You know, I saw something on Facebook the other day that somewhat reminds me of what you suggest. Seems there’s a website that’s devoted to parents sending in pictures of their toddlers upset (read: crying or in a tantrum) over the most minuscule or irrelevant things. So you’ve got pictures of little Johhny wailing his lungs out over broken pieces of cheese. Then the caption will say, “And he asked me to break them in half for him.” Yadda yadda.
Maybe we need something similar here? Whiny students protesting the most absurd non-issues imaginable. Then we can take shots of them yelling at authorities and post them with “And the dean refused to only serve low fat milk!” The fallout would be even better than pissed off two year olds.
More and more I think it resembles a cult. This hyperbolic fear reaction is probably induced by some instructors and reinforced by the reaction of the administratipn and others.
Apparently Emory has a policy that students have to reserve areas to chalk ahead of time. So they’ll be disciplined for not doing that, not for what they wrote.
I hope next time they actually follow procedures, at which point anyone trying to erase or deface “Trump 2016” will be in violation of the policy and face disciplinary action.
I think this is just a really bad construction. They’re saying: it’s true that students were protesting. It’s false that they were “afraid or traumatized, not [i.e., rather than] angry or protesting.” I think.
You don’t make your case very well by editing out the key word in the second phrase, which was “traumatized,” and thus completely distorting the meaning. Snopes agreed that the students were angry and protesting.
I don’t see how my removing two words changed the meaning in any degree whatsoever. In the previous paragraph Snopes says they were protesting. In this one it says they weren’t.
This is the claim that they were “testing”:
*
Students at Emory University were offered “emergency counseling” after pro-Trump graffiti appeared overnight in campus “safe spaces.”*
They set it up as an obvious straw man, and then tore it down. If they had tested the claim “Students at Emory University protested the chalking of the words ‘Trump 2016’ on campus, claiming to be in pain, and received concessions from the university” which is the actual story, they could not have done this.
No, they didn’t. They referred to what the media is actually saying. You know, the stories they are actually sent and respond to, which they always quote in the article. And this time they even quote multiple people saying this stuff.
And then they have a section where they specify what parts are true and what parts aren’t, so that you can’t be misled as to what is being said.
You are the one telling them to rewrite things to fit a preconceived conclusion. You want them to ignore the outrageous posts and just focus on the ones you think are true, instead of looking at the whole thing.
Fuller, yes. But not full. Here’s the full quote of that paragraph:
WHAT’S FALSE: Counseling was offered to or demanded by anyone; students complained their “safe spaces” were violated; students were afraid or traumatized, not angry or protesting.
So everything said in that paragpraph is false. The claim that they were not protesting is false. So if “not protesting” is false, that means they were in fact protesting.
The claim by Snopes is that the students were protesting, but they were not complaining their safe spaces were violated. They were not afraid because of the chalking, and they were not claiming to be traumatized. They were, in fact, angry and protesting.
Great. So, instead of taking the actual story, they took the most extreme version of the story as retold on the most extreme outlets, and said that certain nuances of that were untrue, and therefore the story is “mostly false”.
Again, the thing that is upsetting people is the actual story as reported by multiple legitimate news outlets, including the actual school newspaper from the actual school: Students at Emory University protested the chalking of the words ‘Trump 2016’ on campus, claiming to be in pain, and received concessions from the university. This is true. This actually happened.
They tailored the “claim” by peppering it with additional details about safe spaces and counseling that no one was actually caring about (cite: the words “counseling” and “safe spaces” don’t appear anywhere in this thread, because no one was claiming them as a reason that this was stupid) in order to get the desired outcome of “mostly false”.
The same reason you think you have the right to be comfortable in your own house and yard. The students are championing for a place where they can get away from the real world for a while. A place where people who are regularly face bigotry all the time can get away from it for a while. A place where they don’t constantly be on their guard.
They have to say “safe and comfortable” because all you guys keep making fun of them for saying “safe spaces” when they aren’t in any real danger.
What I don’t get is why people give them grief for this. Let’s say you get together with your friends and want to have a place where no one makes you feel bad for drinking to excess and getting rowdy. If someone comes in and treats you badly because you drink, you would get upset, right?
So some gay people want to get together and have a “no homophobia allowed” rule. Why is that something to make fun of? Or, heck, let’s say all the minorities get together and have a “no bigotry” rule. Why does that bother you?
This is why the Snopes article is useful. It points out how all the blustery hate articles are just that. They are no different than the “Obama is a Muslim” Facebook posts. They are deliberately misstating facts to work people up into a tizzy.
The shit about safe spaces is MRA bullshit. The crap you believe about them is stuff created by their opposition. I don’t know why you fall for it.
A “safe space” is not a bad concept. You may disagree with their rules, but the idea of a place where you can go and get away from the bigotry you face everywhere else is not a bad idea.
And, before some of you pull out the “lecture” bullshit, let me remind you that this is just like hundreds of other posts. It’s not some horrible thing because I gasp disagree with you, and try to explain my point of view.
And the counseling and safe spaces were the crux of what made this story? Obviously not, as no one in this thread anywhere brought them up. You don’t get to add unnecessary details to a story that nearly no one associated with the story, and then call the story “mostly false” when those unnecessary details are wrong.
That was not Snopes’ finest work. For instance, they ignored the article where the guy Snopes referred to as a protest organizer who said he wasn’t scared of the chalk told the AP that he wasn’t a protest leader and that one of the chalked messages made him feel unsafe. And saying that it was false that students felt afraid when the article Snopes did cite actually quoted students who said they were “afraid” and feeling “fear” is just shoddy. The Daily Beast quotes other fearful students, including one who said, “I legitimately feared for my life.”
And given the use of language like “triggering” and “navigate through the environment of distrust and unease,” I can even see where the “counseling” claims came from.