Stephen Fry hits out at ‘infantile’ culture of trigger words and safe spaces
attitude.co.uk
attitude.co.uk
I think that safe spaces / micro-aggressions may come from the perfect storm of a) a generation that was conceived after a period of widespread crime and social uncertainty, leading parents to coddle them and try to protect them from the world [see 'helicopter' parenting'], b) the self-esteem movement [everyone wins prize], and c) increasingly feminized primary and secondary education. The number of male teachers has dwindled rapidly over the decades.
I don't want to appeal to gender stereotypes but I remember seeing some research that indicated that while boys in a playground situation were more physically aggressive and directly confrontational during disagreements with each other, girls tended to have higher incidence of shunning and social exclusion - emotional/relational aggression.
Maybe we shouldn't be surprised to see safe spaces / micro-aggressions as a strategy to shut down unpleasant situations (ideas) rather than confronting them as ideas. These strategies are essentially forms of shunning and avoidance.
Regardless of how one feels about the veracity of these gender stereotypes and how they apply to the sexes, the strategies are real and they are a significant difference from what we've historically had as cultural values in the US and UK: "we're all strong enough for dissent, it's about more than our feelings."
Certain groups realized they could gain power by being offended. Once you create that incentive, unchecked, it's game over.
the problem is mixed in there there are reactionaries which took the opposite extreme stance and are poisoning the ground for constructive criticism
The amount of think-pieces that have been dumped over the internet psychoanalyzing "the medal generation", talking about the ways in which kids have had their self-esteem massaged by lack of bullying, or beating, or suffering, or how "America has been pussyified" or whatever, all part from the premise that when a student says "take this down, it offends me", they are actually being honest in this weak way.
On some level I suppose it makes it easier for the person making the critique, they get to brag a bit about how they have a "thicker skin". But that's not what's going on at all.
The equivalent would be if we all just flagged every post we disagreed with and it was removed by mods as long as you we include text saying that it triggered us.
I guess I'm in a relatively rare position around these parts of usually agreeing with the radical students' aims (demolishing certain kinds of speech, like "race realism" and "sex realism", taking down statues honoring unworthy figures from the past) and not their methods (legalizing em out of sight and squashing dissent vs taking them down via argument).
>>> I think that safe spaces / micro-aggressions may come from the perfect storm of a) a generation that was conceived after a period of widespread crime and social uncertainty, leading parents to coddle them and try to protect them from the world [see 'helicopter' parenting'], b) the self-esteem movement [everyone wins prize], and c) increasingly feminized primary and secondary education. The number of male teachers has dwindled rapidly over the decades.
> People aren't belittling students for being offended
As you can see, there is a strong identity component here.
As in all things in life there are nuances. This problem isn't even tied to this generation in particular, the only issue to contend today is that in this generation sensationalism breed views and views breed consensus, all in all this situation isn't that much different from people fighting against the N* racial slur in the last century, only the communication channels and consensus rules differ, especially regarding diffusion speed.
This is a part of a bigger problem: modern society ethics diffuse and segregate groups at a pace that has no precedent while not sporting the same mediation and dialectics needed by living in close physical social groups.
The most recent outrage seems to concern transsexuals using something other than the cisnormative bathroom.
You did mean to include those forms of outrage, right? Because to me those still look like "game on".
As a tactic it seems to have been quite successful so it's not surprising that disparate groups are using it.
Pick a random decade and you'll hear exactly the same things.
Christopher Hitchens in 1994, for example, defended David Irving when St. Martin’s Press "de-platformed" (to use the modern term, that is, canceled its contract to print) Irving's edition of the Goebbels diaries.
Look at the generations of people who insisted on the "right" to not hear certain racially charged slurs in casual conversation. Just watch 'Archie Bunker' episodes if you want a reminder of what that was like in the 1970s.
I propose that it's only "increasing" because things that are recent, and which affect us and challenge us most directly, appear more important than things in the past. Even more so where we implicitly accept the views of the winning side - eg, woman's suffrage - as being correct, and don't think that those on the losing side also thought themselves as being correct.
Censorship simply because you don't like what someone says has been around forever.
When it's the government, is easy to say that censorship is when the government goes beyond time/place/manner restrictions on free speech.
But with the migration of the public commons to private areas, is it censorship to prevent a Black Lives Matter protest at the Mall of the Americas? Occupy Wall Street managed to survive so long because Zuccotti Park was on a privately owned public space which was required to stay open 24 hours a day, and thus avoid city curfews in public parks.
It's even less clear that a private entity like St. Martin’s Press must never change their mind about publishing a book, should they decide that doing so will give a Holocaust denialist the ability to use their name in support of his cause.
When HN users flag a spam comment for maid services in London, and it's later deleted, is that censorship?
We know all know of HN posts which cry out censorship for receiving downvotes.
The few times I've looked into one of these controversies, it seems more like people are using "censorship" as synonymous for "criticism I don't like." (Certainly not all cases! Just a boringly common majority of them.)
It's also a massive problem with the internet in general. After all, the internet doesn't have public property, ever. Every site is privately owned, so theoretically every site can choose what to allow. But without a public platform, that also means perfectly valid ideas can be basically banned from public view by way of large gatekeepers and popular communities banning them, regardless of their legality.
Either way, it's a tricky thing to answer, since any 'solution' wil cause a lot of problems in one case or another.
Once the slurs are banned, to use the PC example, the movement doesn't stop, but instead the focus moves onto the next thing so that now the debates are about how to label someone who suffers with mild myopia, or whatever today's campaign is.
The right is just as guilty of this outrage game as the left; in some areas the coalitions are such that they gain power from it. In more left-leaning situations, the outrage power swings left.
I detest both. I want people to be able to say things without constantly being threatened with firings, no-platformings, and blacklists.
Any serious talk about free speech should focus on the core issue: people in power abuse their power to punish the powerless when they express themselves in the wrong way. Students have practically no power or influence in society. So even if these "SJWs" are entirely unjustified in their actions the impact on society is utterly negligible. This is why the panicky reaction in the linked article about student activists repressing free speech is so comical. If anything, the student activists increase free speech by giving a platform to those people who would otherwise go unheard.
What happened at this university is no different from a secretary deliberating forgetting to book a hotel room for the person they like least in the group. No different from the clerk at the DMV sending you to the back of the line because you made a paperwork mistake.
Where is the moral panic about this type of petty nonsense? Nowhere! Because we recognize it's petty nonsense, and not worthy of hand-wringing commentary or a national conversation. But when it comes to students and free speech and safe spaces every news channel and every major magazine is talking about it like it signifies the end of Freedom itself. It's totally absurd.
I think the difference is that petty nonsense on college campuses is publicized and quasi-institutional. If, somehow, a DMV employee was publicly and proudly making people they don't like go to the back of the line, and they had powerful people aligned with them, there would be some outrage.
While a few overzealous activists are not going to end Freedom itself, I (and apparently many others) still want to confront petty nonsense when it begins to institutionalize (by being supported by faculty/admin or influential media members).
What about a county clerk refusing to sign legal marriage certificates for gay couples?
It makes no sense to blindly apply free speech principles based on majority/minority. By that logic we ought to amplify the voices of neo-nazis and other undesirables simply because they're a minority that would otherwise go unheard. To the contrary, I believe we're better off banishing them from the campus instead.
I completely disagree with your characterization of hate speech as speech that causes "subjective discomfort". Specific types of speech can do a lot of harm to e.g. individuals who suffer from mental illnesses or PTSD. So organizations have to choose. Either you ban the speech that will predictably harm individuals or minority groups, or you allow all speech (including hate speech) and the more vulnerable people will be forced to leave to protect their mental health. That's the reality of the situation. I don't think this is a difficult choice.
In practice free speech restrictions on college campuses don't restrict scientific work or scientific debate (in the broadest sense), so I don't think there is any cause for concern.
There would be some hope of that if university students and admin had the slightest awareness of the 'Streisand effect.' They don't and they end up raising awareness of speakers and ideas they are scared of. It's comical. Free speech wins eventually, and that's net positive.
In reality, people protest because it works, even though they have to draw attention to the behavior they want to put an end to. The hope is to persuade the majority that they are righteous and the other side is in the wrong. That's how you get change. Sometimes the protesters mess up and end up looking bad. Then they lose credibility. That's OK, because then a different group of activists will stand up and continue pushing forward.
Safe spaces, micro-aggression theory, and other progressive concepts are quickly becoming mainstream, and they're definitely here to stay.
Until the next generation rebels against them. It's already happening.
The Streisand Effect relates to things someone doesn't want others to know about. If a protest isn't about supressing ideas or information then the Streisand Effect is not relevant.
It's true that a lot of people are only hearing about this because of the protest, and that some of the public reaction is negative, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they would have been better served staying quiet.
Maybe hate groups are perfectly capable of getting the attention of their targets and supporters already, and getting the public's attention is the best way changing the status quo and reducing silent acceptance.
How about just blindly applying free speech principles? That's kind of how the "free" part of that is supposed to work.
Would it change anything if the left were 1/5th as guilty as the right? Or 1/50th? Or 100x more guilty?
If your views don't change, then you give more power to those who are most guilty. As another example of sarcasm, "Look, one person on welfare once bought drugs so it's okay for big banks to illegally foreclose on mortgages!"
I'm certain that you do want people to be fired for saying some things. If a geology teacher at a public university were to only talk about Young Earth Creationism then they should be fired. No?
If a professor or reporter should plagiarize - plagiarism is NOT illegal - then they should be fired. No? If further investigation shows a 20 year history of plagiarism across scores of publications, do you seriously propose there mustn't be the functional equivalent of a blacklist which prevents that person from working again a prestigious institution?
If an invited speaker for "How to be Moral" is accused in federal court of sexually abusing boys when he worked as a wrestling coach at a high school, then he should be de-platformed. No?
De-platformers presume to be protectors from ideas that they find bad or dangerous. The reason why it won't survive as a strategy is because it seeds resentment among the people who have to go along with the platforming choices of their 'betters.'
It's becoming obvious that not everyone agrees with PC/call-out culture, but they don't feel comfortable saying so. We're in a preference falsification bubble now. It's going to pop.
You objection has another easy out - most places are neither fully public nor fully private, so the distinction "public sphere" vs. "private sphere" doesn't really apply. For example, if Y were invited for a private conversation with the university president, then is that public or private? What about if it's only limited to university staff? Only to university students? What if it's a private university? A private, for-profit university?
A third easy out is to couple the invitation to the number of ticket buyers or attendees. If there are many protests then the host can say "our analysis says that fewer people than we thought would attend the event so we have decided to exercise our option to cancel the invitation."
In any case, my third example, which is obviously based on the current news about Hastert, was constructed to let you explain why that Hastert-like figure should be allowed to speak on how to be moral, rather than being uninvited.
Finally, your statement "De-platformers presume to be protectors from ideas that they find bad or dangerous" is at best incomplete. Some protests are from students who are upset that their student fees are being used to pay speaker fees for someone who they disagree with. For example, I think that Kissinger is a war criminal. I wouldn't want some of my student fees and tuition going into his wallet, even if Clinton might be right by saying he has excellent insights about global politics.
When haven't we been in a "preference falsification bubble"?
People get lost in the argument that the First Amendment only applies to the government. To be fair, you didn't. You sidestepped it entirely in your examples.
This issue is whether people consider themselves strong enough to allow a marketplace of ideas. The answer for this fragile generation appears to be no.
That's the one that says you aren't forced to include people you don't want to include. It's the reason why a private club can legally exclude Jews.
The objections I raised all had to do with including that aspect of the First.
This generation is no more fragile than the previous ones. In my generation, we were the weak ones because we were too fragile for the corporal punishment - beating by wooden boards - that previous generations received as children.
You should expect outrage about gun ownership in california. Because you're saying that you are for taking people's rights away, or in general prevent them from something where the model isn't proven to necessarily be correct.
I was thinking specifically of http://www.salon.com/2013/05/22/tornado_survivor_to_wolf_bli... . The news reporter Wolf Blitzer asked a tornado survivor if she "thanks the Lord" for her survival. Quoting that article:
> Vitsmun hesitates for a moment and smiles. “I — I’m actually an atheist,” she said, laughing off the awkward moment.
This brought her into the spotlight, with Rush Limbaugh declaring she must be the only atheist in Oklahoma ( http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/05/22/media_elites_co... ) and Glenn Beck saying it was a setup (http://www.salon.com/2013/05/23/glenn_beck_cnn_interview_wit... ).
A better example would be teacher-lead mandatory school prayer, which has been illegal for decades, but it still occurs. Here's an example of a family which sued the school over mandatory prayer http://www.rawstory.com/2015/02/georgia-public-school-teache... . They did so anonymously for fear of retribution.
Again, this is not someone who goes around saying "I am an atheist" but is instead someone who will likely face retribution for saying "I am an atheist" even once in public (or in private to a school official) in order to complain about illegal school practices.
Neither of these two occurrences are "kind of immature" nor the result of an activist speaking to people.
[0] http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10....
Is it not confronting to refuse it in your presence because you find the behavior unacceptable? What would you prefer the confrontation to be like?
I don't agree with the extreme measures often taken by university kids but I also think criticism of it should be accurate to its state. That is, it is a form of confronting the idea of a social issue by creating a space where certain behaviors are unacceptable to facilitate more productive conversation without someone's ignorance shouting it down, taken too far with too many subjects because it's practiced mostly among young college kids who are really not experienced at all.
Source? Is there a wide academic study on this? I know current college kids who sre studying genocide in literature class and rape in societal context. Most of the studies academia has on rape and microagression and so on are from professors on college campuses who presumably teach similar stuff. I find it highly improbable that this safe space issue in universities just sprung out of an aether of the internet into unsuspecting professors. Especially when, as I understand it, it started in universities.
To be fair, these are also young adults floundering about with these new ideas. Presumably there's always been kids who complained about the professor in one way or another. Is the 'too hard' criticism of the modern ratemyprofessor.com any different than another young person complaining about a useless perceived microaggression? They're both probably going to be ignored in the greater context of things.
I asked if there are any widespread studies on professors routinely (I would assume a casual 1 in 4 or 1 in 10 correlation would be routine?) being forced to edit and change their syllabus.
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1030-dear-liberal-professor-...
A law professor saying it's becoming harder to teach laws relating to rape: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trouble-teaching-rap...
> To be fair, these are also young adults floundering about with these new ideas. Presumably there's always been kids who complained about the professor in one way or another. Is the 'too hard' criticism of the modern ratemyprofessor.com any different than another young person complaining about a useless perceived microaggression? They're both probably going to be ignored in the greater context of things.
I'm not trying to stop them complaining. I am trying to stop them having their professors sacked and having speakers no-platformed.
I would prefer it violent. I would prefer the illiberal left exposed as bullies than universities just caving. The more people see that they're currently the fiercest opponents of a free society the better. I would prefer universities not caving and the no platformers shouting people down, rioting and assaulting people.
> I don't agree with the extreme measures often taken by university kids but I also think criticism of it should be accurate to its state. That is, it is a form of confronting the idea of a social issue by creating a space where certain behaviors are unacceptable to facilitate more productive conversation without someone's ignorance shouting it down, taken too far with too many subjects because it's practiced mostly among young college kids who are really not experienced at all.
Fine. A university is not a safe space. The public square is not a safe space. Let them have their safe spaces where they organise them. Their own clubs and societies for example.
Dude, why? This comes off to be as a gut based, emotional viewpoint rather than a rational one.
Citation? World Bank disagrees with you but has only data going back to 1996 (then: 86% female, now: 87% female).
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.PRM.TCHR.FE.ZS/countr...
You know who has the highest percentages of teachers being female? Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and that region. Just for a point of comparison.
I found some more specific numbers for Ireland: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/the-gender-gap-in-e...
1961: 63% female, 2011: 74% female
Clearly the trend that you claim, but hardly a staggering rate of change. Meanwhile, my searches still turn up articles complaining that school administration is male-dominant. I'll be frank: I don't think you have anywhere near enough evidence to make the claims (about causes) you're making.
University councils are infamous for being dominated by old white men who are used to shout in meetings. People will find a balance eventually, but having this old white guy telling people to "grow up" really isn't helping.
And while we're at it, since this thread is going down into "this is reverse racism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw_mRaIHb-M
So that makes it fair to unfairly stereotype others?
> I think it's quite OK to call out your fellow stereotype when they're being dicks.
Call out your fellow [members of a group that contains you] when they're being dicks, sure. We need that. But don't stereotype them to do it - we don't need that.
Is this the incident that you are referring to? It didn't seem to feature old white men to me - but I may have misread it or misunderstood, could you help?
That's what you seem to be doing, though.
By that logic, if we had increased the number of male teachers people would be breaking out in violent fights instead?
I think that's making the phenomenon a bit more rational than it is. Growing up in american middle-class suburbs in the 90s is easily the safest childhood any child every had.
I think a big factor is that the baby-boomers in the west was the first generation that were able to focus on individualism and self realisation in a first-class way, and in passing that excitement on to their children, they created a generation of parents who perhaps over-indexed on those values. When everybody is a unique snowflake, the "everybody else is doing it, it's probably going to be fine" approach to decision making get tempered in favour of "oh, maybe that's how my parents approached things and I almost fell out of a tree that one time, and they could have done more to make me practise the violin, but luckily I'm very smart and I have read a lot of books and I took a lot of classes and my child is very special and unique and so I need to work out, from first principles and with great care, exactly under which circumstances going bicycling in the street will aid the specific, carefully laid out plan I have for my child" -- and that's where you end up over-indexing on the dangers and rationalising over-protection, and you remove the mechanisms by which kids learn to make decisions and mistakes for themselves.
...a whole bunch of prose appealing to gender stereotypes.
If society is, in fact, "feminizing", it's a far safer place for the vast majority of humans than it was before. And out of that safety come a whole bunch of voices that weren't traditionally given much credence.
To the extent that this is a phenomenon that is spilling outward from the US, I think it's simply the fact that a lot of people have platforms that never did before. The discourse is becoming a lot more complex because of it. It's old white men like Stephen Fry that have to grow up and get used to it. Welcome to the great democratization of speech.
Let's face it, it's been a white man's world for a long time, where the cultural discourse has centered around the tastes of the dominant viewpoint, regardless of the fact that it might not actually be particularly empowering to people who have identities that are increasingly divergent (and yes, I realize that Fry is no stranger to this). The appeal to Shakespeare rings a bit hollow from that perspective. Shakespeare's great, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it's beyond criticism to say that maybe the elevation of his works and their themes hasn't exactly been democratic.
In case you're wondering, I don't advocate for a society that attempts to shelter people. It's fine to push back and say, "no, we're a place where even unpopular, hurtful people are allowed to speak" and "no, we're a place where we're going to deal with tough issues head on". But that's an argument that isn't won in perpetuity, it has to be continually negotiated. And I'm more than a bit amused to see people squirm when confronted with the reality that they now have to negotiate with people whose viewpoints have traditionally been given little to no credence.
Source: I have it too, and find the SJW/triggering crowd to be absolutely painful to listen to, especially considering they're usually the crowd that tends to call those with bipolar, "crazy". ;)
And what do they do? Attempt to silence other voices.
This isn't progress. Respect for all voices is progress.
Watch the Yale video and tell me where the negotiation was.
There was none. Many of these people are incapable or rational debate or discussion.
Because...feelings.
And let's be honest, the discourse is always driven by feelings. I detect feelings in Stephen Fry's piece. "Rational" is often code for "agrees with me".
According to the association’s rules, student council meetings should be held in a “safe space environment”…This includes “refraining from hand gestures which denote disagreement”, or “in any other way indicating disagreement with a point or points being made”.*
That's just utterly baffling to me. I don't understand how any form of real debate can be had when participants are subject to being excluded for actions like, say, shaking their head in disagreement.
This entire issue seems to reek of a desire to stifle debate under the weight of bureaucracy, to save having to consider complex issues. Naturally, this will involve the kind of selective enforcement of rules that is such a hallmark of corrupt legal systems worldwide. I like to think that there will be enough rebellion against this from inside student bodies that we'll reach a more sensible compromise, but who knows?
I'm pleased that 33 people voted in her favour, but it's scary that 18 people voted against her.
EDIT: deleted "bigger". It's a concern, not a bigger concern.
I guess being cynical does not give me mine.
The anti-Israel brigade move in mysterious ways (he says waiting for downvotes)
I call it oversensitivity, Fry calls it infantile. I don't disagree with him. It's a childlike lack of acceptance of the world, followed by an attempt to shape the world into something they are content with, displaying childlike reactions when the world doesn't heed to their demands. Unfortunately this behaviour supported by a community of people who also behave the same way, or at least, feeling a moral sentiment behind the actions of the other, support them believing their actions are noble.
If you pretend rape, race, homosexuality, transgenderism etc don't exist by not allowing these words to be spoken, or acts and circumstances to be portrayed, you create the environment for these facts of life to rot in the mind of society.
It's healthy for us to talk in society, just as it's healthy for individuals to talk about their issues - it's unhealthy to pretend they don't exist.
But, as you point out, the effect is that those who would have heard her are now relying on mainstream media for an interpretation of her views. All of a sudden she is a victim and a champion of the repressed. So maybe not infantile but, at the very least, naive.
I fail to see how letting Bindel spin herself as a victim and a champion of the repressed in person, at an event set up with an opponent who was on the same side as her on this, would do anything to stop this.
(I think someone did manage to debate Bindel on trans rights and trounce her a few years back, after which she went back to her Guardian column and penned an attack on them which reached a much broader audience than anything in the debate. Not a useful tactic.)
But that's the thing though. By not letting her speak this turned from an issue on trans-gender rights, for which Bindel is extreme in a way that doesn't endear her to anyone much, to an issue of freedom of expression.
Now, not coincidentally, freedom of expression is a subject that an awful lot of media editors are going to give an awful lot of air time to. And they're all going to be on her side. And they're all going to avoid going into detail on what she was banned for because it detracts from their argument.
Saying that they explained their reasoning is a bit like yelling over your shoulder why the goal should have been disallowed as you take your ball home. It might make you feel more justified but it'll hardly improve the perception of maturity.
[...]
> just like they never covered the very special exemption added to UK anti-discrimination law to allow this and how exactly it got there,
Rape and domestic violence centres have always been given exclusions in discrimination law, from the 1970s sex discrimination act through all the statutory instruments and duties (eg Gender Equality Duty). But that's not a blanket right to exclude trans-people - a SARC can not just say "no trans people". The exclusion has to be a proportionate response to achieve something reasonable.
The Code of Practice for the act is very clear:
>> “Service providers should be aware that where a transsexual person is visually and for all practical purposes indistinguishable from a non-transsexual person of that gender, they should normally be treated according to their acquired gender, unless there are strong reasons to the contrary.
>> As stated at the beginning of this chapter, any exception to the prohibition of discrimination must be applied as restrictively as possible and the denial of a service to a transsexual person should only occur in exceptional circumstances.”
But most SARCs do not exclude men or transpeople, many on this list specifically mention that men can be the victims of rape and sexual assault and that men are able to use the services.
http://thesurvivorstrust.org/sarc/
The real problem is the tiny number of SARCs available - if more were available some could specialise on services for transpeople, on services for men, and services for women.
Also, that Code of Practice is the result of a change of government and a fairly intensive lobbying campaign by trans activists to reduce the damage done by the exemption. It was originally intended to be much broader in application. From the original explanatory notes:
"A group counselling session is provided for female victims of sexual assault. The organisers do not allow transsexual people to attend as they judge that the clients who attend the group session are unlikely to do so if a male-to-female transsexual person was also there. This would be lawful."
That is, originally it was intended to allow rape and domestic violence services to exclude all trans women as a class because they believe that some cis women wouldn't want to attend if they were there. This is a common belief amongst a certain group of vocal feminist activists who think trans women are men and run government-funded services. Note that there's no requirement that clients are actually unwilling to attend, just that the organizers think they would be. I think they also intended this to apply this to one-on-one counseling on the basis that women would have to share a waiting room. This was also a rollback in protection for some trans women, because the law on Gender Recognition Certificates didn't permit this. Any future Governemnt can trivially change the Code of Practice back too; don't think it'd even require a vote in Parliament.
(The reason trans people got added to anti-discrimination law at all is because the European Court of Human Rights ruled they had to be. There was some pretty impressive foot-dragging on implementing that too.)
Trans-people and men have always been excluded from some rape crisis services. This continues to be the case, but recent legislation and clarification to that legislation made it much harder to apply blanket bans.
I disagree about the one-way nature. It would be possible for an organisation offering group counseling to victims of sexual abuse by Catholic church to ban priests and nuns; I believe it's possible for an organisation offering services to trans victims of sexual assault to specify only trans people in some roles.
I think we agree that the UK still needs to do much better to protect trans people from harm and to enforce the rights of trans people.
They're being misused. If Peter Tatchell (a prominent campaigner for LGBT rights) or Germaine Greer risk being no-platformed that's a pretty clear sign the concept is being misused.
A friend in the Army told me about one of the training exercises which simulates a car roll. Some people who have been in a car roll get a panic attack if they go through the simulation. The instructor said that if anyone had been in a roll and felt that way then they would be excused from the exercise.
I suffer from acrophobia. I would like some warning that the hotel I'm going to stay in (Hyatt Regency San Francisco, I'm looking at you) has a large open atrium and glass elevator for my room on the 8th floor.
Do you think these are childish and oversensitive reactions? Perhaps. But if so, why call out "Social Justice Warriors" as being unique? If not, what's the difference?
The point isn't that plot twists, car rollovers, and glass elevators don't exist, nor that rape, race, homosexuality, etc. don't exist. It's that some people have been raped, and talking about rape unexpected may lead to unexpected emotional reactions.
Now that I think about it, a few years after 9/11 I was in Sweden taking a Swedish course. It was a 9/11, so the teacher thought it would be an interesting topic for the class. Completely out of the blue, I started thinking about what happened again, and broke out crying. And it's not like I had a close connection to NYC or any of the people involved. I figure if a reaction like that can happen to me, then I can well see how others would be more strongly affected by more personally directed trauma.
Nor was it something I wanted to talk about more at that point. The teacher quickly switched to a different topic, since the goal wasn't to talk about 9/11 but to learn Swedish. It certainly doesn't mean that I want to pretend that 9/11 didn't exist, so I don't think you can make the conclusion you did.
Again, you might say that I'm oversensitive or childish. Shrug At some point how do you know you aren't sensitive enough?
Don't take that to mean that I require warning before anyone talks about 9/11, or that there be some sort of "safe space" for me. I am neither proposing that nor defending it, only arguing against the validity of your proposition that people want safe spaces and trigger warnings as a way to "pretend rape, race, homosexuality, transgenderism etc don't exist by not allowing these words to be spoken, or acts and circumstances to be portrayed, [and thereby] create the environment for these facts of life to rot in the mind of society."
When one bans raising a hand or shaking a head at a discussion.
It's not such a hard question.
For example, how to tell what species something is. Simple question, right? One only needs to look at a cat, dog, human, or some bird in the sky to easily see they are all different... until you consider the corner cases like ring species. Suddenly the really easy question of how to tell two species apart doesn't always work. Getting the exact answer can be very difficult if not impossible (often because these questions derive from placing human created abstraction onto reality, and often the fit is not perfect no matter how tightly we press down).
(Eg for free speech, America and Germany draw very different lines, but most people would be fine in either place free speech wise.)
This is true.
> To confront it head-on.
This is not, and can often make fear and phobia much worse.
There's a difference between a carefully structured plan of therapy that gradually exposes an arachnophobe to spiders in a controlled environment and someone throwing a bucket of spiders at someone and yelling "Feel the fear and do it anyway"
I think you are talking about a different argument?
Personally, I see direct parallels to the current call for "safe spaces" to older calls for non-gendered job titles, prohibitions on the casual use of racist slurs, the student protests against Kissinger appointment to Columbia which lead to the university cancelling his appointment, and more. I can't point to a time when there wasn't a debate about a "change in society to accommodate the fear or the offence".
It all seems more of outrage about "kids these days" and "things were more meaningful when I was your age" than anything else.
Is that the argument at hand that you refer to?
In most cases, that's exactly what it is.
No. Why would you think that?
Thus, you've helped establish another similarity between trigger warnings and spoilers.
I uderstand the purpose of safe-spaces. And, to a degree, I feel people are free to build them and use them. I just think they are counter productive. You have nothing to gain by shunning and blocking ideas and concepts. On the limit, for extreme responses and feeling, you should probably seek help to manage them.
Your post explains why people feel the way they do with certain stimuli. What I wanted to say is that each individual should analize their responses, and accept or change them.
If a person is still haunted by a traumatic experiece, maybe they still need therapy to handle it. We can empathize with them but should not change our behaviour.
[EDIT] Changed "should empathize" to "can empathize". We can't force a person to empathize with another.
Now that I think about it, a few years after 9/11 I was
in Sweden taking a Swedish course. It was a 9/11, so the
teacher thought it would be an interesting topic for the
class. Completely out of the blue, I started thinking
about what happened again, and broke out crying.
Having an emotional response is not the thing that is being criticised as childish; blaming the person who triggered it is.
https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2015/02/14/the-guardian-...
Moreover, the example linked to in the article¹ is sickening and feels outright revulsive. That is the very slippery slope of all slippery slopes: you are left to wonder what indeed could possibly come next?
¹) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/03/student-accused-o...
It's interesting the debate was about "anti-semitism", because so far as I can tell that has become a code the UK press uses for anyone who thinks that Israel may not necessarily have the moral high ground in its dealings with the Palestinians.
The nonsense about safe spaces and whatever is reprehensible, but it's actually less reprehensible than one-sided public debates where right-wing politicians are given space to attack anyone who thinks politicians should make their tax returns public for "immature populism", but attacking a left-leaning leader for the way he eats a bacon sandwich is mature and responsible journalism.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/06/sun-ed-miliband...
The point being that politics always seems to be a nasty business full of nasty people being nasty to each other, and everyone else they can get away with being nasty to.
Maybe student politics is a symptom of that, not a cause.
I have always wondered if that line of attack was actually anti-semetic (Milliband's dad was a Belgian-born Polish Jewish). The UK is a place where people are mostly too insensitive to notice actual prejudice. Bad behaviour is so competely pathalogical and institutional that no one really believes it exists beyond fringe weirdos.
It's interesting the debate was about "anti-semitism",
because so far as I can tell that has become a code the
UK press uses for anyone who thinks that Israel may not
necessarily have the moral high ground in its dealings
with the Palestinians.
As Eric Hoffer has said, these kind of people don't hold real convictions beyond an unquenchable lust for redemption for what they perceive as the injustice of the empty, ruined landscape of themselves.
I think personally tatchell and fry have been too generous and provide too much benefit of the doubt against the people who stifle open and full dialogue in the sinister name of trigger word or safe space.
A few examples:
Many of my relatives died because of marxism. My grandfather was in jail, because he was capitalist and employed 5 people. I can not be around people who approve any form of class warfare or class privilege. And I find cultural marxism triggering!
My ancestors were slaves. In fact even word "slavery" is named after "slavic" people. By using that word, you are condoning slavic people to be slaves and that is TRIGGERING ME!
As much as I disapprove of the caricatureizing of the concept of not being a rude person and the extreme positions that are being taken by the students, I feel it's still important to recognize they are young adults navigating these heavy concepts of balancing censorship and unacceptable behavior that deserves derision such as shouting slurs at people. Being condescending and dismissive of the entire concept just comes off as a rather extreme reaction to young people being what they've always been and exploring the society's boundaries that they live in and seeing what negatives they can change in their own circles. Once they actually get out of university I'm sure it'll be fine, as every generation has been one way or another.
Anyway I believe that it is already covered well. There is anti harassment law. And treating rape victim badly is fast way to loose friends.
We are not talking about tiny fraction of people, but majority of population has some skeleton in the closet. Stats says that up to 25% women are rape victims, should all of them get a safe space?
Also does this cover men? Prison rape jokes are quite popular on mainstream TV. And it is still socially acceptable to say that 12 year old boy "got lucky" with older lady.
And how about war veterans with PTSD?
I believe my response covers it. It is very expensive or impossible to provide safe space for everyone in its current form.
And if we provide safe spaces, we should probably start at prisons, which have much harsher conditions than universities.
I will ask, is there much wrong with a group of people organizing a safe space for themselves? It's impossible to make a public space "safe" but is it possible for individual groups to make spaces for themselves IRL? For example, my research university had an area in which LGBTQ people had meetups for bi people, LGBTQ of color, etc. I found that perfectly possible to exist.
Religious students don't get trigger warnings for courses that treat their views as anywhere between foolish and evil. Classical liberals don't get trigger warnings for their sociology, cultural anthropology or social psychology courses, despite the fact that all those disciplines have faculty that are overwhelmingly leftist. There's a great deal of diversity of opinion in those departments but it's diversity of leftist opinion.
People aren't stupid. Trigger warnings aren't used in a way that has any correspondence to PTSD triggers. They're used as a stick to beat political opinions of the losing faction with, currently the right.
Could you explain further some examples of trigger warnings IRL that you've dealt with, because I assume there aren't widespread studies about this sort of thing and you seem to have a vastly different experience than mine. I'd like to understand it.
The discussion is primarily about how people perceive the idea of a safe space over the actual experience of it. I don't think it's very useful, it just reinforces peoples' perceptions of others without actually engaging with those peoples and concepts/experiences directly.
As for safe spaces, this is fine if we're talking about a room at university, but if we're talking about making a university itself a "safe space" then forget about it. It's a public place where people have to live their lives.
But this is the point -- how prevalent are actual psychological triggers and PTSD, compared to the price of "safe spaces" etc? The examples given are not all that contrived compared to the ones people successfully use to silence each other, regardless of how scientifically accurate they may not be. Do we rely on mental health professionals to give certificates of trigger, or do we err on the side of bowing to every claim of offense and trauma? The GP demonstrated the absurdity of the latter, and I think the former is untenable too. The middle ground is "Try to be nice and have a thick skin", I guess.
I knew a girl in college who had been violently raped and it obviously had a profoundly traumatic impact on her. She needed help. However, the solution was not to avoid teaching about The Rape of Lucretia.
That said, I believe trigger warnings are essential because even when the inner work is being done, healing takes time. Even a lifetime. We need to be cognizant and empathetic of this.
I kind of agree but there is a practical problem...
I know several persons who were killed in motorcycle accidents. Their relatives still grieve years and decades after the events. Should every article or TV show contain a trigger warning "This movie contains action involving motorcycles"?
I know a couple whose young daughter drowned in a swimming pool. They haven't recovered from this a decade later and they are quite sensitive when it comes to swimming and swimming pools. Should every movie and book have a trigger warning in front "Warning, somebody drowns in this movie"?
I know a couple who divorced and she is still crushed by this and she hates when somebody talks about mariage and get anxiety attacks. Should every movie contain a message "Warning, this movie contains at least one wedding"?
The house of a close friend of mine burned down and because of this she has severe anxiety about big and open fires. Should every movie contain a warning about fires?
Is it save to talk about pregnancy? There are tons of people who had several miscarriages or they are physically unable to even get pregnant.
Can I talk about my (almost) perfect childhood? There are more than enough kids who grew up in toxic and abusive environments.
The point is that people get scared and scarred by literally everything. It's not just rape, violence and war but also dogs, alcohol, shouting, snakes, loud music, ... Almost everything justifies a trigger warning for some people so the question is: What is worthy of a trigger warning and what is not?
Luckily there's some push back to prevent it, and that push back is coming from both sides. There are people who want to protect freedom of speech[1], and there are people who want to explain what "trigger" actually means - it's not a means to avoid anything, it's a tool to help the very small number of people who need it to be prepared to confront challenging situations. Most university situations would never need trigger warnings. It's frustrating that this stigmatising disempowering bit of ignorance has taken such a strong hold over some communities.
[1] and it's useful to have people like Fry (who is gay and has a severe and enduring mental illness) and Tatchell (also gay and has campaigned for years for LGBT rights) on that side of the argument
Oh lordy. For a moment there I thought I was reading an issue of The Onion.
It's a little frightening how similar it is to newspeak (1984) in attempting to eradicate undesirable concepts.
From Wikipedia :
American Civil War : Total 705,000–900,000 + dead
Chinese Civil War : 1.5 million + 250,000
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion#Death_toll
The Russian Revolution is also nearly double the death toll.
One could also throw in the Wars of Religion and the 30 Years War as well.
Classic typo!
It could easily be argued that earlier wars were either smaller, or not truly "civil" (because the rather pointless semantic distinction between internal and external wars has rarely been as clear as at the time and location of the American civil war).
Personally, I'd grant that title to the 30 years war (despite it's very international nature), but that is not because of any objective reasons, I just happen to live in a landscape culturally shaped by it.
I believe those involved believe they have been historically, and continually, victimized, by the system, citing whatever majority they wish to define as their oppressors. All of the political correctness, and hostility towards free speech and expression, is a way for those groups to exert power over their "oppressors", and give them a feeling that they are in control. It's all about power.
This is not to say that their concerns are unjustified, but the method in which they seek justice lies more in power and retribution than healing and cooperation towards a better society.
Stephen Fry and I share similar mental health issues (bipolar), and one of the things that comes with this awful disease is that "triggers" exist for us in unexpected and uncontrollable situations. It's often easy to say "just get over it" and "deal with it", but it's not that simple. It's entirely possible, and trust me, it happens, that a disagreement can cause a week long depressive state.
That said, we deal with it because we have no other choice. If we required others to censor themselves, we'd eventually turn into little imps who never see sun light.
I face only positive employer, police, etc. biases. Being a minority is actually hard in this country. I have no patience for playing the victim card when you were born on third base.
> Being a minority is actually hard in this country.
What country would that be? /s
De facto patriarchies exist all over the world, but that doesn't mean that they consist of 'white males'.
http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2014/09/30/christopher-...
The real point is that saying "I'm offended" doesn't give anyone the right to shut up anyone else. We have freedom of speech, not freedom from speech. The recent move in the US to push hate speech laws is an egregious attack on our foundational principles of free speech in my opinion.
First, we live in one of the safest times in human history. The number of wars is at an all-time low.
Second, over the last couple of decades, a couple of billion people have seen their standard of living rise due to trade and commerce.
Third, the internet and social media is isolating people much more than they ever have been. Growing up in the upper-middle-class in the U.S., if your people don't like what some other people are saying? They're basically invisible.
Finally, colleges have lost their way. What used to be about preparing folks for a career is now a club for making friends of the right type. They used to be responsible to parents and society. Now in many cases they are direct service organizations for kids seeking a "college experience"
You put all of this together and you create a bunch of 18-year-olds that can be as closed-minded as many 80-year-olds. After all, they've never really had their beliefs challenged. And why should they start now?
There's a re-factoring of higher education that has to happen regardless of this particular issue, and it can happen none-too-soon. But parents of teenage kids should feel responsible too. It's your job as a parent not only to teach values, but to let your child explore new ideas and learn to defend their opinions using logic and civility. If you're 10 and refuse to talk because your feelings are hurt, that's one thing. But if you're 18? You missed something really important somewhere in your upbringing.
ADD: I am reminded that of one of the last big pushes for civic education and critical thinking was in the 1950s. This is when the famous "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in the U.S. (If you don't know why this is important, consider yourself lucky.) During the Korean War, when the communists captured soldiers, many times they didn't torture them. Instead, they "educated" them.
It suddenly occurred to a lot of people that if you're 18 and can't articulate why your opinions are important -- and defend them -- then you're vulnerable to just about any new idea that comes along. That's the real travesty here. When I hear about kids not wanting to hear ugly or challenging ideas, my first thought is how totally vulnerable these folks are to just a little bit of indoctrination. To be that way and attending a major university? It's a travesty.
If this is the quality of their experience, they shouldn't worry about repaying their loan. The colleges should be refunding the money back to the lenders.
>I love Stephen Fry, really I do, but this oft-repeated quote is bullshit and he is perfectly demonstrating why that is. What he’s really saying is this: everyone else’s feelings don’t matter, but his do, because he frames them as universal rules of discourse rather than feelings.
https://eev.ee/blog/2016/02/15/everyones-offended-these-days...
http://www.mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/news/statement-on-step...
He has lots of good stuff and that interview with Fry there seemed to be a bit rushed, normally Rubin is calmer and more prepared.
When this came up before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404752 ) I found quotes like a 1960 PTA magazine:
> 'I've known a lot of kids who were treated like little heroes. Afterward, they expected everything to be handed them on a silver platter— and it wasn't. They couldn't adjust.' "Beyond any doubt, the boys in Williamsport last week were treated as ...
A Boys' Life article from July 1937:
> We want to teach them not just to sit back and expect things to be handed to them on a silver platter but with confidence, based on their training, to go out and get what they want. We need to stiffen a moral flabbiness that has been affecting our youth.
Life Magazine, March 29, 1949:
> We have reared a bunch of weaklings in our young marrieds of today. Too much has been handed to them on a silver platter without their having had to work for it, and they lack the intestinal fortitude to meet life as a challenge.
Nor is there some recent spurt of left-wing faculty. I think faculty is more centrist than, say, the 1960s. I'll cherry pick https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/08/politics as the first page which agreed with me ("Professors lean left, but major new study of faculty views finds more centrism and less radicalism than critics of academe see -- with growing moderation among young academics.") YMMV.
I'll bet Stephen Fry has conditions on whether he attends events (perhaps around money or expenses). If he won't turn up to my house in another country on his own expenses, is he trying to shut down debates? No. Get over it.
This implies that some other instances are not, but then you dismiss them all as if they all were just refusals, which makes your post seem self-contradictory.
On the right, well we all know why
On the left, because it overwhelmingly victimizes women (some truth to that, of course, there's some truth to the rightist argument as well)
It's infantile. Most go on to First Grade, where they learn to share and the benefits of sharing with others. You learn, you grow.
If you hide or act like this, it just seems like a lack of education to me.
I have a 7 year old son, and the level of shielding from the outside world is a constant factor of conflict with my ex. When I see the level of freedom he has vs. what I had as a child, it's really quite depressing, and frankly most of his class mates have it worse, as most of them don't have anyone that's trying to moderate it.
It scares me to think of people growing up with that kind of filtered, blinkered view of the world, because sooner or later that filter is taken away, and they will be unprepared.
Gen-X though was verbally harsh, sarcastic and IMO more idealistic than Gen-Y. Gen-Y (as a whole) begins to show a strange mixture of extreme political correctness, anti-individuality, self-promotion and right-wing and business values when it suits them.
The Orwellian thing Fry mentions is not so far off.
So in the US, I am free to call anyone any name I so choose. the control aspect comes where a group of people are looking to be offended, if not by language, then by something else more innocuous (i.e. dreadlocks, etc...). It is a butt-hurt-culture that feeds on itself. If one of their own says something not in-line with the party, they turn on that person - and this in turn keeps people in line. the EXACT opposite of liberty.
The ONE group where its okay to willfully attack is the "straight, white male". (lets see how that statement is received). People don't want equality, they want to feel like a special snowflake who is above everyone else. Just don't dare to say or think anything that's outside the 'party line'.
"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it..." ~ Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"... unless you say something i don't agree with, then you're a racist, bigoted monster and must be destroyed." ~ every SJW ever.
You mean like how the FCC bans some words on Telly?
Or threats, obscenity, defamation, government employees during official duties, or on matters of national security.
the "Obscenity" you cite is more art/visual, and not verbal. verbal obscenity is covered as part of free speech/freedom of expression.
Defamation has be brought against you by the 'offended' - NOT the gov't.
What does gov't employees during official business have to do with anything? feel free to scream at cops all you want, just stay out of their way... screaming in a session of congress warrants a trespassing charge, not a knock on the 1st.
I guess for Fry, who has devoted whole books worth of self-pitying screeds to how tough his life is due to his problems with mental illness, offense is something he should be allowed to give without limit, but something he should never be expected to accept.
So there very much seems to be a double standard here. If you are an older feminist or gay rights campaigner or celebrity you can take advantage of a platform in the national newspapers to complain about the activities of students. If you are a student all you can do is not attend, but even doing that can get your name dragged through the mud in newspapers because people like Julie Bindel, Germain Greer and Peter Tatchell are given a huge platform by newspapers.
(It may be unrelated, but I'd point out that refusing to share a stage with one of the world's foremost gay rights activists is a preposterous decision in this case, and I'm glad it was roundly ridiculed. Even if it's not 'no-platforming' as such, it's still a bad position to take, and stinks of the general idea that debate is too much work.)
If you believe that people should be free to say things without fear of censorship, even if they're things that you don't like, then "safe spaces" are a really bad idea.
You can believe that but also still believe that people shouldn't be free to cause wilful offence under the protection of "free speech" (which, as we all know, isn't guaranteed anyway.)
As a rightwing, small 'c' atheist UK conservative I'm daily offended by what I consider an avalanche of vituperative 'free speech' by people who do not hold my views. I'm happy to live with that and argue my corner. Exclusive of violence, those with different ideas in their heads can insult me as much as they like; it's their arguments to which I'll be attentive. Maybe I'll even be persuaded on some issues.
Ideologies whether political or religious must be subjected to strong criticism or we're all finished on this planet.
I don't have a problem with avoiding certain subjects if I know someone has serious problems dealing with e.g. memories of something that's happened to them. Nor would I have a problem changing the subject or being more careful about working if someone points out that it is uncomfortable for them.
But I would mind having to pre-emptively self-censor because someone might take offence at something that is not intended to offend.
Personally, if someone started talking about wanting to censor on this kind of basis, I'll insist I'm being triggered and they're causing me distress - I'm sure that would lead to an interesting conversation.
Just because -you- don't mean it to offend or -you- don't believe it's offensive doesn't mean it isn't -to someone else-.
> I would mind having to pre-emptively self-censor because someone might take offence
Don't you do that anyway? I do that every day - at work, to my nephews, to my parents, to strangers. What's the big deal?
I haven't claimed otherwise.
> Don't you do that anyway? I do that every day - at work, to my nephews, to my parents, to strangers. What's the big deal?
The big deal is not self censoring, which yes, we all do out of politeness and respect. The big deal is being forced to self censor things we consider appropriate to talk about in context out of the concern that someone present might possibly find it offensive, rather than being able to rely on anyone present who finds offensive to be able to speak up or leave.
If I'm having a political discussion, and were to feel forced to not express my opinion because someone might take offence, I would be largely unable to express my political views, for example. If everyone were to avoid saying things about politics I find offensive, I could effectively shut up debate by entering pretty much any political debate.
> and were to feel forced to not express my opinion because someone might take offence, I would be largely unable to express my political views, for example.
That would be problematic for you (and I fully agree that it can be effectively used to silence political dissent) but you don't have an automatic right to express those views wherever, whenever, and to whomever you wish anyway.
I don't generally intend to offend. But I often intentionally state my opinions of things knowing it might offend someone. E.g., if at a political debate, I won't avoid stating my view just because someone might take offence. The intent isn't to cause offence, and I will respect it if I know there are people present that find a specific subject particularly difficult, but I don't believe we should accept that people have a right to not be offended if they choose to participate in a meeting knowing certain subjects will come up.
> but you don't have an automatic right to express those views wherever, whenever, and to whomever you wish anyway.
I have not suggested I do. But that does not mean I should not take severe offence if e.g. an organization like a student union effectively shuts down meetings where views the majority doesn't like, but that some students want, are likely to come up by insisting on "safe spaces".
I have yet to be at any political meeting that would be a "safe space" if you insist on offending no-one, for example. But these means of censorship are unsurprisingly being applied in exceedingly one sided ways. Incidentally a lot of the people that regularly gets a platform at many of these places are people whose views I find deeply offensive.
Commonly, free speech is limited where someone is encouraging violence against a person or group (hate speech), or when there is measurable harm done to a person (defamation). Being triggered because someone voice a different view about a political subject is neither hate speech or defamation, but it is something which "safe spaces" has recently been made to restrict.
I haven't been following this very closely which is possibly why I haven't seen an example of this "political triggering" claim. Do you have some examples?
> Commonly, free speech is limited
I think you're talking about the governmental limits on free speech there - private individuals and institutions have no such constraints and can limit whatever speech they want (within the bounds of legally-mandated discrimination, obviously) because (as I understand it, I'm not a US lawyer) they're not bound by the First Amendment.
It's just that when a public figure like Peter Tachell is on the receiving end of it they can use their media presence to complain, unlike the people Fry didn't want to engage with on Twitter. In the Tachell incident all that happened was a student decided not to attend an event with Tachell. He was not being censored or "no platformed" in any way. The result was he threw a tantrum and wrote articles attacking the student in national newspapers (where the student was given no opportunity to reply).
What people like Bindell and Greer and Tachell and Fry are demanding isn't the ability to say things without censorship. What they are demanding that that they can go onto a campus and force student to listen to their talks.
That's just completely false. Lindell/Greer/Tatchell/Fry are pointing out, in my opinion entirely accurately, that there is a trend towards stifling and opting out of discussion under the guise of safety, in place of engaging with debate.
Who do you think invites speakers to campus in any case? Obviously some people are interested in what these people say. That's absolutely not 'forcing' students to listen to talks, and I am speechless that you could honestly think that was the case.
You're wrong. All of this has already been published, and it was a single click away from the submitted article. The LGBT rep of the Students Union was clearly trying to no-platform Tatchell.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/13/peter-tatchel...
> In the emails, sent to the organisers of a talk at Canterbury Christ Church University on Monday on the topic of “re-radicalising queers”, Cowling refuses an invitation to speak unless Tatchell, who has also been invited, does not attend.
That individual is trying hard to get Tatchell no-platformed. Luckily the SU rejected it.
So unless you're forced to listen to me, even if you'd rather not, I don't have free speech?
Bullshit.
The point is that you are free to remove yourself from discussion that you don't want to participate in. You're free to publicly complain about an individual's views.
What is more worrying is the desire to prevent those views being aired to other people as well. You have the right to not listen; you don't have the right to prevent other people from listening. That's what a 'safe space' policy can result in.
Free association doesn't include the right to decide, having listened to such an argument that one does not wish to associate with someone with a particular set of views?
I look forward to Fry hosting David Irving on Qi. I look forward to your spirited push for the argument creationism needs to be taught in science classes.
No platforming someone is not the same as not inviting them into your space. Public spaces are not safe spaces.
I agree that shutting out certain polticial views is bad, but I also don't feel anyone should be forced to platform or shoved into politics when they really don't want to deal with that. I mean, then it just becomes a case of forcing people to listen to you and that's not free speech at all.
I fail to see the relevance of safe spaces and trigger warnings to what you wrote. Large portions of the student body hated the anti-abortion stuff and you protested against it and worked around it. Go you. That's how things should be done.
> I agree that shutting out certain polticial views is bad, but I also don't feel anyone should be forced to platform or shoved into politics when they really don't want to deal with that. I mean, then it just becomes a case of forcing people to listen to you and that's not free speech at all.
You may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you. You can't shut out politics because politics is what happens when three or more humans get together. That's what entryism is about. One would not think hobbies as marginal as atheist organisations, SF con goers and computer gaming would be worth infiltrating and taking over but they've all become vastly more political recently.
No one's forcing you to attend the Marxist/Nazi/Libertarian/Socialist speaker's talk. They're objecting to the attempt to prevent them speaking at all.
Well, you see, the tunnel was called a safe space. And people were waving around signs saying "trigger warning: gore pictures ahead".
> No one's forcing you to attend the Marxist/Nazi/Libertarian/Socialist speaker's talk. They're objecting to the attempt to prevent them speaking at all.
I don't see how this is possible, because the internet exists and also because people can make their own talks off-campus or so. Of course, no business establishment or property owner, or even university is obligated to give them a platform. No one is obligated to give any idea or viewpoint a platform. Certain subjects are approved of for platforming by the people that set the rules for how their buildings are to be used. Is that censorship?
For public universities, why not?
Preventing them from plastering large gore pictures is very different from preventing them from showing those pictures to people who voluntarily comes to a meeting, or after asking someone if they want to see.
To me, the latter is what is deeply problematic. Especially considering that a lot of issues that are now accepted by the mainstream would have been in the "deeply offensive" category when the movements started out.
E.g. imagine a student union today denying a platform to advocates of gay rights. It's not that long ago that such speakers would have been considered extremely offensive in the UK, and were routinely denied a platform.
The moment student unions and the like sets themselves up as arbiters of what views are acceptable, they are no better than the many people who over the years have fought to deny platforms to gay rights advocates or advocates of womens suffrage, or civil rights regardless of race, or in favour of interracial marriages, or to end slavery. Yes, someones views may be vile to you, but if there's one thing history has shown us, it is that the majority has been on the wrong end of a vast number of issues for a long time before things changed. And it's easy to assume we're on the right side.
The problem is that everyone believes they're on the right side, which means a substantial proportion of us are wrong no matter the issue. The moment it becomes acceptable to censor, that means a substantial proportion of us will want to censor views that will put us squarely on the wrong side in retrospect.
Inasmuch as there is a real point of debate here, and not just the whinging of butthurt right-wingers who are used to having a platform given to them whenever they ask, the question is whether students have a right to control who the university gives a platform to. This is an area of legitimate struggle (students say yes, administrations say no), but it's overshadowed by the bogus argument that this is actually about censorship.
Their views are deeply offensive to me, and would have been back when I was a student too. I get sick to my stomach at the kind of attitude it demonstrates.
If they genuinely want to provide a "safe space" then they need to shut the hell up about these policies too, as they too are likely to cause offence. Otherwise it is simply hypocritical attempts to stifle the speech of just the people they disagree with.
No platforming began in universities and is still mostly confined there because the tactics necessary for it would get the police called almost anywhere else. The university is not solely the illiberal left's space. When they try to no platform someone they're almost always trying to get the university administration to ban the attendance of someone another university club or society invited banned. Fuck that. Other people's safe spaces aren't their safe spaces. If they want people gone or want to make their attendance impossible or unpleasant let them use violence and incivility and suffer the consequences.
> Inasmuch as there is a real point of debate here, and not just the whinging of butthurt right-wingers who are used to having a platform given to them whenever they ask, the question is whether students have a right to control who the university gives a platform to. This is an area of legitimate struggle (students say yes, administrations say no), but it's overshadowed by the bogus argument that this is actually about censorship.
Some students say yes, others say no.
The students behind this find the notion that they're somehow silencing nationally-published journalists by telling them they're not welcome farcial, and I agree.
If these students believed the rooms would be empty, I strongly suspect they wouldn't have a problem with letting them come and be humiliated while their opponents made fun of them outside.
Presumably most of the opposition to these speakers is because they know perfectly well that they will have an audience, who want to hear what they have to say.
While censorship in the total sense is a bad idea, there is some need for contextual awareness that some anti-censorship people try to gloss over. You shouldn't be able to go into a Catholic mass and yell over the ceremony and then claim "censorship" when security/police come to remove the disruption.
People congregate within certain parameters because there's an agreed-upon premise that is to be used as a foundational basis for further exploration and which is not open to debate within the prevailing context at the time. There is a place for "safe spaces" insofar as they involve civil and voluntary peaceful assembly for a common purpose, places like churches and trade shows, where people are expected to accept some basics as forgone conclusions at least for the duration of the meeting.
Thus, while I am free to publish a post on my blog that is scathingly critical of node.js without invoking the wrath of government or institutional censors, I should probably not feel free to present "node.js: used exclusively by idiots" at a node.js conference in a non-satirical way (the conference organizers would probably quash this talk; I could either cry "censorship" or just accept that the venue was an improper place to try to make the argument that node.js is used exclusively by idiots, no matter how fervently I may or may not believe that).
For further example, if there is a strictly pro-thing subreddit that has rules that state only pro-thing things should be posted, instead of becoming upset at the "censorship" and decrying it as a "safe space", I should move on to a subreddit that has moderation policies and basic premises that I find more agreeable and allow those who favor a positive interpretation of thing to continue to assemble peacefully.
I hope we don't lose respect for free private assembly whilst trying to point out the absurdity of the SJW's "safe space". The SJW "safe space" is bad because they essentially mean that they should have a force field that protects them from coming across any idea or concept in public that they don't agree with, which is of course ridiculous. Traditional "safe spaces", i.e., venues that control the direction of the conversation and allow their attendees to freely come and go, are not bad.
This is only tangentially related, but I just wanted to jump on here as I think the quoted bit is a potential example of anti-safe-space rhetoric that could be used to imply that the control of the message at private meetings constitutes a free speech/censorship issue. There is a place and time for some things, and that's fine. I hope you'll forgive my extrapolation from your statement here.
There's a distinct difference between being offended by something and 'flouncing' away, versus demanded that people be prevented from doing things which offend you in the first place. Stephen Fry is the former; 'safe spaces' are the latter.
Have you read any of Fry's autobiographies? He is triggered, as the kids would call it, by the mere reference to warmed milk. He demands no-one speaks of, say, bread and milk in his presence. And then he complains rape victims are over-sensitive.
"He ran a thumb between Clara's lips ... Of honey and sweet warm milk.” “Aniseed?” “If you like aniseed it will..."
There's nothing else relevant except your comment on google or Bing.
I also found comments on Stephen Fry's site about QI XL from 07/03/09 [1] where bread and milk was apparently discussed, with no mention of Fry going off the handles over the subject he himself apparently introduced. And the comments themselves includes multiple mentions and have been left up.
(EDIT: The episode in question is season 6, episode 11, Films and Fame. It doesn't mention "warm milk" but it does go on quite a bit about bread and milk which GP also claims he has an issue with. Stephen Fry asks what you should not feed a Porcupine; Emma Thompson, who is a close friend of his and certainly would know if this was a no-go area, answers "bread and milk" and Stephen Fry repeats her answer, and David Mitchell and Alan Davies then gets into an extended argument about bread and milk. Here is where it starts [2]. That episode also includes a fantastic segment with discussion about the late Alan Rickmann, btw., where John Sessions does some fantastic impressions of him)
Barring evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assume that if there's a mention of this in his autobiography, that it's meant as a dry joke or exaggeration for comedic effect, which would fit very much into how Fry writes and talks.
[1] http://archive.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/qi-xl-070309-bread...
All of this sjw/triggering stuff is nonsensical and baffling, but it is also baffling that we live in a society where attacks on a person's character and history somehow influence the validity of what that person says. Anyone has the capacity to say something that is true. If a murderer stated that the Moon orbits the Earth, you would have a hard time convincing rational people not to listen just because he was an immoral person.
Ultimately, it is fallacious to disagree with someone just because you don't like them or because they are hypocrites. Hypocrisy doesn't make a statement or set of statements true or false.
Attacking a person's character or history instead of attacking their argument represents an act of dissociation or insansity, either of which would equal triggering in the magnitude of its infantile absurdity.
I find this quite amusing as the end of a comment that started with an attack on someones character.
Nigel Slater mentions in his autobiography the revolting luke-warm milk served at UK schools in the 70s.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71969.Toast
(Ctrl F for milk)
If you don't like the way rude people act, and you can't reason with them or have a meaningful dialogue, you can simply ignore them. If a communication tool turns from a cheerful digital village square into a seedy back-alley, getting out of there is sensible. That seems to me opposite of insisting that people accommodate you at all costs, which is what he is criticizing.