Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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

Did those skateboarders ask the dog's permission to ride by?

sympathetic at least to the notion that you shouldn't go around patting strange dogs on the head.

if a large dog skateboards by it's only an 85% chance of triggering a bite

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/0leFK8XiWIM/maxresdefault.jpg

my mother's dog will growl at you if you stay up too late.

well, dog skateboarders are less likely to pop ollies

I may just be paranoid, but I will not ever pet a strange dog. The only exception would be if I have been standing around for a couple of minutes already, chatting with the dog's owner in a friendly manner, and the dog acts very sociable the entire time. Oh, and it can't be a tiny 'toy' breed, either. Those fuckers are usually high-strung.

yeah. if i dont know a dog i wont really move toward it at all. if it wants to be friends (and 99% of them do!) it will come to you and demand attention.

haha i do think it's wise not to go petting bitin-ass dogs, i just think it's funny to make this wisdom into yet another piece of awareness-raising

When you walk with a child next to someone with a dog, you cross an invisible beam, triggering a flow of unasked for but comforting verbiage issuing from the dog owner's mouth.

no it is funny. particularly the quantification and graph-abeness of it.

i was pondering this thread recently and wondering how often this sort of thing, from trigger warnings to the post about dealing with people who have chronic pain, has become boiled down to matters of etiquette.

http://tah.oah.org/may-2015/trauma-and-trigger-warnings-in-the-history-classroom/

historians have a roundtable

LINENTHAL: I do not think we use the term "trauma" mindfully in public discourse. There has been an interesting transformation of its usage, from referring to significant physical trauma to—since the advent of the diagnosis, "Posttraumatic Stress Disorder"—referring to psychological injury. However, the term has come to be used in really sloppy ways: too often an inappropriate synonym for "troubled," "confused," "upset," and so on. It has become a part of what is an insidious therapeutic discourse eager to characterize people as patients. That students—or others—may seek to inhabit a diagnosis they are offered does not necessarily mean that there are legions of damaged souls in our classrooms at risk of falling apart should we introduce difficult subjects. Of course it can be the case that some instructors are coarse, tone-deaf, and disrespectful to the power of difficult topics, insensitive to the need to provide helpful contexts for students. Of course we need to attend to students who, for whatever reason, do not have the emotional resources to engage certain subjects. However, it does the great majority of our students a serious disservice to treat them as too delicate to struggle with difficult issues. They are "students," after all, and a kind of "creative dislocation" should be part of evolving intellectual—and emotional—development.

something i wonder about a lot re this issue ^

It has become a part of what is an insidious therapeutic discourse eager to characterize people as patients.

otm. Also: the invasion of therapeutic jargon into language.

feel like there must be some way to de-incentivize that

do you want my fist to impact you?

That is probably true about the overuse of the word "trauma" - especially in the context of law school. It's probably not such a distortion, however, when referring to the experiences of urban public school students in the U.S.

In the city where I live, 47 people were shot in one weekend. We do subject urban school children to enough violence that I think it is not exaggerating to say we are traumatizing them. It's sick that we, as a country, expect children to live with that level of violence as if it is acceptable or normal.

The US is a sick nation in some ways - sick because we are desensitized to these levels of violence. Not sure if Americans are reliable experts on what is and isn't "trauma".

WILLIAMS: As a history professor who is African American and an African Americanist, I teach courses that cover some of the worst forms of human brutality, so yes, I believe it's part of my job to ensure students understand the histories relating to black people's violent subjugation. I do not shy away from difficult subject matter because if I did, there would be little space to accurately teach the history of my field. Nevertheless, I do remind myself that some of my students are encountering a more complex and violent history in my class than they have in K–12 or popular culture.

I realize that learning about these horrors might be difficult and make students sad, or angry, but most of them are fortunate enough they will not encounter chattel slavery, lynching and rape culture run amok, and racial massacres. The killings of unarmed African Americans by police and vigilantes do raise justifiable questions about whether or not we are facing a new nadir, however. If students have experienced rape or a racial killing (like those we discuss in my surveys and seminars), I believe we can ask students to differentiate their personal experiences from what they have read or heard about in class.

Talking to fellow Americanists, especially those social historians who research working-class people, immigrants, women, and ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, I know that I'm not alone in giving trigger warnings in higher education classrooms the skeptical side eye. When I asked a group of Americanists about warnings on syllabi, folks scoffed and rolled their eyes. One historian explained that he tells his students that his classes "are rated R" and gets on with the business of teaching modern U.S. history. Another joked that if universities decided to rate classes, our U.S. history courses would earn MA ratings and there seemed to be a lot of agreement at the table. I think we teach unvarnished American history the way we do because we help our students work through the complexities of the nation's strengths and flaws and hope they will become agents of change.

xp

There has been an interesting transformation of its usage, from referring to significant physical trauma to—since the advent of the diagnosis, "Posttraumatic Stress Disorder"—referring to psychological injury.

didn't feel right to me, and OED attests to "traumatic" to refer to psychologically stressful events in non-scientific publications since the 60s, whereas PTSD first appeared in 1980

sorry to nitpick while avoiding the main point, but I haven't yet decided what I think of the main point; the writer seems to chide the public at large for conflating run-of-the-mill stress with a full diagnosis following a serious incident, and then does the same thing himself by throwing people "who seek to inhabit a diagnosis they are offered" in with all the other shrieky hand-wringers

(perhaps this is unfair as I haven't read the whole piece, and certainly bits of that excerpt do ring true. not going to read the whole piece right now, however, as I should've been somewhere else ten minutes ago)

WILLIAMS: ...Second, I know from personal experience and conversations with friends that virtually anything (smells, sounds, sights, feelings) can be a trigger. Given this complexity, triggers are also hard to predict for each person. For example, the shutter of cameras at a family reunion triggered my cousin, who disabled land mines in Operation Desert Storm. Also, I agree with Roxane Gay, who writes, "I don't believe it is at all possible to anticipate the histories of others in ways that would be satisfying for anyone." With this in mind, I wonder, how do we anticipate all the ways our students might be troubled by historical material we teach? I do not think we can and do our jobs effectively.

This is another piece of the PTSD thing that I don't know what to make of. Is PTSD something almost uncontrollable and random - triggered by unpredictable stimuli that may share no content whatsoever w/ the original incident? Or is PTSD the feeling of discomfort when discussing something that personally once happened to you? Or both? Along with psychology's pathology drift into every element of life there's also this opposite drift where the science of psychology is dismissed entirely, or maybe it was never scientific enough to stand up + so it becomes a stand-in for a number of amorphous difficult to discern ideas + it's unclear which ones are supported by the psychology industry at all (and when coupled w/ psychology's own inclination to absorb more and more facets of experience into a pathological paradigm you end up w/ a mechanism that feeds itself - start w/ X and a student adds X+1 and then psychologists decide X+1 sounds great and how about X+2 too etc).

Fourth, reading psychiatrist Sarah Roff's essay in The Chronicle ("Treatment, Not Trigger Warnings," May 23, 2014) reminded me of a point that's often ignored in the debate: students who are experiencing PTSD symptoms need treatment. She writes, and I agree, that universities (especially counseling and psychological services offices) can be good spaces for students to receive the help they need managing their emotional wounds. This isn't to say that psychiatry and psychology provide a cure for everything that could be hurting our students but it could be a step in the direction for helping them obtain some relief for their suffering.

from another discussion among academics of trigger warnings - i assume the author is not reporting a facetious protest

'I still don’t employ trigger warnings in my courses - in part because I have had students inform me that they’ve found trigger warnings to be triggering, and to engender responses that they find unpleasant.'

had been wondering whether trigger warnings were as much an issue in history courses as in literature

and when coupled w/ psychology's own inclination to absorb more and more facets of experience into a pathological paradigm you end up w/ a mechanism that feeds itself - start w/ X and a student adds X+1 and then psychologists decide X+1 sounds great and how about X+2 too etc

except in case of campus trigger warnings, afaict, it’s not psychologists extending language-game of ‘triggers’ and ‘trauma’

Posted this on the Baldwin thread but no one rlly cared but I think this is tangentially thread appropriate. There's a whole lot going on here

http://www.youtube.com/v/GjUSMtyJjp8&fs=1&hl=en

thought this was interesting and revealing of a lot of the exhaustion some people feel being enmeshed in this stuff daily

Park isn’t as abrasive on Twitter as she once was. (Nor is she as prolific: “I definitely tweet less now,” she said. “Back then, I tweeted, retweeted things hundreds of times a day. Now, maybe fifteen, twenty. Some days, I don’t tweet at all.”) A recent tweet—“I don’t know if I believe in romantic love anymore, or if it exists separately from violence. I do believe more than ever in friendship”—seems to come from a different person altogether. She grew uncomfortable when I asked why conflict on Twitter had once ensnared her to such an extent. “You don’t have a PR person telling you what to say. Sometimes I feel like a child celebrity, defined by some things said and done in immaturity forever.”

Park’s understanding of her Twitter presence carries a distinctly Christian note. “It’s a lot like purity politics in the church,” Park observed, referring to the tendency of Twitter groups to attack perceived wrongdoers. It is, she pointed out, a strategy that works for activists until it turns on them. “You do one wrong thing,” Park said, “and you’re tainted. You’re out forever.”

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121861/suey-parkof-cancelcolbert-fame-has-stopped-fighting-twitter

the death of call-out culture started so quickly

not enough

well and this coming from park, very much sort of the child star of callout culture, is pretty significant i think

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121866/history-ptsd-and-evolution-trigger-warnings

jeet heer

nothing about cc is significant except the oxygen thereby thieved

So turns out the complaints to the Danish bus company was an organized campaign from Israel. 75% were in English, and most were more or less copied from a standard complaint. They were from Israel Europe Freedom Center, and they went like this: I was exposed to the recent hateful advertisement campaign on your buses. In the advertisement, there is a content that hurts the feeling of me as an Israeli and of the Israeli people. The warm friendship between the Danish people and the Israeli people is being harmed by this hateful campaign. I call upon you to cancel the hate advertisement on your buses. Thank you No mention of the maps.

Good job for that forum - and of course even more the idiotic Danish politicians - on harming the warm feelings from Denmark to Israel immensely more than any BDS campaign has ever done. The hypocrisy, the double standards, were mind boggling.

God, I hate the Danish free speech hypocrisy. Geert Wilders and Golder Dawn is a-ok, but BDS, no, that's hate speech!

maclean's is canadian so we can legit call this "creepy liberalism"

http://www.macleans.ca/work/jobs/hes-fired-whos-next/

http://jezebel.com/how-to-teach-an-ancient-rape-joke-1705749434

Fuck this guy and his terrible music but I just wanted to lol @ the location of the "trigger warning" obv not intended as a real trigger warning

http://m.pitchfork.com/news/59725-nxne-defends-action-bronson-against-accusations-he-glorifies-gang-raping-and-murdering-women/

"in which the artist cooks a meal over a woman's dead body, rolls her up in a carpet, throws her in his trunk, and proceeds to violently stab her when he discovers she's still alive (trigger warning, obviously)."

dumbledore dies (spoiler alert, obviously)

thx foole that article was great

goole!! sorry!!