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

The drupal people did not go after that guy because he was into bdsm, nor because he was gorean. They've made that very clear.

xps

― heaven parker (anagram)

huh, i must have missed where they did that. controversy tends to get more disseminated than perfectly reasonable explanations - have a link to a reasonable explanation?

there's some stuff here:

https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/a-statement-from-the-executive-director

and a bit more detail here:

https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/working-through-the-concerns-of-our-community

tl;dr: they're not saying why they asked him to leave but they're assuring us it was not b/c of his private life

"because the very premise of this thread is 2009 ilx personified and it will never not be like that."

"what's the next step? spam the thread with "ironic" photos? or was the somebody else who did that?"

i've learned a lot from this thread! and now i know what drupal is! sorry you hate it and the people on it and that it reminds you of 2009. i only started it to get opinions about an article in a magazine with the title *The Coddling of the American Mind* that came out in 2015. I didn't mean for it to be a rolling thread. But it turned into one. i promise i won't start spamming this thread that i started a year and a half ago with ironic images the way i used to in 2009. thanks for listening.

also, great post, marcos! sorry for the constant bumping of a thread title that has outstayed its welcome.

man, the open source community remind me so fucking much of mainline protestants sometimes. i know there's a fine line to walk w/r/t privacy but lack of transparency (_particularly_ in the open source community) will always lead people to assume the worst. the drupal people are in a tough spot here - with the narrative already having become "garfield was sacked because he was a gorean", simply saying "no he wasn't" with no further comment may not be read by everyone as a credible statement. :(

no worries scott any concerns i have certainly aren't targeted towards you. and frankly i'm as bad as anybody else, i keep posting to this thread even though i flat out told that guy i'd stop, but the drupal thing is a topic of particular interest to me and for whatever reason it never got hashed out on the gor thread revive a couple weeks back!

I now regret looking up "Gorean"

I'm going to assume it's a community of people who live as though Gore had won the 2000 election.

yea that and then just throw some sex slaves into the mix

let's all go to GOR!!

the "ironic" thing for me is that since i started this thread i've had to learn to cope with frightening triggers and they are no joke and they are no fun and i only wish good things for anyone going through any rough times out there.

Well done! I'm much the same - self-harm/suicide triggers can knock me sideways.

What harm comes from those warnings? Xp

― Eallach mhór an duine leisg (dowd), Thursday, 27 April 2017 14:23

Don't know if there would be any. My understanding is that just about anything can be a trigger but it's sometimes recommended to avoid overly specific warnings because they themselves can be triggering.
Wondering whether umbrella groups are better or if something so conceptually specific is necessary sometimes.

I've seen people who use trigger warnings say that they can be used excessively and can be harmful to certain people. Perhaps harmful to people who would benefit from exposure therapy and/or should be prepared at all times without warning?
In all the FAQs I've read I haven't seen whether syllabus sheets are tailored to specific students who've already asked for certain warnings, or if everyone get the same syllabus (with spoilers and potentially triggering triggers).

I recently saw someone posting a photo on Twitter of a table of contents page for a fiction anthology, with trigger warnings for each piece of fiction. The tweeter was saying this is the ideal standard but I don't know if it was just a book for a specific audience or what they expected of all books. If it's the latter I'd prefer they were at the back of the book, because it looked like it'd be easy to spoil the stories by glancing the wrong spot on the page. Not sure what to make of the whole idea.

Still wary that some people will exploit these things to their own ends and that people who would genuinely benefit from warnings are not always being catered to as much as they should be.

Tangentially related, some books/authors being judged harshly for representation issues
http://yhlee.dreamwidth.org/2298302.html

"Walk on the Wild Side" is now considered to be transphobic:

https://www.facebook.com/csaguelph/posts/1303682526336126

Their reply to the first comment is priceless.

idk seems kinda otm to me?

It looks like they've deleted the post.

https://media.giphy.com/media/5xaOcLtop2JSKbnCBoY/giphy.gif

yeah it's gone, wish I'd screenshotted it now but the story is here:

http://www.mrctv.org/blog/canadian-student-association-apologizes-playing-transphobic-take-walk-wild-side

I wonder if there were any other problematic songs 40 some years ago? Investigation is required.

Kinda dickish coverage (and don't read the comments). I think the actual point, that trans people in the present day don't like being thought of as a way for cis people to "take a walk on the wild side," is well taken and worth thinking about. I'd compare to POCs saying hey, um, please don't refer to dating us as your encounter with the "exotic." I have no beef with Lou Reed but yeah, it's not some crazy notion to say that a forty-year-old classic-rock staple might just maybe reflect ideas (even ones that were 'liberal' at the time!) that don't comport with present mores. Based on the comments, I imagine at least some of the response would be the same if the organization had apologized for playing "Brown Sugar" or "Under My Thumb."

The idea that this song is some kind of watershed moment in transgender acceptance or something is pretty hard to take - can't imagine anyone advancing that claim until it came under criticism, but I might be in a bubble here and perhaps there are trans people for whom this is some kind of beloved anthem.

my take on that is that a song not comporting with present mores is not something to get worked up about.

I think saying the song "might just maybe reflect ideas (even ones that were 'liberal' at the time!) that don't comport with present mores" is a heck of a lot better than calling it "transphobic." But I guess historical context gets in the way of dogma reciting.

what's inherently transphobic about those lyrics?

woops sorry dr casino i didn't read your post before posting mine

wasn't Lou in some kind of relationship with a transgender person at one point? I seem to recall the Spin Alternative Record Guide or somesuch references paens to his (unfortunately phrased in retrospect) "shemale lover."

a song not comporting with present mores is not something to get worked up about

or the clash between past/present offers a teachable moment, maybe look at the history of how representation has evolved in pop culture. crazy i know.

no. just ban the songs and issue apologies.

honestly the best thing to do is burn all previous media. this will help prove how evolved we are.

'-phobic'?

wasn't Lou in some kind of relationship with a transgender person at one point? I seem to recall the Spin Alternative Record Guide or somesuch references paens to his (unfortunately phrased in retrospect) "shemale lover."

Rachel: http://dangerousminds.net/comments/rachel_lou_reeds_transsexual_muse

The most interesting thing about this for me is that the refrain about 'coloured girls' apparently did not trouble them.

perhaps there are trans people for whom this /is/ some kind of beloved anthem.

there were at least a couple in the comments.

fwiw, the invitation to the wild side in the first two verses comes from Holly and Candy. was Lou with Rachel when the song was written?

who the invitation comes from in the lyric strikes me as maybe kind of a weird standard for evaluating these things. lou reed wrote the song! it's like saying "well, the woman in 'under my thumb' certainly doesn't seem to have any complaints, or mick jagger would surely have told us about them."

but yeah um... it's a student organization. presumably they place a high priority on inclusiveness and listening to their mebmers, and everybody having a good time, especially when picking out things like the background music playlist for a social get-together or a bus trip. so they respond to their members' feedback, by deciding not to play something that makes them feel shitty. getting in a lather about this as a "ban" is what seems hysterical and oversensitive to me, sorry.

good music is supposed to make you feel shitty iirc

some eyerolling on ilm is hardly getting in a lather btw

but who will eyeroll the eyerollers

how much airplay does "i wanna be black" get on the cbc?

"it's a student organization. presumably they"......

we can presume a lot of things here tbf

getting in a lather about this as a "ban" is what seems hysterical and oversensitive to me, sorry

It does seem a bit too much 'the perfect storm' also, like I wonder if someone out there has a job which is basically looking for INSANE SJW BANS to write articles about?

Still, talking generally about the song, I dunno if 'phobic' really describes its attitude

who the invitation comes from in the lyric strikes me as maybe kind of a weird standard for evaluating these things. lou reed wrote the song! it's like saying "well, the woman in 'under my thumb' certainly doesn't seem to have any complaints, or mick jagger would surely have told us about them."

understood, and generally agree, but the fact that Holly and Candy were actual people and Lou's friends is context for reading the voice.

I wonder if someone out there has a job which is basically looking for INSANE SJW BANS to write articles about?

― Never changed username before (cardamon), Friday, 19 May 2017 15:00 (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these ppl exist on either side of the spectrum and v few of them need paying

When that song was written was there even a framework/language through which the talk about or understand trans people? Or any kind of agreement on terms/attitudes in the LBGTQ community as it existed at the time? Like, with "I Wanna Be Black" you could have pointed Lou toward any number of sources to show him how fucked up his lyrics were, but WOWS? I dunno.

replace "the" with "to"

maybe they should have played the very next track on the album, "Make Up", which is about embracing queerness and has a supportive chorus of "Now, we're coming out/Out of our closets/Out on the streets/Yeah, we're coming out"

also important to note the album is called TRANSformer just to make this situation even more ironic

more than meets the eye there

The student association at a Canadian university is apologizing to members of the transgender community who may have felt “hurt” or devalued by overhearing Lou Reed’s “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.”

In a statement on Facebook, (...)

I don't think the point of the objections is to say that Lou Reed was a bad or thoughtless person in the 70s, or that he hated trans people then or now. The context is certainly helpful if we do want to understand what he was going for in writing it, but obviously that's not the only lens through which you might evaluate a song's suitability for a playlist. Presumably no one would find it newsworthy if they'd decided to cut the song on the grounds that their membership was telling them it was sucky and boring to sing along to, to name yet other criteria for making such decisions. Meanwhile I think it's cool that whoever decided this went "good point, I never thought of that," instead of treating the complainant(s) as an outsider/irrelevancy/freak/whatever.

It's not my fight, and I don't want to try and speak for either the objectors or the people they persuaded, but I feel obliged to say something since this thread is so often a space for weak high-fiving about those out-of-control hippie-stink-line SJWs. Sometimes I feel like starting a thread tracking the latest battlegrounds in the sinister left-wing War On Christmas and seeing how many people dive right in. Did you know some of the most virulent anti-Santa rhetoric is spread on... wait for it... COLLEGE CAMPUSES???!!

this thread is so often a space for weak high-fiving about those out-of-control hippie-stink-line SJWs.

This is the sort of stuff I hate. Shoveling every objection into the same pile as the gamergate/alt-right.

xp I have a feeling unsubstantiated by any evidence whatsoever that 'War on Christmas'/'You can't say blackboard anymore!!!!' is a sort of 80s/90s phenomena which was mostly fictional, whereas the current round of c2015-now stuff has sometimes (sometimes) actually happened (and so it's worth sifting through the stories that come out to establish this: did it happen, what really happened, what's the context)

the war on christmas is just a metonymy for concern about a general erosion of religious faith + public expression thereof.

no. just ban the songs and issue apologies.

― President Keyes, Friday, May 19, 2017 10:31 AM Bookmark Flag PostPermalink

yeah wow sorry to have "shoveled" this super accurate and illuminating analysis of this story in with people thoughtlessly throwing around the language of "bans" to make things that aren't free speech issues into free speech issues.