That’s an interesting world view, mainly interesting for how wrong it is.
Case in point: I would be judged a liberal by most standards, certainly by American standards. I support nuclear power. I recently quoted a number of leading climate scientists – the kind that conservatives are always railing against – who wrote an open letter to Congress endorsing nuclear power as an essential part of the solution to climate stabilization.
And it’s not just me, or the climate scientists’ open letter. I live in a Canadian province that is liberal even when compared to the most liberal US states, and I take pride in the fact that more than half of Ontario’s power generation comes from nuclear. This is concurrent with major investments in wind and solar, with most of the rest coming from hydro. None comes from coal any more. This seems like a pretty good balance.
In the US, only three states come close to the same proportion of power from nuclear, and of those three, two are traditionally considered liberal states: NJ and Connecticut.
Your alleged facts are strangely at variance with reality.
I think that the Telegraph’s headline is wrongheaded to an extreme. But I think it is a symptom of the media’s (left and right leaning) to create controversy in order to drive readership. It’s not a left wing conspiracy, it is a great deal of spin.
That said, the underlying points of the article, that racial discomfort can unintentionally lead to feelings of ostracization, seem pretty obvious.
I don’t feel like going back and looking all the way through the article, but did it say that anyone who does not use proper eye contact is a racist, or did it say that it was one of the signs of a possible racist?
If the former, you have a point, if the latter, not so much.
And speaking of spin, here’s my attempt to turn Shodon’s quote on its head.
So conservatives want to do something about taxes because they are anti-tax, but only in ways that are pro-monopoly. And they are so pro-monopoly that they turn against low taxes when it comes to renewable power.
Actually that seems like a fairly clear presentation of the attitude. “We can’t support renewable power, which has a chance of working, because some monopoly might loose its profit margins. We prefer solutions like oil, that funds terrorist and pollutes the planet, because at least the 1 percenters can double their earnings every decade.”
And this shows how conservatives support tax cuts. And it’s liberals’ fault.
And before anyone jumps on me how renewable’s could save tax money, consider how much taxes we have paid to fund renewable technology compared to the trillions we’ve spent on middle-eastern wars to keep the “cheap” oil flowing.
The point was that if the Telegraph had reported on that, The Telegraph would had turned a talk about how some interns commenting about educators trivializing the holocaust by making games about it into a report about how “The ADL is making a Warcraft game with Jews being gassed!”.
I guess what you miss that in this case is the conservative media was the best example of what you are complaining about, only in reverse.
So no response I guess. The Telegraph, or conservative media have nothing at all to do with this. The original source was posted and quoted verbatim. Waving the flag of conservative media is a thinly veiled dodge and not an effective one. It doesn’t matter what the Telegraph said or didn’t say because the actual source says the same thing.
Omitting context, again the idea was to smear the whole university (and by extension, all liberals out there) as if it was teaching that to all. Point being that there is really not much of a slope to be slipping there. Nut picking indeed.
Again, it has to be said, the exaggerations made in the reporting do indeed make the attempts at trying to make this to be a serious issue to only cause others to laugh at the attempts at making a mountain about that mole hill.
Right, so it says “Might include”, right?
It’s a suggestion, a suggestion for the staff to keep in mind when interacting with students of diverse backgrounds, to ensure that the students don’t feel as though they are being disrespected due to their race.
It’s not bad advice, really, I’ve been to many HR seminars that pretty much the same thing; that holding yourself aloof and reusing to make eye contact or to direct your speech towards an individual may make that individual feel as though you are being dismissive. Being dismissive towards a marginalized minority can come across as being dismissive specifically because of race, even though it may be for other factors, or because you are just generally aloof.
Making eye contact and speaking directly to a person makes that person feel as though you are acknowledging their existence, and it is a very powerful way of keeping someone’s attention, so it’s probably just good advice over all. Two reason why it is related to racial issues, one that without thinking of it, staff may allow unconscious bias to prevent them from treating them as they would a majority student, and also that, the minority student deals with such micro aggressions on a regular basis, so it is hard for them to tell if you are refusing to acknowledge them because you are aloof to all, or because you have a conscious or unconscious bias against them.
I do not find that a suggestion made to the staff in order to get the staff to have a better relationship with the students really works the way that the telegraph article portrays it, nor how you have apparently taken it. All in all, this article smacks of nothing more than the right wing outrage machine desperately looking for things to be outraged about, and utterly failing, once a second look is taken at their claims, but of course, they bank on the idea that many of their readers will not bother to check or challenge their claims.
Yes, but the actual source, as previously noted, is the discreditable National Review which, as also previously noted, substantially distorted and sensationalized the facts. My only recent acquaintance with the National Review is that the climate change denying lunatic Mark Steyn has been using it as a platform for pushing denialism and also, as a bonus, he and some other columnists there have been using it to try to smear Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, in response to which Mann launched a defamation lawsuit against Steyn and the publication. The last I heard the suit got the go-ahead by the DC Court of Appeals after the defendants tried to block it.
So, IOW, following allow with k9’s logic, you concede you have no point.
Besides not being deserving of scary quotes as **k9bfriender **points out, the whole things looks like if a secretary in a department at George Shultz’s Bechtel Group had said in a lifestyles internal newsletter that nuclear power was going to fail in the long run. Once one finds the context, one should be appalled later when finding that a tabloid reporter wrote that George Shultz told their shareholders about an impending meltdown.
Sure the press did quote the secretary properly, but the result was not only misleading. Even if one grants them that the quotes are original, pretending that it was Shultz telling it to shareholders, the reporter there was going into lying territory. It is really underwhelming in the extreme when it was very likely that a secretary was just pondering. Of course, if they had reported about who the mundane source was, it would not have been news. Nuts are indeed working in all places, but it is also a fallacy to cherry pick, or as mentioned before: to nut pick. When the idea is to try to smear an institution or a class of people.
People who don’t understand the social cues of eye contact cannot transform themselves based on such guidance; it may well be ignored or taken to unnerving extremes.
“Treat people like you treat people.” That’s all. But no, calling out (even as a possibility) that eye contact is a “microaggression,” is more ludicrous than helpful.
[ol]
[li]So you don’t know what the word “might” means?[/li][li]You can’t expect your audience to know the specific reason why you’re not making eye contact. From their perspective, they see a sign of disrespect, even if the reasons you’re doing it aren’t completely out of your control. So be aware of the situation, and when someone calls you on it have some understanding for how it might come off as you explain what’s actually going on. As someone whose anxiety makes it hard to make eye contact, and who additionally has difficulty understanding spoken language (even English, my native language)–something that often comes off as inattentiveness–I figured this out long ago.[/li][/ol]
People who don’t make eye contact are obviously suffering social phobia, a serious condition. Those that call the sufferers of this condition racists are, in fact, using micro-aggressions… At the same time, those suffering from social phobia are using micro-aggressions against anyone they do not make eye contact with.
So, the answer is clear.
Shoot them all*.
Slee
It’s a joke, son*.
** Is that unacceptable? Should it have been 'It’s a joke, <insert your preferred gender pronoun here, unless of course you don’t believe in gender. Then insert whichever word makes you feel all squishy and happy inside>?
The deduction that I could make millions as a therapist by simply reprinting that pamphlet.
I notice that you quote me, or paraphrase me, as saying, “They cannot transform themselves.”
But of course what I actually said is, with newly-added emphasis on a relevant phrase: “People who don’t understand the social cues of eye contact cannot transform themselves based on such guidance…”
Such guidance being, of course, a line in a newsletter. Certainly those with trouble intuiting social cues for eye contact can transform themselves with more robust guidance.
