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Comment by SeanDav | Hacker News Reader

A little research will produce a vast number of examples of political correctness with real consequences and not just "straw-manning".

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.

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Just to add some more info; it was the student union that was running the yoga class and cancelled it, the university administration had no part in its cancellation. This was wholly done by students.

That doesn't seem to change how ridiculous it sounds, does it?

Nope, it's more ridiculous, I think. I'm used to misguided administrations; that's par for the course. But students policing themselves, and it's worse than any misguided administration could do? Unbelievable.

For some reason I am strongly reminded of the book "Interesting Times"

“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

Not in the least.

Anyone who has worked in student organizations should be able to attest that students don't have full autonomy from administration/faculty/university governance. I have no idea what role, if any, that any of these influences played on this situation, but I think it's a bit simplistic to assume students made this decision solely on their own.

Furthermore, I don't believe they outright cancelled it, but they suspended it temporarily to look into whether or not they should cancel it.

Still ridiculous, but less so than it's being represented as.

And honestly, I'm fine with that. Universities are for learning, and real learning comes from doing. The questions the students were grappling with are real ones. I expect they misapplied them here, as the yoga traditions I'm familiar with are mostly conscious Indian exports, their effort to share something with the world. But students should frequently get things wrong, because that's how real learning happens.

Learning only happens when there are consequences for being wrong. Aside from being ridiculed by people they disagree with and thus don't care about being ridiculed by, they have faced no consequences.

> Learning only happens when there are consequences for being wrong

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?

I would argue the act of debugging it is the consequence. You assume something to be correct (or make a stupid mistake), you face the fact that it's not, you adjust your behavior and gain insight into facing the problem again. Same thing applies to social experience, the difference is in WebGL there is something approximating a 'right way.' I never thought Yoga would be contentious, some people do, now I'll think about it and try and understand why they feel that way.

It is impossible to prove a yoga class at a university harms a culture. It is easily provable that forcing these people not to meet on campus as a group does real actual harm. And I don't care about their feelings, I care about fairness and justice.

I think the argument would be more along the lines of: "You're calling this Yoga, but here is what Yoga has meant historically in my culture, which is actually quite different." I think the types of behaviors people attribute to PC nazis or similar are understandable responses by groups of people who are usually ignored by the mainstream so they raise a stink (read: pay attention to us or else!). Conversely putting people into that box usually comes from groups who are (like myself) historically highly empowered and have the luxury of intellectualizing things that are more in the corporeal/emotional realm for the groups they're critiquing (ie. stereotyping, mockery, physical abuse). I think fairness and justice are highly subjective and can only be gleaned by carful consideration of both sides, which is to say understanding why they have their "feelings" and why you don't care about them.

> I think the argument would be more along the lines of: "You're calling this Yoga, but here is what Yoga has meant historically in my culture, which is actually quite different."

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.

There's nothing understandable, and certainly not mindful, about a bunch of childish students telling someone they can't do Yoga because it might hurt someone's feelings. Especially when the argument devolved into "You can't even have a stretching class (no longer associated with yoga), because it might hurt someone's feelings." That is ripe for hurtful, deserved, mockery.

The consequence is your toy project won't work, and you'll have to find a solution. In doing so, you probably won't make the same mistake again, hopefully having learned something.

Aren't the bugs the consequence? Or it not working correctly? The framerate being to low? I taught myself WebGL by making planet sized spherical terrains. There were consequences just about every single moment I was doing this.

One, international ridicule is a notable consequence. Two, you have no idea what else has happened to them, so you have no grounds for suggesting they have experienced nothing that might aid them in learning. Three, most useful motivation for learning is intrinsic, not extrinsic, so what matters most for their learning is their own opinions on what happened, another thing you don't have access to.

You're trying overly hard to rationalize something here.

Ridicule is a consequence, bring back the stocks I say! (only half joking...)

I think the modern equivalent is called Twitter

For every example of absurd political correctness - of which there are many, particularly in universities - there's an equal and opposite example of absurd bleating about political correctness from somebody upset that a private website barred them for sending out racist memes.

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'd even say that for every example of absurd political correctness, there are many examples of the absurd bleating about political correctness.

I think you misread sago's point:

> 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.

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/ottawa/university-ottawa-...

Make of it what you will.

According to the article, it was canceled because "they couldn't get a French name and nobody wants to do it"

I think this has more to do with Francophone people feeling marginalized as opposed to colonialism or caring for Indian people's feelings.

You should post a source for the quote.

What is the "real" consequence here? And is it still straw manning, in a sense, to make judgements based on an incomplete story, and jump to conclusions about someone else being wrong, without the whole story?

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.

It was invented by Indian fitness gurus to market to the west.

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