PSA to white people:

You can say n****r all the time if you say it like this:

It's actually maybe sorta kinda racist to believe the average black university student would be offended by that.

I need to cold turkey myself from grunching when I read these long threads, I almost posted this exact thing.

Like, opportunity compared to what, Sudan? Breathtaking insight there professor, can I have my tuition fees reimbursed now plz?

Yeah, the above is pretty much this whole thread in a nutshell. Foldn doesn't like various liberal ideas like microaggressions, trigger warnings, safe spaces, and not inviting conservative speakers to commencements but then hamfistedly equates them with censorship or some other infringement of rights. The only other big idea is that Foldn thinks its only fair that people be allowed to say racist things here without being called racist.

No.

Well, you're allowed to say dumb things like this without being called a moron, so you got that going for you. It's not that I dislike ideas like microaggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces, there are contexts in which all of those can be good ideas. It's that it's been demonstrated they are used by far left il-liberals to stifle free expression, which is a bane to education. There is a large debate around those concerns, which, thankfully, the far left is losing with inferior arguments. And it's not just conservative speakers who get disinvited, liberal speakers do too, and I oppose disinviting both.

Note that in foldn's attempts to present this as "of course the fundamental ideas are reasonable its just when they are taken too far that is a problem" there is DEAFENING SILENCE of any time when they are not used enough, when the balance has swung too far the other way.

Like part of me wants to have a good faith agreement here. Something like microaggression is, in my mind a very value concept and one I'm very glad has started to become in our national consciousness. Namely, that so often the dominant culture says and does things that are individually small but on aggregate create a powerful sense of otherization and real world disadvantages (think unconscious resume profiling) and offence and that we can and should be conscious of these things. At the same time I, and I think every other liberal ITT, is happy to acknowledge that of course this issue - like any issue - can go too far as evidence by [insert tumblr blog] and go off into ludicrous territory.

What confuses me though is why fold is so asymmetric here. At the same time that the "too far" category gets the hyperbolic tumblr heap treatment, there is just not a single example or situation ever seemingly raised where fold thinks huh, there is a problem here because these people are using a lot of microaggresions and we should raise that point and try to raise consciousness against that.

FoldN lying about the **** you link doesn't work, why would you expect to get away with lies about the thread itself?

Foldn provides these examples all the time. He must have mentioned five or six of them yesterday right after saving me from a mob of angry Klansmen.

Many here have spent the bulk of this thread making ad hominem claims which don't support any arguments against the claim free speech is threatened on campus. It's tiresome to continue batting them down, so I've been trying to mostly ignore them. But there's one idea that is particularly common and pernicious. Many of you may have read Conor Friedersdorf's takes on campus free speech issues, and he is pretty clear-headed on the often made and easy debunked assertion that free speech advocates are trying to silence students:


Friedesdorf discusses the Intelligence Squared debate (posted earlier) in depth, and closes with:

Ad hominem? Please, for the benefit of new poster 5ive, please quote an ad hominem fallacy I have made.

Foldn, posts 18 and 19 of this thread; that's when the wheels fell off.

p.s. I'm not joking. That error snowballed.

"ad hominem" is one of the most ridiculously overused memes on the internet. Yes, fold, we are criticising YOU and YOUR hilariously bad posting. You have clearly and repeatedly demonstrated zero interest in a good faith discussion of the issues, so pointing out the patterns in your behaviour and explaining why they are bad is entirely apt. So yes, cal it ad hominem if you must but you don't dismiss it by calling it thus.

And it is also true that you continue to ignore the central criticisms leveled at you. You have not, will not, and likely can not defeat them. So you are 2/3.

But let's keep one point completely clear: you have in no shape "batted them down". That fundamental criticism remains entirely untouched from you. Of course, if you actually wanted the good faith conversation you claimed to want - and not just bash away with hyperbole and heap arguments on this issue - at some point you would have to address it and take some responsibility for your own terrible, terrible posting ITT.

I'm only half through this thread but I gotta say Foldn is pretty niggardly with his willingness to admit when he's wrong and somebody else is right.

ThatsTheR-word.jpg

Glad it's not just me that gets wound up by this. Even if people don't mean it this way, it always comes across as a "Look at me with all these fancy Latin fallacies I know". We all know you only know one.

I've been meaning to break this thread up and try actually talking about my experience with "safe space" policies having been a student within the last decade. I'll skip some details (like which uni) because I don't like giving too much personal info.

For those not familiar with UK universities, most activities are run by a related "society". You need a minimum of President, Secretary, and Treasurer, a small constitution, and in return the society is granted some privileges (mostly being allowed to book rooms for meetings, but also things like society advertising).

I was quite involved with a few societies, and some others to a much lesser extent. One that I had some brief dealings with was called the Women's Society. The WS had a strict safe space policy.

Most societies allowed non-student members (although this was rare because non-students didn't typically know about you or care), and allowed membership on a fairly casual basis. The WS had protocols like proving student union membership, and providing your uni ID in order to access their Facebook page. They heavily moderated the page, and if you ever read it it was a wall of trigger warnings. Debate was, to an extent, stifled. They'd hold the odd talk, often with a speaker from the gender studies department. They'd have the odd discussion, but certain avenues were not allowed - it was an expressly feminist group and the whole MRA/anti-feminist spiel usually ended with a delete and often a ban.

So that probably sounds awful to Foldn, I'm sure. But one of the key aims of the WS was to provide support to women who might be dealing with issues like abortion, sexual harassment, assault/abuse (particularly sexual), and any other discrimination. And those women in the group wanted a particular space on campus where these things could be discussed in a non-judgemental, non-aggressive, gentle manner. So yeah, modest proposal type discussion was not conducive to that environment. Hence some debate was stifled.

But the important thing is to then contrast this with the rest of the university. The society I was most involved in (I held committee positions and ran events), the poker society, was not a safe space. Unless it was outright abuse or spam, moderation was at a minimum on our pages. General standard was if you were willing to post it semi-publicly, then on your head be it. At games, if you were non-abusive it didn't make much sense for committee members to censor whatever **** people talked while drinking and gambling.

The debate society was not a safe space. They actually held a discussion over whether they should be, because discussing stuff was what they did, and an almost unanimous vote was that they should not be a safe space. They wanted to talk about any subject no matter how controversial or dark.

The philosophy society was not a safe space. Similar reasons. Policies were about etiquette but not content. You want to argue for moral nihilism or that abortion is genocide, go for it.

The politics society was not a safe space. You want to argue that the Saudi legal system is superior, then it's only your reputation that's at stake.

The rock and metal society was not a safe space. You want to play Necrophagist or Cannibal Corpse full blast? There are guest slots to plug in your iPod at their socials.

Essentially, the vast majority of the campus was not a safe space. Lectures weren't, tutorial groups weren't, most of the social groups weren't, the student union meetings weren't. To the best of my knowledge, only the WS and the LGBTQ society were. And yet, in spite of that, there were plenty of Foldns on campus to whine about how debates were being censored, freedom of speech was non-existent in these groups, people had been banned from pages just for making a few "honest criticisms".

This still appears to be the way that safe spaces operate. Small areas where people can discuss deeply personal issues without the fear and anxiety of doing it elsewhere. And this eminently sensible idea is a great concern to some because somehow, having designated groups in which people aren't castigated for whatever they're trying to deal with might go too far.

It's always clueless. It's always from people who are either extremely conservative and what they mean is "I'm not allowed to push my politics on them whenever I choose" or from those who simply haven't experienced the way they actually function.

Blade that is exactly my experience as having been on campus for well over a decade now from undergrad to grad to now professor. There are a couple places in women studies student groups where they do stifle the standard antiSJW Reddit style group of white males that like to troll about this stuff on every single social media page associated with the university. They try to create a supportive environment where you can talk about your sexual abuse, for instance, without a bunch of trolls. But that's it. That's the worst. the university as a whole is nowhere remotely close to stifling free speech. And most of the caricatures the (far larger and more prominent) antiSJW portrays just don't even exist

Good post.

With all due respect to uke and blade, I am afraid that all of the time you guys spend working, attending and living at universities has colored your perception of things. We really need an unbiased view on this issue. Like a bunch of stand-up comedians who dropped out of high school and avoid college campuses as a matter of principle.

Or fictional takes on the subject from noted authority figures, like imaginary views on how Glenn Greenwald moderates his website.

Does it reveal anything about a person when they think "a safe space" means the entire campus is now banned from no holds barred academic discussion? And that freedom of speech isn't valued?

I don't know by anyone would listen to someone who's never even tried posting homophobic garbage on Glenn Greenwald's forum.

Details aren't important, the important thing is that we can call Mexican people cockroaches on privately owned commercial internet forums without the word being mentioned.

Otherwise, well, free speech no longer exists.

The majority of Conservative acquaintences I almost exclusively interact with on social media completely lack the awareness required to recognize how much of their prating on about safe spaces and freedom of speech is 100% projection. It's like the best real world example of it.

No, calling you a bigot for advocating for suppressing LGBQT rights isn't censorship, isn't prohibiting your free speech rights and isn't safe spaces run amok. All this is is you really, really wanting a safe space to spew ignorance uncontested. That's it!

I think if someone's main posting animus was the consequences of sexism and racism in our society, and how we often try to push that stuff under the rug while we should be having conversations about things like microaggressions and the aggregate harm they can do, in that context it would be perfectly valid for someone to say "oh and hey sometimes these valid ideas get taken a little to far". That would be reasonable. We could have a debate about exactly what the degree of that was. But if your main animus is yelling, dramaticizing, expanding, hyperbolizing every instance where any person fighting racism and sexism debateably steps over the line while never being animated by the racism and sexism itself, then, well, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ47glxcxr0

a big chunk of this crowd isn't old conservatives, its the reddit gamergater type of young white males whose number 1 social signal is apathy and mockery anytime someone gives a **** about something. All the SJW and white night and MGTOW and so forth are coming out of that community, not conservatives. I doubt these guys even vote, and their main political opinion about clinton is lolling at SJWs who only vote for her because she has a vagina