The good ones have been done: Mother Earth; Protect the Weak; Enjoy good sex; Malign the wealthy; Death to Nixon.
What’s left is a bunch of lame-ass pretense that stupid shit is Important.
A racist lurking in every shadow; verbal insults turned into a Weapon of Aggression; standard ridicule made out to be Actionable Offenses…
Yeah; it’s pitiful. But kids need a Great Cause. Without them, they would have to meet an academic standard to feel significant, and who wants to substitute mastery of a topic for the easier-to-attain significance of being a Victim?
Only a handful can be Top Tier academically. Everyone can be a Victim, with enough training, and Victimhood has far too many delicious secondary gains to pass up.
“Political correctness” is simply ugly-speak for diminishing my Cause from Great to bullshit. As a matter of fact, calling something I CARE ABOUT “political correctness” is AGGRESSION, you asshole!
Cite please? Ward Churchill compared the victims of the WTC massacre as “little Eichmans”-ergo, they deserved their fate. Is this not false, hateful, and barnrupt of morality? And he claimed to be American Indian-he is not.
in short, every statement you made is false.
Boy howdy–doesn’t context just make a difference! The guidelines specifically state that religious symbols and specific-holiday symbols may be displayed in
However, there are other guidelines for holiday displays that “would give the impression that the symbol is associated with the university.” These rules are far stricter and should in general be “focusing on the winter season rather than a particular holiday.” It’s this latter set of guidelines that discourage mistletoe, along with crosses, stars of David, angels, etc.–again, all of which are allowed in private displays, displays by campus groups using the display areas that are always available to campus groups, and so on.
This terrible example of political correctness run amok? It is, like virtually every other example, overwrought and incorrectly represented; it is an entirely reasonable item in a set of entirely reasonable guidelines.
Cite for what, for my claim that he’s out of the mainstream of leftist thought? You provided the cite! He called victims of the WTC massacre “little Eichmans”! Are you for real trying to claim this is within mainstream leftist thought?
It’s also not like right-wingers don’t get equally hysterical over trivial stuff.
Think about how many people actually believe that Christians, or whites, or men, or heterosexuals face huge amounts of discrimination or that there really is a “War on Christmas”.
I’m not sure which I find weirder this time of year. The number of adults who get upset over hearing someone say “happy holidays” or the number of those same people who with a total lack of self-awareness wonder why people might not like being told “Merry Christmas”.
Uh, of course it’s not. It’s specifically a symbol of Christmas–or do you think it’s a common element of Hanukkah and Diwali displays?
People who are reading this as saying that such things can’t be put up by groups or individuals need to reread the entire document, including the parts that specifically describe how specific (as opposed to inclusive) displays may be made.
I don’t see it as any different from Holly in that regard. Holly = OK*; Mistletoe = Not OK. Or “decorated trees”.
It’s not really a big deal… unless you insist on defending what is clearly a stupid decision by whoever wrote that. If someone is offended by mistletoe, they need to grow the fuck up.
Secular things that are still associated with Christmas:
Snowflakes (used as decorations)
Decorated Trees
Misteltoe
Holly.
If you (and this is directed at everyone) had NOT read the Cornell document and were instructed to strike one of those things off the list as being “too Christmasy” to be inclusive, which would it be?
For me, it would the tree. But all of those things are related to Christmas. All of them.
I’d have guessed the problem with mistletoe is less that it’s not inclusive, and more the whole, “If you’re near this plant, I get to kiss you,” aspect.
Well, we do see rampant political correctness in the political arena, and for decades now, academia has been very politicized. As such it stands to reason that PR has crept into college campuses. Like the OP, I can’t say for sure how bad it is, since I haven’t been on a campus in many years. But there is plenty of anecdotal evidence swimming around the internet to suggest that it is a bit out of hand.
Political correctness in general is, in my opinion, an indirect assault on free speech and ultimately free thought. If you can’t lawfully stop people from saying certain things, the next best thing is labeling what they say as hate speech or racist or sexist.
There are so many issues in society that ought to be debated head-on, but aren’t because everyone is afraid of being labeled as some sort of bigot if they use the wrong word or point out facts that are inconvenient. It has created a chilling effect on public debate about a great many topics, and I think the same is happening on college campuses. That is a travesty if true.
Okay, it’s the product of an overly energetic 5% (if that) of the student body who are becoming politically active for the first time and going a bit overboard, and not otherwise something a rational person would find particularly concerning.
The problem is that while sympathizers hand-wave the lunacy as mere “outliers,” universities capitulate and professors/administrators have their reputations and livelihoods put on the line.
For example, a couple hooligans paint swastikas and the UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT loses his job?
Here is the Yale Intercultural Affairs Committee email, which encouraged students to take a moment to think about their costume choices, and gave a simple four-question test to gauge whether a costume was offensive or not.
Here is the Erika Christakis email, in which she posits (among various tangents) that the original email represented adults exerting control over young people, and that offending people is part of the traditional college experience.
Lastly, here is the open letter directed at Erika Christakis. It does not included a demand for Yale to ban any costumes; it’s a rebuttal of Christakis’ points (such as that the idea of not wearing offensive costumes originated with the administration and not from students’ complaints), and objects to how Christakis trivialized the underlying issues.
That spin is pretty bad. The president and chancellor resigned not because of people painting swastikas, they resigned because they handled that - and other racial incidents on campus - horribly. By the school’s own admission: