Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

(i will never forget the moment a seemingly nice, much younger than me guy hit on me and then asked me if i'd read any tucker max. i was like, have you? why would you ask a woman you wanted to like you that?)

ha see this is exactly the scenario i couldn't conceive

some things are still tribal

my tribe prefers large books, especially Rand and DFW--better to use as missiles

those of us who've wryly noted what literature it's okay for serious men to enjoy

Oh god, so now I'm not a serious man!

Da Vinci Code certainly serious lit /s

i dunno, being that I've invested a lot of energy in certain areas of music over the past decade or whatever, and thought a lot about why I like things and what I like about them, I find it hard to judge ppl for being kinda "entry level" about certain stuff. Bc I certainly recognize my own ignorance when I'm at a bar with, like, someone knowledgeable about craft beer or whatever, and I have friends for whom this list would completely go over their head who are not, like, dumb people! And read. So if I have any issue with it its just along those lines I guess, i dunno though, Ive certainly gone on dates where someone's cultural choices made me eye bug. but not thaaat often to notice trends

On the other hand I'm sure women get hit on with book discussions esp in like grad school more often than I'm dating so

Nb speaking more to ppl reading the list who don't get it than dudes who are super enthusiastic about like tucker max

Is anyone on this thread talking abt prof saida or is that on a different thread

Sorry prof grundy, saida is her first name

this would be the one

where?

i don't think anyone ever did, i thought about it but

oh, i see ... i personally don't have anything intelligent to say about it, but was thinking the ILE brain trust might

yeah i had nothing either… it's just, another one of those. personally i have no feel for the ~~tensions~~ of 'well MAYBE ppl are RIGHT to be critical of professors making public statements like that'. nope - and college presidents (or regents etc) scolding / responding punitively to any extramural speech is some bullshit

saida hits home to me for various reasons.

its just right wing political theatre and a craven campus administration (but its bu so they have a huge record of that, and honestly it is a better response than the "not just under the bus but driving the bus" response you might have gotten from the admin there 15 years ago).

like they played the trick once with tweets over israel which is hot-button and they think they can keep doing it over "lol white people" tweets just the same, but i think the play will die out way faster in this case, or at least i hope it will.

otoh i think this happening repeatedly will have a huge chilling affect on already over-anxious-about-the-market young academics ever saying shit on twitter. otoh idk if that's a huge loss in any sense except a moral one. also note the twitter acct is locked now but i appreciate in the bio: "i regularly neglect to codeswitch on this personal account. " so, welp.

did the administration reprimand her? Last i heard they stood by her. dumb if so

They haven't fired her but released a statement condemning her for 'stereotyping people based on race'.

twitter is a very unchill place imo

otm

i just spent my first half hour on twitter, catching up w my old network of progressive teacher leaders / change agents, where is the thread where people talk about how fucked up twitter is, i think i'm having an anxiety attack

there's a few threads about twitter alright

sense i have about the grundy kerfuffle is that nothing of note has happened

grundyfuffle, fufflegate

same goes for the book list, i guess? lazy snark, kind of funny, kind of nothing. srs books, pop books, dude books, sure.

i've read about 20 of them, most of which i enjoyed. i've attempted & abandoned and/or disingenuously claimed familiarity with a bunch more. funny thing is that, of the small number i have read, quite a few were recommended to me by women who liked them a good deal more than i did: angela's ashes, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, the man who mistook his wife for a hat, the tipping point, etc.

wau is this one ever in this thread's sweet spot

http://www.universityherald.com/articles/18983/20150514/kennesaw-state-student-accused-of-harassment-for-waiting-on-meeting-with-advisor.htm

https://twitter.com/hashtag/ItsBiggerThanKSU?src=hash

Kennesaw State University (KSU) in Georgia acknowledged it received and is looking into a complaint from a student who was accused of harassment for waiting on an academic advisor to meet with him.

A student named Kevin Bruce posted a video to Twitter Wednesday night with the message: "Rude advisors at Kennesaw. [ Shaking my head ]." In the video, an advisor Bruce identified as Abby Dawson approaches him and tells him he is harassing her and her assistant and leaves to call campus security.

holy shit this person looks terrible.

but yeah it reminds me how "disrespect" and "harassment" have entered into business-speak as all purpose ways to get people to shut up.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Z2X-fRYjZ0YJ:chronicle.com/article/A-Plague-of-Hypersensitivity/229963/%3Fkey%3DTmJ3IFc3bCVHYXFrMzZEZz1VaH1tMEl4NSYaOXBzbl1XFQ%253D%253D%3D%3D+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

columbia sociologist/journalism prof todd gitlin

i had been waiting to read this, it's paywalled (didn't think to use the cache until now). i don't know anything about gitlin but i would have thought he would have been more clued in?? blasts the phenomena with 'data' in a skeptical fashion but seems oblivious to the activist roots of the phenomenon he starts with

and the ovid-related thing by the columbia humanities students (don't remember seeing that above?):

http://bwog.com/2014/05/10/reading-lit-hums-rapes/

there's a tweet out there from some other student advised by that advisor, where the student re-asks a question, yknow, tryin to feel out whether an exception to some policy can be made, and the advisor emails back like, 'i refuse to answer that question again'

yeah there's a huge swell of ppl posting emails with that advisor that are just sorta nuts

like it somehow escaped her that her job involved helping students

it is true that students don't listen and don't do things for themselves and can be hella annoying buuuuut

Seems a case of someone using oppression buzzwords to get out of being competent at their job

We have this thing called 'Folkemødet' every year. It would be 'Volk-meeting' in German, you know, popular meeting, a meeting for all the people. It's a 'democracy festival', where politicians and speakers speak and discuss and we are all very much a people. Then a group of fanatic Free Speech activists (free speech for everyone except muslims, though, of course) invited Geert Wilders. And now a group called Party of the Danes, formerly neo-nazi org, has invited the leader of Golden Dawn and a couple of fascists from France and Italy to talk about 'persecution of nationalists' in Europe. This is where Denmark is at the moment, a haven for fascists murdererous militias - which is what Golden Dawn is - under cover of being a 'wild west of free speech', as a politician called us recently.

well, yes--in the Wild West speech was free, but snoring too loud got you killed

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-purists-dilemma-spiritual-pollution-in-a-modern-world

ACCORDING TO A FRONT PAGE story in The New York Times, growing numbers of “Haredim” (the preferred term for strictly observant Jews) are asking that female passengers on airplanes be moved so that Haredi men will not have to sit next to them. Not all Haredi Jews object to males being seated next to females on public transportation. Indeed, the demand is a novel one that many Orthodox Jews repudiate. But some segments of the Haredi community have adopted increasingly strict interpretations of Jewish law, making gender segregation in particular a “litmus test” of Orthodox faith.

Within every faith tradition, one sees the same split between a purist wing that insists on the strictest forms of observance and a more pragmatic wing that takes a more accommodating approach. Even among religious fundamentalists, one finds versions of this split. Perhaps the most prominent example is Jerry Falwell, who formed the Moral Majority by exhorting his fellow evangelical Christians to abandon their focus on inward spiritual purity and make common cause with Catholics instead.

This constant tug-of-war between purists and pragmatists produces a continual ratcheting up of the purists’ standards as they react to the pragmatists’ accommodations. Purists are increasingly gaining the upper hand, based partly on demographics (higher birth rates) and partly on the internal dynamics of reactionary movements (which in the classic fashion of backlash politics are fueled by gains on the other side).

Yet dynamics internal to modern liberalism itself are also part of the story. Many of the practices of so-called religious traditionalists are historical novelties. But so too is the growing belief that a liberal society has an obligation to accommodate such practices.

That belief has taken hold in a breathtakingly broad formulation of the principle of religious accommodation. According to the current view, recently embraced by the Supreme Court, people of religious faith have the right to make other people accommodate their practices unless the countervailing interests of the state are of the very highest magnitude (“compelling,” in the parlance of modern constitutional doctrine) and there is no “less restrictive” way of protecting those interests.

If it's so important not to sit next to a woman on an airplane, then buy three adjacent seats and sit in the middle one. kthxbye

what if someone's religious practice contradicts the one being asserted? like if the airline was owned by someone w/ a religious belief in radical egalitarianism and sees this request as an abrogation of their religious right to have men + women sit together on their planes? whose religious faith do we transgress? seems obv to me that the state should not impel anyone to do anything. if they can't fly bc they'll be seated next to a woman they can either take aimless' suggestion, or just not fly. the govt does not have an obligation to make flight safe for ppl's religious convictions.

Religious convictions should have very little influence in all politics. One you use religion to justify negative actions towards someone, you are introducing dangerous and anti-social elements into society.

I'm also weary of breaking it into a binary of "purist" vs. "pragmatist" as it implies that a pure and true reading of religious texts vs one that is less "pure". Which is on some fundamentalist tip.

The only way to avoid being contaminated by other people’s sin and spiritual corruption, on this shared understanding, is to totally withdraw from society — or give up the demand for perfect religious purity.

Ironically, the very people who see themselves as upholding traditional religious faith have forgotten this traditional religious wisdom. Not only are the practices they are seeking to protect modern inventions. They have also lost sight of the original understanding that the quest for spiritual purity can only be pursued by escaping from the bonds of society that force one to do business and share public accommodations with those whose practices and mores deviate from one’s own. The result is a spate of purist demands to be protected from spiritual pollution, combined with an uncompromising approach to religious accommodation that ignores the need for compromise on which the principle of accommodation is based.

Pretty much otm.

This doctrine has considerable intuitive appeal. Why shouldn’t society accommodate people with different religious practices if it is possible to do so without undermining any critically important interests? We accept that people with physical limitations have a right to reasonable accommodations that obligates others to make certain sacrifices: of money, convenience, and so forth. So why not apply the same principle to addressing the incompatibilities between religious practices and mainstream cultural norms?

Interesting comparison but I think it suffers from false equivalencies. Religion less as a choice and more as a fact of genetic inheritance. Like being born with a malfunctioning eyesight or a defective heart, you don't really get to choose what religion you are born to. A major factor is simple geography but the religion of your parents is probably the strongest influence. One cannot choose who their parents are.

However there is the matter of proof. If you are claiming to be blind or have a heart defect, there is a way to prove it. It is a real and tangible fact and it impacts someone's life in a real and physical way. If you apply for help as a result of your disability you need proof. There is no way to prove who is a real Evangelical Christian or who is simply saying they are to get the benefit.

FWIW i think it's all a failing mainly of modern Mental Health and Public Health in general. I'd be down w the politically religious being classified as mentally handicapped. Also corporations that want to be people also have to take psychiatric evaluations.

growing numbers of “Haredim” (the preferred term for strictly observant Jews) are asking that female passengers on airplanes be moved so that Haredi men will not have to sit next to them.

don't see how anyone can entertain this

yeah i'm pretty sure airlines are not going to do this

Why not move the men?

Or, I mean, ask that the men be moved.

And inconvienience a holy man?

it's harder to move men because they're more rational

less sentimental

smellier

i have an academic facebook friend who's an activist and surely favorably disposed toward discomfort-trigger safe-classroom agitation, although it's generally not what she goes for come concern-sharing time on the ol newsfeed

but she loves dogs and she's always posting this stuff passive-aggressively insinuating that the world is at fault for not knowing how to behave around dogs which means that ~more often than you would realize~ it's not the DOGS' (or owners') fault if they bark bite etc

https://scontent-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xat1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/11151071_700178326771793_6382628676804543274_n.jpg?oh=8f2d8f27d21c007cf8cee79c7832490d&oe=560022E9