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I've got some scattered thoughts on this that are all things I've been thinking about for awhile.

 

A)  There's a tendency to treat all offense as equal levels of oppression, so a fan artist doing something racist is the same as a major network producing a racist character.  Both may be bad, but one clearly reaches an audience of scale of radically different proportion and matters a lot more. 

 

Sunglasses) Related to that, it can feel difficult or impossible to address offenses that actually matter, like institutional oppression in our major institutions (government, police, academia, etc), to the point that it's easier to feel apathy about change than it is do anything.  But, you can yell at some individual on Tumblr who will actually listen and pay attention to you, so that feels like doing something.

 

C) I think the age thing Markson mentioned matters a lot, on both sides.  Many communities seem to have an expectation of equal levels of wisdom in regards to social justice, regardless of age, upbringing, geography, context, etc.  We should all strive to improve ourselves, but the reality is that many people are going to have different levels of hurdles to get past to make that improvement.  The message becomes that active growth is bad, because if you need to grow, then that means you're a bad person who has done/thought bad things, and thus are irredeemable.  I've got two people on my Facebook feed who regularly make posts along the lines of "If you think X, then just go ahead and de-friend me now, because I don't need you in my life."  I see that thought run through something like this whole fiasco as well.  If all you are interested in doing is preaching to the choir, why do you speak at all?  Your words have no meaning, or purpose, for they will never enact change, and that's what you claim you want. 

 

D) Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ghandi wouldn't be welcome on Tumblr, or in a whole bunch of other communities.  Tumblr today would reject, cast out and seek to destroy MLK as a misogynist of the worst degree.  Change will never come from the perfect, because there are no perfect people.  And yet, such is the standard that is set.  Seek, raise, praise, question, destroy, seek again.  This is the cycle of existing with any degree of prominence within these communities, it seems. 

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Social media is not a place for discussion and growth thanks to the sheer volume of possible feedback.  It is a place where you entrench and fight.

 

What a missed opportunity for society to grow.

 

On page 5 there was similar discussion to this and it's interesting that none of our views really changed :P

 

Except back there we talked about a women who somehow had the strength to endure through all the crap thrown at her and here we have younger girl who was crumbling under it... so it's just more sad :x

 

The irony upon irony and sadness that ensues from this is just argh

 

https://twitter.com/StickerSymphony/status/659483861844267008

http://matriarchalmuffin.tumblr.com/

 

I hope none of us engages in that kind of shit show :x

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I've got some scattered thoughts on this that are all things I've been thinking about for awhile.

 

A)  There's a tendency to treat all offense as equal levels of oppression, so a fan artist doing something racist is the same as a major network producing a racist character.  Both may be bad, but one clearly reaches an audience of scale of radically different proportion and matters a lot more. 

 

Sunglasses) Related to that, it can feel difficult or impossible to address offenses that actually matter, like institutional oppression in our major institutions (government, police, academia, etc), to the point that it's easier to feel apathy about change than it is do anything.  But, you can yell at some individual on Tumblr who will actually listen and pay attention to you, so that feels like doing something.

 

C) I think the age thing Markson mentioned matters a lot, on both sides.  Many communities seem to have an expectation of equal levels of wisdom in regards to social justice, regardless of age, upbringing, geography, context, etc.  We should all strive to improve ourselves, but the reality is that many people are going to have different levels of hurdles to get past to make that improvement.  The message becomes that active growth is bad, because if you need to grow, then that means you're a bad person who has done/thought bad things, and thus are irredeemable.  I've got two people on my Facebook feed who regularly make posts along the lines of "If you think X, then just go ahead and de-friend me now, because I don't need you in my life."  I see that thought run through something like this whole fiasco as well.  If all you are interested in doing is preaching to the choir, why do you speak at all?  Your words have no meaning, or purpose, for they will never enact change, and that's what you claim you want. 

 

D) Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ghandi wouldn't be welcome on Tumblr, or in a whole bunch of other communities.  Tumblr today would reject, cast out and seek to destroy MLK as a misogynist of the worst degree.  Change will never come from the perfect, because there are no perfect people.  And yet, such is the standard that is set.  Seek, raise, praise, question, destroy, seek again.  This is the cycle of existing with any degree of prominence within these communities, it seems. 

 

Thanks for this post. All of this stuff has been majorly frustrating to me lately. Many people on the internet these days seem to expect others to all basically have the qualities of a Super Jesus, and if they aren't then everything about them must just be terrible. Every single person I've gotten to know has terrible opinions about certain things and I still have terrible opinions about certain things. People might like the idea of living in a massive echo chamber but a lot of these "terrible people" are often people that are worth having in your life. My best friend is a republican with some opinions that I strongly disagree with but so what? He's a pretty cool dude in a whole bunch of other ways.

 

And honestly, Twitter has made this problem so much worse.

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This kind of thing does tend to happen to young people, but I don't necessarily think I didn't go through the same type of thing growing up, albeit to a vastly smaller audience (a few people being negative vs the whole internet). I think what makes social media unique is that at some point a difference in scale becomes a difference in kind. Just think of any moderately sized twitter fight. They are often over things people wouldn't be thinking about outside of that context, almost like an argument had over a dinner with friends over say a particular football game played years ago. This seems inconsequential at a personal scale, but when CNN or some popular blog decides it's worth covering a feedback loop starts that reinforces its impact and importance. Minor flaws become what defines a person or thing, and bring heard is more important than having something to say. Personally I stopped using twitter, barely check Facebook, and am so much happier for it.

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All the whatever else going on here aside, it's a pretty bizarre thing to involve a bunch of strangers on the internet in attempted suicide drama by first posting about and then coming back with an intensely awkward personal video about it after hospitalization. I feel like even before the fan art debacle, if she willingly puts stuff as personal as this publicly on the internet that would indicate to me she is already in need of major help.

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I don't see what's bizarre about it. Suicide is often a cry for help or attention which stems from existing unresolved issues - the internet is just another avenue for that. I don't think that necessarily makes her less sane, it just means her judgment is impaired, which... if you're at the point where you're attempting suicide, that's kind of a given.

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All the whatever else going on here aside, it's a pretty bizarre thing to involve a bunch of strangers on the internet in attempted suicide drama by first posting about and then coming back with an intensely awkward personal video about it after hospitalization. I feel like even before the fan art debacle, if she willingly puts stuff as personal as this publicly on the internet that would indicate to me she is already in need of major help.

 

It makes perfect sense if the attempt in question was precipitated by harassment from people on the Internet.

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That is some embarrassing shit. I hope those people will look back on themselves and feel bad.

 

Also, I've found that discussing my depression with online folks is a great way to vent in general, so I'm not about to judge someone else for dealing with depression/suicidal thoughts in a generally constructive way.

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I don't know why people see fat shaming as bad but bigotry shaming as a-okay. Fat shaming is bad because using shame as a weapon is bad, not because fat is good. (Fat is whatever.)

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I think the idea is that bigotry is worse than shaming. Which I could see the argument for if it wasn't that bigotry was viewed as some awful taint on your soul.

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I think the argument would be that you shouldn't be ashamed of being fat but you should be ashamed of being a bigot. (But yeah, I agree with the sentiments that bullying/shaming is not criticism, and that expecting/demanding that people be perfect in all opinions and actions is foolish.)

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Synth, I'm surprised by your lack of sympathy here. Suicide attempts, whether successful or not, are messy and bizarre in many different ways. But I find it hard to believe that someone would risk their life simply to bully some bullies on the internet. It seems more likely to me that it was her same dependence on internet approval and acceptance which led her to attempt suicide that also led her to keep communicating online during her recovery. Unless you believe she faked her suicide attempt, you surely understand that she's in an extremely fragile psychological state.

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We've spoken about this a bit before, but I've seen a lot about this particular incident lately.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/

Whenever I see an article like this I like to think it's an isolated thing, but it seems like this is becoming the new norm. The responses to any contradicting opinion seem to become more hostile, widespread and in some cases violent. in this case to an email of all things, which seems to be so far the most absurd reaction to something like this. I would be interested in sitting in on a class where sensitive topics are discussed, but if this is indicative of the tennor of a college campus today I feel like any conversation like that would be over before it began.

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Criticizing her original email is fine, as it honestly had some pretty dumb/ignorant things in it (particularly in the second half).  I could break it down, but it's late and I'm tired.

 

 

But, if the article is correct about people hounding them, harassing them, attempting to get them removed from at least one of their positions...no, that's not okay.  That's the nuclear flyswatter approach.  I firmly believe that everyone has to have some room to make some mistakes and learn, and that email seems like a prime opportunity for some discussion and education (on the staff/faculty side needing to learn things). 

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Whenever I see an article like this I like to think it's an isolated thing, but it seems like this is becoming the new norm. The responses to any contradicting opinion seem to become more hostile, widespread and in some cases violent. in this case to an email of all things, which seems to be so far the most absurd reaction to something like this. I would be interested in sitting in on a class where sensitive topics are discussed, but if this is indicative of the tennor of a college campus today I feel like any conversation like that would be over before it began.

But, if the article is correct about people hounding them, harassing them, attempting to get them removed from at least one of their positions...no, that's not okay.  That's the nuclear flyswatter approach.  I firmly believe that everyone has to have some room to make some mistakes and learn, and that email seems like a prime opportunity for some discussion and education (on the staff/faculty side needing to learn things). 

 

Except for the power of a national-scale news outlet aggregating the reactions of dozens upon dozens of different students to a campus scandal, making it seem a massive and coordinated response by the entire student body, I don't see anything particularly out of the ordinary here for a university campus, neither when I went to college a dozen years ago or when I teach at a college today. Yeah, that email is almost offensively Pollyanna to me, especially in the same week of news that saw Mizzou football players striking to force the institution's president to step down over racist remarks, and I might be outspoken enough to say so in the public view if I were a student at Yale today. Clearly, many actual students at Yale felt the same way, each individually or in small groups, because they're still teenagers and often overreact to upsetting things with an insufficient level of jadedness and realpolitik, but that's not the same as a student-led movement to silence "dissenting views," especially since the article in the Atlantic doesn't really bother to make clear what those views would even be.

 

Honestly, I'm going to say it more explicitly than I've ever said it before on these forums: I have spent eleven years now in post-secondary education, three of them also teaching between sixty and seventy students. I have around two dozen friends with whom I'm in regular contact who are also either teachers, students, or both at a post-secondary level. In all of this time, among all of these people, I have never encountered anything as apocalyptically pervasive as the stuff that's regularly reported about trigger warnings and social justice gone maaad. I've never even heard a second- or thirdhand account that approaches it. It's all through these news outlets, with a nigh-invariable tone of hand-wringing about these darn over-sensitive kids, and that doesn't surprise me at all, because news outlets have several large incentives to research and publish these kinds of articles.

  • First, as has always been the case since "political-correctness" became a thing in the nineties, you can generate a lot of page-views conflating the efforts of oppressed people and their allies to create safe spaces for themselves with the censorship of a nebulous "dissent," something that has provided reliable fuel for movements like #GamerGate as well as the old-fashioned racism of Greek organizations, for example. Apparently, in a truly tolerant society, people of color would be better to let white people go in blackface, if that's what those white people have always wanted deep down, or at least ask them why they're doing it — so says some middle-class white woman.
  • Second, criticism of contemporary campus activism is always popular, if only as a low-grade form of whataboutism, because it makes people reading the Atlantic feel better for caring about the real issues (whatever they may be; the article cites massacres of First Peoples, in an attempt to be both humorous and dismissive) instead of subliminated racism in college administration. With any luck, by the time that "fuck your safe space" becomes the new "hippie cut your hair and get a job," they'll be too old (or dead) to feel sheepish about being bystanders on the wrong side of history.
  • Finally, it makes young people look stupid for caring about shit and saying occasionally ill-considered things, which is also important to readers of the Atlantic. Note, always, that when a person of authority says something dumb or shitty, it's a reasonable mistake that anyone could make, but when a young person (or, heaven forfend, multiple young people) say something dumb or shitty, even in response to a dumb or shitty thing said by someone else, it's a culture of coddling that's killing intellectual discourse in the Western world. Also, don't let our youth grow beards and learn Greek, because that makes them womanly and unfit for political office... wait, sorry, I confused us with Rome in the second century BC. Did you know that human history has been a nonstop decline as successive generations don't properly appreciate the things that previous generations find important and instead are interested in things that previous generations find unimportant or even unpleasant? We'll be hitting rock-bottom, any century now...

Sorry, I know I'm being glib, but I can't emphasize enough how this "coddled college culture" phenomenon seems manufactured to me. Campus scandals have always been like this, if my time reading back issues of my university's newspaper has anything to say about it, but now there's the infrastructure for them to get national attention and a cottage industry devoted to spinning them into a pattern of problems leading to... something bad? I had more I wanted to write, but there's a recent article in the New Republic, another publication that's made some hay in the past on the moral panic over trigger warnings, that covers most of my broader thoughts about the changing dynamics of sensitivity and tolerance in campus culture as a whole: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122543/trigger-warning-myth

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Also, on a much more personal note: if the fear of coddling college-age students is that they'll get a worse education for it, I wish that those people would direct that energy into the adjunct crisis and corporatization of the university system, rather than demanding that victims of childhood abuse to go into reading Lolita blind...

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With any luck, by the time that "fuck your safe space" becomes the new "hippie cut your hair and get a job," they'll be too old (or dead) to feel sheepish about being bystanders on the wrong side of history.

 

Finally, it makes young people look stupid for caring about shit and saying occasionally ill-considered things, which is also important to readers of the Atlantic. Note, always, that when a person of authority says something dumb or shitty, it's a reasonable mistake that anyone could make, but when a young person (or, heaven forfend, multiple young people) say something dumb or shitty, even in response to a dumb or shitty thing said by someone else, it's a culture of coddling that's killing intellectual discourse in the Western world.

 

Dayum, son. Hell of a post.

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Except for the power of a national-scale news outlet aggregating the reactions of dozens upon dozens of different students to a campus scandal, making it seem a massive and coordinated response by the entire student body, I don't see anything particularly out of the ordinary here for a university campus, neither when I went to college a dozen years ago or when I teach at a college today. Yeah, that email is almost offensively Pollyanna to me, especially in the same week of news that saw Mizzou football players striking to force the institution's president to step down over racist remarks, and I might be outspoken enough to say so in the public view if I were a student at Yale today. Clearly, many actual students at Yale felt the same way, each individually or in small groups, because they're still teenagers and often overreact to upsetting things with an insufficient level of jadedness and realpolitik, but that's not the same as a student-led movement to silence "dissenting views," especially since the article in the Atlantic doesn't really bother to make clear what those views would even be.

 

*snip*

 

:tup: :tup:

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I don't think this article, and those like it are so much about the opinion the students are reacting against, and they are only to a lesser extent about the student's reaction. The author makes it clear in a few passages this is about what he sees as a fundamental change in the priorities of a college campus ad a result of the money involved. I get that you haven't experienced this personally Gormongous, but do you work at a 40k+ a year institution? Is you university more concerned with student money than teaching the students? I don't mean to be confrontational here but your post seems to me to be complaining about the same things as the article, just under a different pretext. I'm certainly of the opinion that the students reacting violently to dissenting opinions are a minority, but this minority from most accounts seems to be having a significant impact on their universities by virtue of the corpratization you are talking about. It's not that students are having strong reactions to dissenting opinions, or that students should be made to read distressing material (something I would argue is the purpose of a college, but that is besides the point) it is that the universities are failing miserably in resolving the most predictable conflicts imaginable. It seems like mob justice is becoming an acceptable means of defeating a dissenting opinion, and the university says nothing about that for purely financial concerns.

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So should public protesters, camped out on public land, in full view of the public expect to be able to create "safe spaces" free from people photographing or videotaping them?  I'm particularly bothered that a mass comm professor was involved in driving off a student reporter (she's not a journalism professor, btw). 

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As someone who is still learning about all this stuff, and still holds prejudices, that I am now aware of and actively working to stop...how do I actually...do anything to help people? Reading what people write about and making sure I don't say horrible things feels pretty empty to me.

 

It's better than being an asshole, but only in the sense that it's neutral rather than negative behaviour.  

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I don't think this article, and those like it are so much about the opinion the students are reacting against, and they are only to a lesser extent about the student's reaction. The author makes it clear in a few passages this is about what he sees as a fundamental change in the priorities of a college campus ad a result of the money involved. I get that you haven't experienced this personally Gormongous, but do you work at a 40k+ a year institution? Is you university more concerned with student money than teaching the students? I don't mean to be confrontational here but your post seems to me to be complaining about the same things as the article, just under a different pretext. I'm certainly of the opinion that the students reacting violently to dissenting opinions are a minority, but this minority from most accounts seems to be having a significant impact on their universities by virtue of the corpratization you are talking about. It's not that students are having strong reactions to dissenting opinions, or that students should be made to read distressing material (something I would argue is the purpose of a college, but that is besides the point) it is that the universities are failing miserably in resolving the most predictable conflicts imaginable. It seems like mob justice is becoming an acceptable means of defeating a dissenting opinion, and the university says nothing about that for purely financial concerns.

 

My current institution falls just shy of $40,000 a year. My undergrad institution was $32,000 when I was a freshman and $36,000 when I was a senior, but they've probably passed $40,000 by now. Oops, I just checked it, they're $59,000 a year. Jeez, I wouldn't be able to afford Grinnell if I were a freshman today! That actually makes me a little sad.

 

Anyway, I am not sure that universities paying lip service to student protests is anything new. In 2004, before social media and outrage culture were really going concerns, my undergrad institution signed a lucrative deal with Coca-Cola to make it a Coke-only campus. This was at the same time that the news about "killer Coke" was coming out of Colombia, so there were weekly demonstrations for several months until the administration put the associate dean who brokered the deal on administrative leave and made a promise not to renew that deal when it expired in a year. Grinnell doesn't have a large administration or adjunct staff and, given the largest per-capita endowment in the country, it's not remotely dependent on the tuition of its students or the donations of its alumni, except as metrics for the US News & World Report, so it's minimally vulnerable to the pressures of the corporatized university, yet I have absolutely zero doubt that this is the sort of event that would be reported by news outlets as another example of over-sensitive students complaining about their first-world problems, namely the right to choose which blood- and sweat-soaked product from the developing world to consume. It's anecdotes like this one that make me feel that they're different processes, itsamoose.

 

Yes, university administrations have an incentive to keep their students happy, because they're increasingly regarding them as paying customers. They also have an incentive to keep the students' parents happy, because those are usually the ones paying the tuition, and these two groups often have different priorities. There are also incentives to keep alumni donors, trustees, corporate sponsors, and local elected officials happy. In almost all cases, these are the meaningful interests to an academic institution, thanks in large part to the fucked nature of the aforementioned US News & World Report. The corporatization of the university system means that there are a lot more claims to the attention of individual universities but, like with actual corporations, the student as "customer" only has the least of those claims.

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