Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

idk where else to post this but it's lol:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/karen-halnon-professor-airplane-arrest

Karen Halnon, identified as an associate professor of sociology at Penn State, was on an American Airlines flight from Nicaragua to Miami, according to television station WFOR.

“The United States has declared war on Venezuela,” Halnon repeated throughout the video, which was posted to YouTube as a clip titled "Crazy woman on a plane."

“Venezuela has been declared a national security threat," she repeated on the video.

"You're a national security threat," another passenger shot back.

Halnon later told WFOR that she was returning from a trip to Nicaragua working with single mothers and felt the need to talk to people about the destructiveness of U.S. imperialism.

On the tape, she eventually unbuckled her seatbelt as passengers around her groaned.

"My great hero Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil supply," she said. Halnon was then informed by a flight attendant that the police would be arresting her shortly.

At one point, Halnon calmly lit a cigarette as the passenger next to her got up and left.

"This girl's a gangster," another onlooker said.

Hanlon confirmed to WFOR that she indeed lit a cigarette on the plane.

“I took a few puffs out of it," she said. "Every other revolutionary smokes. Fidel. Daniel Ortega. Tomás Borge. Che Guevara."

as the passenger next to her got up and left.

most startling line in report

"shit that looks like an onion article but isn't"

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wy2tQ951XZ8/TcBjVtpO40I/AAAAAAAAABk/AxxjvSWmGX4/s320/Virginia-Slimsad1968.jpg

does Daniel Ortega smoke? this page is no help

http://www.vipfaq.com/Daniel%20Ortega.html

evictions are cool

“The United States has declared war on Venezuela,” Halnon repeated throughout the video, which was posted to YouTube as a clip titled "Crazy woman on a plane."

i love how deadpan this reads

Flakes on a Plane

hiyiooooooo

http://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/college-professor-bans-student-from-class-for-his-views-on-r#.uq5pzANq3

If sexual assault becomes qualified as rape, what happens next? What else can we legally redefine to become rape?

waht

Thank you for the lols though

“Right now, going to college is a terrifying experience if you are male.”

True, whose Facebook page says he studies “How to Annoy People” at Reed,

gonna graduate summa cum laude by the looks of it

https://www.change.org/p/reed-college-restore-jeremiah-josias-luther-george-true-to-his-humanities-110-conference-2

“Right now, going to college is a terrifying experience if you are male.”

oh man!

true as a subset of "life is a terrifying experience if you are a sentient being"

seems to be a pretty clear case of a guy with a good amount of education without the intellect to successfully apply it. mixed in with a giant serving of narcissism is the perfect recipe for a loud troll, which is really all he is. also a dickhead.

http://www.reedquest.org/freshman-excluded-from-conference-petition-sparks-controversy/

“Right now, going to college is a terrifying experience if you are male.”

this is silly and unhelpful

“Please know that this was a difficult decision for me to make and one that I have never made before; nevertheless, in light of the serious stress you have caused your classmates, I feel that I have no other choice,” Savery wrote in the email,

this is insane and abusive

I keep wanting to quote something from these and post a sarcastic response, but there are too many oblivious quotes from this guy. Send him to reddit college or something.

he does seem like a royal pain in the ass, but just based on this it does seem like he's doing what you're supposed to do, officially, when you go to college, even if he's doing it on the basis of rong beliefs. probably it's kind of maddening to experience the clash of the rational-critical-discussion ideology and the this-is-a-safe-place-for-learning ideology. especially when combined with an old-fashioned OSTRACISM. he's probably reading john stuart mill inveighing against conformist social pressure as an obstacle to the truth in one class and then in another his classmates and his teacher are colluding to exclude him from his own education.

If is he supposed to educate himself he can do that through a million other ways than going in to a college where other people are paying lots of money to hear this expert talk about stuff and ruining their value.

what are you talking about?

he got thrown out of a discussion section.

College is not a place where you go and everyone in class talks to the professor about their shared experiences and they learn organically. You pay money to take classes. The professors are teaching the class, not the students.

If is he supposed to educate himself he can do that through a million other ways than going in to a college

glad we're making college a safe space from being educated. i can't wait for the inevitable story of an identity studies professor explaining to an inquisitive student that it's not their job to educate them and that asking them to do so is like demanding free labor.

xxp no doubt that's a rationale for a professor asserting control over a classroom when a student monopolizes a discussion. but… he got thrown out of a discussion section. we're not talking about 'let the professor teach, he's who we paid to hear'.

Please explain again why this guy did what you are supposed to? Do you realize how many actual victims (that he has discounted as not existing or numbers being inflated) have "done what you are supposed to do" and report their shit and get turned away because of attitudes like his?

lol @ identifying listening to a load of mra bullshit from some creep with 'being educated'

The professors are teaching the class, not the students.

I like this too ^ I mean totally insane formulation but I can dig it.

I don't like what he says, and fucked if I'm gonna defend his right to say it, life's way too short

xxp well, for example, when people make claims that cite statistics, you're supposed to inquire about their validity. when people make controversial claims you're supposed to challenge the reasons given for them in order to eventually produce the strongest reasons possible, to better understand the reasons given, and (if it comes to that) to see that the reasons are insufficient for the claim. standard critical-thinking stuff, practically an ideology, like i said. it seems the student has that part of it down. he might not be doing it well, and he might be doing it from a position with unpalatable beliefs or unexamined assumptions of its own, but still… the assumption is that you do it in order to improve, generally, the state of everyone's beliefs. if there's something wrong with his, then the whole point of being in college is that he go through the long and often uncomfortable (not just for him) process of putting his wrong beliefs to the test of discussion with others.

standard liberal-arts crap, no?

Yo, Bruneau, might be worth your while to check into not only how colleges generally, but Reed College specifically, actually works. Here, I will be a bro and get you started:

Reed maintains a 10:1 student-to-faculty ratio,[14] and its small classes emphasize a "conference" style, in which the teacher often acts as a mediator for discussion rather than a lecturer. While large lecture-style classes exist, Reed emphasizes its smaller lab and conference sections.

Although letter grades are given to students, grades are de-emphasized at Reed. According to the school, "A conventional letter grade for each course is recorded for every student, but the registrar's office does not distribute grades to students, provided that work continues at satisfactory (C or higher) levels. Unsatisfactory grades are reported directly to the student and the student's adviser. Papers and exams are generally returned to students with lengthy comments but without grades affixed."[15]

I have friends who graduated from Reed. "The professors are teaching the class, not the students," is cuckoo bonkers crazy talk.

Conference member Tom Maude-Griffin ‘18 says: “The decision to ban him from the conference was virtually unanimous. There were two guys who vocalized issues with banning him… but neither actually said in the conference that they did not agree with the decision.”

probably they were scared of being next

lol yeah next step the gulag

it would've been so insane to me if a professor i took in college banished someone for a period so the class could discuss whether they should be allowed back

Reed College is a private liberal arts college located in southeast Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon.

Ok, ok. LOL. I am just really confused about why this guy is going to this college.

yea who would choose to go somewhere where their thinking doesn't conform in every area of life to the people around them p crazy

cool to let a hundred flowers bloom about whether victims of rape are liars

i don't think anyone's saying that.

it would've been so insane to me if a professor i took in college banished someone for a period so the class could discuss whether they should be allowed back

― Mordy, Thursday, March 19, 2015 1:39 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agree with this, but idk, the student's own quotes in the Reed Quest article make it seem like he could have easily met whatever definition of "hostile environment" they're using.

Just confused about the idea that his speech has been suppressed. Dude's ideas have now been spread everywhere for free via internet quotes. No one has any idea what was actually said in that class by the teacher or other students, do they?

no one believes that false rape accusations never happen, and no one believes that real rapes never happen. no one believes that the statistics we currently have are definitively accurate. what we have are two ideological povs - one of which believes that any questioning of a particular narrative is a threat to the cause of society taking rape seriously. i find that position sympathetic, but it's an ideological position (don't question anything or you'll give ammunition to the enemy). i don't believe someone should be thrown out a classroom bc of an political dispute. equating a student asking whether we can trust the popular studies on the subject with the proposition that 'victims of rape are liars' is pretty dishonest + inflammatory.

xp adam he was thrown out of his class bc he said something ppl didn't like. that's the alleged free speech violation (a negative consequence - being thrown out of the class - bc of his speech). not that no one is able to hear his opinions in the wide world.

he studies “How to Annoy People” at Reed

tbf it is the juilliard of this

True writes: “… I questioned the largely purported 1-in-5 rape statistic. I stated that I did not believe that the rape culture exists.” Savery corroborates this statement, saying, “[True said that] in general, society was paying too much attention to rape and that rape statistics were overblown. He claimed that we needed to spend more time being sympathetic to men who were falsely accused of rape.”

“I apologize that I caused survivors of sexual assault to feel uncomfortable with my views,

I guess he must feel he was pretty damn statistically unlucky that there happened to be survivors of sexual assault in his class. What with the statistics being overblown, and all.

the whole point of being in college is that he go through the long and often uncomfortable (not just for him) process of putting his wrong beliefs to the test of discussion with others.

Disingenuous at best. This post, and everything out of that kid's mouth afaict.

Banning from class seems weird to me, but I'm not sure what leadership is supposed to do when someone is actively hostile to others, which is what it sounds like True is, and wants you to keep giving him the space to be so. Which I guess makes you "oh god HIM again??" in any group, but espesh around sexual assault issues, is going to bring up bad shit for a lot of ppl and is, I don't mind saying, just basically offensive.

Not every space is right for your issues. If you want to disprove rape stats or w/e, hold an event. Start a club. Get your own air time.

i was thinking about an analogue to this and came up w/ a student responding to a reading of Maus or Night by questioning the official death toll of the Holocaust. it's similar in that it's an inflammatory question that suggests that the motives of the person asking go beyond the superficial question (are the rape statistics correct / are the fatality numbers correct) and are more odious (rape denialism / holocaust denialism). also both cases are similarly irrelevant to the literature under discussion (what does the rape of Lucretia have to do w/ false rape accusations?). i guess in both cases i'm too attached to the 'sunlight is the best disinfectant' idea that i'd balk at banning either idiot from the classroom.

'sunlight is the best disinfectant'

What is that - some anti-vaxxer shit?