Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Also you might want to reconsider the fedora as a personal style choice.

well, i think the picture of self-culture in a liberal like mill is predicated on a certain degree of personal risk-taking in the pursuit of growth, and on a certain health of spirit (the kind he suffered a lack of during his depressive episode)

if you take bernhard's metaphor w/o worrying too much about the fit, and say ok, society is now such that so many more of us are just sick (in some sense, wounded, whatever), and no one has the right to force us to suffer any more than we already do, where in anticipation of the sort of harms under consideration here, we require ourselves to engage in this kind of more extensive regimentation of our public interaction, it seems like something that is not going to improve our health any—at best, maybe maintain our sickly condition without it worsening.

something very nietzsche's last man about that picture. xp

― j., Monday, March 10, 2014 12:30 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how loudly do you allow yourself to fart in public

ok, this thread has taken a turn toward the ad hominem. let's clear out for the night and get some sleep. this thread will still be here in the morning.

it was a serious question

i want to

1. understand the liberal point of view from which there might be reasonable resistance to the increasingly broad practice of issuing trigger warnings outside of special, self-chosen contexts

2. ask whether fully taking over the liberal way of managing this issue (viz. add more safeguards, more opt-outs) is the best way of achieving the underlying goals. i am not sure, but i gather that many people to whom trigger warnings seem beneficial are also interested in changes to society that would make trigger warnings unnecessary. but adding another procedure to our interactions may be a more attractive way to 'solve' the problems without changing anything that causes them.

that's all. if you can't talk about that without getting abusive then i think you should ask yourself whether you are capable of having discussions about things at all.

it was literally a serious question i'm not kidding

what kinds of spaces need trigger warnings? presumably we don't need to slap one on the front page of the NYT bc you can reasonable expect that a newspaper will cover sometimes traumatic events and will only take care to give a trigger warning for particularly graphic images (like when they showed the death photos of saddam's sons). similarly other public spaces like tv/movies + radio already take precautions to only show certain content at certain times, to rate themselves, and even censor certain kinds of profanity (or even depravity - like jeffrey dahmer getting bleeped in 'Dark Horse'). so really we're just talking about internet spaces, and particularly places like blogs that might cover a range of content and only occasionally something trauma-related. if that's really the entire context of the 'trigger warning' convention it's really a very small bunch of ppl working out group ethics and not really anything srsly compromising free speech ethics imho.

mordy, the spaces contemplated in that article include classrooms, syllabi, etc.

Oberlin College has published an official document on triggers, advising faculty members to "be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression," to remove triggering material when it doesn't "directly" contribute to learning goals and "strongly consider" developing a policy to make "triggering material" optional. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it states, is a novel that may "trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more." Warnings have been proposed even for books long considered suitable material for high-schoolers: Last month, a Rutgers University sophomore suggested that an alert for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby say, "TW: suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence."

Well yeah, this seems pretty silly. I had a chat w/ a lit. teacher at one of the local Orthodox Jewish orthodox in Philly about the kinds of books he was allowed to assign and any insinuation of sex, violence, etc was problematic + really restricted his ability to compose a syllabus. It's hard to imagine you could have a functional Lit department w/out teaching this kind of literature. Violence + trauma themselves are major motifs of contemporary humanities.

that's all. if you can't talk about that without getting abusive then i think you should ask yourself whether you are capable of having discussions about things at all.

― j., Monday, March 10, 2014 12:55 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and ok this wasn't like my point with the fart thing but do you not see maybe a teensy shred of irony here

how loudly do you allow yourself to fart in public

I do not ever purposely lend impetus to my farts when I am in a public place. I do not go to great lengths to suppress them, either. I let nature take its course with minimal interference, but under the right circumstances I will make a bit of effort to mitigate them.

This is a different situation from publically venting an opinion which may greatly offend and requires only a trivial act of will to suppress. Farts are not willed into being and even the most poisonous farts should generally be forgiven as being beyond human control.

There absolutely should be a debate about the use of trigger warnings in a college setting, especially re: literature. I can see a strong case for warning students about books which contain graphic scenes of rape or child abuse but it's unhealthy to not discuss where lines should be drawn.

To take Oberlin's TWs on Things Fall Apart as one example, it's meant to be an upsetting book. Any anti-racist novel you can think of might trigger a reader who has experienced racism but that's the point. I worry that to trail it with a long list of warnings will have the effect of putting some readers off.

I'll tell you, one book that coulda done with a trigger warning is Jude the Obscure; because sweet merciful christ, I did not see that shit coming at ALL

When Trigger Warnings become spoilers

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it states, is a novel that may "trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more."

But surely anyone teaching Achebe would say in advance what it addresses rather than assigning it blind? I don't know, maybe these lists are useful for some teachers.

Trigger warnings are kind of the privileged person's substitute for thinking ahead of time that treating a difficult subject like...a hypothetical, like an abstraction, may be harmful to someone for whom it's not hypothetical. If people resist being encouraged to show this consideration, if they react badly and defensively when you bring it up, if they reduce a student's grade (or threaten to) if that student exercises their right to protect themselves...

Like, if you think this kind of thing is unnecessarily legalistic or w/e, fine, but...actual, literal laws about lots of things are necessary because people don't just naturally do what's good for each other (or their goods are contradictory or etc).

if they reduce a student's grade (or threaten to) if that student exercises their right to protect themselves

Is that's what's happening? Clearly that would be wrong.

That was part of the resolution being passed in the college case that motivated this shitty article. I also heard from someone that when the student in question approached the prof afterward, he or she was uncooperative about resolving the issue, which led to this official resolution. I've asked the person who said that for a source, not sure where they got that info.

Thanks. Following the links about that Santa Barbara case, it seems like a clear-cut case of where trigger warnings should have been used, especially as it was a film rather than a book.

“Two weeks ago, I sat in class watching a film screening and felt forced to watch two scenes in which the instance of sexual assault was insinuated and one in which an instance of rape was graphically depicted … there was no warning before this film screening … and it was incredibly difficult to sit through.”

If you didn't use the phrase TW but asked anyone if a teacher should warn students before screening a graphic rape scene I don't think there'd be much controversy. Although the article isn't about a single case it's bad form to start with that example.

To what extent should these protections extend? Do we determine what traumas should exempt you from engaging w/ particular material or should the student have the leeway to pick what he or she feels comfortable learning? For example, should someone who lost a family member to terrorism be allowed to opt out of any September 11th related literature? Should a veteran of the Iraq war be allowed to opt out of reading Civil War literature in an early American lit class? What about if you haven't experienced trauma directly but the material just makes you feel very uncomfortable? Should we let Christian fundamentalists opt out of learning about evolution in a biology course? Who is going to determine the validity of the objection?

I can't help but feel like colleges should let all applicants know that course material may upset students, and that part of education may include being confronted w/ information that can make you feel sad or hurt. If a student has a particular concern about their circumstances (like maybe they're a refugee from a war torn country) shouldn't the onus be on them to ascertain beforehand that a course won't be too debilitating to their psychology?

I'll tell you, one book that coulda done with a trigger warning is Jude the Obscure; because sweet merciful christ, I did not see that shit coming at ALL

the experience of reading this book without knowing what Hardy's going to do is one of the greatest, most horrible experiences you can have as a reader imo

in personal communication and online where you don't have the benefit of a course description/cover copy. etc, trigger warnings seem like a nice courtesy! in school they seem ridiculous to me, in my quest for knowledge I'm going to run across shit that fucks me up, the end, goes w/the territory. imo there's an easy right way to address this pedagogically i.e. the teacher says "so, we go over some pretty intense stuff in this class and if you have issues around that stuff, be advised, our themes here are" &c. alternately, when I was in college a very righteous professor taught a course on excess in art and every year the first thing he did on the first day of the semester was screen Pasolini's Salo

Yeah basically 'free speech' is a sham anyways, and using that to justify being a jerk is no better than saying "I was drunk". Let's have some personal responsibility. You are not 8. Maybe think about people other than yourself from time to time.

exactly (xp to mordy).

framed in the way DL/orbit mentioned it suggests that teachers are reacting punitively to the exercise of rights. but i would like to see what happened in the oberlin instance. i would expect it's far more likely that a student said, i won't do this thing, the content is triggering, and a teacher said, it's your grade, do the work or don't.

there is already a procedure in place for students who e.g. suffer ptsd: it is to seek a medical exemption and confer with instructors to make suitable arrangements for doing the coursework.

my understanding of the beginnings of 'trigger warning' discourse is that it had much more specifically to do with extreme or graphic content apt to provoke episodes from vulnerable readers. i.e. suffering past specific incidence of trauma in such a way that they fit the use of medical exemptions like the ones used already.

the references to triggers in the oberlin resolution seem so much broader as to have lost contact with the specific function of trigger warnings intended for e.g. ptsd sufferers.

http://new.oberlin.edu/office/equity-concerns/sexual-offense-resource-guide/prevention-support-education/support-resources-for-faculty.dot

Understand triggers, avoid unnecessary triggers, and provide trigger warnings.

A trigger is something that recalls a traumatic event to an individual. Reactions to triggers can take many different forms; individuals may feel any range of emotion during and after a trigger. Experiencing a trigger will almost always disrupt a student’s learning and may make some students feel unsafe in your classroom.

Triggers are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything that might cause trauma. Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression. Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.

this is obscurantist. a sort of immunological concept of recollection, and of whatever causes recollection, of trauma, is linked to a nonspecific range of negative emotion that is disruptive to learning—but it's clear enough how that relates to sexual violence and the trauma incurred from it.

but the last paragraph goes a lot further to import a vast range of assumptions into the already seemingly fluid concept of 'triggers'. what are the links between those sentences meant to be? whatever they are, it seems as if the intention is to legitimize a use of the concept of trigger that is broader than, let's call it, a medicalized use (i would include psychiatric usages there too). and that's a big part of my uncertainty about this, as a strategy (since it is clearly part of a shift in social justice strategy as well as in the preferred techniques for self-care being taken up and defended by people whose personal projects may or may not be that invested in social justice work). if nearly anything, whether concerned or indifferent, related to our violent cultural legacy is being re-conceived according to an immunological conception of people's emotional health in connection with any and all of their encounters with that culture, but the clinical basis for treating some cases of emotional disorder separately (because their etiology is due to incidence of some specific trauma) is minimized to such an extent that anything anyone says is triggering for them is triggering, how could that not have consequences that are worth asking about?

i don't really appreciate the 'if you resist, you are bad' implication. i think it's obviously possible to show concern for personal well-being and for systemic ills while disagreeing with this specific innovation in the practice of doing so.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/178725/feminists-talk-trigger-warnings-round

Did anyone bring up the Wellesley sculpture incident yet? That was the first thing that made me take a second look at the concept of trigger warnings and think, whoa. Interested in hearing in orbit's thoughts on that issue .

boomingest post j.

i missed this the first time around! i agree that it's a thing, "creepy liberalism," if that's what we're calling it

i don't know this writer:

But every life, every existence, belongs to one person and one person only, and no one else has the right to force this life and this existence to one side, to force it out of the way, to force it out of existence. We’ll go by ourselves, as we have the right to do. That’s part of the natural course.”
— Thomas Bernhard — from Concrete

my education is drifting back to me in dim waves atp but it seems a little... noteworthy to have an extended conversation about suffering and its place in public life in a totally non-christian way. is it fair to call trigger warnings regimented compassion?

The Oberlin website is what made me uneasy about this whole thing - when I read "Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism" I thought good luck studying literature then. I think TWs should be used as sparingly as possible. In the Santa Barbara case a rape survivor would have every reason to be pissed off with having a filmed rape scene sprung on her without warning, although I'd rather that was addressed with the teacher in question, who failed to exercise basic consideration for his/her students, rather than tackled with blanket application of TWs.

This piece that Valenti linked to is a good take on it and the idea of the "student-customer".

http://tressiemc.com/2014/03/05/the-trigger-warned-syllabus/

goole, one of the reasons i emphasized liberalism is that besides the context of rights and harms i was thinking of mill's utilitarianism, since that kind of rationalized/regimented epicurean or christian-derived project to ameliorate or eliminate suffering seems to feed the readiness to adopt trigger-warning policies as much as, say, a more justice-minded attitude toward reform might also. and for mill one of the chief virtues/passions to cultivate, for someone who wants to extend the application of the greatest happiness principle, is compassion (which in his description sounds basically like a feeling of oneness with all beings). (i don't know it well, but i think the flip side would be something like judith shklar's take on liberalism as motivated above all by a hatred of cruelty, as the chief vice.) and it fits with the way he roots the individual projects pursued in 'on liberty' in a richer picture of self-culture than just the yes-happiness-no-harms-no-unjustified-coercions picture of him that one can take from a looser reading of the utilitarian-reformist liberal project. (we want not just happiness or freedom from pain, but the satisfactions that come from directing our own growth as people, from being able to make ourselves whole.) which seems significant in this context since we're talking about the use of trigger warnings in education.

but 'regimented compassion' is a good term for it i think because it suggests that there's something odd about the undertaking. consideration would probably be a better term for it, in relation to ideas about the decorum and decency of speech and public behavior, but including 'compassion' in the phrase suggests the more fundamental motive while reminding how in certain ways the arrangement being promoted—more extensive use of trigger warnings to enable individuals to manage their own self-protection—effectively brings about the self-exclusion or self-absconding of people in need of compassion from a public space in which others would otherwise confront suffering toward which to be compassionate or not. so that policy officially acknowledges the existence of suffering but delegates its treatment to the sufferers, who if they are lucky will be suffering enough and in acknowledged-enough ways to be able to find some other private or official remedy (say, a therapist), and permits those who issue trigger warnings to think of themselves as having discharged the claims of suffering upon their attention because they have changed their behavior so solicitously.

While we're talking about racism and trauma/PTSD:

http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/03/suicide_crisis_among_native_youth_on_reservations.html

Native youth are more than three times more likely to commit suicide (a number that increases to more than 10 times on some reservations), and have post traumatic stress symptoms on par with Iraq War veterans.

http://gawker.com/triggered-college-professor-argues-for-right-to-tear-1550250284

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

thems triggerin words, podner

http://www.happytrails.org/_images/trigger/01-sm-Illustration%20Photo.jpg

so this happened: http://gawker.com/starbucks-apologizes-to-louisiana-woman-over-satanic-ca-1556322885?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

A liberal friend of mine who also happens to be Christian was curiously defending this employee, indicating the customer was 'privileged' and guilty of "#firstworldproblems". I don't see how this is acceptable, though - employees shouldn't be speaking on behalf of their companies, and similar to me not being appreciative of having a Bible verse written on the side of my coffee cup, I don't think someone of religious persuasion would appreciate this kind of a message. At the end of the day, this isn't an earth-shattering event, no, but it is something that could get that employee (rightfully) shitcanned - people order a drink, not unsolicited symbolism.

I mean hell, I have Sigil of Baphomet jewelry so obviously I am not offended by these symbols, but I get a little unnerved when some liberals seem to hold themselves to lower standards than they do conservatives.

the defense was largely strange too - "companies have a right to spread whatever message they desire"...well last I checked, I'm fairly sure Starbucks wasn't endorsing Laveyan Satanism or the LEft Hand Path etc etc

The kid was a dopey jerk for doing that at work, the customer was overly dramatic in being so shocked that they couldn't speak to someone at the time. What they meant to say is that they didn't want an in-person confrontation. Unless you were the subject of satanic ritual abuse (lol) ain't no numbers in caramel gonna make you triggered.

the defense sounds oddly like they're trying to connect dopey barista to hobby lobby owners

I would agree with the customer's defense being code for conflict avoidance.

and yeah, this was more or less an idiot employee trying to be subversive. an entertaining debate ensued about whether this pentagram was Satanic in intent; because the cup is spherical, one can't easily tell whether it's inverted or classic in design!

that is a dumb debate, it's next to a 666, he was trying to rock out with the devil

last I checked, I'm fairly sure Starbucks wasn't endorsing Laveyan Satanism or the LEft Hand Path etc etc

― Neanderthal, Wednesday, April 2, 2014 5:35 PM

that's exactly right. nothing to see here.

http://cafesguide.com/assets/pages/68/9d/689deffca5a6f86c2c35858601ca6b58_330.jpg

I feel bad for this woman, I suppose, but I would be delighted if this happened to me. especially at a Starbucks!

finally figured out the gimmick for my future coffee shop.

i keep meaning to respond to j's long post up there and not getting around to it.

would love to see that.

i don't have a problem with half-measure meliorism, is the short versh

idk how religious i would have to be to find that bored adolescent chicanery more unpleasant than the 'coffee' itself, probably somewhere between fred phelps peace be upon his soul and torquemada

i would like that!

i was thinking some more about the genealogy of generalized 'triggering' talk after i read about that uc prof who tore up some protesters' signs because she said they triggered her.

i feel like i missed out on some change in academic fashion between the early 00s and now that expanded the scope of 'triggering'. my sense back then, around a lot of mostly white feminists and other activists (who still cared about issues like intersectionality), was that the trauma-studies-style thinking about triggering was not so much in the air yet and if ever, people talked about triggering mostly in connection with rape and sexual assault.

but i also feel like i lack perspective on how much influence the internet may have had in the meantime. looking around on tumblr, i was reminded somewhat of old livejournal days, thanks to a really widespread use of 'triggering' that seems to get underemphasized in the current discussions (prompted by e.g. the college curricula stories): on online diarists, basically, warning their readers (probably diarists themselves) that they're going to talk about self-harm and suicidal thoughts. which seems like a different vector for generalized talk about triggering. it goes along more closely with a style of self, performed in a space where vulnerability is given special license and where every reader is likely to be in a particularly vulnerable place if they share any of the triggerable issues they're reading about. i can see how enough talk about triggering in that sort of context would significantly open up the sense people attached to the word.

er, some xps there