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

isn't that what steve bannon is saying?

i think steve bannon wants to destroy the government and start a civil war

ok, well, the specific hypothetical which i found laughable was the implication that communities deciding to take down founding-father statues would be a turn for the worse. you can conflate that with "intentionally damaging civic culture" but i don't buy that at all, it seems like a tendentious elision. one pictures young hothead radicals, eager to find a way to damage civic culture, picking up a broken brick of society from the gutter and hurling it at a statue of thomas jefferson.

if that's not what you're going for, please feel free to correct me but it just sounds like you're buying into or inadvertently propagating the right-wing stereotype/fantasy you claim to want to shield us against. i for one can think of lots of reasons to get rid of statues that in my view are about an *affirmation* of civic culture. certainly the removal of confederate monuments reflects that, no? not much "civic" about devoting ostensibly shared resources to erecting and maintaining those, since their purpose is to let certain populations know who's boss. taking them down can be a real corner-turning or eye-opening moment - "yknow it never occurred to me what that would look like to somebody descended from slaves" etc. if a community came to the conclusion that jefferson is in the same boat, sounds like a healthy civic discussion to me.

Sometimes think there might be value in keeping around statues of horrible people as some sort of reminder but I'm not committed to it.

I think that the "promissory note" idea is the only thing that allows us to maintain social fabric while progressing ethically. But cutting off that note at the root by disowning the entire independence narrative would be v difficult to recover from.

We're a multicultural country. We don't have the luxury of appealing to other commonalities to create trust and allow society to function. We have this contractual nation idea that this nation was founded for ideals to which we still subscribe. I think you're imagining that some kind of ad hoc new nationality would come to replace the founder mythology. That seems a little optimistic. It seems more likely that we'll just become more fractured without shared historical touch points.

there's a lot of leaps there and i can't really follow them all. but really there are so many ways to engage with the promissory note/perpetual improvement narrative than by venerating these specific guys. for example, you might choose to make another step towards progress by... taking down their statues. depending what values are shared in that community that might feel very affirmative.

enshrining the statues as sacrosanct, as if touching them is a deliberate and negative assault against any possible commonality and community, feels bizarre to me. monuments come and go. figures who were once universally-known national heroes become obscure. we swapped eisenhower for susan b anthony on the dollar coin and we're hopefully about to see tubman replace jackson. the greek revival museum burns down and gets replaced with a neogothic one (or neoclassical or art deco or international-style depending when we're talking), the vietnam memorial becomes a more important site to visit in washington than the jefferson memorial. those things happen sometimes with active pushing for a realignment and sometimes it just happens but in neither case is society atomized and the constitution vaporized.

washington and jefferson are a lot more important to our national mythos than eisenhower or even jackson. more importantly they're metonymic for the documents that enshrine those shared values. they're not so easily extractible imo.

also i think i'm much more pessimistic about the current level of atomization/individualism than you are.

well, in turn, i'm a lot more skeptical than you are about the values attached to these characters! who am i to tell someone who associates jefferson and washington and the constitution mainly with its force as a conservative document designed to retain and standardize injustice (specifically the enslavement from which both men drew all their wealth, as you know of course) that they're wrong and that taking action based on that point of view goes against the promissory note / american-experiment potential of the good bits of the constitution?

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/11/01/the-problem-with-problematic/

The accusation that “society tends to favor privileged voices” is, according to some, not only a political analysis but an economic one. “The fear,” one literary agent told me, “is that if a publisher takes on a book written by a successful white male writer about a disabled Native American lesbian, a real disabled Native American lesbian might have trouble placing a book about the same subject at the same house; the publisher already has one.” What this suggests is that books are being categorized—and judged—less on their literary merits than on the identity of their authors.

What’s distressing is the frequency—and the unexamined authority—with which the words “experience” and “lived experience” define who is qualified to write or even to weigh in on a book. If it’s not your “lived experience,” you’re not writing in “your own voice.” It doesn’t suggest much faith in the power of the imagination—our ability to envision what it might be like to belong to another group, another gender, to live in another historical era. To take the argument to its illogical extreme, how can one write a historical novel if one has no “lived experience” of that period?

Time machines obv

We'd love to publish your novel about the fall of Rome but there are some Barbarian authors with lived experience of the subject and we need to listen to them

While we wait for this utopia to materialize, let's ask the Visigoths' descendants. Since Alaric was probably born in present-day Romania, feel free to hire me as your sensitivity reader.

I don't really see the generation that's filled with Hamilton fever tearing down too many statues of founding fathers tbh.

They'll take a statue of Madison, turn it around, topple it over, and shoe him where the shoe fits.

http://induecourse.ca/affirmative-action-for-conservative-academics/

Oh no

Jonathan Haidt on the two threats to liberal democracy: the right wing in politics, and the left wing on campus. https://t.co/WrKa1Q60Pl

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) December 20, 2017

https://www.city-journal.org/html/age-outrage-15608.html

Haidt’s thing really does begin like this:

What is happening to our country, and our universities? It sometimes seems that everything is coming apart. To understand why, I have found it helpful to think about an idea from cosmology called “the fine-tuned universe.” There are around 20 fundamental constants in physics—things like the speed of light, Newton’s gravitational constant, and the charge of an electron. In the weird world of cosmology, these are constants throughout our universe, but it is thought that some of them could be set to different values in other universes. As physicists have begun to understand our universe, they have noticed that many of these physical constants seem to be set just right to allow matter to condense and life to get started.

For a few of these constants, if they were just one or two percent higher or lower, matter would have never condensed after the big bang. There would have been no stars, no planets, no life. As Stephen Hawking put it, “the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”

Some have suggested that this fine-tuning might be evidence for the existence of God. This would be a deist conception of God, of the sort that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and most of the Founding Fathers believed in: a God who set up the universe like a giant clock, with exactly the right springs and gears, and then set it in motion. I myself am not taking fine-tuning as evidence of God. I’m simply using it as a way to open this lecture. I want to lift your attention up into the cosmos and put you into a mindset that is awestruck at our improbability. And if I have succeeded in doing that, then I’d like you to take that same mindset and apply it to the existence of our improbable country.

oh man I'm in the middle of grading papers right now and that kind of rambling off topic speculative introduction is rampant. c+, blatant filler, outline is not under control.

(clearly the only explanation is that my students are all coddled leftists)

read the thread title as meaning (trigger warning: article in the atlantic)

it's a lecture guys. ppl do all kinds of rambling in lectures to keep audiences attention - they tell jokes, stories, etc. i know you disagree with his arguments but try to focus on them and not on the meaningless intro he used to discuss them.

sorry chief

lol sure okay. "try to focus on the author's argument, and not the way the author advances a position through deliberate choices in framing and delivering their thoughts." good advice i'll be sure to tell my students that.

also it's not a lecture. it's an essay published on the internet. which announces upfront that it's edited from a lecture. which means you don't have to keep "all kinds of rambling" which btw is not exactly a sign of a great lecturer anyway in my book. what we actually have here is not a spellbinding rhetorical flourish to keep an audience engaged, but three paragraphs of a strained and sloppy analogy to physics in order to introduce the idea of... now wait for it because this is an unfamiliar concept for most of you.... "fine-tuning." what will those scientists come up with next?

Imagine three kids making a human chain with their arms, and one kid has his free hand wrapped around a pole. The kids start running around in a circle, around the pole, faster and faster. The centrifugal force increases. That’s the force pulling outward as the human centrifuge speeds up. But at the same time, the kids strengthen their grip. That’s the centripetal force, pulling them inward along the chain of their arms. Eventually the centrifugal force exceeds the centripetal force and their hands slip. The chain breaks. This, I believe, is what is happening to our country.

since you asked.

demonstrating still further his excellent grasp of physics

btw in addition to the points you might expect if you've spoken to a boomer in the past decade (the kids don't love america; where have you gone walter cronkite; war is great and unifying but "vietnam was different" for some reason we don't have time to go into) that essay also manages to slip in a blandly euphemized version of a real classic:

we didn’t manage the healing process well in the Reconstruction era

now of course, this is ambiguous! he doesn't actually say reconstruction was too harsh. maybe he means something else; maybe he means the opposite! it would be cool to know, because iirc the civil war and its aftermath is an important time in american history and anyone putting forth a big theory about why the country's gone where it's gone should probably be able to tell you whether they think reconstruction was too harsh or not. no time here, tho; gotta talk about tetherball. i wonder why the whole essay is on this weightless, empty level, tersely citing exceptions to its rules without explaining them and implying that something was wrong w reconstruction without specifying what, all while finding the time to go into multigraf detail on its pompous technical metaphors. i hope it is just because the guy does not know a whole lot.

It has always been wrong to bet against America, and it is probably wrong to do so now. My libertarian friends constantly remind me that people are resourceful; when problems get more severe, people get more inventive, and that might be happening to us right now.

maybe!

only time, time itself, will tell

My libertarian friends constantly remind me that people are resourceful; when problems get more severe, people get more inventive

Your libertarian friends are telling you that as an argument for immiserating the bulk of the population in order to help them achieve their innovation potential

'it has always been wrong to bet against america'

i thought this guy was supposed to be a fucking scientist

what a shitty article

oh now he's a professor of 'ethical leadership' in a business school

https://78.media.tumblr.com/21f8d6a23104f7f1e0f0ef956945f97d/tumblr_oycsqzBRbh1vy747uo1_500.jpg

I like the physics metaphors. That’s the only way I’m gonna communicate on ilx from now on.

http://alicedreger.com/Wellesley

All in all, I think the engagement at the Wellesley protest went well, even if it was an ironic lesson in the social construction of identity. A number of students came up to me to say they had really had their minds opened by realizing what they’re told about someone might not at all be true. A few told me they were planning to push back against the problem of what amounts to falsehood-based activism.

So, I felt like I did a pretty good job for the students and faculty there. But it was impossible not to leave with a renewed sense of just how fucked up campuses are right now.

a renewed sense of just how fucked up campuses are right now

It seems to me that the people who are creating fake Facebook and Twitter accounts impersonating her, and the Facebook and Twitter corporations who allow impersonations to persist, are the truly fucked-up people and entities. Students being taken in by such impersonations may be naïve or gullible, but that is not the same as fucked up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-wonder-wayne-lapierre-is-on-edge/2018/02/23/3aedcab0-18af-11e8-b681-2d4d462a1921_story.html?utm_term=.be1d376677ba

He saw a “tidal wave” of “European-style socialists bearing down upon us,” creating a “captive society,” eliminating “resistance,” making a “list” in a cloud database of those who spank their children, expunging the “fundamental concept of moral behavior,” controlling speech through “safe zones.”

...

LaPierre singled out three billionaire capitalists to blame for the socialist revolution: George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. But he saw conspirators everywhere in the government — Trump’s government: the FBI (with its “corruption” and “rogue leadership”) the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the intelligence agencies. He also blamed the Democrats, media, Hollywood, universities, classrooms, Black Lives Matter, elites and Keith Ellison.

Even the CPAC audience seemed to be stunned by this unhinged time-traveler from the Cold War. “You know, I hear a lot of quiet in this room, and I sense your anxiety,” he said. “And you should be anxious, and you should be frightened.”

A certain ex-ilxor:

https://splinternews.com/if-you-truly-care-about-speech-you-will-invite-me-to-y-1823614969

If You Truly Care About Speech, You Will Invite Me to Your Office to Personally Call You a Dipshit

Civil society requires the toleration of the expression of opposing viewpoints, no matter how personally discomforting you may find them. Therefore, it would be profoundly hypocritical for the editorial staff of the New York Times opinion section not to immediately invite me to come to their offices to call them all morons and trolls.

tick vg

nyt op-ed seems especially rudderless/clueless these days even for them

Pareene was on ILX?

One of Pareene's best. It even got Lawyers Guns & Money linkage.

he was here for quite awhile!

xpost

My local alt-weekly’s resident Bari Weiss fan wrote a great article today detailing the history of Satanic child abuse hysteria and then comparing it to the current calls for a boycott of a local business over an allegedly racially-motivated firing.

Did Sommers actually have to cut her speech short as a result of the heckling? That seems like a key point.

David French has some words for y'all sliming Bari Weiss!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2018/03/08/after-a-worried-howard-student-emailed-her-president-about-housing-he-replied-about-her-tone/?utm_term=.162a155e1e56

ahh yeah this is the stuff

grownups with power really are the worst

was the response incorrect do u just not agree with his..........tone......................................