Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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!!

sick burn

http://gothamist.com/2015/05/28/manspreading_crackdown.php

whew, i was getting worried we weren't arresting enough people. glad we found some new crimes.

typically I'm closer to the handwringing sjw side than mordy's meninists but in the case of manspreading—as I've iterated elsewhere—i p much think the case against it trumped up if not bunk outright

but wow, https://twitter.com/tnr/status/603642850451070978

the dwayne betts piece he links is an even better breakdown

im not entirely sure i 'get' what 'creepy liberalism' is entirely, but i would think if anything is creepy liberalism it is most sociology

To her credit, although in a rather disquieting way, Goffman does not claim that she did it for science. “I did not get into the car with Mike because I wanted to learn firsthand about violence,” she wrote. “I got into the car because . . . I wanted Chuck’s killer to die.”

There is a convention of “reflexivity” among ethnographers and certain other qualitative social scientists, in which the researcher is expected to include her “perspectives, positions, values and beliefs in manuscripts and other publications.” This is considered necessary for engagement in the “processes of self-awareness and self-criticism as an intrinsic feature of the research process.” Viewed in that context, Goffman’s reflection on her desire for “Chuck’s killer to die,” and her satisfaction with the experience, comprises a meaningful part of the whole story. But expressing a bone-deep emotion is one thing, acting on it is quite another, and impulse control would seem to be an indispensable tool for the ethical ethnographer.

Unsurprisingly, the violence in On the Run has featured prominently in most discussions of the book. So has Goffman’s role as participant-observer. Marc Parry of the Chronicle of Higher Education writes that with Mike and his friends Goffman “dodged police, partied, and discussed shootings.” In a review in the Times Higher Education, Dick Hobbs writes, “police raids, chases, guns, drugs, arrests and a cop’s boot on her neck typified her time in a community that was corralled, controlled and regularly beaten to the verge of submission.” What offends me is that Goffman has turned 6th Street into a jungle that she has braved. I come from a community, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, that’s in many ways like 6th Street. At 16, I plead guilty to carjacking and went to prison for eight years. Yet, I know that my experience, even though it was shared by friends who also went to prison, or sold drugs, or were murdered, does not represent our community.

[…]

There is one more dark aspect to On the Run. Immersing herself in the lives of her friends and subjects, Goffman nearly loses herself. One night, after a rival crew murdered Chuck, she found herself driving Mike around searching for Chuck’s killer. She tells us that she wanted Chuck’s killer dead just as Mike and the rest of the crew did. Mike did not find his target that night. What if he had? Goffman never interrogates her own motives, or how close she came, potentially, to abetting a killing. Instead, this reads as her crowning war story, the moment when she finally understood what it meant to be one of the young men of 6th Street.

University of California at Santa Barbara sociologist Victor Rios has a name for this: the “jungle book trope.” In his book Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Youth, Rios characterizes this trope as a self-aggrandizing fairy tale, in which an innocent white person gets lost in the wild, is taken in by the wild people, survives, and returns to society with a story to tell. I wish Goffman’s book didn’t read that way to me. But it does.

"manspreading" has got to be a nadir in these SJW neologisms. it's...not a portmanteau, it doesn't rhyme with anything... it sounds like something dane cook would have come up with

Thanks for the Maclean's link!

should have quoted more relevant passage from betts, e.g. “her unrelenting focus on criminality is just as likely to encourage more arrests and surveillance than to convince people that mass incarceration should end”

im not entirely sure i 'get' what 'creepy liberalism' is entirely, but i would think if anything is creepy liberalism it is most sociology

maybe the ‘creepy liberalism’ here is that her (well-intentioned) desire to not just empathize but identify with community she’s studying causes her to project and play out her own fantasies (largely if inadvertently based on media stereotypes)— to potentially counterproductive effect: “unwittingly, Goffman gives ammunition to tough-on-crime politicians who want to believe that urban areas are breeding grounds for crime and lawlessness”

a more objective/ distanced approach might have resulted in a more balanced, multifaceted picture— focused e.g. more on structural issues, less on the phantasmatic narrative in which she's the star

alice goffman is not creepy liberalism, she is just down for whatever

that jezebel article is excellent

omg at that perfect "the answer is no" bot below the headline! https://twitter.com/YourTitleSucks/status/603644363214729217

but the true answer seems to be yes

admitting u conspired to murder someone in yr ethnography must be the pinnacle of white privilege

should have quoted more relevant passage from betts, e.g. “her unrelenting focus on criminality is just as likely to encourage more arrests and surveillance than to convince people that mass incarceration should end”

i sorta get this, but i also feel like it's a little bit of a red herring in the overall piece. like, this is a violent community already hugely surveilled and under siege. Not that his concern there is dismissible, it's legitimate to be aware of but .. raising awareness of that in and of itself isn't the problem. like...there's a countervailing pressure to sweep it under the rug. the problem with her piece isn't just that it focuses on criminality and violence—such studies could be done, surely?

it's the narrative which is drawn from it, which in this case only serves to reinforces a mythic pathology, dehumanizing individuals, reinforcing a status quo. she's not saying anything new—oh, the police are more aggressive? what year did "batterram" come out

not that i've read the book, but the fact that a gang convinced her to do a drill suggests i might be better off

while we're at it here's kelefa sanneh on sociology & black pathology in the NYer earlier this year: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/dont-like

sorry if this is a bit of a derivation from creepy liberalism's concern with free speech but

i meant deviation

I liked Goffman's book a lot and felt like this "desire to not just empathize but identify with community she’s studying causes her to project and play out her own fantasies" was entirely absent. She really doesn't come off as the star. Nor does it read as "white woman survives in the jungle." It reads, throughout, as someone who is on the one hand a human being among human beings but who on the other hand is maintaining a strange rigorous distance from the other humans in the room, in something like the way a psychoanalyst does.

Violence does not play a very big role in the book. It's mostly about spending a lot of time in waiting rooms and owing money to people and to the state of Pennsylvania.

these sorts of ethical entanglements are all over the place w/r/t anthro. i think its telling that Sudhir Venkatesh's "Gang Leader for a Day" didn't come in for the same vein of criticism, probably because the underlying point of his book was to pathologize rather than sympathize.

his book also came out pre-social media tbf

but actually even at the time i remember hearing some criticism about it, how relative to his earlier more academic work it seemed so 'marketed'

http://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/law/ethics-on-the-run

these seem like fundamental problems btw