Because it’s a waste of time and energy and helps feed this I’m offended nonsense because a building was named after somebody years ago. It’s acknowledging and legitimizing foolishness.
It will blow over. This is more of a moral panic than anything incited by imaginaned slights. It also can suggest that we live in an era will being offended is encouraged.
Thank you.
Thank you thank you thank you for this.
I have felt (in other fora) like a lone voice in the wilderness on this.
If it was offensive to me I’d say the same thing. I can’t imagine there being a building or street named after someone and caring or in general letting that sort of thing matter to me. I don’t see being offended as that big of a deal. People need to learn to react proportionaly.
Sorry but I take most of those “if it was offensive to me I’d say the same thing” statements with large grains of salt. Mostly what we see in these sorts of threads and more broadly discussions are people who very vigorously defending the right of people to speak offensively to other people with out fear of criticism and great criticism of people who say things that they read as offensive or who express speech in manners that offend them.
I have no firm thought about changing the names of the buildings as a specific example as I do not know enough about how much offense those names cause … but let’s flesh out the concept some …
Confederate flag? Historical artifact that doesn’t mean anything now? … People choosing to be offended over nothing? Its offending people shouldn’t be a big deal? People need to learn to react proportionally?
Is Japan’s ongoing denial of the Rape of Nanking and of “comfort girls” something that you cannot imagine people in China being offended by? Is denial of the Armenian genocide something that you cannot imagine being offended by and that objecting to is an imposition upon free speech? Holocaust Denial as well … those who object to it are just thin-skinned?
Statues of Lenin remaining in Russia was mentioned but many of the former Republics have gone so far as to make symbols of the communist past not just removed but illegal, actually restricting free speech … with some wonderfully silly implementations. I am confident all here would agree that passing a law against such expressions is repugnant, but were the people of Ukraine over-reacting in wanting the statues of Lenin removed?
If there was a school with a statue of Saddam Hussein still standing in Iraq do you think many Shi’ites would be thrilled about attending that school? Would that also be being offended over nothing and over-reacting? Or do you think that maybe they’d interpret that statue’s presence as a not so subtle sign of how welcome they are (not)?
In fact symbols honoring past oppressors and past oppressions are across the world routinely objected to after the oppressive regime is no longer in power, at least as soon as the formerly oppressed are no longer powerless to make it happen.
If you cannot imagine feeling the way that most people who have been historically oppressed feel then I suggest the problem may lie in your not having sufficient empathy and not with them.
Well put, DSeid. What is at issue is that this costume kerfuffle has highlighted the wrong-footedness of both sides’ approach, while at the same time becoming a social-media referendum on “how big of a deal” the systemic issues are at that particular institution, in this case Yale.
The wrong-footedness is frustrating and sad. Nicholas Kristof of the NYTimes had a nice Op-Ed piece that I won’t try to link to behind its firewall, but was basically saying everyone needs to take a deep breath. There is too much tone-deafness and intolerance going on.
The referendum on underlying systemic issues is where things appear to be changing. Stuff that has been “woven into the fabric” of some geographies are being called into question, bolstered by video. Flags, buildings, street names, statues are actively being questioned across the country - as I think Jon Stewart framed it, “the racist wallpaper of everyday life.” Sorry if I mis-attributed that; I am pretty sure I heard him say it.
One of the speakers at the William F Buckley conference upset students by, apparently, making light of genocide. From the Yale Daily News, “‘Looking at the reaction to [Silliman College Associate Master] Erika Christakis’ email, you would have thought someone wiped out an entire Indian village,’ [president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Greg] Lukianoff said, according to Gian-Paul Bergeron ’17, who was present at the event and posted the quotation online just after 4 p.m.”
I’m pretty liberal, but this whole thing is kind of ridiculous.
Responding to speech with fliers?! Move over Gestapo!
I note that conservatives remain terrified of students and their sometimes less-than-polite speech, while remaining sanguine about things like NC’s ouster of a university president in favor of installing a Republican operative. Threats to free speech are only threats if it’s undergrads hollering. If it’s backroom political deals that fire government employees who don’t toe the party line, it’s hunky dory.
Actually what really happened there is a good illustration of where the lines get crossed.
Whether or not protesting over making a genocide joke is ridiculous or not is immaterial.
Putting up fliers before a conference starts (and ITR’s claim that it was during is not his link states; apparently youcan make this stuff up after all) is not any a big deal. Refusing to leave private property? Appropriately removed by force if need be. That is not protected free speech.
Chanting loudly outside when people are leaving a conference, without blocking their path, holding up signs, not actually disrupting the meeting? Protected free speech. No matter if you agree with it or think it is idiotic or find it offensive.
The student who spat at someone coming out? Agree with one of the organizers of the protest - not:
Calling that protest
Also protected free speech. Even though I don’t personally think of thugs as chanting slogans, holding signs, and making sure that they leave a path for people to walk through. But y’know that headline writer may know a different class of thugs than I do. No, there was no shutting down of free speech going on. That’s dumb speech. But go at it.
Some dumb speech, some rude speech … all around maybe. Each of us will decide for ourselves what we think of the speech, if we care to bother ourselves with what jokes get made and what a few college students chant about at all. But there was no restraint placed upon free speech going on. The limits that were placed - removing someone from private property; the protest organizer soundly condemning the protester who spat at a conference attendee - are not limits upon free speech. They are drawing the appropriate boundary between free speech and unacceptable behaviors that should be restricted.
Why do you constantly harp on liberal “suppression” of free speech on college campuses but ignore conservatives (like Daniel Pipes) who do the same thing? Couldn’t possibly be ideological, could it?
There’s no defense for whiny kids getting butthurt over nothing.
The defenders look silly and are doing their cause of cultural sensitivity a great disservice.
I can’t speak for the person you are asking the question to but I can answer for myself. I am neither right or left-wing (I am a moderate libertarian) and I find that type of behavior atrocious as well. I will criticize conservatives just as quickly as left-wingers when I notice that type anti-free speech behavior. It is technically true that chanting, drowning out and “shouting down” other speakers is free speech as well but I don’t make living as a lawyer and am not interested in listening to bullshit defenses of such boorish behavior. That tends to be a tactic of the Left today and that is why it so commonly mentioned in these types of threads. It is also correct to acknowledge that right-wingers have it in their tool chest as well and have used it as well.
Free speech is an ideal which should allow all people to speak openly and honestly no matter how distasteful their ideas are to the masses or even a loud but minority opinion. That is the whole point of the protection of free speech. You don’t need protection of free speech for statements that most people already like and agree with.
Exactly. The value in free speech is that people can say controversial and even wrong things. The same thing that protects bigots is what protected abolitionists and those who fought for civil rights when it was considered offensive and unpopular. You can’t have effective dialog and change if you limit one side of a conversation. Everybody thinks they are right, every culture and subgroup thinks their values are the values that are positive for society. There is no way to filter out bad speech but not possibly positive but dissenting speech.
I’m part of a “historically oppressed minority” so it’s not entirely hypothetical.
I think whether they would be offended over nothing depends on context. If John C. Calhoun and the Confederate cause where championed by much of Yale and it’s faculty it would be more than an artifact or if it was erected or his holding office were relatively recent. So I’d say it differs from a Saddam Hussein statue there. Likewise given the Russian occupation of the Ukraine that gives a very different set or reasons for why the statue of Lenin was defaced. It’s very much apples and oranges.
While I get this is the internet and no one can prove you’re not a dog, I genuinely will defend the rights of those who have offended me. To not do so is to fail in having any sort of real democratic spirit.
It may be that the woman in the video shouting at The Master, “Who the fuck hired you?” was herself on the committee that hired him.
An article from the Yale Daily News about a meeting with the dean of Yale College contains this sentence, “The impromptu gathering, which ballooned out of a chalking event on Cross Campus in support of Yale’s people of color, which Holloway had attended, came days after alleged racist behavior at a Sigma Alpha Epsilon party and an email from Silliman College Associate Master Erika Christakis criticizing over-sensitivity to cultural appropriation.”
I’m most interested and amused at the idea of a “chalking event”. Is that a Yale thing? I don’t think they had that at the school I attended, except for physics formulae written in chalk on the ground that greeted freshmen on the way to their exams in first-year physics classes.
Apparently it’s fairly common. See here for example. At UCF we were permitted to post freestanding billboards in certain areas instead.
As to what’s “worth” getting offended over … certainly I cannot disagree that from where I sit some on every side seem to engage in recreational offense taking. (All of which, once again, is free speech.)
The most amusing ones to me are those who take offense that a company chooses not to wish you a Merry Christmas. Really? This year’s poster child: Starbucks decides that this year’s holiday cup is going minimalist and it is an insult, an attack on Christianity, to be protested against?
Indeed, you cannot make this shit up. People are actually offended that Starbucks decided to go red sans snowflakes or tinsel this year. Really actually upset and insulted.
You’d think they had put Christ in a pool of pee on the cup …
Update to this situation from Halloween 2015 at Yale: Nicholas and Erika Christakis, the husband and wife who were the leaders of Silliman College, have resigned.
Oh man, I’m sorry for the resurrect but I somehow stumbled back over this thread and holy crap. This Yale incident had a huge effect on me. I watched my world go insane as the calm, rational people I thought I had a great deal of respect for took exactly the obviously wrong damn side.
To call Christakis’s email “polite” or “civil” shows an attitude much like that of the five year old who thinks they should get whatever they want because they said “please.”
Prior to this incident I had certainly been working on figuring out a distinction between the substance of truth-seeking rational analysis in the spirit of cooperative development and the mere rhetoric of it. But this Yale incident was the most intense case, the magnifying glass focusing the light into a flame, for me, w.r.t. that issue. I really started to see in a way I hadn’t noticed before how civilly rational rhetoric is sometimes not just ineffective but positively trollishly destructive.
And this focus on literal content and logical implications on the part of the ones who want to ignore Christakis’s clear condescension and aspersions. Holy moly. Literal content and logical implications are not how people operate. They operate at the level of conversational implicatures and the psychological effects of phrases etc. A good troll hides their use of those kinds of effects behind text that, taken purely literally, is perfectly logical.
And I’m sorry but my experience since then has confirmed what became for me a despairing suspicion. That those who insist as some here have on this hamfisted, blindly literal and logical reading of things where literality and logic are clearly not the only things at play–people who insist on this have shown themselves on many occasions in my experience to be defending such a way of reading things because they know how to use it to abuse people and systems and they want to protect that structure. It’s one that makes them feel powerful.
I fucking remember this behavior from my elders as a gaslit kid and teen doing everything I could to believe them when they told me the wildest untruths about the bible, religion, psychology, culture, what have you. My religious background definitely taught me what a literal reading and a strictly logical approach will get you. It will get you to a place where you ignore reality to defend your power structure at all costs. It will leave you unable to examine your most basic axioms because the logic of your religious life determines what “literal” means in every case, and forces you to ignore everything in your life but the text and its implications, and those axioms as a result aren’t even visible much less questionable.
No, Christakis didn’t call these students children. She instead used every tool available to her to get her audience to envision them, to treat them as children.
No, Christakis didn’t state that the college was trying to impose a rule about halloween dress. She instead used every tool available to her to get her audience to react to a fear that the college, whatever it’s doing, may as well be doing that. She did everything she could to get her audience to associate the colege’s actions with control, authority, and so on, concerning halloween dress.
No, she didn’t say the terrible things. She used words to put those ideas in the audience’s mind, without actually saying the things. This is how rhetoric works and if those of you who denied she was doing this were really being serious, I don’t even know what to say. The rhetoric of her email was blatant. It was not subtle. To insist on literality and strict logic here is to let her get away with her trolling.
(When I say she was trolling btw I am not necessarily saying she intended to troll. Trolling becomes a habit. People don’t even know they’re doing it. Indeed, they often honestly think they’re engaging intellectually. But if their intellectual engagement issues forth in attempts to elicit a reaction, with nary a thought of learning new truths, then whatever they think they’re doing, what they are actually doing is trolling. “Politeness” “civility” and “rationality” only make the trolling more effective if they’re good at it.)
Sorry, I’ve gone on, and I know a lot of what I just said probably made little sense. But DSeid and LHoD et al, you are my heroes in this thread.