Eh. I know for a fact that we had this conversation in the 90s. I would guess we had it in the 80s. I’d be surprised if we hadn’t had it in the 70s, and the 60s as well.
Universities have always been full of left-leaning kids trying out political activism in a bit of a bubble.
Indeed.
Nobody wants to be a bigot, but we are told that all issues begin and end with race. To deny this fundamental truth is to be a bigot, and to deny that this truth is a truth is to also be a bigot. It’s a tautological trap, and the only escape is to embrace the truth that racism is the primary force that drives society. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, and it binds us together.
Racism is the Force?
In reality, no one here has said this. To refresh your memory*, when I posted about Cornell U.'s policy I said
(bolding added for emphasis).
*I can’t use this phrase without thinking of the classic Thurber cartoon.
And since it’s Xmas, you deserve another cartoon. Chill, babe.
I know what you said. It still incompletely represents the actual policy, which is fine with such usage in specific contexts.
:rolleyes: Which is lovely, because during the sixties, there was nobody pulling a “kids these days” act, right? The older generation totally took sixties protestors seriously, didn’t they?
I admit to no such conclusion.
Definitely had it in the 1950s. Ever heard of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale?
You’re correct. Usually I’m more careful in my wording, but I was sloppy here (my daughter came up to me mid-post and wanted me to play, so I rushed through it). I should have said that some people on the right play this stupid game of incorrectly representing and selectively quoting in order to Trump up charges against liberals. Breitbart is like the grande dame of this sort of behavior, but there are plenty of others, and their bullshit should not be believed. [edit: if you are reading this and posted one of these links, you’re almost certainly one of the people who should know better than to believe the bullshit–it’s extraordinarily unlikely that you’re the original source of the bullshit. Just to be clear.]
I sincerely apologize for this post in which I blamed the right, no qualifications, for this behavior.
And if that were all that were going on–if folks were saying, “On this list, I think the decorated tree is more Christmasy than mistletoe,” I might even agree–and there’s no fucking way we’d be discussing this memo, get real, because who the hell cares about how some college ranks sort-of-generic symbols for their guidelines for staff parties and the like?
But let’s not pretend that that’s why we’re discussing this issue. We’re not discussing this in a thread on which holiday symbols are the most secular. We’re discussing this in a thread on political correctness run amok, which it emphatically is not an example of.
This was my first guess too. If I had to hazard a guess about the bureaucrat’s reasoning behind putting mistletoe in the same category as a menorah (and I don’t, and neither does anyone else, because again who the hell cares except inasmuch as it’s another ginned up example of KEEE-RAAAAAZY KOLLEGE HIJINKS), I’d guess that they were talking about holiday symbols and which list to put them on, and mistletoe came up, and somebody said, “Oh, HELL no, remember Dawkins at the last Christmas party? That shit goes on the NOPE list,” and that’s where it ended up.
But that is exactly what is going on due to your posts. You didn’t believe the original post on the subject and demanded a cite. You got one and then went off telling us how it made total sense. And yet it doesn’t. You were ready to pounce on this and defend it as a rational policy because mistletoe = Christmas. I already agreed it wasn’t a bid deal, except when people like you bend themselves into pretzels trying to defend it. Most people look at it and say: Yeah, stupid.
College ought to be a place where kids can hear a thought, challenge it, and dismantle it if it is without merit. What I seem to be hearing now is that kids can hear a thought and then wish it far far away if it frightens them or doesn’t fit into their little box.
Soon enough they’ll learn that the world doesn’t work that way, but I think the longer this revelation is delayed, the crueler it becomes.
Well, you laugh, but imagine when one of these kids, finally reaching full adulthood, enters the workforce and sees :eek: :eek: :eek: MISTLETOE!!! somewhere in the workforce. How on God’s green earth do you expect them to process that when all along they thought they were in a “safe space”?
The idea of a “safe space” ought to be abandoned altogether.
We live on Earth, with humans, and it can be a very unsafe place to be. The only safe space ever was your home, when you were a little child. And only if you had a decent childhood.
There are no safe spaces in adulthood. One can only hope to be tough enough to deal with all of the crap that life throws your way and figure out what things are meaningful to get upset about and shrug off the rest.
And there are definitely things to get upset about and reasons to fight. But if you can’t tell when it’s important, you’ll spend your whole life fighting everything and winning at nothing.
Hopefully many of these students majored in something related to Human Resources, there will be plenty of jobs to go around.
“What I seem to be hearing now…” Isn’t this Great Debates?
Some may remember the Duke Lacrosse case, when three white male lacrosse players were accused of rape by a black stripper and a group of 88 professors spent money to run an ad declaring that this instance of rape was obvious proof of the horrible racism and sexism that occurred all the time at Duke. Shortly thereafter, overwhelming evidence showed that the lacrosse players were innocent and all charges were dropped.
Wellthe professors who were behind the attack ad seem to come rather heavily from departments like Anthropology, Sociology, Women’s Studies, Black Studies, and so forth. I see one each from Math and Physics, and no others from any technical field.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that some students who want useful skills from their education are moving to coding boot camps where they only have to pay for knowledgeable people teaching, rather than having part of their tuition diverted to the three-ring circus that is humanities and social sciences.
That whole debacle was a shameful embarrassment for the University and for the race-baiting media at large. Sharpton and crew should be outcasts of our society for their behavior.
This is a terrible summary. Here’s what really happened:
Are you seeing a pattern? Is there a reason why you’re missing the fact that this is a discussion about political correctness, and that this memo is a terrible example of such a phenomenon? Or do you believe it’s a great example of political correctness and have just been keeping your reasons for this belief a secret?
They’re not the only ones. The University of Tennessee’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion issued guidelines for making holiday parties conformist and uninclusive, as well as joyless and bland. Examples:
Holiday parties and celebrations should celebrate and build upon workplace relationships and team morale with no emphasis on religion or culture. Ensure your holiday party is not a Christmas party in disguise
Holiday parties and celebrations should not play games with religious and cultural themes–for example, ‘Dreidel’ or ‘Secret Santa.’
The media reported it and the guidelines disappeared, proving once again that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
There’s a certain amount of “can’t see the forest for the trees” here. The real PC part is that people feel the need to tell other people how they should celebrate Christmas. Here’s a thought: Let people celebrate their fucking holidays they way they want to celebrate their fucking holidays. If you don’t like the Baby Jesus themed Christmas party, don’t go. There are plenty of Santa themed ones you can attend. And if Santa offends you, maybe you should stay in your dorm room and read a book or find some like-minded friends and go out for Chinese food. If I was living in a Muslim-majority country, I’d have no reservations about celebrating with my Muslim friends. The same way I was happy to celebrate seders with my Jewish friends when I was invited.
Here’s a thought: let employers set the fucking rules for their businesses the way they want to set the fucking rules for their businesses.
Are you seriously going to say that a business that doesn’t want their employees setting up crosses on outside windows, or that doesn’t want mistletoe at holiday parties, is PC?
Again: in the Cornell case, people were allowed to celebrate their fucking holidays the way they wanted to celebrate their fucking holidays in their own space.
The forest that’s getting missed here isn’t some insidious PC culture. It’s the culture of certain folks on the right who are looking for any excuse to attack multiculturalism, to attack the idea that Christianity shouldn’t reign supreme. Buying into their nonsense is a bizarre thing to do.
