Author Topic: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia  (Read 21866 times)

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Offline mellenORL

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #30 on: January 03, 2016, 10:36:12 pm »
I read it. It's almost Poe-ish...or maybe they are in fact double entendre trolling the admins, sorta like haggling at a flea market; ask a crazy high price, so when it settles, you do indeed get what you actually wanted?
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Offline Sigmaleph

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #31 on: January 04, 2016, 02:29:34 pm »
The argument that's used is that it's only a tool of oppression and racism if implemented by oppressors.  If it's implemented by a marginalized group, then it's fine because they're creating safe spaces free from oppression they face everywhere else in society.

so if the majority wants to separate from the minority, it's segregation. if it's the opposite it's safe-spaces?

... i've been back from a three-day bender and i still feel i need a drink for that one.

There are non-obvious complications, I think. I mean, most people would agree that a woman who was recently raped by a man and now has painful flashbacks to it every time they see someone that reminds them of their rapist has a right to a space away from men? Or trans people who are harassed regularly might want a place where chances of being harassed are low and so only invite other trans people?

And most people would agree that if I run an elite university and only allow white people to join, or if I own a company that only employs men, I'm kind of fucking over people.

(if you don't agree with the above I wanna hear about it, too)

And to some extent the principle of "certain spaces like workplaces and universities are not allowed to discriminate by sex or race or etc. but if you want to form a support group go right ahead and choose your members however you like" works. But then you have places which are neither jobs nor support groups and it gets tricky.

If I start inviting my friends over for dinner every Friday nobody will think I'm obligated to invite anyone I don't like, right? And if I just so happen to be a wealthy white dude* it might be that all my friends are also wealthy white dudes. And maybe we talk about business, because I assume that's what wealthy white dudes do. And then maybe two of us make a convenient business deal, or someone's nephew just graduated from Wealthy White Dude University and someone else it turns out has a job opening. This is a thing that happens.

But if I stop calling that "Friday night dinners with my friends" and start calling it "Wealthy White Dude Social Club" then that becomes segregation and you get angry thinkpieces on Leftist Media Website about how the doors to the inner circles of power are closed to women and minorities, and everyone agrees that WWDSC has to reform and allow new members. Because framing it as a club with a rule that only white dudes get invited looks like they are racist assholes who don't want to have to look at non-white people, and so on.

As a general rule, oppressed minorities don't have the keys to the inner circles of power**. They aren't blocking the career prospects of cishet white dudes*** by not inviting them to All Black or All Women or All LGBTQ spaces. Which tends to lead to the intuition that everyone who is blocking a minority group from entering their space is gatekeeping, which is Bad and everyone who is blocking cishet white dudes is trying to create a space where they are free from harassment, which is Good. This is not universally correct (for instance, imagine a genderflipped version of the first example, a man who was raped by a woman) but it's the intuition driving the safe spaces argument.

I don't know of an easy way to decide who is a demographically segregating for good reasons and who is doing it for bad ones. But both good and bad reasons exist, and some kinds of reasons are more commonly used against certain kinds of groups.

TL;DR: Power differences matter, general principles are hard.

*which I assume you all know I'm not. 

**this is complicated by who you count as an oppressed minority and what circles of power you mean, but correct to a first approximation

***and you have no idea how ashamed I am of even using that phrase, but here we are.
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Offline guizonde

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #32 on: January 04, 2016, 04:01:05 pm »
you basically elaborated on my oversimplified and slightly badly worded viewpoint, if we take "the majority" to be "wealthy white dudes". i should've said "the economic elite", or somesuch.

frankly, i'm against any kind of segregating. it only leads to things like not understanding others, or worse, xenophobia (using "xenos" as "people different than me", not "foreigners"). i don't see why i should ban a woman from my activities based on her gender, why should she be allowed to do the same to me?

yeah, i know, rapists exist, they traumatize people, something something viper's nest. not going there on the issue. but it's just as silly banning one gender on a cautious principle as it is banning a race. men rape, blacks steal, jews jew, and latinos are secret cartel members. of all i said, only the first one still seems to be politically correct. if i say women whore themselves out to gain social standing, i'll get doxxed in the next 15 minutes. there's something wrong with that.

rather than gather all the victims in one place, where the conversation will devolve in an echo chamber quickly (see some communities on tumblr), why not gather the offenders and drill the harmful out of their system? why should i be de facto penalized for having a wang when it's one man doing the raping? why should a black be penalized because a black steals? why should a woman be penalized based on the actions of another? because it's easier that way? maybe, but it's not fair.

i fear that having safe spaces that ban others ban both the evil (which is good), but also the good (which is bad). echo chambers will vilify others based on principle and forget the decent majority. how is that any different from a redneck hating mexicans?

so far, in my life, i've been assaulted by 2 africans, three "arabs"*, and been attacked by four women. for each african that assaulted me, i met their nice counterpart. same goes for the "arabs"*. the women... ah, who am i kidding, they were classic abusers, absolutely no different than their male bully counterparts. of course i met civil women. most women i meet in fact.

now, were i to have integrated an echo chamber, i'd be a misogynistic racist. i still believe there is goodness in this world. therapy and meditation help. it's taken me years of aversion therapy just to suppress the abuse i was dealt, but it's possible, and every woman i meet who does not fit into the mold of the women who abused me reinforces my outlook that i just stumbled on bad seeds. but as they say, "once burned, twice shy".

as a result, every person i meet will be met with skepticism and caution until proven otherwise. it's not fair to the genuinely nice people i meet on a regular basis, but it only lasts for the first contact. once i establish that someone is not good for me, i politely break off contact and go out of my way to avoid them. this way, i can concentrate on the good eggs, not the negative aspects of living in modern society.

of course, i wouldn't be surprised if my viewpoint got entirely disregarded because i'm a cishet white man and frankly, what do i know about social justice? it won't be the first time.

*i put "arabs" in quotes because technically they're north africans, not from the arabic peninsula. but to uncultured and xenophobic reactionnaries, they're the same thing.
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Offline Sigmaleph

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #33 on: January 04, 2016, 05:42:39 pm »
A safe space is not really an echo chamber? In the sense that a safe space is meant to be one part of your life, not the entirety of it. You will still interact with men or white people or straight people or whatever even if you have a group of people where they are absent. You have plenty of chances to be exposed to other views there.

I don't think people should segregate every part of their life from any group (and it's pretty hard to do it from majority groups, for the obvious reason). But if you don't allow the rape victim from the first example to have one place, a support group to be open about her experiences where she doesn't have to reminded of her rapist, then you are hurting her. This isn't about punishing all men because one man raped her, it's about giving her the environment she needs.
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Offline Canadian Mojo

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #34 on: January 04, 2016, 05:46:31 pm »
The counterargument to not having safe spaces is that they are only meant as temporary sanctuaries and there is nothing wrong with having a place to escape from the world for a while. When used like that, they really aren't harmful to anyone... even if it's a group of grumpy old men sitting around smoking cigars and lamenting the bygone days when women were barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen and the darkies knew their place. You come back out into the real world and get on dealing with life. It's only when you spend you entire life in one or worse yet try to extend its sphere of influence to cover the entire world that it becomes a real problem.


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Offline guizonde

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #35 on: January 04, 2016, 05:54:25 pm »
i agree completely with you, sigma and mojo. some modicum of triage is necessary in anyone's life in order to eliminate the toxic elements of society.

nowadays, however, i get the feel a "safe space" is less "support group" and more "let's blame everyone but us for our woes". that's a bad attitude to have because it constitutes a downward spiral in human interaction. that's why i have a problem with tumblr and online communities in general. fandoms, music boards, youtube comments... it's all about belonging to the group and belittling the "plebes" and "sheeple".

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You come back out into the real world and get on dealing with life. It's only when you spend you entire life in one or worse yet try to extend its sphere of influence to cover the entire world that it becomes a real problem.

you said it, not me. now check out our very own "things people say on the internet" and "wsj" threads...
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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #36 on: January 04, 2016, 05:59:54 pm »
So when black people come together to discuss the racism they face, they should instead... be blaming themselves for that racism? Wat? I pray I've misunderstood you.

Offline Canadian Mojo

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #37 on: January 04, 2016, 06:24:20 pm »
i agree completely with you, sigma and mojo. some modicum of triage is necessary in anyone's life in order to eliminate the toxic elements of society.

nowadays, however, i get the feel a "safe space" is less "support group" and more "let's blame everyone but us for our woes". that's a bad attitude to have because it constitutes a downward spiral in human interaction. that's why i have a problem with tumblr and online communities in general. fandoms, music boards, youtube comments... it's all about belonging to the group and belittling the "plebes" and "sheeple".

Quote
You come back out into the real world and get on dealing with life. It's only when you spend you entire life in one or worse yet try to extend its sphere of influence to cover the entire world that it becomes a real problem.

you said it, not me. now check out our very own "things people say on the internet" and "wsj" threads...

Any tool can be abused. Some we ban, some we regulate, and some we just let people hurt themselves with because at the end of the day there will always be idiots.

Offline guizonde

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #38 on: January 04, 2016, 06:30:52 pm »
So when black people come together to discuss the racism they face, they should instead... be blaming themselves for that racism? Wat? I pray I've misunderstood you.

you totally misunderstood me. i take it you refer to this sentence:

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"let's blame everyone but us for our woes"

meaning, "it's not our fault, it's the world's fault. yes, that includes that dude over there that has nothing to do with it. so long as we're not blaming ourselves".

what i am saying, however, is that instead of black people coming together to discuss the racism they face, we (the human race) should be taking steps to knock racists down a peg. that was *checks* paragraph four of my wall of text. because let's face it. it's not the victim's job to correct their aggressor's tendencies. all they can do is support each other. what needs to be done is eradicate the aggressor's tendencies so they don't commit the act in the first place. see what i'm getting at?

@mojo: what happens when the idiots take over and they start hurting others? tumblr, reddit, even 4chan (to a lesser extent) encourage young impressionable teens to think that some acts are a-ok. i'm thinking of the shoplifting fandom specifically, but any racist/slut-shaming/revenge/dangerous behavior subgroup can be included.
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Offline Canadian Mojo

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #39 on: January 04, 2016, 06:40:31 pm »
@mojo: what happens when the idiots take over and they start hurting others? tumblr, reddit, even 4chan (to a lesser extent) encourage young impressionable teens to think that some acts are a-ok. i'm thinking of the shoplifting fandom specifically, but any racist/slut-shaming/revenge/dangerous behavior subgroup can be included.

Teenhood is just more public these days, but I don't think it's really all that much different then it ever was. Some will learn the hard way. Most won't need to.

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #40 on: January 04, 2016, 06:45:42 pm »
I haven't been this glad to misread something in a while.

Offline dpareja

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #41 on: January 06, 2016, 02:05:49 am »
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/persinger-psychology-class-1.3389410

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A Laurentian University professor in Sudbury, Ont. says he has been stopped from teaching a first-year psychology class after asking students to sign off on his use of vulgar language.

Dr. Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist, said he asked students in his introductory psychology course to sign a "Statement of Understanding" during the first lecture. The statement lists a sample of words that might be used during class, and includes the F-word, homophobic slurs and offensive slang for genitalia.

"One of my techniques is to expose people to all types of different words," Persinger told CBC News. "Silly words, complex words, emotional words, profane words. Because they influence how you make decisions and how you think."

By using words in lectures that cause emotion, Persinger said he can teach students about how that affects the brain's rational processes.

Then he was called into the provost's office and told he was being pulled from the course.

I'd have no problem with removing him if he was using such language with no prior warning, but when he warns students in advance so that they have the opportunity to transfer to other sections (and makes the policy known generally so students can transfer into his if they want), and every student enrolled in the class agrees to it...
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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #42 on: January 06, 2016, 03:20:07 am »
For fuck's sake. This isn't a goddamn primary school. It's a university, teaching grown men and women. Honestly, if they're offended by naughty words, that's their fucking problem. The idea that such thin skinned bullshit was used to pull the guy from the course is just moronic. The fact that the oh-so scandalous words were actually relevant to the course is just the cherry on top of the stupid cake.

Offline RavynousHunter

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #43 on: January 06, 2016, 09:14:23 am »
Fuck, even in primary school, kids are saying bad shit.  They might not fully understand what they're saying, but when you hear a girl who just barely entered puberty tell another girl to "get that cum off her lip," you really need to step back and re-examine your priorities if you're offended by such words in your 20s.  Or beyond.  God damned pussies.
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Offline TheUnknown

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Re: Suppression of Free Speech in Academia
« Reply #44 on: January 06, 2016, 06:18:56 pm »
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Political correctness is the post-modern term for being superficially kind, and setting up invisible barriers with multiple complex levels of protocols of communication, that in the end isolate people and their ability to empathize with one another.

Ignoring the pc bitching for a moment (because no matter what, I always side-eye people using cases like these to immediately slam pc as a concept), this is exactly the problem I've had with environments like tumblr; it all comes off as incredibly fake and two-faced, though superficial is probably the best word.  It's almost like the neo-liberal version of how the younger generation views the 1950s.