliché "takes two to tango"--meaning someone does something dumb, people react in dumb ways, and the dumbness continues to increase exponentially until it swallows the sun (or at least inspires another hack article in the atlantic).

Well, yeah, but it was only one of the parties whose job it was to prevent people from tangoing at the college.

well sure Americans appropriating the Tango is nagl name and shame

If it's your job to make sure there's no tangoing in your community, you might not be able to prevent all tango. But if you yourself starts tangoing, even though it takes someone else to tango with, you're objectively bad at your job.

And no, that people disagrees with me doesn't prove that my point is subjective. Could just as easily mean somebody doesn't know what they're talking about.

way to go all Footloose town on us FB

And no, that people disagrees with me doesn't prove that my point is subjective. Could just as easily mean somebody doesn't know what they're talking about.

Didn't want to be a jerk about it...

had a friend tonight cite that one article about this issue from the New Yorker from earlier this year and extrapolate all of the wrong conclusions from it - trigger warnings and 'safe spaces' are "closing dialogue when dialogue should be open". humorously of course, said friend says this in the same post where she compares trigger warnings to the PMRC of the 80s and says she didn't need explicit lyric labels on her kids' albums, ergo nobody should need trigger warnings. (she's in her 40s and has recently gone back to school to acquire another degree, but has not suggested she has experienced any of these things firsthand)

many left-leaning folk seem to have adopted "trigger warnings/safe spaces are bad" as the du jour position and I will admit, being long removed from academia, to not having any first-hand knowledge of how these things work in most universities, largely relying on articles/interviews/this thread etc. But has seemed to be that even the term "trigger warning" doesn't necessarily carry the same set of expectations for each student, and even when they do, students don't even use them the same way (one might wish to actively avoid said topics, others might just want a warning of what is to come so they can mentally prepare, but still engage with the topic), and safe spaces don't have to feel like they are coming at the expense of other communities.

obv think there's a problem with drifting into solipsism and "avoidance" if practiced can have a deleterious effect, but on the other hand (as said upthread), if something is a trigger, that often means said person has experience in the matter so they are not 'avoiding' anything as they've already been exposed to it.

why is it that so many lefties have been so quick to distance themselves from trigger warnings/safe spaces as acceptable when they've often embraced similar ideals outside of academia? is it, like was posited by one of the interviewed in The New Yorker, that some feel like these students are "doing the Right's work for them"? Is it less to do with political alignment and more to do with generational divide ("these kids today..." etc)? Is it a fundamental misunderstanding of what, exactly, these terms mean, due to faulty received second-hand knowledge? is any of it regional at all (ie do schools in different regions interpret the concepts differently, do they happen more frequently in one versus another, etc)?

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/12/12/reed-college-engages-soul-searching-after-posters-and-shouts-insult-director-boys

I think there is a tremendous generational divide at play as far as expectations go. The rules of discourse on campus are obviously undergoing a major overhaul.

To me, the whole thing seems about as moot as it could possibly be, given that the loudest and shrillest voices for "safe spaces online" are bully boy white supremacists with hides thinner than tracing paper (i.e. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/12/26/drexel-condemns-professors-tweet-about-white-genocide) and we just gave Trump 103 judicial vacancies plus the nuclear codes to play with, but I'm not going to college again any time soon.

i definitely saw, in grad school, people say they felt "unsafe" during discussions where people made mildly conservative or heteronormative (evopsych) comments in class. i heard someone say that another student had "said a lot of hurtful things," when said student mostly just pushed back on the idea that they, personally, had benefitted from "white privilege." (this was someone not from the US).

the language of harm is definitely being used, by college students, as a passive aggressive way to make people who disagree with them seem like bullies. this is an abuse of the original idea of trigger warnings, which of course i support.

i vote "fundamental misunderstanding of what, exactly, these terms mean, due to faulty received second-hand knowledge" - - - combined IMO with some misplaced application of PMRC-era hangups, where i think a lot of people who identify as "left" are primarily attached to fights for freedom against "censorship." which isn't a bad fight to fight! but i think there are a lot of well-meaning folks, and a lot of outlets/publications, that really put their chips on "freedom" and aren't really equipped to talk up "being considerate." turns out to align really well with what your average conservative would say, since the emphasis on "freedom" exclusively leads us pretty fast to individualism and fuck-you-ism.

idk though; early in this thread i noted some kinship here to tired old "political correctness GONE MAD" stuff and i'm pretty sure that in the 90s there were plenty of mainstream liberals, Dems, etc., who would have co-signed that "political correctness" had "gone mad," insofar as identity politics and taking the experiences and demands of non-privileged groups seriously were seen as "going too far" and for all i know probably "coddling" also.

i think a lot of the no platformer-type activists, or the people at reed who recently called a lesbian filmmaker a "cis white bitch" for daring to try to tell the story of someone less privileged than them, are fundamentally illiberal in outlook. maybe they are just young. but it doesn't do any good to pretend that there isn't an issue where people are saying they feel "unsafe" or whatever in order to bully people out of not having a platform. this is happening to people who are not even conservatives, like the aforementioned filmmaker. or that yale dean who stepped down after the halloween email.

i am not in favor of slurs, personal attacks, anything else like that being tolerated in the space of civil discussion -- the space of a classroom or reading series. but it is for this reason -- in the name of civility or whatever, not of anarchic "free speech" -- that i dislike some of these tactics i am seeing.