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.
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?
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...
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.