Do you think the campus is under some sort of obligation to give a forum to all points of view? Were the students not free to say “We are not interested in giving time and space to someone who offends us. Since both time and space is available on a limited basis, let’s try to do better.” based on this “Commencement Address” he gave on his show? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgKnKBdpnKc
BTW, if you are truly interested in knowing why they object to him being the commencement speaker, this interview with the students tells us a lot. Berkeley Students Want Bill Maher Out As Commencement Speaker: Here's Why - YouTube
I don’t know what it tells you, but it tells me that they’re a couple of completely unpersuasive twits who think he’s going to come on campus and rail against Islam. Maher is a mainstream pundit and comedian. I very much doubt he would have offended anyone in a commencement speech. He was cancelled on the basis of anger over a single viewpoint that pissed off a community that was once a fervent advocate of free speech and has today become “woke” and has a recalcitrant need to demonstrate that fact.
In contrast, closer to home, several university campuses have also cancelled scheduled speakers, and those were far-right lunatics whose schtick was peddling falsehoods and promoting violence. I fully supported banning them, not because they were right-wing, but because they were fundamentally toxic full-time shit-disturbers and nothing more. I think one of them was Ann Coulter, another may have been a neo-Nazi. Putting Maher in that category is offensive.
But AFAICT, it was never intended for the general public. It was from an internal program. The Washington Examiner got wind of it and blew it all out of proportion (shock!).
All the right-wingers I know will latch onto something that Fox News or some such has put out, and use it to justify their opinions without ever considering if the source is accurate. And they always fall back on the same tired stories, regardless of how discredited those stories are.
Its the same grift Tucker Carlson pulls on his show. The only difference is that since Maher is not a white nationalist like Tucker, but a cranky old Democrat, he can get away with lazy scapegoating of progressive Gen-Zers for views and “moral panic”.
I’m the furthest thing imaginable from a “right-winger” in almost all respects, so I don’t know why you bring that up. And I don’t see that it makes any difference that it wasn’t intended for the general public. It was intended for whatever domain the students felt they had influence over, presumably the university campus. “It” – whatever way you want to define it – a list of suggestions, a list of discussion points, whatever – proposed that certain very common words be excised from the language, and therefore it needs to be evaluated on those terms. Which is just what critics like McWhorter have been doing, and it’s a good bet that he knows a lot more about language and its impacts than the naive idealists composing that list.
So, to be clear, @wolfpup , do you think it’s a bad idea to examine our language from time to time and wonder whether we might be carelessly using words that are hurtful to someone else?
Personally, i think that’s a good thing to do.
I think it’s a fine idea, and any implication that I’ve said otherwise is a misreading of the things I’ve written. I’ve indicated my support for gender-neutral terminology, for instance, and the reason for it (in this case, it’s not about avoiding being “hurtful”, but about dispelling an ingrained world-view of male dominance). Not all changes are on an equal footing. Some are valuable and the reason can be readily explained, others are more controversial and the merits can be debated, and still others are just plain stupid with no credible justification. Someone pointed out that these distinctions are subjective, as indeed they are, but I think reasonable people can be in general agreement about the valuable ones versus the outright stupid ones.
Huh. Since the point of the Brandeis exercise wasn’t to convince anyone to stop using those particular words, but was, instead, to encourage people to think about which words might be hurtful or inappropriate, i got the opposite impression.
It’s real simple-Just dismiss those with a different opinion as stupid and/or “woke” and those that remain can come to an agreement and still have time for lunch.
Wrong. Has anyone in this thread actually defended the nonsense at Brandeis? Maybe someone did and I missed it, but what I’ve seen is arguments that they were only suggestions, that they weren’t enforceable, that they appear to have been withdrawn, that no one would have even known about it if Republicans would just shut up, etc. I haven’t seen anyone say that these were actually terrific ideas.
And I am certain that you are indeed very far from a right-winger.
Just pointing out that when this sort of “outrage” is pushed by RW media whose only motivation is to make people angry, it has a real effect. We really have to consider the source, and consider what the real facts of the matter are. In this case, it’s a whole lot of nothing. But some people didn’t get the memo, and people are still dredging it up as a reason for outrage.
When I read stuff like this, the first thing I do is google “Debunking X”. McWhortle should have done the same thing. It’s old, dead, insignificant “news”.
Everything else you’ve written, including the rest of this post, gives me precisely the opposite impression.
It’s a very short post, and makes just three points:
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I’m fine with the idea of examining our language from time to time and making appropriate changes (the kinds of changes that I previously described as promoting greater respect or inclusiveness).
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I fully support gender-neutral terminology as an example of such positive change, because there are good and clear reasons for it.
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Not all language changes have equal merit.
Would you be kind enough to show me what part of that gives you the “precisely the opposite impression” from what you quoted? I have to assume that you’re making the most uncharitable possible interpretation of any ambiguity, and even then I’m not seeing how that impression can be supported. But maybe there’s more ambiguity there than I thought.
I didn’t see this comment earlier. That wasn’t the way McWhorter presented the issue, nor was it at clear from the TV station’s article about it, which began “Brandeis University in Waltham has released an “Oppressive Language List,” as well as recommendations for more neutral language, in an effort to promote a more inclusive campus.” Your “opposite impression” seems to come from an understanding of what the Brandeis affair was about which may well be correct, but of which I was not aware.
I have. The “nonsense” at Brandeis was an attempt to examine common language critically, with the goal of thinking about what common language might be hurtful. I think this exercise was valuable. The actual examples they came up with wasn’t the point of the exercise, and it’s not terribly important that some of them are silly. When i lift weights I’m wasting my time, because i put them down again, and nothing is gained. Except the point isn’t to make the weights higher, it’s to exercise my weight-lifting muscles.
But you seem to think that you should be the one to judge which deserve merit and which don’t. All they wanted to do was have a private informal discussion on the merits of some words. Don’t you think that what they attempted to do was an ideal way to weigh in on this?
So what was actually gained that was valuable? I’m obviously not privy to the inner workings of PARC, but what I see from the outside looking in is:
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A list of “oppressive language” was produced, AFAICT as part of PARC’s Response to Anti-Blackness, Spring 2021 Update.
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Some substantial number of the terms on that list were so silly (read “unworkable”) that they were ridiculed in the media and in the linguistic community (namely, Language Log).
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Subsequently both the list and the Spring 2021 Update seem to have disappeared. All that’s left now is the original PARC’s Response to Anti-Blackness from the previous year (2020) containing just the original one-sentence generic statement about dealing with oppressive language.
So if something was achieved with this exercise, it’s not immediately evident what it is.
Well, they learned that all private conversations should produce valuable results, otherwise they might be leaked and ridiculed.
Not enough to form an opinion on the subject because we are not privy to the actual discussion on the merits of exercise? For all we know they might have found that they agreed with you on the silliness of some of the choices. I am not going to criticize their efforts on what little information there is.
Actually, nevermind.