In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There is no right to not be offended.
There is no right to not be uncomfortable.
Welcome to real life, where you must be resilient to criticism and offense and countless other negative occurrences and feelings.
This is what you do when you are afraid of debate, afraid of being wrong and unable to defend your ideas... when you know you might lose or are losing in the arena of ideas.
You criminalize differing opinions in the name of diversity, and effectively outlaw free speech.
This is why Trump won.
People are not buying this.. they are rejecting it soundly because accepting this premise gives tacit approval to regulate speech, something American culture will never accept, or should never accept in my opinion.
Liberals are willingly accepting this in many places, such as college campuses for example, where it seems harder and harder to avoid the safe space mandate to follow approved groupthink.
I'm not talking about banning free association for those groups that most desire the safe spaces. I'm saying.. those groups, or anyone shouldn't be allowed to deem the entire University (or other shared space) their private safe space and bar others from exercising their rights to free speech and free association.
If the left doubles down with this nonsense, they will push people further away.
> The act required for an assault must be overt. Although words alone are insufficient, they might create an assault when coupled with some action that indicates the ability to carry out the threat.
Granted that that's not the definition in actual use everywhere - but, in that case, you need to specify which jurisdiction's code you're citing, because there is no general coverage of assault in the United States code, but only a few specific cases, mostly related to assault against federal officers and officials in the performance of their duties.
I figured it would be timely and on-topic as a result: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I figured it might help us see things from each other's point of view, and thus gratifying of intellectual curiousity. Perhaps I was mistaken.
But where do you go to find intelligent political discussions. For those of you who don't frequent /r/politics, it was completely taken over by HRC's Correct The Record team, the minute the election was over the character of the sub changed completely. You have to admire how effective they were.
You might be right in that there isn't a good place to discuss it, but I don't think HN is the the solution for it.
A women-only safe space is sexist, as the implied "safety" of not allowing men implies that men are inherently unsafe. A POC-only safe space is racist, as the implied "safety" of not allowing whites implies that whites are inherently unsafe.
If anyone were to even suggest the opposite implementation, a men-only or whites-only "safe space", then the discriminatory nature is immediately apparent and everyone rallies to shut down the idea before it ever reaches implementation.
Edit: Oops, I've invaded HN's safe space. Disagree with me all you like, but as we learned earlier this week it's not the votes that matter. Tell me why I'm wrong, I'm genuinely interested in hearing your opinion.
It's to give people an opportunity to talk about the impact of a thing without needing to prove that thing exists in the first place. It's like climate scientists not inviting deniers to their conference: they want to focus on the implications of climate change, not debate the existence of climate change itself.
I think there are plenty of reasonable safe spaces that accomplish the thing they were meant to do without resorting to blanket exclusions. The answer to one extreme is usually not the other.
> No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
I don't see anything there about genitalia or skin color.
But since it's a "safe space" I think I'll pop in there and relax for a bit. It's time I escape this mediocrity and claim the power of my white male birthright.
I find that when I personally want a "disengagement break", I get more relaxation in just holing myself up at home vs taking over someone else's area.
As for "taking over someone else's area," to me that's just politics. There are ebbs and flows of power and control. Trump's victory is going to legitimize a lot of criticisms and possibly over-correct, though hopefully we will be in a position to have a reasonable understanding of what a "safe space" should be within the next decade.
Start making "safe spaces" for Trump voters to talk about their candidate without being called ignorant and you'll start to see people's attitudes shift on what the sensible limitation of safe spaces should be.
I could imagine this being useful to those with social anxiety disorders or social deficiencies, for group grief counseling, for group addiction support, etc. These are all examples of safe spaces.
What becomes insufferable is when one's safe space extends into the public space or even into my space. That's just people trying to dominate the behaviors of others. No internal turmoil justifies domination over my legitimate behaviors.
I find these discussions of tolerance fascinating. The core message of people that preach tolerance is that we shouldn't give people are hard time for views and beliefs that don't harm others, not that we should accept all views and beliefs as being equally useful.
Of course the issue most comes to a head in situations like gay marriage, where a large group of people see it as causing/embracing some sort of moral decay and another group of people doesn't see any harm at all in people loving whoever they are going to love.
The one group wonders why such a harmful thing must be tolerated, while the other group doesn't agree that there is any harm.
People that start talking about tolerating intolerance aren't trying to have a discussion, they are asserting that their views about what is harmful and what is not harmful should have primacy.
How is this different from other politicians getting votes for supporting gay marriage? It seems to me the "political gain" argument boils down to something almost meta-political; or of satisfaction/boldness in your tribe "winning", or politicians falsely professing things they know voters want -- these apply to both sides.
When I asked, I was looking for something like how voter ID laws are supposedly really written to suppress voters from the other party. Is there some way in which banning gay marriage would inherently strengthen Republicans over Democrats? (Going with this because it was presumably the grandparent's example.)
In the case where it's considered desirable to ensure that homosexual partners receive the same benefits of familial status (e.g. the commonly cited hospital visitation rights), without also including such partnerships in the financial benefits of heterosexual marriage, a federal civil union statute would easily suffice. Such things have been proposed many times, but invariably have been shot down from the left, rather than the right, as representative of "second-class citizen" status, just like "whites" and "coloreds" water fountains - a risible claim, especially in light of e.g. GLAD's explainer [1], in which, discounting the two already disposed of here, every reason cited in favor of "gay marriage", and against civil union, is at its base about money.
Such, at least, is the primary reason why I oppose the idea of "gay marriage", to say nothing of the Supreme Court's having recently discovered in the Constitution that there exists an inalienable right to same. This puts me in an apparently contradictory position, being that I am myself homosexual, but that contradiction exists only in the presence of an assumption that identity politics are the only valid sort.
Of course, to hear "gay rights" organizations tell it, that is precisely true, and we are not allowed to take a stance such as mine, or indeed any other that fails to correspond exactly with the current party line. To do so is derided [2] or pathologized [3] - or, of course, both. The possibility that we might have evaluated the cases for and against on their relative merit, and made our decisions accordingly, doesn't really enter into the discussion - and neither does the possibility that those who claim to speak and act on behalf of all homosexuals need not have their claims taken at face value by anyone, not even we whom they insist they defend.
[1] https://www.glad.org/uploads/docs/publications/cu-vs-marriag...
[2] http://www.out.com/news-opinion/2013/05/13/bret-easton-ellis...
[3] http://mashable.com/2014/06/25/internalized-homophobia-lgbt/...
Really, you're making a "childless couples shouldn't be allowed to get married" argument and using homosexuality as a proxy for the desire for children. It's disadvantageous to use proxies when the original metric is just as easily ascertained: Just let people get married when they bear/adopt/whatever a child, and not before.
I feel that a second argument in there is "marriage is only good for the legal protection of children", but I think that ignores the social aspects, even though I find them backward.
Trump truly played a great song with the media. You have to respect his ability to avoid any policy discussion, preferring to shout fantasies. Clinton wasn't much better, but I don't believe it was an intentional ploy to avoid difficult discussions.
Some people are way too eager to be victims.
Apparently the point of posting the video is that the person recording it thinks they have been harmed (I didn't watch the whole thing)? And that you disagree?
That's exactly my point, you each have your own ideas of what harm is. What follows from that is that of course it will be messy to discuss. But it still stands that the core message of tolerance is that we should examine things for harm and accept those things that minimize it, not that we should accept all things mindlessly.
The recorder of that video has gone on to create a fundraiser with two goals: 1) to defame the man in the video, and 2) to seek general recompense from the public for her harm.
I'm sure you watched enough of the video to get the gist of what happened, and any common-sense person would immediately dismiss her claims of harm. But by giving her a benefit of the doubt, by choosing to "examine" that situation far beyond its merits, she is given the platform and the opportunity to play the victim and in so doing simultaneously cause direct harm to another person and personally benefit from it.
Yes, people will come to conclusions about their personal experiences that few others agree with. So what. Politely tell them that you aren't interested in discussing whatever their beef is and move on. I didn't say that tolerance was an absolute above, in fact I started from a place where I pushed back against that misunderstanding.
Are you offended by people acting on their ideas? (you have no right to this)
Are you offended by people acting on their ideas impacting other people? (you have no right to this, umm.. wait, maybe you do)
Would you prefer that people carefully segregated their ideas to certain places to avoid impacting on (or being impacted by) other people? (oh fuck, the world is complicated eh?)
It is hard to respect people that constantly treat you as an aggressor.
College should be a place where your beliefs should be challenged. If we've learned anything, echo chambers are strong and becoming stronger. The only way to combat that is with adversity.
Cutting off communication between groups doesn't prevent violence. It creates echo chambers that allow them to drift further and further apart. At some point, the only way they can communicate is violence.
Talking to them opens an opportunity for mutual understanding, while dismissing them changes nothing.
EDIT: I don't know why you're being downvoted. You've proposed a great example.
Being a world citizen is a dicey proposition, and my gut reaction is that further insulating ourselves is the wrong way to go. I can't imagine how a military comprised of soldiers who have grown up in this movement can be expected to deal with the events of war.
If a person is truly emotionally wounded and sensitive to common messages from typical life events, they should be afforded therapy so they can cope.
I have no statistics to back this up, though, and would welcome evidence in either direction.
Unsure if I understood you right, but being a world citizen requires a thick skin. It involves, by definition, dealing with other cultures' nasty bits without complaining.
This seems like an important quote for those who are sad/disappointed/angry about the US election results.
One of the things very few partisans seem to want to admit right now, is that the other party is NOT just a bunch of hateful people. That both parties are made up of humans who, for the most part, want to make better lives for themselves and others around them. Mostly people who want to make this country a better place, but obviously disagree on what that "better place" looks like. And those beliefs are built on their life experiences, both what they've been told and what they've been through. And that one person shouting at them and telling them they're wrong isn't going to magically change that. And trying to invalidate their lives by going after their social class or their "privilege" isn't going to help anyone, and is tone deaf to the fact that people at all levels of class experience the same emotions, the same level of panic, fear, and trauma.