The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

trigger warnings are often just about /broaching/ a topic, not even taking an assholish perspective on it.

http://i.imgur.com/yNDKxYv.gif

i kept reading for the clever twist, the angle that would make this article not just another "oh brother, these sensitive students" piece and it never came. so stewart lee's take on PC perfectly applies, it's the best thing i've ever heard on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IYx4Bc6_eE

(^ trigger warning)

Yeah, Lee's spot-on there.

the thing that gets me about trigger warnings is that somehow we've managed to politicize the principles of effective communication. in america, communications is a first-semester college requirement, and if you go that class they say, for instance, that when you speak in public you should tell your audience what you're going to say, say it, and then tell your audience what you just said. so it seems to me that if you're going to talk about, for instance, rape, it's effective communication to point that out.

one of the other things they say in comm 101 is that effective communicators pay attention to their audience. so many people these days get caught up in the fantasy of speaking truth to powerless and wholly ignore this aspect of communication. if your bread and butter comes from scoring meaningless rhetorical points while inflaming pointless arguments, that's at least understandable, but i can tell you from experience those sorts of "victories" tend to ring hollow after a little while. attempting to pummel people into submission with rhetoric simply doesn't work very well.

i wonder if what is really at issue here is something like the "political" in carl schmitt's sense: the political as the space of legitimate conflict. or if schmitt's critique of liberalism as obscuring the political could be useful here.

― ryan, Saturday, 3 October 2015 20:51 (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am not sure that BLM, for example, would characterise the current atmosphere as being void of legitimate conflict, so much as "It'd be nice to have a discussion using shared terms without it turning into Reddit every 5 minutes"

these days everybody wants to talk, nobody wants to listen, and i am a chatty fucking cathy when it comes to explaining stuff. that said, i will always be shit at validating other people's emotions, and calling me out on that is not going to do anything to improve the situation.

Mansplaining, in my understanding, is less "validate my emotion" and more "be aware that 'genially tell me to STFU, I already know this' is a response that's selected for in certain environments and selected sharply against in others"

so many people these days get caught up in the fantasy of speaking truth to powerless

Actually that's a better definition :)

I sometimes wonder if it isn't the internet that has made everything so raw. The college experience seems like a good place to learn to grow thicker skin in the new digital age. I wonder how many freshman are concerned about trigger warnings compared to seniors. I didn't really have to read all the articles and threads, just my two cents.

really have TIME to read

i love the last paragraph of this:

"In 1990, when I was eight years old, radical student activists at Wesleyan firebombed the president’s office. This was not, I hasten to say, a constructive way to go about getting what they wanted. And yet I’m struck by how fundamentally different the thinking of campus activists was then, not just at Wesleyan, but writ large. Back then, students wouldn’t have been caught dead making appeals through official channels. They were more likely to occupy administrative offices than to go to them, hat in hand, seeking to get what they want. Somewhere along the line, sit-ins and underground newspapers were replaced with committees and formal complaints. The question for the passionate, committed young activists at Wesleyan and elsewhere is whether they can ever shake up the system by asking it nicely to change."

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122938/college-students-have-forgotten-how-fight-system

more firebombings plz ty...

I just googled Wesleyan. Who the fuck is going to firebomb a place they're paying $48,704 a year to go to.

It's funny how it doesn't matter how many examples of this behaviour come up, the response of some people on the left is simply to deny it exists. This allows the right to pretend that the left doesn't give a shit about free speech. It doesn't strike me as a great strategy.

my wife is getting a masters at cal state northridge and one of her undergrad classmates likened a pop quiz she took to 'getting raped'. People kinda throw that word around too easily these days imo.

my wife is getting a masters at cal state northridge and one of her undergrad classmates likened a pop quiz she took to 'getting raped'.

And the next person over didn't immediately start screaming "microaggression!!!"?

I just googled Wesleyan. Who the fuck is going to firebomb a place they're paying $48,704 a year to go to.

Odd thing about the recent articles posted is they don't mention tuition at all. Which seems like it should be a huge factor in student/admin relations.

Like I can buy the idea that these colleges are bastions of free speech where students should be compelled to challenge everything if tuition didn't saddle most of them w lifelong debt. These power dynamics don't exist in a financial vacuum.

one of her undergrad classmates likened a pop quiz she took to 'getting raped'. People kinda throw that word around too easily these days imo.

On the contrary, this is the kind of thing I both heard and said routinely when I was in college 20 years ago. But as I grew up I started to understand that was actually kind of a gross thing to say, and I stopped saying it, and it seems to me that I hear it less too. And my increased understanding of this is largely thanks to the kind of efforts the Atlantic likes to shit on. My rights are not in danger from people encouraging me to talk and write mindfully instead of mindlessly.

xp i suppose one instance of this kind of thing that i've noticed in british universities does come down to that, students insisting on getting their money's worth. and tbh that's completely understandable, fuck getting into a dizzying amount of debt and not getting what you perceive that you've paid for, though it is obviously a terrible way to approach university

eephus emphatically otm

It's funny how it doesn't matter how many examples of this behaviour come up, the response of some people on the left is simply to deny it exists. This allows the right to pretend that the left doesn't give a shit about free speech. It doesn't strike me as a great strategy.

― impossible raver (Re-Make/Re-Model), Monday, October 5, 2015 10:33 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know, I think there is plenty of policing of speech and social norms on both sides of the political divide. TBH we're not that that far removed from the "how dare you question america, don't you support our troops"-era among conservatives, and that's still very much a part of that discourse.

Anyway, I don't deny that there are examples of college students going to unnecessary extremes that contradict traditional American ideas of free speech. I do, however, deny that it is a very important social trend that deserves cover stories in major magazines, or frankly much of my attention at all. Like, I wouldn't even put this in the top 100 problems with American's higher education system.

yeah - beautifully put eephus xpost

xp like trigger warnings are stifling our freedom of speech? jesus christ, wait until you find out there are rating systems for movies and video games that tells you how much sex and violence they contain!

eephus otm

tbh how our ratings systems of movies works in practice is actually a bigger threat to free speech than trigger warnings on college campuses.

I do, however, deny that it is a very important social trend that deserves cover stories in major magazines, or frankly much of my attention at all.

two things:

i basically agree, this isn't a huge societal problem or really even a major problem on campuses (maybe there are some exceptions). it is however of particular interest to a few of this on this board since we're "in" academia. it's also likely fodder for a lot of articles because a lot of journalists are not-so-distantly connected to that milieu.

er wait was that two things? it was originally. oh well.

More than anything cases like Seinfeld etc seem more about connecting money w speech in a post citizens united world.

Seinfeld not admitting the culpability for his sins of the 90s. If I ever hear anyone my age or older using the phrase "not that there's anything _wrong_ with that!" again I'm going to walk out of the room.

like let's get real these middle-aged white comedians are horrible

@amateurist

Yeah, totally, I'm not saying that we shouldn't discuss this or other articles, or that they're of interest to no one! I was responding specifically to RM/RM's claims that the left is shooting itself in the foot by not publicly distancing itself from this "trend," because the right can now accuse the left of not supporting free speech. I think actors on the left have no obligation to respond to this because it seems pretty clear that there's less to this trend than meets the eye. Also "the conservatives will call us fascists" isn't really that scary, it's been an ineffective strategy for like 15 years now.

I think that you're absolutely right that journalists' connections to that milieu is one reason why editors are happy to run these articles. I think it's interesting to think about why there is a recent spate of articles, and I've posted about that upthread!

the left is shooting itself in the foot by not publicly distancing itself from this "trend,"

As if the world doesn't have enough articles about this "trend".

Feel like Free Speech these days is more akin to saying "Not it!" while playing tag.

I guess in the same way that what you do as a rebellious young person can come back to you via scandalous FB photos, what you do as a young person in the social sphere can come back to you via an article from the establishment shaming your way of protest.

Unless the article starts with "We should raise minimum wage for teachers nationally and make drastic cuts to tuition." there is no reason for any school-going folks to listen to these clowns. If student protests are supposed to be held to some national standard then let's make public tuition free. If teachers are expected to add more micromanaging to their already overflowing schedules then let's give them some of that plutocrat dough.

Some anti-free speech bollocks from the opposite direction:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2015/10/goldsmiths-diversity-officer-bahar-mustafa-receives-court-summons-wake

I did wonder if anyone on ILX was going to bring up that specific case and the background to it.

It seems like understanding the context of a joke meme like "#KillAllWhiteMen" requires a kind of nuance with regards to understanding the context of what it's like to be a woman living in a world of constant male harassment, and what it's like to be a PoC living in a world of constant racist harassment. This is nuance that gets lost, but it's harder to get people who have never experienced any of it to recognise, let alone care about that kind of nuance.

I've been going back and forth about even reading this thread, let alone contributing to it... to be honest, I can't even begin to explain the kind of cringe I experience on contemplating getting involved. Like, even down to the titles, and how they already slant the discussion in certain ways: the specific choice of phrases like "creepy liberalism" and "coddling" just indicate to me that a certain opinion and mindset has already been formed about them (a negative one) and as someone who is not just in favour of trigger warnings and content warnings but (gasp... even worse!) is the kind of person who needs them is starting, not with a level playing field of "what's this about" but already facing an uphill battle of having to justify one's own existence.

I've been operating for over a decade (maybe more? the idea of content warnings were discussions I was having in the 90s, though we didn't call it that, then, because we lacked the terminology) in communities that now use them by default. It's never been a big deal. But I've given up on reading news articles about them because the blatant lack of understanding or misrepresentation of What They Are For and How They Work just bears absolutely no resemblance to how I've seen them function in communities I'm in that use them. I honestly sometimes feel like, if Trigger Warning were a doom-metal band from Siberia releasing lathe vinyl on some trendy label, you can bet that every dude on ILX would have found more relevant an accurate information about what they were than simply taking the word of scaremongering Atlantic thinkpieces making them the scapegoat for the ills of the American educational system. But "it's a Social Justice thing" just seems to make some people kick in an automated defensiveness where they do not want to investigate further than reacting to what is presented in some kneejerk thinkpiece. If you find yourself missing "nuance" in the discussion of things, maybe that's a gap in your own knowledge and understanding, that you could remedy?

I have a lot of experience (on both sides) of What Trigger Warnings Are For, Who They Are For, How They Work, that in a perfect world, I'd be happy to share. But it's obvious from just skimming this thread that there's a vast disparity in terms of knowledge, and I don't want to over-explain to people who already know all about the subject and are tired of it, or under-explain to people whose literal only exposure is to Atlantic articles or "college kids today are kinda weird and I don't understand their lingo." And I can't shake the nagging suspicion that a lot of the hostility directed towards "Trigger Warnings" is actually veiled hostility directed towards "The Kind Of People Who Need Trigger Warnings" - that is, ~college kids~ as cipher for feminists; rape survivors; abuse survivors; refugees; veterans; people who have been on the receiving end of hate crimes for race, gender, sexuality etc; people with mental health conditions (and how scary and needy and yet oddly... "Coddled" we are?) This list is starting to look, kinda... hmmmmm?

Talking about this stuff is hard. It often makes people uncomfortable. But I often feel like people who experience discomfort at these conversations (because they are not part of the groups likely to need these things) project this idea of "this is awkward and discomforting for me to hear" into their mental picture of what People Who Want Trigger Warnings are talking about when they say "Triggered". It really isn't; it's people who are dealing with the kinds of trauma that may be totally outside of your experience. I get nervous when I see "I want a nuanced conversation" becoming a kind of code for "I don't want to feel awkward or uncomfortable by difficult conversations that implicate people like me." So it becomes this kind of handwaving ~why can't we all be more reasonable~ which is again, not a level playing field, when for one side of the debate, it's an academic discussion involving "something they read on the internet" and for the other side of the debate, it's a highly charged emotional discussion asking people to defend and justify their experiences of some of the most harrowing events of their lives.

I understand this may have contributed absolutely 0 to the thread or the debate or whatever. But this thread has been eating away at me for days now so there it is. I'm not going to be in for the rest of the day to discuss it any further though.

If you need a place to vomit, the toilet is that way.

Wow. I have literally no idea what you mean by that statement.

Here's another piece on Bahar Musafa and power dynamics and the idea of "safe spaces" and the reaction to them

http://mediadiversified.org/2015/10/07/from-safe-spaces-to-court-summons-how-did-we-get-here/

― Three Word Username, Wednesday, October 7, 2015 6:31 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtf -- flagging post

Aw come on - it's a lot of words, but some of them are quite short!

"I am not contributing to this thread, but it bothered me. I will not be back to read it." So you are just releasing bile and running. Nothing wrong with that, just no need to do it here.

It seems like the social context for these issues is significantly different in America and Britain. I'm fully willing to admit that the American veneration of free speech above practically all else can go to far (and maybe even more so in internet forums dominated by Americans). But when I see the text of the British Communications Act of 2003 outlawing "sending by public communication network an offensive/ indecent/ obsecene/ menacing message/ matter", it just seems wide open to authoritarian abuse. Maybe again my view is colored by the American lens of distrust of authority.

Maybe "I feel uncomfortable contributing to a thread because of reasons that I detail in my post; but I really think it's necessary because I seem to have experience and perspective that does not appear to be represented so far. P.S. I'm on an overground train going in and out of signal for most of this afternoon so I can't respond at length" is a more nuanced interpretation of my post if you could get past that bile of your own that you clearly feel towards me!

Now why might I feel weird about participating in threads like this, facing posts land attitudes like that? Why? I have no idea!

Oh, come on - I've can't remember seeing you join any thread, on any subject, where something almost exactly like that wasn't your opening gambit. "I'm a trauma victim/Most of you are horrible/I don't know why I'm even here since most of you are going to be horrible/Here's what I think anyway/I don't really want to discuss it further." You do this every time. Eventually you post something productive, but there's always this ridiculous poor-me throat-clearing first.

X-post because it took 4 stations to get enough signal to post that...

See I just do not understand the framing of trigger warnings as a "Free Speach" issue. Every community I've been in that employed them, it lead to a larger conversation, with a wider audience than I ever encountered in communities that didn't use them. They have always *functioned* in practice, with self imposition, as a way of producing more and freer speach.

But, like this Communications Act was probably introduced with propaganda about protecting "women from threats" and "minorities from hate speach" yet gets used by a racist and sexist institution as a blunt instrument of power against ... you guessed it. Not a surprise. I don't know the answer either.

Sorry for phone typing!

You say "more nuanced interpretation", I say "less bothersome second draft", let's call the whole thing off.

Dude. I get criticised if I post without a thousand apologies and clarifications and couching terms first. I get criticised even more if I do. There is literally no position I can take that pleases people who have already decided to see me (and people like me) in certain ways.

I do think it the tendency of nuanced concepts designed to make more and better conversations happen to eventually be pick up and used by dummies as magical silencing spells. That's where we are the phrase "trigger warning", although I suspect powerful people screaming in terror at the very concept are the bigger problem. This phrase does have a curious mix of political and pseudo-psychotheraputic about it that I think makes people want to pay attention to it one way or the other.

x-post

See I just do not understand the framing of trigger warnings as a "Free Speach" issue.

i dont think they are a "free speech" issue either. it's an education issue. i think the majority of the legitimate concern about trigger warnings comes from a sense that it is not a concept that can be effectively, fairly, or coherently deployed without negative consequences in the education system. the whole idea immediately cascades into a infinite regress of individualism and special dispensation that is an intensely difficult thing for the current education system in the US to cope with. so what's at stake--as far as i can see--is a shift in what we think it means to "get an education" or "be educated."

some people seem ok with the idea of education being entirely "overcoded" with political (or moral) values, but perhaps they only think that way because many campuses tend to be guided by political values they already agree with. when the other guys get in power they may feel differently.

(also worth pointing out that the entire reason college campuses in the US can be such bastions of liberalism is paradoxically because the education system has this measure of autonomy from the political, so maybe that's the sense in which this issue intersects with "free speech.")