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

Trumpism really exposed this stuff full scale - it's often those who rail against "safe spaces" the loudest who find themselves so often needing to retreat to them (see r/the_donald, which bans any dissenters on sight), and those who champion themselves as "free speech advocates" are the ones who completely meltdown at the slightest hint of criticism (Mike Cernovich possibly the best example of all, or I suppose Trump himself)

Yeah conservatives love to do the performative self-victimization thing wrt "censorship." I was just saying that I've seen liberals do the same thing but with the argument that they felt "hurt" or "marginalized" by some comment that was itself not outside the bounds of civil discourse. (Cf the reed college thing, a bunch of instances in my own graduate program, including one time where our *instructor* told us that our classroom didn't always feel like a "safe space" for her, i think referring to a time a student rolled his eyes several weeks before, etc.) so like, this kind of language entering the political sphere -- or being used as a tactic -- isn't a problem in the way conservatives think it is a problem. But it can be problematic.

Also i fundamentally disagree with the idea that asking for the yale dean's resignation was at all reasonable. I think that extending the definition of offensive speech to include tone deaf emails is a dangerous game.

At the same time i love that young people are becoming more critical of the institutions they belong to. I don't think all these activists are terrible or anything like that.

Nb i dont think (redacted) should have rolled his eyes but i also dont think general rudeness is always an example of oppression in a political sense and mixing these things up feels like it can lead nowhere good

She was the head of a residential college and basically told her residents ''if your classmates dress up in blackface I will have their back on free speech grounds, hey just fyi and happy halloween!'' She didn't have to send any email at all and he chose to sit down and write this one. I wouldn't want her to be my head of household either and I 100% respect anybody who said fuck that, it makes me really uncomfortable to live under this roof.

OTM

If she had wanted to say anything she could have said "On Halloween many of you will dress up, and some of you might be tempted to appropriate other cultures.

Nobody can force you not to and ultimately only you can make your own choice, but I urge you to consider how your actions might be interpreted by a member of that culture and consider their feelings. We value all of our students and want them to feel welcome".

Rushing to free speech grounds is ridiculous as it's not like you have a choice in the matter if you are a public institution and telling someone they shouldn't do something is hardly a threat to free speech.

Indeed, I was one of these liberals, until the first time I read a "political correctness gone mad" article about the college I was actualy attending, and it was so willfully and aggressively distortive of the actual political situation that the scales fell from my eyes and I realized the whole thing was a con job.

it's a con job insofar as most of us here probably aren't bothered by some of these "PC gone made" things, but i think it's pretty obvious that in the culture wars these are real battles that have a real impact on the electorate. i don't know if that means the answer is to reject some of it ourselves because the most extreme examples make the left look like absurd children or to just swallow our losses as the cost of doing business but i've spoken to numerous people (and of course some of this is that i fraternize w/ lots of hardcore Zionists who probably are at the epicenter of campus radical politics) who really believe PC on the left is endemic, widespread, and disgusting, and like Trump because he represents everything that isn't that.

Treesh OTM ITT. Those of you who call out and ridicule conservatives for this behavior and then fall all over yourselves to excuse it on the left should really know better. Read Christakis' letter before reducing it to a couple of dismissive sentences!

oh were you under the impression that sharing that link was going to be a thread-defining bombshell, how embarrassing.

(p sure most in this thread have read the letter "in full" multiple times, thank you)

on that note we constantly defame people on the right by bringing up their most radical members, or contextualize statements that aren't literal readings of what they said to make them look as bad as possible. we can't really complain when they use the same tools against us - making college students look as bad as possible and then trying to impugn the entire left with them. there are even understandable reasons for doing so - the university is a bastion of leftist thought and historically a prime mover of the US left wing.

like guess what - most americans don't think someone should lose their job for writing an email calling the university patronizing for banning culturally insensitive costumes. it's not it was misrepresented, it's that some of our ethics are not shared by the rest of the country. it's not that hard to make these incidents look bad, and then claim that they represent some major trend.

Maybe it's cuz you hate commas (and left out a couple of words, I think?), but I'm having trouble following your argument, Mordy. Are you saying we should defame whole groups of people based on the actions of their most radical members?

I really didn't want to pick this rhetorical hill to die on, but it just seems like we should be better than that. We should be able to hear arguments we disagree with, we should be able to handle some discomfort and dissent, because we're fucking right. We should be able to handle seeing some dumbass dress up in a racist costume and tell them to their face why they are insensitive. We shouldn't work the refs and cry to the administrators to do the job for us.

That was the position of the dean who was forced to step down for insensitivity. She thought that norms of behavior can and should be worked out among the students.

i just reread what i wrote and i think it's perfectly comprehensible

So you thought she should have lost her job over that? I guess we disagree. S/b?

No wtf. I definitely do not think she should have lost her job. That is what i have been saying.

I was responding to Mordy!

at this point in my life i think that organizations, institutions and communities (and families) should have expansive rights to create and perpetuate the types of cultures they see as valuable. if the professors and students of a university believe their values should include firing people who write emails like she wrote, then i support them in following their arrow wherever it goes. i don't personally think it's a great idea but i'm not a student or a professor and i have no stake in what kind of people get hired and for what kinds of things people get fired. similarly if the university wants to fire someone like Ciccariello-Maher for calling for white genocide i think they should be allowed to, but not because i'm more sympathetic to the reasons for firing him but because of the general principle. i want people to respect the cultures of my family and community so i think we should respect theirs.

my point above though was more limited- i was arguing that we attack the Right all the time for things that happen among their most radical adherents so we shouldn't be shocked that they do the same to us when the opportunity presents itself. and that to some extent it is fair. firing someone like christakis for what she wrote is not some weird aberration or bizarre decontextualization of a sentiment prevalent among the left (and here not some rogue student or student group even but the administration of the university itself), and that the university is in many ways emblematic of the left for good and fair reasons. i was responding to the idea above that the PC crisis is overstated. in the eyes of those of us on the left it feels overstated because our ethics seem reasonable - so in cases like christakis we agree w/ her firing or at the very least we can understand and sympathize w/ the students who didn't want her as a dorm mom. things even more difficult to defend we just consider outside the norm - that Breitbart is going out of its way to stigmatize the Left for political gain (which obv they are). but the Right feels exactly the same way about their questionable incidents and their norm violations. Trump voters don't think Richard Spencer represents them - he's just convenient for the Left-wing to attack. and even if they think bakers should cater gay weddings (a more moderate right-wing position), they're sympathetic + understand the claim of religious freedom.

Ok. I guess I don't really care about the second-order political fallout or optics (or whatever political hay can be made by partisan publications) surrounding her resignation. She wrote what seems to me to be a very respectful letter, couched in a giant pile of qualifications, and got fired for it. That's messed up.

she wasn't fired, she resigned, jesus. I mean, granted, I'm not suggesting that she and her husband didn't resign due to the mounting pressure and noise that was reverberating in the wake of her email. but she was not fired and in fact they left months after the incident, not immediately.

I actually don't support her being fired for it (though I think her email was fairly cloying and insensitive whatever her intentions) - you can actually dislike the content of her email without suggesting she should lose her livelihood over it, y'know.

some ppl believe that the university banning racially insensitive costumes (and sending emails around about them) is patronizing and infantilizes students. other ppl believe that college students are infants who would wear racially insensitive costumes if they weren't told otherwise. if you believe the latter (& tbh it's pretty reasonable) then an intervention against the former is inherently an intervention on behalf of wearing racially insensitive costumes. there's a kinda consequential v. deontology here too w/ christakis taking the latter position. whatever i mean among the crimes of the university this seems pretty inconsequential to me.

i just reread what i wrote and i think it's perfectly comprehensible

― Mordy, Wednesday, December 28, 2016 12:45 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Maybe it's cuz u misspelt reprehensible

oh plz u for sure agree more w/ my position here don't sjw me

It was merely in service to punning which as u know is the only cause I believe worth taking hits for

Your posts itt today are imo the most otm posts on ilx this year

Mordy correctly described the state of small-d democratic politics as they have been played for the entire history of the USA. Politics aren't played by any rules other than what you can and can't get away with. Yes, there are laws of all sorts designed to limit the more scurrilous or scandalous forms of political brawling, but it has always been a brawl and never entirely clean. I didn't read Mordy as endorsing this state, so much as pointing to the obvious.

fwiw if i was brief or reductive in handling the substance and context of the christakis letter, it's because there was extensive discussion of it in this thread a year ago. sorry.

also this is not really related but my eyes really confuse me with a poster named "DJI" vs. "DJP." unless DJI is DJP?

No obv diff posters but I confuse them sometimes too

Was schwantz until recently.

That sounds like a setup.

ah ok thanks

And yeah sorry, I probably made these same arguments a year ago.

https://twitter.com/AP/status/826984821494788096
The Associated Press ‏@AP 58m58 minutes ago

BREAKING: Officials cancel Breitbart News editor talk at UC Berkeley after protesters throw smoke bombs, flares at building.

hi-five

if this is how the coddled snowflake leftists behave i can't wait to see the militant left

great now I'm gonna have to work Berkeley back into my capstone project somehow v_v

A friend of mine who was at that protest is reporting that, contra some media reports, the only injured person she saw was a protestor hit by police (nonlethal arms). It seems like there was some kind of bonfire which, depending how it's cropped by the news outlet, looks more or less like a raging destructive property-destroying blaze. Maybe there is more to it than that but IMHO it seems like your basic peaceful protest against giving a hatebreeding, harassment-stoking schmuck a platform.

i'm ambivalent on this sort of thing because i think it kinda plays right into MY's hands but i'm also extremely sympathetic to it.

poor milo, the only people who will listen to him are the president and majorities of both houses of congress

there was definitely video of one woman in a #maga hat being maced (or something), but i only saw one injury apart from that that looked like someone who had been hit by a police projectile. local reporters said that the cops were firing rubber bullets and "pepper balls" from the second floor of the building. the bonfire was a portable lighting system that was tagged, then tipped over and lit on fire. which then caught a nearby tree on fire. some windows were smashed, but they picked carefully and only hit amazon (which is on the ground floor of the student union, and nothing else in the student union building was broken) and a number of nearby banks.

the campus received a bomb threat today.

banks are people too my friend

from the chancellor's email: "Last night the Berkeley campus was invaded by more than 100 armed individuals clad in Ninja-like uniforms"

...

wants to make sure their traditions aren't misappropriated

surely the point of ninja-like costumes is that nobody recognizes them?

you mean they might not be ninjas

Milo Yiannopoulos is scum the Berkeley kids were right to riot.

after the shit he pulled at uw-milwaukee and the fact that one of his supporters literally shot a protestor at his university of washington appearance, students at every college should be preventing him from speaking by whatever means they can