This Is Not a Day Care. It’s a University
okwu.edu
okwu.edu
Because 'political correctness' isn't the cancer at the heart of social politics, it is straw-manning. On both sides of every issue.
I'd be surprised, perhaps even amazed, if Dr Piper had represented the complaint in any way recognisable to the person who'd made it. This just smells of tendentious reporting.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...
Remember the other professor who had students call the police because there were mice in their apartment?
I guess I have different students because I've been teaching college since 2000 and have never had any complaints like this and neither have any of my friends.
I was saying that a lot of success is due to chance, and that a lot of life events are due to chance. This got people some people saying that what I was saying was horribly depressing. The guy then proceeded to lecture me that my attitude was what was letting me down in something that I never did, and was irrelevant anyway. And that 'I may not have intended it, but that my actions are causing misery' (because I did apologize to people that saying that they were horribly depressed by me saying that life has chance in it, because I felt the need to be conciliatory).
That is what happened when I tried to be honest and disagree with someone spouting feel good bullshit or whatever else made him look good. A complete frigging cesspool.
If I hear someone expressing a view that I dislike, I'm well within my rights to do any or all of the following things: a) stop associating with this individual b) let them know that I dislike the view they've expressed.
Choosing to do both a) and b) is a normal social response, and the individual that finds themselves expressing views that go against the cultural majority will find themselves in an awkward position. If this view being expressed is worth expressing, then unfortunately the individual will have to endure hardships in order to get the message out and convince the masses ... much like MLKjr being willing to go to jail to communicate the idea that civil rights were for all.
So if someone wants to share racist jokes, then toughen up that skin and let the vitriol fly! They should be proud of what they are and let everyone know ... if it's a worthy viewpoint, they'll find others will rally to their cause; and if not, they'll find themselves awkwardly cast out by their social circle (or at least, their social circle's kids/younger generation).
But still, it's frustrating how many people who supposedly pride themselves on their incisive intellects refuse to even consider that there might be something going on besides "political correctness". This Wondermark cartoon captures the dynamic for me:
Like, here's someone who was fired for saying someone else shouldn't have been fired: http://www.gamerevolution.com/manifesto/turtle-rock-communit...
And it makes me pretty uncomfortable when people express "fear of being attacked for doing something that's okay", and other people turn that into "fear of being attacked for doing something that's not okay", and attack them for it.
Maybe there aren't a lot of employers around who want to hire someone who promotes the view that "bigotry is OK," but surely there's at least one.
You've also turned a defense of a person into a defense of their views. You've turned "someone shouldn't be fired for bigotry" into "bigotry is okay". That is not reassuring either.
Or just "bigotry is OK, leave this bigot alone" is something someone should not be fired for?
As it happens, I'm okay with Donald Sterling being fired. I'm not okay with Josh Olin being fired for saying Donald Sterling shouldn't have been fired.
Would you support me being fired, for saying Josh Olin shouldn't have been fired?
As Popehat writes, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. There's an important question of what consequences should or can legitimately flow from speech. But when this "people shouldn't be scared to express opinions" line gets trotted out only to defend white guys, it's a tell. The nominal principle might be freedom of speech, but if the only people defended are the privileged, the actual principle is maintenance of societal privilege.
I can see your argument, here. I disagree with you, but that's not what I want to get at here.
What I want to get at is this: it's one thing to be scared of making racist jokes. It's another thing to be scared of expressing opinions like "Donald Sterling should not have been fired".
When people say "I'm scared to express opinions", and then you attack them "ha ha, look at the white people complaining that they're afraid to make racist jokes, how sad for them" - and then you also say that it's okay to fire people for the opinions that they say they're scared to express...
I don't have a polite term for this.
What I amsaying is that when the "freedom of speech" flag only gets hauled out for pro-bigotry straight white guys, I think it's not really about freedom of speech but instead defense of privilege. If defenders of free speech want to convince me they're serious, they'll be just as vigorous in defending unpopular opinions of people not in their demographic.
That may even be you, in which case, congrats. But unlike you, I don't think it's unconditionally bad that some people are afraid to express opinions because they may face social consequences for them. E.g., if some of the Donald Sterlings of the world are now afraid to express their bigotry, that's ok by me. And if some people are afraid to publish something because they aren't sure whether or not it's bigoted, I also have a hard time seeing that as bad. That seems like a fine opportunity for them to consider their opinions before publishing them.
In fact, I think that's what most people do. The only thing that's different is that straight white guys now have to do the same sort of self-managing that everybody else has always done, because they're now slightly less insulated from the consequences of their actions.
I disagree with some of what you're saying, and I agree with other bits of it. But I strongly disagree with the thing that you're doing and not even acknowledging.
Are you trying to paint me as some kind of tyrant here? Who said anything about obligation? Feel free to ignore me, feel free to talk about whatever you like. Meanwhile, I will feel free to point out when I don't like the things you say.
Like so: it is a shitty tactic to pretend you're talking to me, to reply as though you have a reply to what I said, and thus to obscure the fact that you're presenting no defense for your actions.
I don't know if this is malice or incompetence on your part, but it's bullshit.
It's not my job to address whatever hobbyhorse you've ridden in on, one I still only find half comprehensible. HN discussion is a recreation for me, one I do on my terms. If you would like to make dealing with you my job, feel free to book me at my consulting rate, $300/hr, cash in advance. I have open slots starting in mid-January. Otherwise, please march back on out of my mentions. Thanks.
What I do ask is that if you choose to reply to me, you reply to the things that I actually say. Instead, you repeatedly chose to say things which sounded like replies, but weren't. You tried to hide your lack-of-response - first, by talking about something unrelated to what I said, and second, by being all "I don't need to talk about what you want to talk about". Of course you don't! But if you're not going to talk about it, you don't get to pretend you replied to me.
But while you choose to interact with me, I am free to point out when you're violating conventions of discourse.
I am not entitled to your words, and you are not entitled to my silence.
These things make me want to push back and do the opposite of what you want, just to annoy you.
However, very well: I will not reply to you again in this thread, even if you choose to reply to me.
I don't intend to deliberately avoid replying to you in future.
I discussed this exact topic with my close high school friends while we were home over Thanksgiving weekend, so I also got perspectives from recently-graduated students in the liberal arts and business at Columbia, WashU, Vanderbilt, and Cornell to fill out my sample.
None of them had ever directly heard or seen any comparable behavior during their time in school. We had all heard of isolated incidents of intolerance in the news, and had the sense that such sheltered students could be found on campus, but we didn't personally know or associate with anyone who could be so extreme or intolerant in their beliefs. Which caused us to ask: how does a student like this get a spot at a decent university? Who raises their child to be so intolerant?
So I have to disagree with your claim that such intolerant and childish comments "[smell] very much like what students today are saying." There is a vocal minority of students who say and do things that do not represent the larger body of students as a whole. There always will be. The average college student is still too busy meeting people, playing sports, dating, drinking, traveling, doing internships, interviewing for jobs, and (occasionally) going to lectures to make a big fuss out of anything that might offend him/her.
Most people are just too busy with life to care, even if they sympathize.
It feels ridiculous when you do it at first but it becomes an incredibly helpful tool.
"You want to add feature X because ..."
... and then, once we've clarified what the request is all about, and I'm sure about what's going on, only then can you move in to help, offer advice, or crush their souls with a series of devastating blows.
No, don't do the latter. Show your side of the story and get them to say it out loud. "Okay, you're right, putting a Perl 6 interpreter in the interrupt handlers of the network stack does sound kind of crazy now."
Doing this makes you a lot easier to work with, or at least that is the perception. :-)
Letting someone fail is often good, too...
No normal person would attend a sermon at the chapel of a given faith, and complain that the sermon victimises them for being a poor practitioner of that faith. This is doubly true when its about something universal like love, rather than how well you practice some specific ritual.
I can assure you that I know plenty of young people who would do something like this - heck, I'm a young person (and also a Christian), and whilst I probably wouldn't be brave enough to actually approach a lecturer and voice such thoughts, I am sure that in a moment of weakness I could certainly think such things internally (which in some sense, is nearly or just as bad). So my assertion is based both on knowing my own peers and being honest about myself.
When somebody calls us out for something, it's only natural to want to blame somebody else - it takes an incredible amount of self-awareness and discipline to immediately jump to self-reflection, without trying to pass the buck. Sure, we may get there in the end, but it's often a journey of various emotions to get to that epiphany.
Are you saying you are one of those people? Or that you believe most people are like that?
Well, this goes both ways.
Like most HN threads on this topic, this discussion is largely full of reactions against perceived "victimization", devoid of any self-reflection about what merit the complaints might actually have.
Would you really attend a sermon at the chapel of either your own chosen faith or someone else's and lodge a complaint that the cleric's commentary on love made you feel bad for not showing love? What, exactly, would motivate you to do such a thing?
Surely, in the context of a religious sermon, either you're a believer and you should feel bad for not obeying the precepts, or you're not and it's all irrelevant?
Sure, there are things we know we should do - whether because of familial duties, social duties, or as in this case, our belief system, or our religion/creed.
Then there are the things we want to do.
Sure, we may know they're wrong, or know we'll regret them afterwards - but that's not to say we weren't tempted.
And the human mind is wonderful at trying to justify doing "bad" things (where bad is whatever your own faith/belief system is). So I may be like, I'm a awesome Christian, I'm going to attend bible college, then when I get there, I hear a sermon that strikes a nerve and reveals some sin that I'm committing - I may try to justify myself, by saying, well, that doesn't really apply to me because of XYZ, or I may be like, that lecturer has it out for me, why is he targetting me when there's so many other sinners, I'm going to have a word with him! etc.
In my high school years, I knew of 3 closeted gay people that attended my church. Since homosexuality was rarely talked about, you could reasonably assume that it may get talked about once a year - if that. On those days, however, I'm sure it felt as if the were being publicly lambasted for something they had no control over. I have never even considered myself bisexual, but it always made me extremely uncomfortable listening to sermons about homosexuality. I can only imagine how those people felt.
This is a situation in which I feel that someone who otherwise attends a service regularly would feel the need to speak out.
People will complain about ... well ... just about anything.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
This habit is extremely powerful. There's no way to require people to do it, but people who do it, at least know the arguments of their opponents, are in such a better position to get what they want that people who don't are left standing, mouths open wondering what happened.
And it's extremely timely as just two weeks ago, President Obama gave this quote:
"I don't want you to think that a display of your strength is simply shutting other people up. And that part of your ability to bring about change is going to be by engagement and understanding the viewpoints and the arguments of the other side."
People don't realize that college already is the safe place where they can develop the habits of empathy and conflict-management. Getting called "bitch" and seeing mice are the least of their problems. Those are going to happen in the real-world no matter what. College isn't a place to preserve themselves from these inevitable, superficial insults, it's a place to develop leadership, contribution and cooperation abilities to get big things done like feeding, improving, healing, leading the world, etc.
So often, all you have to do is keep your lips closed and listen. It can be hard, but that's the way it works, by sometimes introducing an uncomfortable air. Your calm, attentive, silent response to the discomfort is how the energy is resolved. Shortly after the discomfort, you'll feel a mood change and when she says, "Thank you for listening!!" you'll often get a big hug. I sincerely hope this helps you and everyone else big time.
So all in all like the real debate we see on television I suppose.
Keep in mind that in a typical formal debate you don't get to pick your sides - you are assigned a position on an issue and must successfully argue in favor of that position. Formal debate is about the art of rhetoric, and explicitly part of the expectation - and the skill taught - is the deliberate distortion/reframing of fact in order to support your case. Anyone who's done formal debates will have learned this, since you're frequently asked to argue positions you personally disagree with.
Formal debate is a craft of being convincing, not of being right.
Not to mention the structure of formal debates means there is a winner and a loser, and so compromise is impossible. The goal isn't to reach an understanding or middle ground, but to completely obliterate your opponent rhetorically. This fits poorly with real life.
Here is a recent example: A Canadian university cancels a yoga class because yoga comes "from a culture that “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy,”
In a world that can do that, I don't find it surprising that a student could express the view in the original article and actually mean it.
“The Empire's got something worse than whips all right. It's got obedience. Whips in the soul. They obey anyone who tells them what to do. Freedom just means being told what to do by someone different.”
― Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
If I'm writing a toy project to teach myself WebGL, what are the consequences for doing something incorrectly and later having to debug it?
This argument was actually made in the case of the University of Ottawa. The yoga instructor even offered to rename the class to "mindful stretching" so as not to associate it with the spiritual and cultural aspects of yoga / Yogi Practice, but was still shut down by the student's union because they felt that it was gentrifying and demonstrated cultural appropriation.
Personally I think the vast majority of culture has been stolen or replicated from older cultures and I don't think that having a stretching class really constitutes some kind of injustice just because it is derived from traditional yoga.
Still ridiculous, but less so than it's being represented as.
I don't know about the yoga class incident, but I don't automatically see the ridiculousness the rest in this sub thread appear to -- it seems pretty reasonable to me for a group of students to check their assumptions about what they're doing when they learn about something related in history. Yes yoga is now a trendy healthy way to stretch and exercise, and how could history have anything to say about stretching, but it does not seem silly to me to wonder out loud if yoga may have originated as a symbol of oppression or death, or of submission to it.
Make of it what you will.
I would throw it out there that Evangelical Christian university with rigorous behavioural standards are on average considerably less likely than average to attract rent-a-cause campaigning/complaining types and considerably more likely than average to deliver a "sermon on love" full of dire warnings and animosity towards people that don't love in the correct university-prescribed manner...
I think this has more to do with Francophone people feeling marginalized as opposed to colonialism or caring for Indian people's feelings.
> Because 'political correctness' isn't the cancer at the heart of social politics, it is straw-manning. On both sides of every issue.
I don't think they were saying that political correctness was straw-manning, but that it was straw-manning that was the cancer at the heart of social politics.
"The complaining student" is now a trope along the lines of the cab driver who always speaks to New York Times columnists in a way that is convenient for their column.
It's reasonable for OWKU to make this announcement. They are laying out their expectations for their student body. It is inconvenient but students who dislike their position are free to transfer.
OWKU is a private institution and also a religious one (even greater protection). They are well within their means and rights.
I'm starting to think that feelings are being hurt on HN; hence all the controversy.
It may be reasonable for OWKU to make an announcement of their expectations of student receptiveness to uncomfortable sermons, the particular details and manner in which Dr. Piper did so in this case, however, taken as presented, shows a lack of both the general adult ability to maturely deal with uncomfortable situations and the specific Christian virtues it pretends to be concerned with.
> OWKU is a private institution and also a religious one (even greater protection). They are well within their means and rights.
I don't think anyone has argued that OKWU's actions here were either unaffordable (outside of the University's means -- not sure why that would even be relevant) or illegal (outside of the University's rights).
The negative responses I've seen have all be skepticism about the accuracy of the presentation of the situation and arguments that, even if the situation was presented accurately, the piece is a poor response to the situation it describes. (The comment you responded to was explicitly the former -- raising the idea that the "complaining student" has become a common fictional foil to set up rhetorically, whether or not a real complaint exists.)
Not that it is outside of the University's "means and rights".
Can you not judge the student under the same criteria? If the student had been pursuing Christian virtues, the student would have taken the time to see how the sermon could better him/her as a Christian, and not immediately taken offense to it.
That Navy SEAL was Albert Einstein.
People on HN are taking this straw man attack and running with it, though. It's meme-licious.
How to compose a successful critical commentary:
You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement). You should mention anything you have learned from your target. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...
2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
(I tried to follow the rules with my comment)
I believe this might be your bone of contention. The speech was a mission statement, more or less, with an introduction that is very catchy and exciting and clickbaity, but overall irrelevant to the main argument. This is not a response of right or wrong. Obviously the leader thinks people who oppose him are wrong, but the main thrust of the argument past that intro is "where is what we are going to do here".
For example, obviously a long cultural time ago, although it was only a bit more than a decade, all the seniors at the school I finally graduated from (I was a part timer) took the same giant Holocaust class. It was a required interdisciplinary liberal arts survey class, of a topic that changed every year. I believe they had "death" as the topic another year. They were obviously kind of a downer phase. For cultural change reasons they don't do this anymore, which is a shame. Anyway the point of an interdisciplinary liberal arts class isn't to debate philosophically if the topic is right or wrong, but to teach the students how to actually apply the full spectrum of liberal arts, all of them, because you're all well rounded individuals now, to a topic.
Someone who disliked the idea of confronting a rather foreign culture and world view could fight against the class by demanding that you're not allowed to respond to the Holocaust intellectually unless you can first express Hitler's position in a way that modern Nazis would agree accurately represents their view. Why yes I did just "Godwin" you. But of course that logic is total bunk. The real purpose of the class is to teach the students how to observe then analyze the inter-related whole of the topic, across multiple disciplines. That requires application of intellectual skills, not right or wrong judgments. You don't need to express agreement with the text of mein kampf to see how the economic situation dovetailed with the political situation dovetailed with the cultural situation etc. My term paper was how architecture related to the other liberal arts in the reich WRT to propaganda and scale and form etc.
Really the only reason why they gave us the Holocaust as a study topic was to scare the hell out of us, if we fail to learn the skills of cross disciplinary observation, analysis, and synthesis skills taught in the class, maybe something that bad will happen again. Now for over sensitivity reasons, or more likely profound lack of courage, we can't get that reward, can't learn to avoid evil by intellectual analysis. That opens a whole nother can of worms where the campus is now a safe space free of gas chamber triggering, but the whole country overall is far less of a safe space, because the current grads are emotionally coddled, less intellectually skilled, and far more cowardly unless acting in mob actions. Luckily mob action historically has always been effective and rational, correct? And we can make up for personal cowardice with more drone strikes, correct? And the politician that proposes the simplest sounding solution is probably the best because we no longer have the intellectual rigor to analyze, correct? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
While we're at it, let's stipulate that everyone is only allowed to be honest and logical and to base their reasoning on valid premises! :)
It's a nice thought, at least at first glance, but it's just not going to happen.
Besides, the real problem with debates is actually willful dishonesty.
There are vast hordes of sociopaths playing games and overcomplicating things to no end, arguing for positions they don't actually hold, and basically just preventing discussions from ever getting anywhere.
The smart ones are like firehoses of sophistry and misdirection, the dumb ones just (fake-)rage and call people names, and I guess somewhere in between you'll find militant feminists and race baiters and people calling for "safe spaces" and whatever nonsense they come up with.
Some sociopaths have come up with a fun new game: trying to convince people that the earth is actually flat. Yes, sadly that's actually a thing. Look them up on YouTube or something.
But these "people" are the real reason why we can't seem to have a reasonable discussion on anything.
Apparently it's enjoyable for them to fuck everything up, and to prevent mankind's progress towards enlightenment as best they can.
That seems like self-destructive behaviour, but they do it anyway. A bunch of them will see this post, but not one will sincerely help us understand.
I disagree with many of their points of view, but it doesn't mean that they are being dishonest. For all you know, I could be the willfully dishonest one here.
But you bring up an interesting point I've been wondering about lately - is the world complicated and full of nuance to be debated ad infinitum? Or is truth actually quite simple, with the source of complexity being only those who would cloud the truth with bias and/or willful dishonesty?
You're an interesting case though. Your HN comments are clean - no sophistry or trolling - so I guess you have your fun elsewhere.
I've been wondering if there's such a thing as a "benign sociopath", but it's not like I could trust you even if you claimed to be one. I hope so, but so far I'm leaning towards "No".
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-...
But to your point, passing the Ideological Turing Test is something that I think is worth aspiring to.
The owner in 1933 at least was a strong supporter of fascism in general, and Hitler in particular.
This may be the very definition of hyperbole. Taking something that is barely technically accurate and distorting it to the point where it doesn't mean even close to the same thing anymore.
EDIT:
From the link:
> The Daily Mail, devised by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) and his brother Harold (later Lord Rothermere), was first published on 4 May 1896.
> Lord Rothermere was a friend of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and directed the Mail's editorial stance towards them in the early 1930s.
> Born 1868; Died 1940[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Harmsworth,_1st_Viscoun...
So was the royal family at the time: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/royals/6548665/The...
This is a classic trap. Some positions are simply not worth discussing thoughtfully. Not all positions are equal. When you say "both sides" you have already lost; plenty of people use this tendancy to give both sides to every issue equal credence and carefully consider both, so they inject some absurd ridiculous view as the other side and abuse your tendancy to respect them to gain credence for it. Then the overton window is shifted and they have already won before the debate begins. If you even accept the premise that a student should be able to tell a professor what they are and are not allowed to discuss in their class you have already lost the debate, there's no use respecting that view, it's far too extreme.
>And it's a prisoner's dilemma. If you try to be respectful and thoughtful and the other person screams and yells and abuses and strawmans then you will lose the 'debate' by any metric not implemented by a philosophy professor.
Absolutely, and it's one of the most frustrating things I think a lot of reasonable, polite people come up against.
Who decides which is which? I guess you?
It's bullshit to expect that people will seriously consider all ideas out there, no matter how weird or outright stupid they sound.
Well, if you're going to advocate that everybody just believe whatever they want without facts or reason, don't be surprised if people tl;dr your comment and ignore you.
Take the high road, will ya
> Some positions are simply not worth discussing thoughtfully
Like yours? Very humble.
> there's no use respecting that view, it's far too extreme
ideals, you should know what those are
Somehow they believe that their feelings are the responsibility of everyone else.
That real threat is these narcissistic cretins who use intimidation and worse the courts to get their way will one day influence the laws we live under. We won't have any privacy if people who want all offensive ideas and actions curtailed and boxed. Instead of running away from 1984/V for Vendetta type worlds these kids are embracing it
You are right, but I just wanted to clarify that by no means are ALL college students there for a 4-year party and a safe room to run to when something upsets them.
Many are still there for academic and philosophical challenges and growth, and are appalled that this noisy minority is getting so much attention.
Really, if there's anyplace that goes above and beyond the call to be sure that all races, all sexual orientations/identites have equal access and opportunity, it's the modern public university. It's the last place you'd expect to see this kind of whinging.
What's equally baffling is Ivy-league frat boys thinking that "free speech" entitles them to engage in conduct that would get them summarily booted out in the real world.
"What's equally baffling is Ivy-league frat boys thinking that "free speech" entitles them to engage in conduct that would get them summarily booted out in the real world."
------------------
from your link:
"A fraternity brother who was at the party gave an entirely different account than Petros-Gouin. Speaking on condition that his name not be used because chapter rules discourage speaking to the media, he said members of the house always ask for Yale IDs and let everyone in until a party gets crowded. After that, a line forms.
That night, no one with a Yale ID was turned away before 11:15 p.m., the member said. Yale and New Haven police had responded to noise complaints at the party, and brothers were told not to let anyone else in, to avoid crowding. He said numerous students have said a woman who was denied entrance angrily challenged the man who stopped her, screaming: “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”
It was uncomfortable, he said, in part because that brother is African American and others working the door at the time are Portuguese and Costa Rican; he described the chapter as racially diverse. He said some in Yale’s black community have called black SAE members “Uncle Tom” on Monday, making them feel like they are being forced to choose between siding with the fraternity or others of their race.
“It has become incredibly hostile,” he said.
He and another student who attended the party said the crowd inside was representative of the student body at Yale."
--------------------
I see an incident of undetermined "real"(ness)
Social discrimination happens all the time. As a nerd, I've been (back in a time when nerds were shunned) uninvited or turned away from parties plenty of times. Nobody protested on my behalf.
This entire brouhaha over people feeling not-as-popular-as-the-cool-sae-kids is ridiculous. Nobody has a right to social inclusion. The racial angle is a red herring. What happened to these women happens, often worse, to every socially-unpopular person on the planet.
It smacks to me of, going back to my nerd example, blaming factors outside of my own social ineptitude for not being included for social event X.
Definition of the strawman argument:
"A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument which was not advanced by that opponent." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man)
The original article is put in a very specific context: a sermon about a very specific scripture on a theological university. It is not about Yale, it is not about free-speech. It is about the reaction of a self-centered student and how out of place he is; which I understand it is the point of lagadu, and it is why lagadu's comment is not a straw men argument.
The fact that the Yale argument is true has no relevance with the context of the original discussion.
[1]http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/11/07/yale_stude...
This is something that a white heterosexual middle-class male (such as myself) can probably never fully appreciate, but I try to sympathize.
Imagine what it is like to be black in a country where just a few generations back you carried at all times in mixed-race race situations the possibility of being assaulted without recourse or lynched, or in present times accused and convicted of a crime you didn't commit or shot on sight for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Imagine what it is like to be Jewish and have 85% of your relatives systematically wiped out in living memory.
Imagine what it is like to be a woman on a college campus where statistically 1 in 3 suffer sexual assault over the course of a 4 year education, almost always with the assailant getting off without charges.
Most times such people take offense it is not about feeling uncomfortable, but rather feeling unsafe. It is about fear that what starts with words will inevitably turn to, or enable, or justify actions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_violence_research
Not to mention all the (I think justifiable) talk currently about how violent rhetoric from politicians, in the media, encouraged the planned parenthood shooter and other recent domestic terrorists.
I'm not completely sympathetic toward that point of view, but it's clearly not "completely irrational".
Surely college students are capable of distinguishing between the threat of rape, and the discussion of relevant law in a classroom environment? So what is the safety issue here? Indeed, the end result will likely be a net lowering of safety in society as a whole, as a lack of expertise in rape law will make it harder to enforce and successfully prosecute.
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trouble-teaching-rap...
You're right that we do need to teach rape law, now more than ever, and we need to be able to have these nuanced and explicit discussions - but there's ways to do that with empathy for survivors of sexual assault. And honestly, I don't see how warning the class about the content of a discussion beforehand or a few people abstaining (one's that likely wouldn't be participating much anyway) will drag down the entire system.
Grandparent: "Most times such people take offense it is not about feeling uncomfortable, but rather feeling unsafe."
You: "very explicit discussions of rape law can be emotionally taxing."
Why did you reply to parent? You should tell grandparent poster they're wrong. Otherwise you're just giving parent poster the impression they're in disagreement with a viewpoint that uses rhetorical shuffle and impossible to pin down.
Nowhere in your link does it say that any professor anywhere had to stop teaching rape law.
Much like you can't have the historical black plague without the specific species of flea that live on a specific species of urban rat, you can't have SJWs without social media.
Perhaps not so new, Twitter was just slower in the 1500's.
To the extent that hypersensitivity is real, its always been there. Its "come to the forefront" because a certain political faction has chosen to cherry-pick, exaggerate, and sometimes outright fabricate examples of it that occur opposing them to characterize all opposition to their ideas, resurrecting a pattern (and label) that the same faction engaged used for the same purpose in the past.
Imagine what it is like to be white/asian in a country where a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by black men and where black on white crimes are 5.6 times more common than white on black crimes [1]. Imagine what it is like to be Christian when a disproportionate number of terror attacks are committed by Islamic types.
My father feels unsafe (on my behalf) when he watches various Islamic terror attacks on the news. I was in Amsterdam last week, which is sort of near Paris and Brussels (though the Dutch seem to integrate their Muslims far better), and he was worried about my safety. In reality I'm far more likely to die from drinking Belgian beer, eating a space cake and then falling into a canal.
I'm sure most of us agree that his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem. So why aren't the irrational fears held by various student groups treated the same way?
[1] http://www.amren.com/news/2015/07/new-doj-statistics-on-race...
Your experience doesn't reflect the experience of all others.
I believe that's the standard social justice retort to your claims.
Being a more logically minded person, I'll instead invert it; your retort to my comment is that one person in the aforementioned demographic (e.g. a white/asian male) doesn't agree with me. If I could find one person in your aforementioned demographic (e.g. a black female) who didn't agree with you, would that be a valid retort against your comment?
How is the claim that not all asian people agree with your father or had traumatic experiences with terrorism also invalidating experiences your father had? You claim to be a logical minded person but I'm not following the logic that your father's experiences are invalidated when someone says they don't share that view.
Now, about your feelings and uncomfortableness it's up to you.
And there's a reason there's a famous book titled "how to lie with statistics".
The purpose of the NCVS is to track crimes and their characteristics without relying on (often biased, and frequently manipulated) police reports.
Where do you get most your news?
Most of this is gang related, and goes almost entirely unreported, even in Chicago itself. This trend is not unique to Chicago, either
>Jared Taylor founded The New Century Foundation[0], a self-styled white supremacist think tank known primarily for American Renaissance, its online journal. The journal promotes pseudo-scientific studies that attempt to demonstrate the intellectual and cultural superiority of whites and publishes articles on the supposed decline of American society because of integrationist social policies. - [1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Century_Foundation
[1]: http://www.adl.org/combating-hate/domestic-extremism-terrori...
Please, I would like to understand your logic.
I do find it a bit scary that when I google "black on white crime", only racist sites show up. Why are only white supremacists willing to discuss this data? (Or perhaps they are all just super good at SEO.)
Of course, as it relates to my original post, the only relevant fact is that indeed there is something happening that a white male might have reason to feel irrational fear of. (The table shows that most crime is intra-racial, not inter-racial)
Let me remind you of the original point: various people are feeling irrationally large amounts of fear but that fear is of a real thing (either historical, as in maaku's case, or real but exaggerated things in the case I described).
I think there are fairly straightforward explanations, simply deducing from books I've read about urban crime... Most crime is intra-racial because it occurs between people who know each other or live near each other and tends to be concentrated in areas of poverty which tend to be demographically homogeneous. Overall, blacks commit crimes at higher rates than whites, which partially correlates with higher poverty rates, but it's not distributed equally because it's also highly concentrated among small numbers of urban street gangs/groups who commit enormous amounts of crime (of which there's no poor white rural counterpart). These groups are mostly surrounded by blacks, so most of their victims will be black, but there are enough whites near them that the whites who are victims of these groups contribute to the black-on-white numbers being higher. Part of the irrationality and bigotry comes from interpreting these numbers as some kind of targeting going on specifically to whites because there's no reverse equivalent instead of understanding that it actually comes from an urban dynamic that overall causes black victims to suffer even more than whites.
In reality, we have no practical way of doing this. So, whenever we cite a source of data, we are implicitly saying "This is a credible source for the statement is making. You can trust that they have done the work to make sure they aren't just repeating their own biases." And in the case of some organizations and people, you actually cannot say that.
If the American milk board makes a claim about the health benefits of milk, it is not a fallacy to be skeptical of that claim.
Let me introduce you to data science. First I'll read the numnbers in row 2 column 2 and row 2 column 5. Then I'll plug them into ipython:
$ ipython
...
In [4]: 4091971*0.137
Out[4]: 560600.027
In [6]: 955800 * 0.104
Out[6]: 99403.2
Whew, that was hard. Took all the skills I learned in my math Ph.D. to finish the job. Just lucky I didn't have to break out Hadoop. If I wasn't a professional statistician I wouldn't have had a prayer.
Data science would be trying to find out why and putting it into context, especially if there are variables in play that aren't shown by a cursory look. Which a white supremacist has little interest in.
It's a self-feeding loop.
Besides, often times the source isn't really the source. For example, if a publicly devout racist quoted FBI crime statistics, does that mean we can ignore the data because we heard it from the racist and not the FBI?
A white supremacist doing a statistical analysis isn't going to reach all that hard for stats that might contradict or weaken the conclusion they're trying for. If they find one accidentally, there's a pretty decent chance they'll "forget" to mention it.
I'm no expert in the field, but I'd wonder about things like encounter rates for the different populations, varying access to social services, things like lead paint being more prevalent in inner city housing, etc.
I claimed a white male might feel irrational fear of the disproportionately large number of black on white crimes, just as maaku claimed a black person might feel irrational fear of crimes that happened a few generations back.
I linked to a source showing that the number of black on white crimes is disproportionately large. Perhaps this white supremacist organization did make arithmetic errors when multiplying row 2 column 2 by row 2 column 5. Did they?
It's a bit surprising that with all this criticism, no one is actually claiming the number is wrong.
...(eyes roll). Anyway, on a completely different taboo topic, I wonder if you've read the Unabomber's manifesto...
https://archive.org/stream/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture-The...
Note that I linked to it for the content of the first data table. My link is not an endorsement of every single viewpoint that someone at that URL might hold - I actually just spent 2 minutes googling for a fact I had seen before and pasted the first link that had the data table.
If there are twice as many whites as blacks or 10 times as many whites as blacks would vastly change how your figure could be interpreted.
You want to compare black on white crimes to white on black crimes. Not white on white crimes.
Across all races - they primarily commit crime against their own race. But some races receive more crime than they give.
Adjusted for population (there are far more white people than black people) there should be about equal white on black crime as black on white crime per capita. That isn't the case and is precisely what the data reads.
What is important isn't to jump to conclusions but rather investigate why. Which nobody wants to do unless they get labeled as a racist.
* statistics are often counter-intuitive,
* they are easy to manipulate or misinterpret,
* manipulation requires significant effort to discover,
* they are sometimes correct in form but the data is biased,
* bias in the data might have been mentioned by the initial data collectors but the analyzers may omit it (either intentionally or accidentally).
And detecting an arithmetic error would require significant effort. I'd have to open up ipython, copy&pasting the numbers, remove the commas and other formatting, and then press enter.
Um, ok.
Government statistics may not always be perfect, but are you implying that the government is guilty of purposefully manipulating data? Why?
The vast majority of homicides (which the DOJ data excludes) committed against whites are committed by whites, and the vast majority against blacks are committed by blacks. The number of cross-racial homicides are an order of magnitude less in either direction. Don't take my word for it, look at the diagonal at the top left of this table:
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...
According the DOJ data you posted, 44% of the victims of white offenders are not white. Should they all be terrified of white people? Probably not.
So the situation in the data is more complicated than the white supremacists would care to admit.
But more importantly, people's perception of safety is not a direct reflection of the data, but instead, a reflection of the way the data is presented, either by the mass media, or by choose-your-own-agenda websites like the kind you linked.
It also tends to be heavily skewed for the local crime situation in which they live, rather than national crime stats.
Where did I advocate that anyone should be terrified? This is what I said about such fears: "his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem."
Instead of allowing your father to fear for his and your safety based on his irrational and bigoted views, perhaps you could educate him not to accept data from fringe sources. Your reproduction of these titilating facts, completely removed from context, taken from a blog which has a White Power political agenda, is a curious tactic. Do you use this "evidence" to lend credence to your father's views? Do you think this justifies his ignorance? If you truly recognize his views as irrational, then you should not be dredging up wingnut blogs which are merely trying to incite hatred and divisiveness.
Please, educate your father so that his ignorance and bigotry do not permeate through to the next generation.
As for my father's feelings, it's really not cool to suggest he's bigoted. He's not - he's the epitome of a NY liberal and far more left wing than I am. E.g., he mostly accepts the tribalist fascism of the modern left, in comparison to my individualism. He's just unable to rationally assess the risk of low probability events that get lots of media coverage.
(He's hardly the only one. See, for example, this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655349 )
It's generally quite easy to do so when the source of information is biased, so dismantle the message if you want to argue about how it's incorrect.
It looks like these numbers posted were very low effort and lacking any real context whatsoever, so it shouldn't be too hard to rebut them.
Edit: In fact, unprepare does so quite well in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655743
We resort to reputation to calibrate the burden of proof. If the source cited is not a valid authority, that doesn't make them wrong, but it does make it harder for them to establish a claim that merits rebuttal.
I reproduced the multiplication myself, since so many people seem to think the white supremacists can't multiply.
The issue is that the multiplication is not valid according to Bayesian probability analysis. It doesn't matter how valid the original numbers are if you interpret them incorrectly. The implicit appeal to authority is that a group known for social policy commentary is somehow expected to have greater credibility in the area of statistical analysis.
In reality, they are just as bad at it as everyone else.
So in exposing the appeal to authority, we see more clearly that the burden is on them to show that their analysis is mathematically correct. So tell me. Why does the multiplication support their claims?
My opinion on all of these vague feelings of fear: "completely irrational and entirely his [the person feeling it] problem."
Do you refer to the fear of men as being rapists as bigotry?
And what about issues of the credible source not actually being such, such as the CDC not being a credible source once you realize how they twist their numbers (picking definitions of rape which exclude most female on male instances)?
>These data cover all violent crimes except murder, but the number of murders is tiny compared to other violent crimes.
So, we've started by cherry picking our data, a really strong start.
Next we go on by comparing apples and oranges. You've reached the conclusion that as a white male you should be afraid of black people, but the data you linked shows otherwise.
While 13.7% of violent crimes against white people were committed by black people, 56% of violent crimes against white people were committed by other white people.
You are 4 times more likely to be violently attacked by a white person than a black person, if you are a white person. So if you are afraid of being attacked by a black person, you must be 4 times more afraid everytime you see a white person (that is, if you are being logically consistent, rather than using confirmation bias to support a worldview of racial superiority, though your link suggests otherwise)
In this light, it is completely irrational to have anywhere near the fear of black people (or any other race) than you do for white people.
Further, if you are of a race other than black or hispanic, you are more than twice as likely to be violently attacked by a white person (40.3%) than a black person (19.3%).
The only thing damning against black people these statistics show, is that black people are vastly more likely to be violently attacked by other black people than by any other race. This is the same case for all the other races included. People of any given race are much more likely to have a crime committed against them by someone of their own race, than by someone of any other race.
One unfortunate drawback of the survey methodology is that you can't track murder.
You've reached the conclusion that as a white male you should be afraid of black people...
I've reached the conclusion that you didn't read my post. Try again. If you get confused, look for words like "completely irrational and entirely his problem".
Oh, so you think being 4 times more likely to be killed by another white person, means that you have a similar cultural experience to the subjugated minorities who are complaining across university campuses.
And because you have a white supremacy blog that tells you that you have it just as bad as everyone else, you have decided to write off all the actual concerns of real people by saying they are just complaining too much?
Its really a fascinating argument. Good luck convincing anyone else who does not already agree with it.
No one besides you is discussing a cultural experience. The rest of us are discussing irrational reasons for fearing for one's physical safety.
...white supremacy blog that tells you that you have it just as bad as everyone else...
The blog doesn't claim this, nor does the DOJ data table which it reproduces.
Its really a fascinating argument.
You have indeed invented an interesting argument.
Oh sorry, is that a trigger word for you? Let me instead say you are mistakenly claiming that the dangers faced by straight while christian males is of equivalent or greater danger than those faced by minorities.
>The blog doesn't claim this, nor does the DOJ data table which it reproduces.
No, but you are using that blog entry as evidence to support that claim.
Heres how the conversation went:
maaku said:
> The concern is not feelings getting hurt, but rather physical security as a person of minority status.
>This is something that a white heterosexual middle-class male (such as myself) can probably never fully appreciate, but I try to sympathize.
To which you responded:
>Actually white heterosexual middle class males can totally appreciate these things.
Using the source you linked as your evidence for that fact that straight white males have the same concern for physical security as minorities. You further explained that whites, asians, and christians are in a position to be equally fearful for their safety as blacks, women, and other minorities.
Using this evidence, you closed your argument by saying:
>I'm sure most of us agree that his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem. So why aren't the irrational fears held by various student groups treated the same way?
A dismissal of the complaints of minorities which you have written off by attempting to make an argument that straight white males have it just as bad as minorities, and thus if straight white males arent complaining, minorities have nothing more to complain about and should therefore shut up.
If you have a different argument to make, i would love to hear it.
EDIT: I see you instead decided to downvote each of these comments, so i'll just assume you indeed did not have a different argument to make. Thanks for the discussion anyways, have a good one!
Is there a correction factor for housing and employment segregation? The analysis seems to rely on a large municipal area with overlapping cultures rather than the usual situation on the ground which is highly segregated for a variety of socioeconomic reasons.
So given that, it is extremely likely that, say, home domestic disturbances or workplace violence will be extremely highly correlated with victim and attacker having same race.
However whats behaviorally relevant is the totally different statistics of "I'm a X and I see a Y walking down a dark street toward me, how should I react based on X and Y crime statistics?"
"you must be 4 times more afraid everytime you see a"
That whole clause is a statistical error as the odds of becoming a victim of a X have a lot more to do with the odds of a given X being a criminal, than they do with relative ratios of X on Y violence vs Y on X violence. Outside of really weird situations like active race riots or race based protests or similar lawlessness.
There is the meta question of "how do I need to signal to others in public to remain politically correct" vs "how do I actually need to act to survive" and discouragingly that gulf has been widening over past years mostly by changes in required political signalling behavior despite a remarkable drop in actual crime rates. Or at least reported crime rates.
If I'm going to use statistics to rationally calibrate my fear emotion, I should ensure that I am using the appropriate statistic.
I'd start off with the assumption that most violent crimes against me will be committed by another person that is both aware of my presence and able to make a credible threat of force against me. I'm probably not going to get punched in the face by anyone who cannot reach my face with their fists.
And I can further break that down by the fraction of time any given person presents me with the threat of violence. I may, perhaps, use risk of violence per minute of exposure as my metric.
It immediately becomes obvious that the publicly-available published crime statistics are useless for my purposes. They do not contain sufficient information to allow me to determine how much more or less likely I am to be attacked by a person of a given skin color for each minute of exposure to that person in public. I would have to know detailed social habits for everyone within the crime statistic reporting area.
It may be that for every 100000 opportunities to punch someone in the face, the conversion rate is higher for one skin color than for another, and I should therefore rationally calibrate my fear accordingly. But I really have no way of accurately determining that useful statistic from published crime data.
But even with that hanging over us, I still have to object to your misuse of statistics. You said:
> You are 4 times more likely to be violently attacked by
> a white person than a black person, if you are a white person.
But really, this is all moot, because fear is not rational.
> Imagine what it is like to be Jewish and have 85% of your relatives systematically wiped out in living memory.
I think you're taking a devils advocate position here, but this is interesting if true. I'm not sure how the actions of people 60-80 years ago should affect how we view ~20-year-olds today? For example, how is the behaviour of white germans in 1945 related to white americans or british in either 1945 or 2015? I think we were on the opposite side of that war.
As for black lynchings in the american south, again this is a localised issue. But lets say your university is in an area where it happened, how likely is it that someones grandfather was involved in a lynching? Pretty small. But even if they were, should someone today be associated with their grandparents criminal behavior? I don't see how.
Likewise, although I have less personal experience here, even if lynchings were not everyday events or impacted every black American family, the cultural impact carried forward can still be profound.
And yes, I am taking a devil's advocate position. In many cases such as those described in the OP and other comments here political correctness has been taken way, way to far. There is a difference between incitement and a listener's general uncomfort with subject matter. Especially in the context of a university there must be a free exchange of ideas and the ability to have discourse on any subject matter without fear of academic retribution or censorship.
Not really. The Holocaust wasn't a factor in deciding to build a wall along the West Bank. The suicide bombers that would drive from Ramallah to Tel Aviv and blow themselves up in restaurants were.
Europeans and liberals have constructed this narrative that you are espousing. They want to believe that the Holocaust is the key to understanding Israeli policy. This allows them to dismiss Israeli policy decisions in the face of geopolitical events as simply an irrational and tragic response to their cultural trauma.
It's straight up paternalism and it's disgusting.
From Wikipedia:
A 2014 assessment by Sinozich and Langton used longitudinal data from the NCVS to measure rape and sexual assault among college aged U.S. women from 1995 to 2013. Their findings indicated that rape, a subset of all sexual assault, had an incidence of 1.4 per 1,000 female students (0.1%) in 2013[6] during the period studied. The study also found that college aged women (regardless of enrollment status) were assaulted at a significantly higher rate than non-college age women, 4.3 per 1,000 (0.4%) per year versus 1.4 per 1,000 (0.1%) per year, but that women who were not enrolled in college were 1.2 times more likely to be assaulted than college aged women who were enrolled.
Relevant quote:
"The one-in-five estimate, on the other hand, comes from the federally funded Campus Sexual Assault Study (CSA), a 2006 web survey of more than 5,000 women and 1,000 men attending two unnamed, large public universities.
As Yoffe points out, two campuses is an awfully small sample.
Christopher Krebs, a senior researcher at a non-profit research group, RTI International, who led the Campus Sexual Assault Study, acknowledges that. “The one-in-five statistic is not anything we trotted out as a national statistic,” he says. “But it has certainly been used in that way” — most prominently by President Obama. "
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/12/11/the-dueling-da...
I think we've see so much physical discomfort forced on people and minorities that we try to overcompensate by making them COMPLETELY comfortable in every way. But feeling comfortable isn't always a good thing.
Pain from working out isn't a bad thing, it's actually a sign of something good, but many people avoid it. Pain from a beating is bad for two reasons, it strikes both the physical body and the emotional psyche of the recipient.
I think this is at the core of why people want to get rid of emotional damage, they don't realize that some pain teaches, and some harms. Something my football coach used to say to us. If you are hurt, get up and keep going. If you are injured you better get off of my field and rest.
The same is true for emotional damage. Some hurts but is good for you, and other injures a person. It is a thin line to tread but I think we are well past the point where people are mistaking hurt for injury.
Political correctness has done a lot to harm Jews and is used as a tool of anti-semites to further their cause.
accused and convicted of a crime you didn't commit
1 in 3 suffer sexual assault
In any case i don't see how 'safe spaces' are helping. In dealing with an enemy you first have to know your enemy. I 'd rather have someone telling me they hate me openly so i can do something about it, rather than keep it in hiding and be ambushed.
We can play this game, but I'm pretty sure there are no winners.
Why not? What exactly is "white" anyway? The reality is, you can come up horrible historic circumstances for pretty much any human division. Sure, some have had it worse than others, but where do you draw the line? I have Irish ancestors; they weren't exactly well treated.
>Imagine what it is like to be a woman on a college campus where statistically 1 in 3 suffer sexual assault over the course of a 4 year education
You have to really stretch the definition of "sexual assault" to arrive at that metric.
If people actually consider a University campus "unsafe", then the world at large is going to feel unsafe. What is the plan to deal with that?
He's so incredibly uncomfortable with both he'd rather they simply didn't exist.
I have very little patience with anyone who runs the kind of moral racket that Dr Piper runs - which is making a career out of pretending to be a moral examplar by relying on appeal-to-authority and a lot of noisy rhetoric, and using both to justify social privilege for his beliefs.
I don't care if they're religious types, economists, or any other kind of ideologues. In my world their opinions get no respect at all.
You should try separating the opinion from the man and analyze the former without taking the shortcut of appealing to the authority of the latter.
The simpler argument is that Dr Piper is really in no position to act like anyone's external conscience. He has no basis whatsoever to claim that he's either qualified or competent to act in that role.
Now, clearly he believes otherwise. That's very much his prerogative.
It's everyone else's prerogative to decide whether or not they agree.
I'd suggest that anyone who claims to be promoting genuine independent thought is going to be willing to engage in an open debate.
"You're acting like a child and you shouldn't feel the way you do about the things I say" is neither an open position nor an honest one. It's an attempt to shut down debate about an ethical position, not an attempt to encourage it.
Only if you agree that it has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the proposed ideas.
> "You're acting like a child and you shouldn't feel the way you do about the things I say" is neither an open position nor an honest one.
Nor is it the position of the author. When somebody tells you to grow up, they are not telling you how to feel, but how to act based on those feelings.
We can, if we keep them separate. Just like we can analyze Polanski's movies separately from his child-raping persona.
There once lived a great warrior. Though quite old, he still was able to defeat any challenger. His reputation extended far and wide throughout the land and many students gathered to study under him.One day an infamous young warrior arrived at the village. He was determined to be the first man to defeat the great master. Along with his strength, he had an uncanny ability to spot and exploit any weakness in an opponent. He would wait for his opponent to make the first move, thus revealing a weakness, and then would strike with merciless force and lightning speed. No one had ever lasted with him in a match beyond the first move.
Much against the advice of his concerned students, the old master gladly accepted the young warrior’s challenge. As the two squared off for battle, the young warrior began to hurl insults at the old master. He threw dirt and spit in his face. For hours he verbally assaulted him with every curse and insult known to mankind. But the old warrior merely stood there motionless and calm. Finally, the young warrior exhausted himself. Knowing he was defeated, he left feeling shamed.
Somewhat disappointed that he did not fight the insolent youth, the students gathered around the old master and questioned him. “How could you endure such an indignity? How did you drive him away?”
“If someone comes to give you a gift and you do not receive it,” the master replied, “to whom does the gift belong?”
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my takeaway is that since the old master did not accept the young warrior's insults, the insults remained with the young warrior, almost as if he was insulting himself.
In relation to the article, those who blame others for their victimization are in fact pointing out their own flaws.
While in the mundane everyday world, the young warrior simply made a fool of himself.
Being brought up Christian, I also have no argument that many of the "Christian" religions, Catholicism in particular, do seem to favour guilt as the tool of choice to manipulate their congregations into toeing the line - it's one of the many reasons I shunned the church at a fairly young age. I have no interest in spending my life feeling guilty for not living up to an unreasonable expectation of a collection of long dead ancestors that have little (if any) bearing on today's society. What happened to just treating others as you wish to be treated in return?
There is guilt on both sides of this argument and neither one can stop to address their own shortcomings before judging the other.
On the other hand, I have little to argue with the content of the article. If you're not equipped to deal with how the world around you treats you, you will forever be playing the victim card. Is that what you really want for your whole life? or are you ready to take charge of yourself, responsibility for your own emotions and behaviour? or would you prefer to be treated as a child for the rest of your life, protected from reality by 'yes' men, validating you because you haven't learned to deal with your feelings of a lack of validation?
Nobody ever accomplished anything without dealing with the discomfort of the world around them.
You just made me feel bad about all the times I wasn't empathetic. Not really, but witness how deeply ingrained our ability to use and feel guilt is.
Ironically (in the context of the paragraph preceding that quote), that is a characteristically Christian notion.
This may sound harsh but it's reality, and the real problems in life won't be at university, they'll be out in the real world. There are no safe spaces and trigger warnings in the real world.
This article says "I am, but it's okay, get used to it". There's a huge difference between telling someone that their beliefs are wrong to telling them that they are bad and should feel guilty, especially if the doctrine says that everyone is bad and should feel guilty all the time.
No, because the response is going to be "Yes you are", and we descend into a shouting match. The reply is "What is your standard for 'being a jerk', and is that standard a reasonable one?"
> There's a huge difference between telling someone that their beliefs are wrong to telling them that they are bad and should feel guilty, especially if the doctrine says that everyone is bad and should feel guilty all the time.
That seems like a fair description of how "victimhood culture" treats the rest of us.
I don't mean literally, the words you say must be "I'm not a jerk." I mean the defense must consist of a denial that the behavior was jerkish. If that's achieved by laying out standards for jerkishness, that's fine.
The OP read to me as not even achieving that. It wasn't "we aren't jerks, because what we did wasn't jerky", it was "we're going to be jerks, tough on you, shut up".
>That seems like a fair description of how "victimhood culture" treats the rest of us.
I'm not discussing victimhood culture. I'm discussing a specific defense to a specific complaint, which I think lacks value. The specific complaint was not trying to make people feel bad, it was to make themselves feel good. The response explicitly acknowledges that they're trying to make people feel bad.
Let's start here: The point of Christianity is to make you holy, not to make you happy.
When you teach something like I Corinthians 13, if it's going to help anyone's life instead of being merely an academic exercise, you wind up saying "Yes, you really are supposed to love like this. Do you?" If that makes someone feel bad, well, that's not actually the point. The point is that they recognize that they don't love in the way that they should, and therefore see the need to change.
And if you're going to say that changing your life in that way isn't the job of a university, well, this is a Christian university, and they think it is exactly their job. And if you're a student there, then presumably that's what you wanted, too.
You (ikeboy) seem to want this Christian university to be a secular one. That is not a reasonable expectation.
Now, I recognize that there are lots of ways that "making them recognize that they don't love in the way that they should" can be manipulative and even abusive, but it is not inherently so. And the fact that people feel bad (guilty) along the way isn't a flaw, if in fact they are guilty in terms of the biblical standard. To repeat, the point of Christianity is to make you holy, not to make you happy.
Plenty of Christians would disagree with this (most, I suspect, would agree with the first part, but many of those would disagree with the second part, and perhaps more specifically with the idea that the ultimate achievement of true holiness and that of true happiness are separable.) See, inter alia, 1 Pt 1:8-9, Jn 16:22, Rom 14:17, Rom 15:13, Heb 12:2.
That is, if you want happiness more than God, you won't find true happiness. This applies directly to the university president's statement.
I think a good case can be made that it is a validly Christian position pursuing holiness without an awareness of happiness (both one's own and that of others) is the root of blind ritualism like that Christ repeatedly condemns, and pursuing happiness without an awareness of holiness is hedonism (with Christ, also, repeatedly condemns), and that the Christian route rejects the separation entirely -- you can't pursue any of those (holiness, happiness for oneself, or happiness for others) properly while seeing them as separate things.
There was a valid point made that the student chose to go to a Christian college. But note that the logic that that implies is precisely the logic behind trigger warnings: that people can choose what to associate with. Clearly, the student did not anticipate the content of the sermon, despite knowing it was a Christian university. So in that case, a warning for that lecture would have let the student know whether to go, and, depending on how important it was to them, possibly drop out.
Deliberately not having trigger warnings is deliberately deceptive.
facepalm
It seems that in the absence of a warning, there is no informed consent; asking for a warning allows for freedom of association.
If the OP had said "being open to guilt etc is an integral part of our university; as such, anyone refusing to go to this talk will be expelled. However, we will tell people in advance, so they can choose not to go, and then leave." I would support him. To specifically say "I'm not telling people about what will happen" means you don't want people to know in advance. How is that not deceptive?
As I noted above, the argument that the student chose a Christian college and therefore should know about it falls flat, because the student did not know about it. And if knowing was a good thing, then so would a trigger warning on the talk; it's literally accomplishing the task of making sure people know.
> If the OP had said "being open to guilt etc is an integral part of our university; as such, anyone refusing to go to this talk will be expelled. However, we will tell people in advance, so they can choose not to go, and then leave." I would support him. To specifically say "I'm not telling people about what will happen" means you don't want people to know in advance. How is that not deceptive?
The mere thought that this is what you expect says, "I'm not a rational person."
How does anyone respond to that? There's nothing to be said to you. You've made no indication (from the many comments I've read) that you're prepared to have your mind changed or that you're open to other points of view.
You have come to an irrational conclusion and that's it. You're finished. Everyone else (that doesn't agree) is a "jerk" and can take a hike.
Which part of my comments suggested to you that I'm not willing to hear out other views?
I've tried to lay out my arguments at length. Are there any premises I assume that you disagree with, or are there steps I take that are logically unjustified?
And specifically, why is my claim irrational? It's mostly a moral claim, so to be irrational it must conflict with other moral claims I hold, right?
(Also, it's a bit weird that you seem to have a dichotomy between "rational" and "irrational" people; nobody is perfectly rational, and classifying specific arguments as rational/irrational is often more useful. Especially when it leads you to refuse to argue for a position on the dubious grounds that they aren't interested in hearing it.
And perhaps reflect on the fact that by writing off a differing position as irrational without bothering to rebut it, you're creating the bubble you accuse me of being in.
The arguments I see for not having one are: too few people would care so it's not worth inconveniencing the many for the few; there's already informed consent and so it's useless; and the talk is not harmful to anyone. (I think I had another minor one in mind but can't recall right now.)
1 is possible, but is not the one made by OP. I've argued against the premise of 2 (which the OP did make); if you have a more deontological worldview, you might want to frame this as the student's "own fault" for not realizing, but I generally don't blame people for being dumb (in the sense of insisting on them bearing the consequences of being dumb), instead asking which course of action yields the best consequences. In this case, if we assume informed freedom of association is a value, then adding information is a benefit.
3 would be a good defense if done well, but again, isn't the OP. It would actually be the best example of "I'm not a jerk"-type answers. But it's not immediately obvious how we can view something that bothered someone as not harming them. At best, you'd probably need to invoke Christian beliefs and go back to "informed consent" as above. Presumably you concede that Christians shouldn't do this to outsiders, and so the issue is about what counts as informed consent.
I'm a white male, but I grew up being called Gwailo, Gaijin, Auslander, and when I finally returned to the anglosphere in my early teens, I was still an outsider as I spoke with a weird accent and was by that point a through-and-through third culture kid. I got the crap bullied out of me, and eventually figured out that it only hurt if I took it to heart. I learned to pity those whose worlds were so small that they could only take satisfaction from being cruel to me. It was their problem, not mine.
Folks need to have thicker skin, and realise that not everything is about them. In fact, very little is ever about you, most of what people say and do are manifestations of their own thoughts and emotional issues. Physical violence is of course something that needs to be fought against (and this is why we have criminal justice systems which typically take this sort of thing perfectly seriously), but you can only be the victim of "verbal violence" if you choose to take the position of victim.
Why?
Congratulations on being such a paragon of excellence. Why should we require such virtue of all humans? Instead of expecting you to develop a thick skin (are you sure this is a good thing?), why can't we try to reform your aggressors in the first place?
Imagine you have an API that receives a POST with some JSON. Every time your API receives a malformed POST, your application crashes or hangs. Do you a) try to do your best to make sure no one ever POSTS to your uri with malformed data, or do you b) rewrite your API to be more robust and send back an error code when malformed input is received rather than crashing?
Does that analogy make any sense or is it too far fetched?
I don't believe this is true. Human behavior can change. Relative to its levels 500 years ago, we've all-but eliminated physical violence in first-world countries. I don't think it's much of a stretch to believe we can all-but eliminate emotional violence as well.
We're dealing with human beings, so I didn't read your JSON analogy, sorry.
Unreliable, unpredictable, illogical, making no sense and you never has exact idea which rules they obey at the moment and what output they will generate.
So human beings indeed sound like Javascript or PHP ... [1]
[1] 10 years experience with php and JS.
It's also a lot easier to change yourself than every other human on the planet.
What gave you that impression?
> It's also a lot easier to change yourself than every other human on the planet.
I agree, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
Because someone somewhere defines something about another group of people as aggression and we can go "reforming" them with impunity. Take a wild guess what the ranges of something could be ...
> I grew up being called Gwailo, Gaijin, Auslander, and when I finally returned to the anglosphere in my early teens, I was still an outsider as I spoke with a weird accent and was by that point a through-and-through third culture kid. I got the crap bullied out of me
I don't see any value in accepting this behavior. What harm is there in trying to eliminate it?
Because modern society and civilization rests entirely on the ability of people to tolerate being offended. It's what made the enlightenment possible. It's what makes scientific inquiry possible. It underlies every improvement to the human condition, because any new idea is offensive to someone.
If you can't do that then we will try to help you improve yourself if you can (and you want to), and try to give you a place to have a comfortable life if you can't. But there isn't and can't be a place for you at a university, where accommodating you would disrupt important work that will ultimately improves everyone's lives.
Because "we" are not special. "We" are not better than anyone else. It's none of our business to try and change how other people are.
This is a synonyme for restricting free speech and the first amendment.
I hate to break it to you but there are some serious issues with the justice system. In usa at least.
I agree that in the face of bullying or racist speech, we should try to thicken our skin and move on with our lives and understand that the problem is on the part of the perpetrators, not with me. But that doesn't mean I don't think we should try to get rid of bullying and racism in our society..
Exactly, I don't get why people are trying to make universities, workplaces, clubs, or anywhere else "safe places". They should not be safe places, they should be places where you feel confronted, challenged and threatened by different ideas and points of view.
That is one the problems I think. Some people (seems like the majority of young students nowdays) feel "challenged and threatened" personally, and not intellectually.
My experience shows me that there are as many theological points of view as believers. Everybody gets their own personal variety.
However, you can can bet Piper's teachers would have their worldview being very challenged if an atheist or agnostic student started long discussions about the nature of their mission (http://www.okwu.edu/about/).
That's a lot easier to say when you're not much more likely to be a victim of violent crime, or of sexual violence, or of racist violence.
I'm not directly disagreeing with you here or putting words in your mouth. I realize you are not saying safe spaces should not exist. Instead I want to make the argument that having safe spaces is reasonable.
People make safe spaces _within_ universities and other institutions for the same reason some combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder put up signs asking neighbors not to set off fireworks[0]. It is to avoid triggering people that have have experienced serious trauma[1].
For instance using the combat veteran example, it would be unreasonable for a veteran to attend a fireworks show and then complain about the fireworks, but if this same combat veteran was attending University and it would be reasonable to ask the University to provide a safe space away from fireworks or other triggers -- sound proofed dorms if students are constantly setting off fireworks.
There is a big difference in intention between 'safety from conflicting points of view' and safe spaces. Although a safe space sometimes requires limiting certain discussions (a person who was sexuality assaulted might be triggered by discussions and depictions of sexual assault).
[0]: http://www.militarywithptsd.org/fireworks-triggers-ptsd-and-...
[1]: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-...
"Although a safe space sometimes requires limiting certain discussions" That makes no sense in a university IMHO. Students could be excused of classes due to previous traumatic experiences, not the other way around.
No discussion should be silenced because the topic triggers or bothers someone. Sure, we can be sensitive about it, and take precautionary measures (warn the students in advance of the topic, etc.), but at absolutely no point, IMHO, should a discussion in an university be limited because it bothers, annoys, disrespects or triggers someone.
Yes, that opens room for some awful, violent and disrespectful points of view, but so many pillars of modern society were once those same awful, violent and disrespectful POVs.
At Mizzou, they demanded a separate "safe space" because they were literally being sent death threats, which is a separate way to use the idea, and which, in the light of the past week's events, were not unwarranted.
My concern is that silly things which people do, like say complaining about being made to feel guilty, will be used to paint safe spaces as 'silly' or 'unnecessary' when in fact safe spaces provide a very valuable function.
You act as if "conscience" is an objecively good thing, and not just the result of a bunch of totally arbitrary social expectations.
Gay people who grew up in conservative families often have a conscience that makes them feel bad about being gay. Gay people looking for safe spaces where they aren't reminded that they spent 18 years being told they are bad people is imminently reasonable.
Abused wives often feel guilty about leaving their husbands. Finding safe spaces where they don't have to feel guilty about doing the right thing is imminently reasonable.
So, no, it's not unreasonable to find places where you don't have to "deal with your conscience"
Asking for safe space where you don't have to worry about others trying to manipulate your conscience, OTOH, is not unreasonable.
At the same time, expecting formal services at the on-campus chapel of what is overtly an evangelical Christian university to be that safe space is somewhat unreasonable.
(Which is not to say that Dr. Piper's letter is itself a reasonable response to the scenario it describes.)
Actually this behavior is just because of peace time in todays western world. If students were afraid of actually being in danger, they wouldn't bitch about these things.
Obviously there are all kinds of things we do to ensure that universities are safe in different ways, and we find ways to try and ensure this safety doesn't interfere too much with learning. Why shouldn't this concern for safety extend to the mental health of students? Chanting "universities are not safe spaces" is a way of avoiding thinking about what kinds of safety we already provide or could provide, and how we can combine these kinds of safety with the challenging education that everyone recognizes is an important part of higher education.
I agree with the fundamental point about mistaking being offended (or made to feel guilty) for victimization, that being said:
There is such a thing as opression and the sidelining of the concerns of groups within society that are already marginalized. This veers dangerously close to being dismissive of that fact, and the author seems to nearly (if not outright) mock perceived "political correctness" and a set of working vocabulary that has been established around speaking about such marginalization.
I'm not sure that's particularly humble or self-reflective of Dr Piper. Although I'm also sure that such language can be abused (just as any discourse can be misused in favor of the person weilding it). "We don’t believe that you have been victimized every time you feel guilty" may be true, and may even be particularly true for the group of people he is adressing (OKWU students), but I hope it is tightly coupled with a belief in and an understanding of the very real forces of inequality that exist in society today.
The fact is, the world can be pretty freaking hostile if you're gay, trans, a woman, from a minority ethnic group, or otherwise part of a group that is not mainstream. The hair-raising experiences related to me by friends of mine have made it utterly clear to me that I live an awfully privileged life in that regard (specifically, going about my daily life never for a moment worried that I would be sexually harassed or discriminated against).
There are people that mistake "not being pandered to" with "being victimized", but there are also a lot of people who experience these things in an absolutely genuine fashion.
So I'm not trying to act as a "counterweight" to anything, except the extreme cynicism of the author, and people who mistake being challenged in their views for being attacked.
One common narrative re safe spaces seems to be: "if something makes you uncomfortable, you should suck it up instead of trying to force everyone else to accommodate you". I think this is somewhat missing the point, but I can relate to it. I feel like this is the dominant narrative in this thread.
But the narrative in the article seems to be: "if something makes you uncomfortable, good! It's because you're a bad person. You should be a better person instead of asking us to tell you you're not bad".
And I pretty strongly disagree with that.
For example, if the sermon was all about how gay people are going to hell, and that made a student uncomfortable, that's not because the student is a bad person. That's because it was a terrible sermon.
From the description, this sermon was not obviously terrible. But that still doesn't make the student a bad person. Not everyone experiences or expresses emotions in the same ways. That's fine. When people start speaking about experiences as if they're human universals, and if you don't share those experiences, that can make you uncomfortable. That's fine too. It doesn't make the speaker a bad person, but it doesn't make you a bad person either.
Well, no - the proper response to that is not whining but saying:
"Since in hell are probably also Freddie Mercury, Voltaire and Oscar Wilde (and probably Mark Twain) - do I strictly have to be gay to go there or are there other ways I could take" and enjoy the show.
There is no greater weapon against powerful people that take themselves seriously than mocking them and their beliefs.
Generally speaking people need more mocking in their lives. For a long time the only people that could speak truth to power were the jesters. No matter if the power is the pope that could condemn to eternal afterlife in hell or a BreitBart/Jezebel writer that could unleash an internet pitchfork mob on you - you are obligated to take them down a notch whenever you can. Jokes are most efficient.
But what I read in the article is more "because you're not perfect, as neither one of us is, so show a little introspection about you before complaining about others".
And... it's about 1 Corinthians 13. See https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+1... Seriously, go read it, it resonates in quite a peculiar way with this whole discussion.
(edited for missing word)
Maybe that's not quite "you're a bad person". But I feel like your reading is missing the "you should feel bad" aspect.
That chapter resonates with me too, because it's pretty much exactly the sentiment I'm disagreeing with. Supposedly it doesn't matter what you do, it matters what you feel.
No, that's exactly wrong. If you do the right thing, that's good. If you do the wrong thing, that's bad. It doesn't matter what you were feeling when you did it.
Love makes people do some really shitty things. "I love you and I want you to not go to hell, so I'm going to beat the gay out of you", for example. That love is genuine, and it doesn't redeem the action.
The opposite is true as well, where people do good while hating it every minute. (No good example comes immediately to mind, and I'm spending too long on this post.) They don't lose points for having unvirtuous emotions. They did good, and that's enough.
I think I see what you mean. But this is not how I read Corinthians; but I agree that this may not be shared either, and I won't make this about religion, I'm really talking about the text itself.
First, it does not put love before actions. It says actions/qualities (or that most of life, actually) is meaningless, nothing, without love (as an attachment to God/Truth)
Second, it defines what is definitely not "love", so one may not use it as a pretext for wrong doing (at least).
Third, it says that we will never see things fully, neither at once, until, that is, the end (provided it's not an ellipsis, he! :) ).
Plus, "love" as expressed in this text is not Philia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philia) but from Latin Caritas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charity_%28virtue%29) (or Greek "agape"); which is not about a feeling, but about something way deeper, transcendant and, although not quite the right word, respectful, for one to an other. It's love as one of the three Christian theological virtues (fides, spes, caritas), that is, in an intimate relation to the Christian God (in this context) as a guide, a goal, an ideal for love/Philia too.
> That love is genuine, and it doesn't redeem the action.
I see your point. That love is, actually, deeply misled. Actually, that's not love, that's fear that supersedes love ("I fear that you [x] and I don't want to because this makes me [y] and I freak out and I don't think you can decide for yourself, so I'll do it and [z]").
Love (be it eros, philia or even agape) is no excuse to abuse. Good intentions don't make an excuse for incompetence.
1 Corinthian 13 is supposed to make us reflect on love and have some negative feeling when we remember that we've not shown our family, friends, neighbors and strangers love. We're supposed to "feel bad". It means we are alive and healthy.
This sounds to me more like a church than a University.
I'd tell them: You are an electron in it lowest possible energy and you want get to your highest excited state without adding energy. That simply does not work. If you can't handle it, perhaps you do not belong here where you are actually challenged and are required to meet that challenge.
It was also crazy how often they complained but turned out not to have even tried the homework on their own.
"Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a “bitch” and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them."
[1] - https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201509/de...
A great example is orientation. Throughout the US, until fairly recently (at my Alma Mater, SUNY New Paltz - it was 1973), orientation was 100% run by students with no state or 'administrative' involvement.
And it was an adult event. It involved camping, orienteering, and serious discussions about the life ahead. Now that the state is involved, it's a cringey PG-13 experience that leaves students completely disoriented and feeling like children.
The same is true of the way Student Union buildings are run today. And residence life. And university police. And campus dining. And many other facets of student life.
It doesn't help too that it's a Seventh-Day Adventist school and we're both atheists. But it's the only school in town so...
But they are still happening today, and they are decidedly NOT in response to parents. At all. In fact, parents have very little power to effect change at a SUNY school as far as I can tell.
Rather, these seem to be directives coming from Albany (or beyond) and disseminated at conferences that are attended by Student Life "professionals."
For example, go to just about any state school (including a SUNY) and take a walk around the Student Union. I'll bet that you'll notice that it is swarming with state officials - typically students who work part time for the state in a "Student Activities" office.
Maybe you'll see one of their managers, a "Director of Student Union Services" or something similar. Ask how many people worked in that office 10 years ago vs. today, and I'll bet that, more often than not, you'll find that the size of these offices have increased by 50% or more during that time.
The consequence is that student governments, who traditionally ran all the operations of Student Unions and did a great job of it, are now pushed out of this function, in favor of state officials and state directives running them instead.
And these state directives almost always include infantifacation of events and decor in the Student Union.
I have observed this phenomenon at SUNY New Paltz, Binghamton University, the University of Connecticut, UMD College Park (although the food co-cop there is amazing and serves as a partial counter-example) and half a dozen other campuses.
Every time I ask about it, I'm told that it's part of a nationwide trend.
It's bullshit. It's very expensive (compared to the shoestring 2.5-3.5 million dollar budgets that student governments typically work with) and it's making Student Unions spiritually and academically hollow.
Sadly, the SUNY administration is largely not liable for action or inaction on the part of state officials either, who, in my experience, make worse decisions than students or faculty 100% of the time.
(As some folks here already know,) I sued SUNY after being kicked out of school in an act of unambiguous political retaliation, and although I won an injunction, forcing my reinstatement, the state officials involved were granted complete immunity from suit.
These events are documents in a documentary, Campus Coup:
I suggested that deadlines would be systematically in the afternoon. Maybe 17:00. Some teachers had had problems when not assigning clear time, plain date means significant percentage of students turn in their assignments in the following day. But currently the time is often 8:00 in the morning. Which encourages some portion of the students to stay awake all night writing that assignment. Which reflects to all other studies they have that week.
The response was "You're adults now, deal with it."
Why should we accept this?
HR has the responsibility to protect the firm from legal dangers, so don't be surprised if their solution involves the plaintiff being fired.
Retaliation in response to a complaint exacerbates, rather than mitigates, the legal danger to the firm.
>Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.
-Epictetus
To answer your question, we should accept it because that is the way reality is fundamentally. Go ahead and try to eternally fight to erase all darkness so that there is only light. Spoiler alert: it's impossible. If there were no darkness there would be no such thing as light because light implies the presence of darkness and darkness implies light.
> Go ahead and try to eternally fight to erase all darkness so that there is only light.
I will, thanks! Why do you think people try to impede me?
That may be but an insult is not harmful unless you accept it personally. When you accept an insult you are the one hurting yourself.
This reminds me of a passage from MLK's Letter From a Birmingham Jail:
>Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/...
Some of the cries of victimization sound way overblown. I would agree that shutting down the process of learning itself, such as when students attempt to stop professors or others from topical intellectual discussions, runs counter to the primary goal of universities.
However, many of the attacks on these students as a group looks like attempts to de-legitimize the victims of racism and bigotry. The minorities who have been revealing systemic bias, bigotry, and racism at these universities are the students who started and sustain the current protests.
Do not conflate the cause of those fighting against campus racism, bigotry, and bias with those who seek to shut down the the process of learning at the sign of the tiniest challenging or upsetting idea. The core group of protestors desire to be accorded the same protections and positive learning environment that white students have. That some have used this movement as a vehicle for lending power to their own neuroses and anxieties should not in any way detract from us from paying attention and doing something about the systemic bias that these protests and subsequent reports have revealed.
The victim mentality is a social engineering tactic commonly used in mainstream media which has cascading effects on all levels of society and has been used for manipulative purposes by the ruling class, both religious and political, for ages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_mentality#History_and_p...
>Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.
-Epictetus
Needless to say, I find this article pretty rich.
The whole idea of "being yourself" has a lot of nuance that has been left unaddressed. Where do we draw the line between things that we should be expected to change, vs what the world must learn to accept? How much obligation does the world have on accepting us for who we are, and how much pressure are they allowed to put on us to change? Is "being yourself" even an ideal state vs chasing ones potential? How do you avoid crippling guilt if you're always chasing an elusive ideal? How do you learn to like yourself if you're never what you should be? If you aren't chasing improvement in yourself does it just end up turning into decay?
I think it's a really difficult subject while both sides are screaming "DUH!" at each other.
This is not about "being yourself"-euphemism for doing as you please with utter disregard for everything including yourself-, this is about taking responsibility for your actions, about having the honesty and strong enough morals to judge.
The "being yourself" vs "chasing one's potential" you talk about is the difference between animal and human.
I have to say I tend to agree with this statement. I feel like every day I see more and more of the younger generation (~25 and younger) acting entitled to everything. Even in elementary schools, it is no longer the child's fault for acting up, but somehow the teacher's fault, which is a complete 180 from what it used to be.
I have to side with Dr. Piper on this one. The student chose to go to this university, I assume the student also tries to adhere to the Christian beliefs. If this is the case then Dr. Piper is absolutely right. It's not his job to coddle these students and make them feel good. If they are there to learn about Christianity and follow the beliefs that go along with it then they should expect to be corrected when their actions contradict that of the religion they desire to follow. Being humbled is just a part of it.
If I may be bold enough to give this student another verse to look at:
Proverbs 13:10 "Where there is strife, there is pride, but wisdom is found in those who take advice."
I looked up this "1 Corinthians 13", and I have severe doubts that a "student came forward ... feeling uncomfortable" about this homily. By itself, I have doubts. But, the fact that a president of a university would call out a student on something like that? I severely doubt that this event had even happened.
It's easy to conjure up a unknown stranger to fit some stereotype that one wants to call out as a straw man. This is a pretty common (and shady) tactic.
More likely, this is just political propaganda. Or maybe C.Y.A.?
If you want to do that, you gotta stick around long enough to get the title "President of Someplace Nobody's Heard Of" first.
Universities frequently forget that their instructors and their students have entered into a business transaction with them. Students expect to receive a useful education, and instructors expect to have their research and publication subsidized, and the university expects to receive payment from the former and quality of service from the latter.
Anything that disrupts that transaction - such as university presidents getting huffy that "kids these days are too sensitive" - tends to cause a failure of the end result of all three components: education itself.
I wish more tertiary-institution administrators realized that they're operating a business, not some kind of wisdom dispensary that students should feel grateful for being allowed to attend.
Do you feel this type of behaviour is affecting a majority of NA youth ? Or is it more media looking at what could be the very beggining of a trend ?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11573646/...
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/goldsmiths-student-div...
Since there really isn't much more information than that, I can only guess that students at OKWU aren't expected to be critical of the curriculum, and that the administration isn't terribly willing to accept this criticism, possibly due to it's biblical emphasis, but I feel like many institutes, religious or not, have this problem. Take the case of Fullerton's Math department earlier this year.
Another thing that bothers me is that the story could be anecdotal -- the lack of detail makes me suspicious as to whether it's true, or just propaganda that the author is using to enforce that students should accept what they are taught without question.
In any case its one of the weirdest things ever, older generations accusing the younger of not being radical enough. Perhaps the youths are right though, some freedoms are just too much, we don't need to exert them, the same way we don't need privacy anymore. There is value in safety, familiarity, coziness, instead of being out in the open wind. It's perhaps some kind of alienation towards multiculturalism/multiethnicism, and the constant bickering that comes with democracy.
Safe spaces come at a cost though, as they inevitably turn to a form of terrorism, radical religious extremist groups for example begin with the formation of safe walled gardens in their communities.
"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me." 1 Cor 13:11
I've spoken to a few people who experience universities in the US recently and heard very different views. One was that young americans are more political than they had ever been. Another thought it was us peering into the world of internet thought bubble generations, people who "grew up" within one. Another thought it was plain intolerance in a literal sense, very little ability to tolerate others that they find in any way offensive..
Not sure what to make of it. Curious.
It was a learning experience. Wonder 20 years later what would happen if they tried bring someone that controversial in.
As for victimization and oversensitivity, I agree that it's a good thing to be subjected to challenging viewpoints when you're at a university. It's also important to have a platform for responding to viewpoints you don't like. I suspect that attendance at sermons is required at Oklahoma Wesleyan, and I further suspect that students are strongly discouraged from publicly espousing views contrary to the content of those sermons. This doesn't make for a healthy university setting.
That said, writing childish outrage screeds lambasting "victim culture" is not exactly a noble or loving response to the student's complaint. This essay sounds like it was written in about five minutes while in full rage mode about the "kids these days".
The "victim culture" accusation alwasy strikes me as sadly ironic coming from a political wing that claims victimization of the overwhelming majority relgion and culture due to the design of Starbucks cups, the use of the phrase "Happy Holidays", or the existence of mosques. I think the word is "projection"...
Edit/Update: After browsing some other articles in the OKWU "News" section, I'm sorry to see this overtly political screed was posted to Hacker News at all. This university appears to be a branch of Fox News, rather than an educational institution.
I'm a little curious about the actual complaint, and if Dr. Piper had any sort of productive discussion with the student. The standard "we're all sinners, but we must try" sort of thing seems the obvious starting approach.
""" So it is with you. Unless you speak intelligible words with your tongue, how will anyone know what you are saying? You will just be speaking into the air. Undoubtedly there are all sorts of languages in the world, yet none of them is without meaning. If then I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and the speaker is a foreigner to me. """
Dr. Piper has not reached this student, and I fear that his heavy-handed approach means he will not reach this student. Sad.
Life is the crucible in which pain and suffering are just another way you are made better...if you accept them and kill, and resolve to kill, your pride.
Actually, children are necessarily and healthily narcissistic. They need this to help them move from a codependent relationship with their parents to a more balanced one as the turn into adults. Blaming them for this trait is ridiculous.
It would be helpful to know what the student was actually claiming made her/him feel victimized, because given the nature of the university it's easy to imagine how the talk might have included at least some implicit comment about sexuality.
http://www.okwu.edu/blog/2015/11/pat-campbell-and-dr-piper-o...
EDIT: Point being that the story as told by the president is likely to differ from the reality. Could the student have simply come forward to say, hey look there are in fact LGBT students here, I don't agree with this interpretation of scripture, just want to make it known.
[0] by which I mean the narrative states that implicit racism is all around us.
As for the horrifying collectivism and grandiose, mobbish character of the comments, direct the dagger inward at your own pride, arrogance, self-righteousness, and depraved views, as a personal goal of your life. Mind your own business. There is no "we".
No it didn't.
Given the scenario the letter itself lays out, the act of responding by such a public letter is at least as childish, thin-skinned, and inappropriate for a university environment where all participants (especially the administration) are supposed to be adults as the complaint it describes.
And given the specific subject of the complaint and response, it really sounds like the author could do with some of their own reflection on 1 Cor 13:4-5. As well as Gal 6:1 and Lk 6:42.
If you want to instill virtue, it is far more important to exhibit it than it is to lecture about it, though the latter has its place.
If I could read the sermon, or the complaint, I could comment on the response to the complaint.
I was surprised to see this. Is that an evangelical Christian belief?
That doesn't mean that these sins need to be confessed in the presence of a priest or something like that (as in the Roman Catholic Church), but given how God's forgiveness is what Christianity is all about, confession is a somewhat important corollary.
Assuming that God's forgiveness isn't something humans can produce while confession is, "primary objective" may be a pretty good description.
The amount of hypocrisy that comes with the claims that these students should "learn to cope with uncomfortable ideas" is staggering. Guess what: these students are presenting us with an "uncomfortable idea" and the response has been nothing but knee-jerk.
Well done, everyone.
University is for adults, not toddlers.
No one is arguing for this.
As soon as you claim they are, they scurry away claiming that's not what they mean, but as soon as you say "OK then" and move on, they turn right around and it's all about their feelings again. It is very much a part of the modern PC platform that if someone "feels" assaulted, they are, and you must believe them or you are blaming the victim. This is why accusations are as good as conviction in places where PC reigns supreme, because the fact of accusation is itself proof of feeling, and that's it, case closed.
Don't fall for this transparent rhetorical ploy. Arguments that only appear transiently to dismiss one point, then disappear into the ether immediately after, are not arguments, just rhetoric. (This is a general point that applies in many places, actually.)
Along with some NYT coverage on this general topic: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/11/02/when-a-gener...
This issue of students complaining about trigger warnings and the need for safe spaces certainly seems to be increasingly prevalent, but that could just be due to the media giving it more attention.
Are you saying you believe that another person can only be near you because you give them implicit permission to? And that at any time, and for any reason, you could remove that permission?
Where did you get that idea?
"The Freedom of Speech," the legal right defined by the constitution only applies to the government because the constitution only applies to the government.
There's a whole world outside US: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
Stud 2: When it hurts me!
Stud 1: When it's offensive to me!
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/3s5wz2/yale_adminis...
Oh really, so university students are able to consume alcohol, right?
edit:
noun: adult;
- a person who is fully grown or developed.
- a person who has reached the age of majority.
edit 2:
"Longitudinal neuroimaging studies demonstrate that the adolescent brain continues to mature well into the 20s. This has prompted intense interest in linking neuromaturation to maturity of judgment."
The dominant American culture is not one with a single consistently-applied rite of passage to adulthood. Over about a decade, people go though multiple transitions (age of majority, voting age, drinking age---heck, a lot of people even recognize the age at which rental car companies stop applying a "You're probably a dangerous driver" surcharge, at 25 years old).
Meant adult as a contrast to toddlers (whom feelings and sense of security we do care about, for good reasons) and as a status that you target, grow into and nurture, especially more at the university (and hopefully after as well).
Unless your post means to say we should probably drop the drinking age. I'd agree it's pinned higher than maturity curve of youths, and personally find the illegality to encourage a debauched form of underage drinking. But I don't really see how that's here or there.
re, your edit: Are you saying that by some developmental model 17 year olds should not be asked to rise to the standards of behaviour expected of adults? Please elaborate.
The article on age of majority makes it clear that it is a distinct concept from age of license, which can cover things like buying alcohol and running for elected office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_majority
Honestly, your edit seems to put the nail into the coffin of your entire point.
This argument is basically "You belong to social group X. You cannot opt out." Then followed by "because to social group X, you have to behave in Y way. Because that's how X people behave."
Depending on the surrounding culture, with that argument you can justify: why men have to wear ties, why young men should be sent to war, why women should wear burkha, etc. Anything conservative goes.
I'm not disagreeing with your actual point. I'm just trying to point out that your argument is bad.
Also known as "wishful thinking". There's no room for charity when reason is called upon. Be as charitable as you want when talking about the weather with your neighbor, but when you're debating something serious you can not look for imaginary excuses for your opponent's mistakes.
Who is saying this?
From 1 Corinthians 13:
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
That said, these people are just as free to voice these small minded, selfish complaints as I am to ignore them.
No one is arguing for this.
Suicide dropped from sociology lessons: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/15/suicide-dro...
(A-level students are 16 to 18 years old)
I agree that teaching suicide to children is going to be difficult, and that most of the reason is about actual harm, not feelings - the increased risk of death or harm to the students from the Wurther Effect or stigmatising views.
But all of that can be worked around. You provide a mix of comprehensive support of different types to students; you promote a culture of inclusion an sharing in that room.
Suicide is really important. It's the leading cause of death of men aged between 15 and 49 in the UK. Rates are increasing. NHS cuts mean it's harder to get good quality support. Appropriately talking about suicide probably doesn't raise risk, and may well lower risk.
So, it's a shame that this topic got cut from the syllabus.
There are other examples in this thread of law students not learning about rape law because it's too distressing to hear.
That shows a misunderstanding of what PTSD survivors want when they talk about trigger warnings. The point is not "I should be able to live my life and avoid every mention of this thing that causes me significant distress", but "I am currently vulnerable, but getting support, and I need a little bit of warning not so I can avoid the subject, but so that I can make sure I have the little bit of extra support I need to keep me safe".
However: the people on the other side are mostly fucking hateful cunts who scream "What about my freedom of speech?" while seeking to silence the people they're screaming at.
It's insisting that a declaration be given in advance to remove someone from the possibility of having to cope with something uncomfortable.
A safe space is an echo chamber.
If we really want to know the cause of these tendencies, we need only look to the internet. You used to need to find a group of people to hang out with in your area and in doing so you'd associate with the social norms of that group, whatever they may be.
Now you craft your friend's list on Facebook with people who agree with you and reinforce you. If you've ever clicked the "unfollow" button you're guilty of this. This reinforcement leads to an echo chamber.
As a culture, we're effectively putting canvasing over logic and reason in all areas. That's essentially what you get from a social feed that reinforces your views - constant news that agrees with you...which is just canvasing yourself.
Canvasing feeds on feelings and reaction over reason. You look at just about any socially convenient topic and you'll see this. Just as an example, let's look at diversity in tech since this is Hacker News.
We're more than willing to accost the entire industry for lack of diversity as if it's somehow their fault. Yet most of these companies are falling all over themselves to hire people and we aren't hearing stories about discrimination or people not getting jobs...we just see the numbers and assume something is wrong.
We're not allowed to consider that people might tend to just be wired a certain way. Men's brains work differently than women's. Certain problems might be interesting to certain types of people and not to other.
Instead we create a cause and a problem that must be fixed immediately. We look at it from an emotional perspective rather than looking at all of the factors involved to just see if it happens to just be a general tendency or a real problem.
A problem is more marketable...so we go with that instead.
Which is different...how?
That's a needlessly uncharitable portrayal of it. A trigger warning can be used just like a movie's rating is. I don't avoid R rated movies, but I appreciate knowing when I'm walking into one.
Notice the response to your comment was "No one is arguing for this" instead of saying what he/she is actually arguing for.
Your time will be better spent picking the fuzzies off your favorite blanket.
If this were naturally a world where all ideas were comfortable except for the influence of a few bad apples, it might not be a problem, but since the world does contain uncomfortable facts, opinions, and people in abundance, they're basically demanding that everybody else shoulder the burdens.
No. I, or the world will not be taking a "charitable position". As any other human being living in society I'm often confronted with things that I'm not comfortable with. Would you like to know what I do about them? I step away because it's none of my business judging other people's beliefs and the integrity of my feelings is not their responsibility.
So, to reiterate: no, sir. I will not yield something that I do not ask for myself. I will also not be shamed into whatever you're trying to shame us for and I laugh at the notion that you believe you would be successful in that attempt.
Maybe it is societal conditioning, but I think that is wrong and look back on older generations and think they must also have known.
I can not say the same thing for much of these PC causes. I find it iritating and bad for society, much like I am sure racists in the south found the gradual acceptance of interracial dating and increased equity irritating.
I find many of the causes championed, or at least incedents in the news, to be a mockery of a free society but I can't help wonder if I am the same as Jim Crow. I suspect he felt quite vindicated as well.
Women were thought to be naturally uninterested in politics, and to not have the head for it anyway. Dabbling in politics was seen as an unwomanly thing ladies should be spared from.
Not unlike how people today think that the scarcity of women in tech is due to them naturally having less interest in it. It's easy to ascribe the status quo to the natural order of things.
Of writing of that era I like "Are Women People?"[1] It's written from a suffragettes point of view, but it includes some cherry-picked quotes from anti-suffragists, such as:
"The grant of suffrage to women is repugnant to instincts that strike their roots deep in the order of nature. It runs counter to human reason, it flouts the teachings of experience and the admonitions of common sense."—N.Y. Times, Feb. 7, 1915."
That was the kind of thing you could write in a newspaper of the time and have people agree with you. That should tell us something about how blind we can be to contemporary societal problems, and how silly we will look in hindsight.
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11689/11689-h/11689-h.htm
I'm a student at a top 4 year university, and I find the lack of student backbone nauseating. The current trends in university culture go entirely counter to the reasons that we have higher education. Instead of encouraging expression, our culture deafens it with its constant concern towards avoiding offence.
Every adult has screamed about the "Next Generation" being softer or not as capable as the current. I think it's a lack of adults remembering how they were when they were young. I'm "Gen X", the naming of which was often (incorrectly) attributed to aimlessness: "The Unknown Generation" (the real naming reason has a much less arrogant reason).
I am concerned about the seeming "addiction to Victimhood" that appears[1] to be plaguing generations below me, however, I'm about as concerned about it as I would be any trivial thing. Success (however it's defined) requires one to figure out how to navigate the perceived injustices and figure out how to carve out a life. We did; they will, too. Hopefully it'll happen without a bunch of new legislation under the guise of Justice but with the result of further erosion of freedom.
There's one, key, difference between today's screaming and the screaming of generations past: Reach. Just like the current crop of over-protective parents dreaming that crime is so much worse these days than it was when we were kids (when in reality many crimes against children occur with half the frequency they did when we were young), the screaming about injustice is much more visible. This serves two negative purposes: we perceive that the entire generation of kids is a bunch of weak, whining losers based on a handful of folks with extreme positions and those striving for an identity see an opportunity to jump on the large (again, perceived) bandwagon and get some attention. Everyone has an opportunity to be heard and it's up to each of us to set our filters appropriately. Unfortunately, Critical Thinking is something that is often absent or ignored[2].
[1] "Appears" being the operative word. Though I've read many articles, I tend to surround myself with people who fit the age-range and socioeconomic status of the typical Victimhood addict and I don't see any of these traits in them. Anecdote, yes, but so many of the news stories are based on little more evidence.
[2] That sounds like a dig; it's not meant to be. I believe Critical Thinking is a fancy way of saying "wisdom" and is something that is acquired through experience, is rarely teachable (if it's even attempted to be taught) and is often forgotten in the face of highly-emotional arguments. It's the sort of thing that changes the phrase "Founders with heavy accents are rarely in the top 100 start-ups" into "I think people who don't speak English are dumb". Over time, and with experience at your back, you (hopefully) learn to be slow to ascribe malice to another's actions and give people the benefit of the doubt. Everyone communicates differently and I think most of us intend the best, not the worst.
You live in fear, and some of you think that fear is good, as long as it protects those that don't want to grow up. I hope this convinces more valuable students to come study in Europe. It's about time for the brain drain to reverse its course.
Isn't this just an extreme safe-space for Christianity? It's exactly what they're arguing against, but backs up their worldview so it's not an issue.
It's honestly baffling because I am sure there are hundreds of very smart people there who must realize this, including the professors and administration.
Hyperbole?
> We can deal with the Christians
I don't want to deal with the Christians. I don't agree with their worldview most of the time, but the don't need to be dealt with.
> once we sort out the safe spacers
They are the safe spacers, just by a different name. Also, I think safe spaces are fine and they don't need sorted out.
I was just making an observation on his hypocrisy and that safe spaces are not just for left-leaning people. He has cultivated a safe space for Christians and is bemoaning safe spaces for potential non-Christians.
(This addresses only the first part of your comment.)
If a group wants to acquire private property and start a club or meeting where they gather to share like-minded ideas and be away from dissent, that is acceptable. The place for "safe spaces" away from intellectual challenge is NOT the square of a university campus.
The basic protocol requires an accurate summary of the topic and the sentiment from the initiator, and a single bit from the target.
BTW this is essentially how Mormon missionaries do it ("Do you want to hear about my views on Jesus (positive)? Y/N", and I think it's great.
And that seems maybe a bit silly.
Obviously there are shades of gray depending on the particular speech, and we've collectively drawn a line around certain speech (call it "hate speech") which we do believe should be censored. Otherwise, the correct response to speech you don't agree with is more speech ideally in the form of reasoned and well-informed debate of the issues.
What I find the most perplexing is how, in many cases it seems like the original speech which was deemed offensive or victimizing, which typically itself was not even directed at the "victim", is answered in return with extreme prejudice and hate directly aimed at the original speaker. This can also be combined with a social media campaign to attempt to politicize the whole event and inflict maximum damage. This is why I am often confused as to who is the real victim in these cases.
The ad blocker analogy is interesting. Even blocking ads is somewhat contentious (e.g. lawsuits against DVRs with 30-second skip buttons, site owners saying their revenue stream has been decimated, etc.) and this is simply users controlling what their own devices are doing! Blocking an ad might deprive a site of revenue, but it doesn't deprive anyone else of their voice -- no one is being censored.
You say we surely allow people to shovel words into our brains... Hearing speech you don't like is one thing, but what about someone else taking their own inability to function in a diverse culture, and using it to dictate the words anyone who happens to be around them are allowed to speak? This sounds like a case where the medicine is worse than the disease.
The biggest problem with "safe spaces" is that they are not actually limited to small rooms in the student union with play-dough and elevator music, but I think a lot of people are very concerned that the intent is ultimately for the entire campus to be policed like one. And I do mean policed, because stepping afoul of the mythical safe space code of conduct is taken as a capital offense, to which you may see literal rioting in response.
There's a lot to unpack in your comment, but I want to focus on the above. I believe you do have a right to filter your input, and indeed, we can do and MUST filter it because there is so much of it. Certainly my right to speak should not trump your right to not have to be listen.
I think that the galling part about the safe space thing is that people are going to places which are designed to be not safe (in that sense) and then demanding everyone stop doing what they came there to do. It's like walking into a bar and proclaiming "I'm an alcoholic and you're all harming me by drinking in front of me!" That's stupid. But I, for one, don't want the stupidity of a few to somehow lead to a world where I'm forced to listen when I don't want to.
I don't think it's possible to measure insecurity and I don't think it's necessary to measure it. With enough life experience you can detect insecurity in an adult by the the things they say and their reactions to certain events.
What the original poster intended you never know...
Isn't this the essence of religion after all?
It's like that you don't know what were the real intentions of the OP who is unavailable and can't be reached and you're just left with vague texts and conflicting interpretations and re-interpretations making you feeling completely confused and lost.
The pervasive whining being addressed in the article is spot on and was recently addressed in another HN posting: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/11/24/the-yale-problem-begi...
There is a large segment of society that assumes that any alternate point of view, irrespective of how it's presented, must be an attack against them. This is akin to chastising someone warning people not to pick up the active business-end of an arc-welder.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/august-2015-ratings-fox-news-1-in...
My intention was to show that safe spaces exist in more ways than they are described and have been around for much much longer than the uproar of the last few years would lead one to believe, they have just not been run by left-leaning young people in universities.
Isn't HackerNews just an extreme safe-space for SV programmers?
Ok ok ok. I'm not trying to say they're the exact same. But what I am saying in response to your post is... so? That all sounds fine and totally reasonable. I don't see a problem.
I am amused how in the past two weeks the word "safe space" has been weaponized by the liberal left. First they demanded safe spaces. Then they were laughed at on a national scale. Now they throw back "oh yeah... well YOU'RE a safe space so fuck you!". I've seen it in multiple contexts and expect to see it more.
Because it's a reasonable argument to make. Saying "you can't take this from me and claim it is a bad thing when I do it but a good thing when you do it" is a perfectly fine way to respond.
(note: I don't actually mean fuck you. I'd like to think y'all can see what I did there.)
Being safe from criticism.
Anybody who's been on HN for more than a month knows there is a set of topics that will trigger massive discussion threads, for which there is a generally accepted community opinion. If you go against those opinions, you will be downvoted. Go ahead: try saying that you're against the very idea of a basic income for all citizens in a BI thread.
The downvotes on the parent post are IMO a symptom of that. I'd defy anyone to tell me exactly which one of the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html this his/her post is breaking, besides, perhaps "posting perennial flamewar topics." And, if you have to call this a flame war topic, I would suggest that actually proves my point.
I'm not going to hang out on algolia for an hour to dig up the post, but I'm 99% sure PG ended up endorsing downvotes-as-disagreement (or at least condoning it).
Also their mission statement:
As an evangelical Christian university of The Wesleyan Church, Oklahoma
Wesleyan University models a way of thought, a way of life, and a way of
faith. It is a place of serious study, honest questions, and critical
engagement, all in the context of a liberal arts community that honors the
Primacy of Jesus Christ, the Priority of Scripture, the Pursuit of Truth, and
the Practice of Wisdom.To wit:
Biology Major — Students will demonstrate the following outcomes, upon completion of the Biology degree offered by the School of Arts and Sciences:
1. A sound basic understanding of the chemistry of life.
2. A sound basic understanding of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cell structure and function.
3. A fundamental knowledge of Classical, Molecular, and Population genetics.
4. A sound basic understanding of the proposed mechanisms of evolution and understanding of Creation.
5. A sound basic understanding of the structure and function in plants and animals.
6. A sound basic understanding of ecology.
7. Integration of the Biblical Principles into life sciences.
Needless to say, I'm not surprised by the "framing" of Evolution and, essentially, equivocating its merit with, um, Biblical Creationism.
What then does "Integration of the Biblical Principles into life sciences" mean?
Perhaps they join the concepts because they know that the opponents of their faith often try to falsely imply that theories of evolution are proofs of atheism.
I'm under impression that such is also the official stance of the major "mainstream" churches today.
The education was much more about "life-style management and shaping", than actual objective education. Basically, they told us that we can't "drink, smoke, etc", but then complained when we went and told them we were having any type of personal problems.
And you are free to get your education somewhere else.
By rights, they shouldn't even be entrusted with that responsibility really. I mean, Eve was pretty much answerable for the downfall of mankind.
You see, they hate it so so much. Ugh, so icky.
Well it's an evangelical college. It is what it says on the tin. They disapprove of certain behaviors they consider immoral, but if you don't know that going in, you didn't do your research.
It's not like they are disguising that fact.
Everyone attends this school voluntarily, so it's not like someone was hit in the face their first day with the fact that it's a Christian-based curriculum.
But isn't that expected? OKWU's institution is as an evangelical Christian university - http://www.okwu.edu/about/
If you did not want Christian indoc then why would you go to a christian evangelical school?
Distilled down, the school is saying that if a lesson on how we should selflessly love others makes you feel bad about yourself, the lesson you should take away is that you have some improvements to make in yourself -- not that you've been emotionally raped.
If you say anything negative about the religion or its teachings, you are kicked out.
Really? Citation please; I simply don't believe this. Most Christian universities that I have any knowledge of invite (or at least aren't averse to it) tough discussion, and allow for a pretty wide range of critical thought about interpretations of the Bible, how Christianity should relate to politics, culture, science, and many other subjects.
Until a few years ago, you could major in something that amounted to being a 'preacher's wife' (I can't remember the name of the major, but that was its goal).
And this is evidence of what, exactly?
"Safe-spaces", on the other hand, are cudgels of fear, handed to anyone claiming "victimization" to be capriciously used against people with whom they simply disagree and want to shut up. The reason they're even a thing is because school administrators themselves are beholden to the same fear. That's not at all like free association.
Oh please. Now who's fear-cudgeling whom? You're being extremely melodramatic in reaction to a questionable anecdote.
People modeling victim behaviors to remove everything that causes them discomfort aren't something to be afraid of, but also their cries for attention aren't something to be treated too seriously. Allowing them to get their way just reinforces further learning of this silly strategy.
I try to explain that a) most people have little reason to feel consistently victimized, besides just a bad habit and b) this way of communicating isn't really productive.
Harassment, of course, is something different and malicious and should be confronted uncovered and called out, but simple discourse, antagonistic as may be, is something humans should learn how to engage with with relative ease, rather than recoil and become less able to deal with the realities of living in a complex and undanitized society.
Now if you want to argue about how narrow blinkers need to be before a horse is blind then your just missing the point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkers_(horse_tack)
The purpose of safe spaces isn't to impose thought control, it's to allow people who have suffered a chance to recover. You can choose to enter one, or you can choose to stay out of one. It's purely a matter of free association. (Perhaps you're thinking of "speech codes"? I agree in opposing those, but it's a separate issue.) A safe space is nothing more than a "free and voluntary association of like-minded people."
I'd point out, though, that even if a handful of people have been using the idea of "safe spaces" wrongly, that doesn't delegitimize the concept itself. If a few students are doing wrong in the name of "safe spaces," the answer is to argue against those particular students, not against other, unrelated safe spaces.
I linked this above, but since you asked:
https://popehat.com/2015/11/09/safe-spaces-as-shield-safe-sp...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/how-camp...
Are college students, the supposed vanguard of curious minds, closing their minds and reducing their ability to deal with the world they live in?
As for your second question, it's so obviously disconnected from what has been said so far that it's hardly worth even answering. A victim of homophobic intimidation who wants a space free of homophobic intimidation is not "reducing their ability to deal with the world they live in." You're stringing right-wing jargon terms together in ways that obviously don't make sense. A person doesn't have any less of a "curious mind" simply because they want to spend time in a place free of intimidation, violence, or hostility.
What is intimidation in your example? You are projecting a generalized concept that does not have a defined impact on a person. Is it intimidation if someone posts a comment on a website that they are for male/female marriage only, a person yells out a slur on the street, a person walks up to another and says: "We do not like your kind here?" The last item on this list should be the one that a state agency involves itself in as it is the only where physical harm can occur. The others are simply words.
As an aside, in future discussions, try not to resort to simplistic arguments like "right-wing jargon terms" to dismiss an alternative view point. I was worried for a moment you may have a point until I read that.
A "safe space" is a place where you know you aren't going to be singled out and harmed (verbally or physically) by someone telling you that you're a queer faggot and deserve to die.
A "safe space" is a place where people can discuss the actual issues of hatred, bigotry and violence without fear of reprise for being the hated, the attacked, the marginalized.
There's a stark difference between "This isn't a place for saying hurtful things; this is a place for talking about why saying those things are hurtful. That's why we're not letting you in here while you continue to marginalize the oppressed. Let's talk about why you think the oppressed should be marginalized instead."
All the anti-safe-space discussion on Hacker News lately is truly, horribly, fucking disgustingly indicative of the inherent sexism and flat-out hatred that worms its way through developer culture.
They are absofuckinglutely not cudgels of fear. And people who claim they are need to take a real fucking hard look at themselves and their views on those who are verbally bullied, physically attacked, raped, and murdered for being who they fucking are.
I'm coming from the direction of a) being genderqueer and b) having survived sexual assault. Safe places have been remarkable in giving me a place to discuss my feelings about gender without ridicule or hate. Trigger warnings have been pivotal in me recovering from being molested as a pre-teen.
I'm actively scared of coming out in the developer community, because of its deep rooted misogyny. But here I am :)
(edit: I love that I just got down-voted for coming out to the community as both queer and victim of sexual assault! Thanks for proving me right, HN.)
Do you really think that's why you were downvoted?
I can see that, in the context in a "safe space" with a fairly specific purpose as to who (either by specific individuals are shared identity around common potential trauma source) it is safe for.
The reality of trauma and triggering is that there are a wide variety of sources of trauma, and that each is associated with a wide variety of both obviously related potential triggers and less obviously related ones, so I think a problem comes about when either safe spaces or trigger warnings become overly generic -- and, particularly, when contexts that are not specifically-sheltered "safe spaces" become the focus of efforts for demands for trigger warnings around any possible source of trauma (or, in a different way, when they became the focus of efforts to demand "trigger warnings" favoring particular sources of trauma, without any particularly strong reason that source of trauma is relevant and needing to be favored in the particular space.)
Stop seeing the world through your victim-goggles. Just stop.
The basic "problem" from developer culture is that it is heavily rooted in systems logic, and frankly safe spaces as proposed and as advertised and as popularly understood are illogical.
Very simply, using your definition, the safe space both proclaims to allow discussion and then by its very definition excludes one side of that same discussion.
If the claim was "Hey, look, we just need a separate place where we don't fear bullying, violence, and microaggressions" that would be understandable and not a problem.
However, the claim is invariably appended with "And we can have useful discussions here, and no other place can have useful discussions, and we accept everyone--except these other people that we decide have badthink" and once that amendment is made it triggers the developer bullshit alarm.
There's a time and a place for that, to be sure, but there are many more cases in which the forceful imposition of a binary outlook has effects that are socially inhibiting, making it a serious impediment to free discussion and open development of ideas.
If a person cannot (or will not) recognize when taking a narrow and combative approach just makes them an asshole, then the "logical" response is to keep them far enough away to prevent their noxious manner from derailing otherwise productive exchanges.
Moreover, even attempts at polite discussion are often dismissed as sealioning or whatnot--and thus, by being hypersensitive and assuming a victim stance, truly productive and civil discourse is prevented.
Additionally, these spaces do not facilitate a "productive" exchange: we can wager that few really new ideas are being exchanged. Politely, it's a chance to reaffirm values and provide a sense of belonging and comfort. Impolitely, it's a circlejerk.
If people need a place to find comfort, that's great! To claim anything other than that, especially that it somehow is some setting for honest and fair discourse, is a misrepresentation.
For example, these "safe spaces" apparently are to protect against "micro-aggressions" (a term I only recently learned) which if I understand correctly means to "take offense where none was given" aka to put words into someone's mouth? So now it's not even what someone is saying but how someone in the audience might feel, because of their own personal history, indirectly because a word the speaker used. And this is the speaker's responsibility now that someone in the audience was made to feel this way because they were confronted with a disagreeing opinion?
I think this is where the accusations of mollycoddling come in. It sounds like these kids aren't ready for serious academic discourse. They're stuck in a world where there is only one "right" and they paint caractures of their racist and bigoted antagonists to support their view.
What I find noxious is warfangle's claim that we must all be sexist and bigots to raise questions around academic freedom and censorship in colleges / universities... I think this is a typical parlor trick to try to shut down productive discussion. Frankly I would have liked to see a rebuke from dang in response. Why is it ok to attack a group saying a viewpoint is "disgustingly indicative of the inherent sexism and flat-out hatred that worms its way through developer culture." All the same, I'll let warfangle speak for themself and I don't expect HN to be free from dissenting opinions or even vitriol. Because in an attempt to shut down a "narrow and combative approach" it's impossible not to have a chilling effect on the overall discussion. In your safe spaces you might be spared from some of the bad, but it comes at a significant cost to others around you who aren't triggered and are capable of having adult conversations on difficult topics.
Frankly I've been waiting for an article like this to hit the front page because I am very interested in seeing the varying perspectives and actually having a chance at productive conversation on HN, which you won't find in the comments anywhere else that's for sure!
Quite as it should be, the best "safe place" is the one we create for ourselves in our mind. I never imagined students would demand a real-world physical equivalent that somehow everyone else in the room is supposed to comply with.
newspace = makeSafe(space);
How would we test that this function is performing correctly?
That said, the term "safe space" is something I've never personally encountered being used in the context you present it in. When a group of like-minded people come together in a private space, they don't then declare "This place is a safe space for $x people". It's obvious that everyone present is of like-mind, and those who are there for purposes other than discussion of the topic at hand can be expelled through social means as a consensus action of the group without any need for authority involvement.
Meanwhile, I often hear the term "safe space" used by people when they want to take over a shared space to insulate themselves from people who might disagree with them or maybe even be bigots towards them, while in public. I am not in any way arguing that bigotry is socially acceptable, but it is protected speech, and while it is perfectly appropriate to tell people that their bigotry is offensive, inappropriate, and unwelcome, it's not appropriate to ask that an authority come in and forcibly establish a zone in a shared space where-in some speech is okay and other speech is not.
My opinion, which I think is largely in-line with the person you replied to, is not one born out of hatred or bigotry, it's born out of concern about the death of dissent. It's a concern that our culture is shifting to one where everyone lives in an echo chamber and is intolerant of any ideas not of their own making. It is perfectly acceptable as a society to be intolerant of intolerance, and that includes both intolerance based in bigotry as well as intolerance based in delusion. This is not an argument in favor of people "just taking it" when others behave in inappropriate ways towards them, but it is a plea for reason around dissent. Respectful disagreement is not offensive or inappropriate, even though some people may use disrespectful terms in their dissent which themselves are offensive or inappropriate, that does not mean that all people who disagree are inherently offensive. It is not oppression to disagree with someone, it is oppression to prevent dissenting opinions.
Given that so much of the influence and respect people in the public eye have these days is based on the appearance that they're socially/politically appropriate, it's very clear how claims of victimhood can be used to intimidate. In some cases, I don't have much sympathy for those who have come under fire since they are in a position to clearly state their position and walk away relatively unscathed, but some people unfortunately are not in that situation. Take for instance, the two Yale professors who clearly argued for school administrators to allow students to define their own standards and for students to have a discussion, instead were reviled unfairly by some students who instead want administrators to use their authority to impose speech controls. Unfortunately, those Yale professors have less influence with which to save themselves than the administrators who more often come under fire.
Perhaps the most confusing thing to me about this whole situation is that in most cases the people calling for "safe spaces" are people who are part of marginalized groups or are saying that they act on behalf of marginalized groups. The social concepts surrounding free association, free speech, and dissent are there to protect marginalized groups. It allows them to exist, gather, and discuss their ideas, thoughts, experiences, and feelings and to publicly disagree with people who are in the majority groups and be protected from the oppression of being silenced by authority while doing so. It seems strange to me that the people claiming to be proponents of marginalized groups would want to take away these protections from anyone.
I could write more, but I don't think it would lend anything else to the point I'm trying to make. If anyone reading this is unable to understand the difference between free association of like-minded people in private spaces vs trying to enforce speech controls on everyone, including those who may not be like-minded, in a shared space, and why the latter might be concerning to many for reasons that do not originate from any personal hatred or bigotry, I will attempt to clarify further. Otherwise, I hope the above is well-stated enough to put forward that position.
How do you feel about your HR department and their anti-discrimination and harassment policies? :)
You get more protections from harassment in the workplace than students get on campus.
Tolerance of intolerance (e.g., hate speech) leads inevitability to the extinction of tolerance itself. Discussions on why intolerance exists and what can be done to combat it are precisely why safe spaces exist. And yes, I believe university campuses should be exclusively safe places. Hate speech itself has no place in an institute of education - just as it has no place in the workplace. Discussions about hate speech, on the other hand, absolutely do.
Personally, I'm not sure I'd support anyone harassing another personally, although if speech isn't intimidating to a person, you can't say it's harassment, I think (IANAL).
Nobody's saying that we should turn main street of podunk, OH into a designated safe place (though, it says a lot about the culture in america that it is decidedly NOT a safe place to be if you're LGBTQ/POC/etc).
I would argue that this is an unverified and overblown statement. In fact, I don't even see why this would eventually lead itself to be true, unless you already consider bigotry and hatred to be the majority norm in a very pervasive sense. I could write more on the matter, but others have done some considerable study on the matter [1]. I would say that overall being tolerant of intolerance is a good thing, because these people naturally exclude themselves from social structures and circles of power where they are expected to maintain a leadership role towards those they are bigoted against. Further, by integrating intolerant people with those of us who are tolerant, there is more chance for them to learn why their hatred may be misplaced, and for us to learn where the boundaries of our own personal expression should be.
Thinking merely that we must "stamp out all hatred" is in fact a form of hatred in itself. You can't fight fire with fire here.
[1] http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/23/how-marcuse-made-toda...
-Tom Lehrer, Intro to National Brotherhood Week
http://www.last.fm/music/Tom+Lehrer/That+Was+The+Year+That+W...
A university and a office are two very distinct environments. University is designed to create an environment for learning, growing, debating, being challenged in ones preconceived notions, and in some ways, it's also a crucible to help prepare young adults to enter society as productive members.
To apply the same standards of a workplace to an academic institution is ridiculous. In fact, in many ways we want workplaces to become more like university. It's another example of the friction and the push back against efforts to sterilize the workplace (trying to prevent it becoming the next "safe space").
Bigotry is a belief structure. Discrimination and harassment are actions, which may or may not be based in bigotry. I am in no way advocating that it is okay to discriminate against or harass people based on their identity. Speech can be an action, but it can also just be speech. It's not a simple line, but I think it's well defined in the law and well understood in society the difference between a statement of opinion, which may or may not be bigoted, and harassment.
Also, I'd like to point out that you're awfully focused on my statements around bigotry. Bigotry is a consequence of humanity, but it's also something that can be changed through education and discussion. The very reason why it's important to protect dissenting speech, is because it's a protection for society against bigotry. The movement that's currently happening around "safe spaces" is not merely a reaction to bigotry, it's also a reaction to dissenting opinions, ignoring the latter for the former because the former makes an easy target to argue against due to its inappropriateness and unpopularity does not change the facts of the matter.
I think part of our misunderstanding is that we disagree on what is entailed in a "discussion" and what is entailed in the term "safe space". To me, a discussion must have, among other things, diversity of thought or position. This implies that there will be dissent. In the usage of the term "safe space" that I've experienced, dissent was not allowed, in fact it was in some cases violently rejected. If there is no room for dissent, then what exists within is not a discussion, it's a group affirmation. You do not walk away from a group affirmation having learned anything, although it might make you feel better about yourself. A discussion provides the possibility of learning something, gaining awareness of other viewpoints, understanding of someone who is different than you, and perhaps the possibility of convincing someone else to change their viewpoint to share yours.
On a university campus in a shared space, I'd very much hope that any discussion that occurs about any topic, but especially topics of politics and social mores has room for dissent. For instance, I'd hope that my dissenting opinion regarding the existence or establishment of "safe spaces" would be welcome, if not applauded in a discussion about identity politics on a university campus. At the same time, if I were on said campus and I heard someone expressing a grossly bigoted opinion, such as something which is blatantly racist or sexist, I would confront them and provide them my dissenting viewpoint to their bigotry and hope that it were welcomed, if not embraced by the person who I was having the disagreement with. University life is supposed to be about having your viewpoints that you grew up with challenged, meeting new people who are different than you, finding out about the vast diversity of opinions and thought that exists in the world, and opening your mind to the possibilities that life holds. When we use social means to censure people and demand the cessation of dissent in the name of not causing offense, we trade away the possibility of teaching students about the vast possibilities of the world in favor of not rocking the boat.
thank you for the articulate reply.
FWIW, this concept of safe space isn't quite what I had in mind. I think, perhaps, what I failed to articulate is that the safe space concept that grinds my gears is the kind that is an expectation carried around by people who really do just want to shut other up. Professor said something they didn't like? "Waaah...this classroom isn't a safe space". Group-I'm-not-a-part-of says something they don't like? "Waaah...they're making my school a not-safe place".
I have no problem with the idea of a physically-located place with heightened expectations of civility.
One thing to realize, also, is the context of love (as the topic of discussion in the classroom was in 1 Corinthians 13) in many evangelical circles.
Love, defined in many conservative christian circles, is devotion to the Church, the Husband and God, to the exclusion of all else. Even when it hurts. It's about staying in an abusive relationship because you need to submit to your husband's wishes, no matter what. It is not the selfless emotional connection of one person to another. It is the subjugation of the self.
This student may very well have felt victimized for how love was being talked about. But all we know about the classroom discussion was that the topic was 1 Corinthians 13. Not what was actually talked about with regard to that chapter. I've heard 1 Corinthians 13 be twisted in some very evil ways.
Please do not read any tone into what I'm saying here, because if you've gotten that message I honestly don't know how. "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another." - John 13:34
The verse you reference above is in the context of marriage and you hear it a lot at weddings, but the context of love within Christian community is always going to go straight to the way that Jesus defined it. There's no part of the Christian community that is going to try to override what Jesus said. "Just as I have loved you" means unconditionally. It doesn't mean as long as they agree with you, have the same color skin as you, speak the same language as you or fit some specific stencil.
I realize this is a bit off-kilter for Hacker News but sermons that talk about how we are all sinners in need of forgiveness are there specifically for two reasons.
1. No matter what you have done, God will forgive you. No matter what you have done, God loves you.
2. Because God will forgive the worst of us who truly asks for forgiveness, we have no right to deny forgiveness to anyone who truly asks for it either.
I've visited a lot of different churches throughout the southeast in my life and I've never once heard a minister say anything that implies anything other than the above.
I grew up in one. They use words that mean one thing to everyone else but mean (via subtext) another thing entirely to the in-group.
That's why I specifically called out that kind of church; I thought I was careful about that. I've been in many churches that are amazing, wonderful places. But I've been to other churches (usually PCA) that can be downright evil.
Edit: this wasn't about skin color, but more LGBTQ/nonbelievers. They're a very different breed of bigot than Those Who Wear Sheets.
I guess "safe space" (quoted as a term under discussion) isn't really the right term here - but the student is the one who raised the issue of "victimization", which to my mind is really more what we're talking about than actual safe spaces as you defined them. So on this point, that might actually be good feedback to that professor, because I think struggling with the terminology in this particular topic is common.
One thing to realize ...is the context of love ...in many evangelical circles
As a conservative evangelical myself, your explanation of the Christian concept of love is somewhat confusing and contradictory to me. But putting that aside, I still don't see how this student felt "victimized", unless now any negative feeling or emotion makes one a victim. Feeling guilty for failing to live up to a standard is a negative feeling, but I don't think it makes one a victim (and if it does, then I think the word victim becomes utterly void of meaning).
One wonders if it was all in the professor's head? Or if it even happened? Where's the proof! Flip the conversation, just because the professor is claiming to be accused of saying something that made the student feel victimized doesn't mean it happened!
The concept of safe spaces originally came out of the societal intersection of the LGBT, Riot grrrl and 3rd wave feminist movements of the late 80's/early 90's, where there was an existential threat of violence and intimidation from opponents/bigots/homophobes/just dicks.
As you say, vital for those movements and the people in them at the time.
Where the threat is not of violence and intimidation, but rather of hurt feelings due to encountering someone with different political or religious views from you, I think it's better for society as a whole for those feelings to get hurt; or preferably some spirited and hopefully non-intentionally inflammatory discourse to occur between people of opposing views so that we can better understand each other and progress as a society.
I'm not saying that safe spaces are not needed any more, just that they seem to be increasingly used where they are not necessary.
Relevant reading:
https://popehat.com/2015/11/09/safe-spaces-as-shield-safe-sp...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/how-camp...
http://www.gayalliance.org/programs/education-safezone/safez...
Also, I hope you realize how silly you sound. "Safe Spaces" are supposed to be free from antagonizing rhetoric, violence, and judgement. Its not supposed to be safe from the emotional pain you feel when someone tells you that you might be wrong for the first time in your life, or that a college sorority girl dressing up as Mulan isn't culturally insensitive (especially in today's world where the lines that traditionally divide us are being constantly eroded by near instant communication and a sub 24 hour flight to anywhere on the globe), or that god forbid that racism is not exclusive to white people of Anglo-Saxon decent. College specifically is about challenging world views and teaching students first and fore most how to become citizens of the world. Its not for "safe spaces" where students are tucked into comfortable rooms with rounded corners and foam flooring to make sure they never hurt themselves.
The story in the article is more like if there were a meeting of comic book lovers and someone comes in and says "your love of comic books is offensive and victimizes me because I don't love comic books, you need to stop right away" and then pulls the fire alarm.
Having a private place where certain views are protected is fine. My house is a 'safe space' for my family. But to voluntarily enter my house and then tell me I'm victimizing you is just silly.
You have missed out on the wave of evangelical schools that market to parents as babysitters. Here are some quotes from the OKWU student handbook:
http://www.okwu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/2013-2014-Stu...
> Students should understand that all traffic on the Internet on campus is capable of being viewed, monitored, and logged by OKWU
View porn and you can be expelled. Might not want to search for birth control either.
> Possession or use of alcohol on or off campus, contributing to the use of alcohol by other OKWU students, and/or being present in an environment where alcohol is being consumed is prohibited. Use, possession, purchasing, etc. of tobacco is prohibited.
Note the on or OFF campus bit. This is where the evangelical babysitting really kicks in.
> By virtue of their voluntary enrollment, all students, regardless of age, residency, or status agree to engage in sexual behavior exclusively within the context of marital heterosexual monogamy.
> Gambling, pornography, immodesty, profanity, crude, vulgar, or offensive language, and disrespectful behavior, such as gossip, dishonesty, and malice are also viewed as inappropriate behavior for all students. The University supports the stance of The Wesleyan Church on the issue of dancing.
A christian extremist complains about a student who had complained about a sermon, and says that viewpoints need to be challenged. It's useful to see if that extremist is a massive hypocrite or not. In this case it seems he is.
However, the school's official rules tell students they should not engage in, "profanity, crude, vulgar, or offensive language, and disrespectful behavior [including] gossip, dishonesty, and malice." The school has a right to define behavior requirements for the student body (all of whom are adults who can choose to attend or not). However, if they are going to post an attack on a student who wishes to expand the speech restrictions on campus, it seems reasonable for them to explain why the student's ideas about restricting speech are bad and their ideas are good.
In a more general sense - most people agree there should be some limits on speech (fire in a theatre, etc). However, when someone suggests a limit on speech they don't like the reaction is like the one in the article: shocked disbelief that someone would want to restrict speech! I don't have strong feelings about "safe spaces" and the like, but I don't think the idea is that strange or hard to understand and that people should at least talk about it within our never-ending discussion about how we want to live with each other.
No dancing guys and gals, it encourages the encroachment of evil upon the home.
http://prospect.org/article/report-bob-jones-university-resp...
>There were other systemic problems in BJU’s counseling program. The same staff in charge of counseling were also often involved in BJU’s disciplinary infrastructure—in a school where students could get in significant trouble for an astonishing array of infractions, from not keeping their rooms clean enough to going off campus without permission. Students routinely were expelled without notice.
>In an uneasy mix of roles, Jim Berg served as both the head counselor and head disciplinarian. But the problem was broader than his particular purview, as victims described an environment where they were afraid to come forward to get help after being raped, because they feared being punished for breaking another rule during their attack. One student who was struggling with the revelation of her childhood abuse told GRACE she was placed on disciplinary counseling after she was caught smoking cigarettes, and Chancellor Bob Jones III attempted to impose an even harsher sentence of restricting her to campus for a semester.
>Particularly harrowing was the experience of a student who alleged that her pastor had been raping her since she was 15, and who came to BJU officials when she became pregnant as a result of ongoing coercive sex with the pastor. But because she had lied about going off campus to meet him, BJU kicked her out of school.
>BJU officials defended its comingling of counseling and discipline as something that made sense within the school’s enduring adherence to the practice of in loco parentis— the quasi-parental role that most colleges abandoned fifty years ago—but students described its effect as both chilling and retaliatory.
> There's a stark difference between a free and voluntary association of like-minded people and a so-called "safe space"
No, there defintionally is not... perhaps there seems to be a confusion over definitions.
The fact that people want to expand the rules governing a particular safe space into a large sphere doesn't change the definition of a safe space.
You can take offense with someone wanting to make a classroom into a safe space, but I really don't get why any non-authoritarian person would insist on not allowing safe spaces at all.
Also, I'd be surprised if OKWU faculty/students/alumni don't try doing the exact same thing (expanding the boundaries of their safe space) by voting for fundamentalist christian politicians who enforce christian morality on women who use birth control, homosexuals, people who consume alcohol, etc.
> ...which uses a pretext of "victimization" to capriciously thought control others who simply committed the offense of disagreeing or criticizing.
What, like kicking someone out of a university when they realize half way through a difficult-to-transfer course of study that they're gay? Or that they enjoy square dancing?
The harm that fundie universities like OKWU have done to students who disagree ever so slightly with their idiotic version of religion is demonstrable and significant. Your argument that students somehow "should have known better" is, IMO, fundamentally misinformed.
> And this is evidence of what, exactly?
That OKWU is a safe space and that safe spaces have always existed, but they usually function to shelter people who are aligned with popular opinion / cultural norms. You know, like social norms (e.g., not employing publicly out gay people, looking the other way when transvestites are assaulted, etc.) protecting homophobes from having to knowingly interact with the icky gay people.
OKWU is a safe space for people who don't want to have to interact with anyone who does not subscribe to their particular brand of nutty American puritan christianity. It's a place where people can be openly homophobic and openly judge other people's sexual morality without being socially ostracized like they would be in the real world.
Just in case my opinion isn't clear by now: Everett Piper is a massive hypocrite who runs a religious commune with strict codes of conduct while also appealing to liberal values. He doesn't actually give a shit about free speech or dissenting opinions. It's impossible to take someone seriously when they claim universities aren't safe spaces while also expelling people for disagreeing with a very particular and very whacky form of christianity.
Well, a good solid Christian university isn't really a safe space; you should have a lot of theology and church history that you didn't know about taught - it will (should, heh) force a reexamination of what you claim you believe (as an aside, the summary is that the bog standard teachings from most churches only scratch the surface of what is actually there; reality is harder and more challenging than the milquetoast that is commonly taught).
That said, it's fair to say that if a 'feminist' university existed, going in and complaining that your male feelings were hurt should get you the same response, mutis mutandi. Like another posted stated: this university does what's on the tin. If you or your parents don't like it, you shouldn't attend.
Article Point: A student shouldn't complain because the content of the lecture hurts their "feelings". If they disagree, that is fine.
Your point: The college doesn't like certain acts being part of their community. The college doesn't like certain speech being part of their community. And it doesn't like it if you do not believe in the faith.
The two points are not related.
The difference is that OKWU markets itself as a Christian university; its stated vision is "to provide a thorough and sound education within a Christian philosophy of life" and education "in the light of Christian principles." Its student handbook clearly lists tobacco, drugs, alcohol, porn, and premarital sex as unacceptable.
It should not be any surprise that if you are found to be engaging in any of those activities--which you and I may think are fine, but OKWU clearly does not--you will be disciplined and perhaps even kicked out. OKWU could not be more clear on this point.
In contrast, Yale and many other universities claim to embrace free expression. Yale informs incoming students: "Yale’s commitment to freedom of expression means that when you agree to matriculate, you join a community where “the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox” must be tolerated. When you encounter people who think differently than you do, you will be expected to honor their free expression, even when what they have to say seems wrong or offensive to you." http://yalecollege.yale.edu/new-students/class-2019/academic...
So OKWU may be many things, but it is not hypocritical. If Yale and these other schools do not live up to their own freedom of expression promises, they are.