- TV’s diversity problems go far beyond Stephen Colbert — and any single late-night host – Vox
- Mitchell: Rape case sends mixed messages on prostitution | Chicago Sun-Times This actual column written by an actual (and in some ways liberal, I’m embarrassed to say) columnist actually argues that it’s not actually rape if the victim is a prostitute. AAARGH!
- Oh Joy Sex Toy – Defective by Melanie Gillman A lovely short comic about being genderqueer and trying to become a parent. Melanie Gillman is one of my favorite new cartoonists.
- The Victim of a Scary Web-Shaming Speaks Out — NYMag
- Black children with appendicitis are less likely to get pain meds than white children | The Incidental Economist
- The Death Of Victoria Gray: How Texas Jails Are Failing Their Most Vulnerable Captives | ThinkProgress
- Into The Black Closet | Rock, Paper, Shotgun “For the trans woman who plays games like this or Gone Home there’s a melancholic note of nostalgia behind every move: a longing for the childhood or the girlhood you never had, all the while recreating it in digital pantomime to weave a sense of memory for a never-happened history.”
- Crumb, Racism, Satire, and Hyperbole « The Hooded Utilitarian “In that sense, racists who have embraced some of Crumb’s imagery aren’t confused; they’re not stupidly getting it wrong. They’re reacting instead to a failure of his art.”
- Do people know which social interventions work just from hearing about them? To do a test, we made the following game.
- Poldark-style six-packs ‘smack of vanity’, says Matthew Macfadyen | Media | The Guardian
- When your stupid wizard parents force you to make the bed.
- “I feel like a lot of frugality is very deeply intertwined with class privilege; you can get by with so little because you have social capital which was secretly very expensive to acquire.”
- Ben Carson Month Is in Full Swing | Mother Jones
- Hungary Shuts Borders, Refugees Left In Limbo | ThinkProgress
- Mike Huckabee (Apparently) Thinks the 14th Amendment Applies to Fetuses but Not to Black People
- The devastating argument against prescription drug cost shifting | The Incidental Economist
- Why concentrating on exactly what words are used is not the best or most meaningful form of pro-disabled activism
- I admit this photo is a mildly clever gag. But it’s also a way that Wil Wheaton tells me, a liberal fan of his who probably agrees with him on 99% of issues, that if he ever meets me I’ll have to wonder if he’s inwardly feeling contempt for me for the way I look.
- Identities Are Not Arguments | Thing of Things
- How to Manufacture a Statistic | SINMANTYX
- Millions of Americans have been married three times or more – The Washington Post
- The Katrina disaster that hasn’t ended
- McDonald’s and Franchising – McDonalds is trying to have it both ways – not being an employer when it comes to employee rights, but acting like an employer when it comes to employment conditions.
- Teachers’ unions do not hurt student outcomes. | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy
- The most unrealistic thing about Hollywood romance, visualized – The Washington Post I’ll save you a click – it’s the age gap between male and female leads in movies.
- If You Disagree With This Post, You’re Joining A Bullying Lynch Mob | Popehat
- How lower family wealth means Black college graduates get fewer benefits from their degree than their white counterparts.
- “Replace girls with readers and nerd with conservative, and you have the entire Sad/Rabid Puppies issue in a nutshell.”
- Bartolo Colón is pudgy, the oldest player in the National League, and awesome:
So, none of the above –
I hadn’t really listened to Trump. Oh, I’ve heard clips and quotes, but when people show you that stuff you don’t know how much of that is the person speaking and how much of that is what the person doing the selection and presentation wants you to think. So I pretty much ignore all that.
But my wife is a big Jimmy Fallon fan, so I watched Jimmy’s interview of him. I think I see the appeal here. Not so much his specific position on a given issue, but his attitude. It’s positive. He says we can solve problems, and that’s what people want to hear. They don’t want to hear “We have to give illegal aliens a path to citizenship because it’s impossible to deport them.” He says that we can uphold our laws and solve our problems. And that appeals to a LOT of people.
God help us all, it may appeal to enough people to get him elected.
Plus, he knows way more about how to use TV and how to think on his feet than the politicians do. He’s not going to give you a carefully crafted, nuanced, focus-group tested position on an issue that represents what he thinks you want to hear. He’s telling what he thinks and how he feels, unfiltered, and damn the torpedoes. He knows how to cut a deal, too, and he knows that you never want to admit weakness. So when he says something stupid, he won’t apologize. That lets his opponents hammer him. He just keeps on going and leaves it behind.
JHFTDC, this may work.
Huh?
TD = “tap dancing”
Argh, even Ken White, who I think of as a pretty reasonable libertarian-ish person to read, buys into nonsense about how the notions of trigger warnings and microaggressions are silly oppressive concepts (and so, I discovered the other day, does Kevin Drum, and also, how did mentioning trigger warnings and microaggressions together become a thing?). Sometimes I feel as though I literally don’t live in the same world as these people. In the world that I live in, “microaggression” is a useful word that has been around for years (I first heard it on Female Science Professor’s blog several years ago, and I’m pretty sure her post that I read didn’t invent it) to describe a pretty obvious concept (that the small bits of sexism, anti-Semitism, racism, etc, that people experience, both sting in their own right and accumulate to be not-so-small). In the world that I live in, trigger warnings/content notes have been on the Internet for years, and they are useful for engaging with material that can wreck me emotionally for hours or days if I come upon it unaware, and have fuck all to do with censorship or free speech. When I come across the really vicious commentary on these topics I get upset, but when I come across the less vicious versions I just feel a profound disconnect, like, do these people think these concepts were invented last year by a bunch of teenage feminists with an authoritarian streak in order to, I don’t know, mess with the academy and undermine academic freedom? Because that is the impression that I get from them.
Regarding the web-shaming article: I don’t especially like that the article segued into a broad focus on “shaming,” which I find to be a hopelessly vague term that’s often used to cast reasonable criticism as something more sinister (I was accused of “shaming,” as well as undermining liberalism, for having retweeted one of the early tweets about that scientist who wore a sexist shirt on TV a while back). We already have good words for the bad behaviors that sometimes emerge from online criticism and argument, like “harassment” and “trolling” and “threats.” However, one of the big things I learned from that article is that Brandon Darby now works for Breitbart Texas! Figures. I don’t even know what that guy’s deal is; his political transformation makes David Horowitz’s look mild. Since I know some of the other original Common Ground Relief folks, I’m pretty sure that means I know people who knew him back in his leftist-anarchist humanitarian community organizer days. And during his weird transformation from that into agent provocateur, FBI operative, and far-right activist.
Angus Johnston just had a fantastic post about how Jonathan Chait is full of shit when it comes to free speech, and by extension how many of the ‘liberals luuuuuv censorship’ bozos are also full of shit.
I’ve heard this a lot – that protesting a speaker is somehow “anti-free-speech,” but that opposing those student protests is … not? It’s awfully silly.
Anyway, the linked post is well worth a read.
—Myca
I found the Unit of Caring post on disability terminology interesting, but I’m not totally persuaded by it. (Or, rather, not persuaded by the stuff after the paragraph on barriers to entry, which I thought was pretty great–the rest of this comment refers to the rest of that post.) You can make those arguments about *any* social justice-type terminology argument: it’s a combination of asking for things for politeness’s sake, and also hoping that through discussion of politeness you also get people to see the underlying thought patterns that are discriminatory/problematic/whatever. (And it is also not unique that some words are offensive to some people within a marginalized community, but not other people within that same community.)
I guess I’m also skeptical of general claims of “your activism energy about X would be better spent on Y”, because I think it’s very hard to get a holistic picture of what kind of activism is going on, and “I see too much of X” may as easily be a statement about what kinds of activism the speaker is likely to run into as it is about what kinds of activism are actually happening.
It is inane to claim that the most unrealistic thing portrayed by Hollywood is age difference in couples.
Large age differences in real life are clustered at both ends of the income spectrum, i.e. among the outliers. Well, movies are not always about the most ‘average’ individuals, are they?
Should we also count the numbers of times that a female defeats, in hand to hand combat, males of higher weight and significant martial training in movies, and compare that to the real life likelihood? Or the times protagonists survive damage that would kill a human twice over?
Movies cater to their audiences. Young women fall for old farts, hunks fight over bland teenage girls, venal and manipulative people get their just deserts, social maladroits get the girl, and the world is saved by ploys a ten year old would see through.
—–
By the way, the most unrealistic thing about romances in movies is BY FAR the expectation that deception and manipulation are easily forgiven, let alone forgotten, and a solid foundation for a lasting relationship.
Lirael @4–yeah. People who object to trigger warnings usually seem to me to be working under a few misconceptions about what they are, including but not limited to:
– That trigger warnings cause fewer overall audience interactions with material;
– That trigger warnings are a negative judgment on the content;
– That trigger warnings are a novel way of marking content, whereas otherwise people primarily deal with unmarked content;
– That trigger warnings, even if they might be helpful, are useless because triggers are unique to the people who have them.
To which my responses would be, in order,
– Some people will avoid all content when in particular mindsets; trigger warnings allow them to interact more with content that doesn’t contain it. They change the default state from “might have bad stuff” to “probably won’t have bad stuff”, for some definition of bad stuff. As far as I can tell it generally increases engagement with things that don’t have trigger warnings in places where trigger warnings are widely used, to a degree that far more than offsets the small number of people who see a trigger warning and decide not to interact, as opposed to, say, delaying interaction or ignoring the warning entirely and interacting immediately (which is what most people do). It may even offset it for material with trigger warnings by increasing the possible audience–I don’t know.
– They are simply a description.
– Think of buying a book. You can get loads of information on that book: not only the content of the jacket copy, but genre, cover art, book reviews, price, format, which authors were chosen to blurb it, even things like publisher and editor if you have some knowledge of the industry. Acting like available meta-information about content is a large deviation from normal practice is really weird. What’s more, especially in classrooms, a note that something may be upsetting? Really common! Even before the existence of trigger warnings! Because it’s easier to deal with emotional responses if you’re prepared to have them.
– We have a really cliche phrase for this: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Triggers are unique, but you can bet death, graphic violence, and rape are triggering for more than one person.
I don’t think trigger warnings should be mandatory. But I get so annoyed at people who object to their existence. (….and apparently rant about it at every available opportunity, sorry! I got trained up more than a decade ago by arguments over similar warnings on fanfiction stories.)
Harlequin, I pretty much agree with you on all that (meaning comment #6); but I still thought the UoC post was interesting and worth a link. Especially the thought about how terminology can create barriers for entry is useful, for pointing out that there is a cost as well as a benefit to language politics.
@ 5 and 27:
Seems to me that the factor there is income, not race. In other words, these don’t happen because people are black. They happen because they’re poor, and disproportionately affect blacks more because blacks are disproportionately poorer.
So I think I’m just going to link to the last thing I said when the topic of institutionalized trigger warnings came up
Have fun!
I liked the unit of caring post and several other disabled people commented on my Twitter to agree. I am very frustrated by the way that a lot of disabled people feel shut out from the decisions over which language gets approved or disapproved.
I have nothing of importance to add. I just came to say that I laughed so hard I snorted at the Ripley stapler .gif.
Carry on!
Ah–that’s interesting, Mandolin; I hadn’t come across that perspective before. That does put a different spin on the last bit of the post.
(Amp, I didn’t mean to make it seem like I thought the post was unworthy of being linked here or anything–I thought it had some good bits & some less useful ones, and was interested in discussing the latter.)
***
Also on terminology, I guess, I’ve seen some people move from the term “trigger warning” to something like “content note,” which might mitigate some of the harms of the former term. I still think it’s a useful concept, as long as it’s opt-in. (Or, I guess, easy opt-out: one website I use makes you select from a set of common warnings for things you post, but one of the options is “I choose not to use warnings”. But that choice is explicit, which is a norm of that community. And it is just warnings there, not trigger warnings. Some people choose not to use that site because of that requirement, which is also fair enough.)
Harlequin @8: YES. I found another one in the overall-good post that’s #26 on the link farm:
It’s a small part of that particular paragraph, but… I can see how if you think that people calling for trigger warnings/content notes are generally calling for that content not to be used [if you’re calling for it not to be used, why do you need a content note in the first place?] would see it as parallel, since causing a PTSD flashback is at least akin to a violent act. (And speech codes obviously fit.) But “causing a microaggression” = “sorta equivalent to a ‘lynch mob'”? That doesn’t make any sense unless you use the Chait definition of “microaggression”. (I think he claimed his opponents thought microaggressions caused “searing trauma”.) I guess if you cross out the “micro” part the misunderstanding makes sense?
(Angus Johnston explains how he uses trigger warnings/content notes here. While he says that students can leave the classroom if they feel the need, he also says that they are responsible for material that they miss and should talk to another classmate or to him for notes, and there’s no mention of a way to skip over assigned reading.)
And yeah, Myca @5, that post was great! There is a big difference between being pro-free-speech and supporting the preferred first speaker doctrine, and Chait clearly supports the latter.
That’s probably most of it, but I have to think that Chait’s essential deference to authority (supporting the speech of powerful, well paid speakers over the speech of students whose school it fucking is) and his bullshit ‘reasonable person’ contrarian nature (“Lookit how much I’m not like those liberals! Why, I support conservative speech over liberal speech … golly, most of the time!”) have to play parts.
And … why, what a fucking coincidence! Those are exactly the parts that lead fuckers like him to 1) support the Iraq War and 2) be taken far more seriously than all the objectively correct people who opposed it. Buying into the ‘liberals are the true censors’ narrative is just more of his customary fellating the powerful for the sake of cocktail party cred.
—Myca
@Myca–makes sense. I haven’t read enough Chait to get a good sense of the deference to authority bit, but he does seem to have the “I’m not like those liberals” thing–it seems to be a pretty common phenomenon. Some people do it a lot, but it’s pretty common for people to pick particular issues or incidents and sort of highlight them as their ‘Sister Souljah moment’ to prove that they’re one of the reasonable ones. (I’ve seen people apparently doing that with Fat Acceptance–‘I’m not one of those SJWs!’)
Pesho:
Yes. So profoundly true that it’s worth saying again.
Yes. My wife and I have a friend whom we have just spent a few months coaching so that they could see the deception and manipulation their partner was subjecting them to, and from there make what decisions she wanted to about it. Romantic comedies need tension, and everyone wants to go with the sitcom formula. But would anyone actually want to LIVE in a sitcom? What if writers of romantic comedies wrote about people who have strong relationships because they founded them well and maintain them assiduously? There’s plenty of comedy gold in there; it’s just often more subtle, more wry.
What about scenes where someone with their crap pulled together gets into a series of potential relationships and then fires each potential partner for excellent reasons like deceit, gaslighting, boundary violations and other forms of assholery? It can be really funny seeing such a person draw a line frankly and enforce it forthrightly.
So, Pesho…
…thanks for that. What you said.
Grace
Myca (quoting Angus Johnston):
I would consider anything that interferes with communication between a willing speaking and a willing audience as “anti-free-speech”, even where that thing might be considered “speech” itself. You’re argument seems akin to suggesting that harassment, bullying or threats of violence should be an acceptable part of “free speech”.
closetpuritan:
I think there’s a wide gap between simply rejecting the heckler’s veto and supporting the preferred first speaker doctrine, and and I think Chait’s position is far closer to the former.
IIRC, Chait also objects to students protesting outside the building where the speech is taking place, as well as students holding protests/circulating petitions to attempt to stop speakers from being paid with their tuition money? If I’m remembering Chait’s positions correctly, those are both beyond a simply anti-“heckler’s veto” position.
Perhaps coincidentally, Now Face North (from the Alas blog roll) just had what I thought was a great post linking campus free speech arguments with trigger warning/microaggression arguments.
@Harlequin: Heh, that’s me, and it was actually this link farm post and the comments, combined with Angus Johnston’s post (I regularly read his blog) that helped me think through the connections that I talk about in that post you linked to. I’m glad you liked it! I’m also glad that it was clear, as I was trying to condense a lot of thought into one post and I was worried this was one of those that was more coherent in my head than it was in my writing.
When then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger showed up to speak at Kresge Auditorium at the Institute I protested outside the building. But I did not consider that I had a right to go inside and shout him down anymore than I thought that the police had a right to stop our protest (which in fact they did not do, although after the then-recent “let’s set a dumpster on fire and tip it over in the middle of Mass. Ave.” incident they were there in force). He had been engaged to speak – and was being paid to do so, which was one reason why I was protesting – and so he had a right to speak and be heard by the audience that he had been engaged to speak to and that had shown up to hear him. To block him from speaking would have been anti-free speech, even it was done by someone else speaking.
@RonF
Oh, you’re a fellow alum! And given the years that Kissinger was SecState, you might have been a contemporary of my dad, though you’re probably just slightly too old to have been a contemporary of my mom.
The situation that you’re describing is one where I think degree is really important. If you and your fellow protesters had taken the stage and railed against Kissinger for five minutes, and then sat down or left, I don’t think that would go against the ethic of open speech or academic freedom (I keep trying to find terms that make it clear I’m not conflating the principle I’m talking about here with First Amendment rights), since I assume Kissinger had well more than a five-minute bloc for his own speech. That’s not a heckler’s veto, IMO, because nothing has been vetoed, just temporarily disrupted. If he doesn’t get to speak because of the heckling, that’s a heckler’s veto.
If Kissinger was there to receive an honor before a captive audience (as is the case with commencement speakers) I think it would be entirely justified to oppose the university giving that to him at all – that’s not the same situation as with a normal speaker on a college campus, that’s the university conferring an honor on someone, in the name of the university community, often with attached money. And I gather that your protest opposed Kissinger being given money to come to campus and speak, and that also seems entirely reasonable and somewhat similar to a lot of recent commencement speaker protests on various campuses, even if this wasn’t a commencement situation.
I find that this gets murkier once you leave college campuses and go to settings, like political events, that are meant to advance certain causes and issues. Taking the stage and disrupting speakers, because you think an issue that falls properly under the banner of the event is being ignored or downplayed, are practically time-honored traditions at some activism conferences. The norms and aims are different than on a college campus and so it seems like the location of the boundaries ought to be too. But I digress.
Desipis:
RonF:
As you’d know if you read the linked post, this was in the context of Chait’s expressing admiration for the free speech culture of Liberty University, where student protest is prohibited. Not where “interrupting the speaker with air-horns while throwing water-balloons of pig’s blood on them,” is prohibited, but where participation in any protest at all is prohibited by the college.
Desipis:
Ah, then you might want to look more closely at Liberty University, where attendance at the speaker’s event was mandatory. It’s a bit of a stretch to call the audience willing.
So: required attendance. No option of protest, either through staging a polite, peaceful protest or by passively staying away.
And I’ll emphasize that this is in reference to Bernie Sanders speaking on a very very conservative campus … these are conservative kids having their free speech rights curtailed, NOT by big liberal meanies, but by the conservative administration … and the people standing up to support their rights are liberal.
When all of this was pointed out to Chait, he tweeted:
Chait:
So … his opposition isn’t to interruption of speakers. It’s to ‘outrage.’ It’s not to ‘disruptive protest,’ it’s to any protest.
I am unaware of any liberal university that has the kinds of restrictions on student protest that Liberty University does. They may well exist, but I seriously doubt it. The big liberal meanies, of course, believe in free speech for everyone and the right of students to protest. Of course, just as we support the right of conservative students to protest liberal speakers, so we support the right of liberal students to protest conservative speakers.
That’s what conservatives mean when they say that we’re anti-free speech.
—Myca
Oh! I think I knew that at one point, but it totally slipped my mind. :) My “multiple names” database is apparently full from too much time online! Great post, anyway.
@Lirael–great post!
Lirael, RonF–those both seem like reasonable places to draw the line for where protest conflicts with the free speech rights of others.
Myca:
A key point you don’t seem to address is that the students of Liberty University are there voluntarily. As far as I’m aware the policies haven’t radically changed, which means they all agreed to those restrictions as part of the conditions of attending that university. It might make for a lower quality education environment, but no one’s rights are being violated.
This stands in contrast to students at a public university, where they are supposedly at an institution that respects a wide range of views, but their ability to engage with some of those views is curtailed by protests. The restrictions at Liberty were foreseeable, avoidable and consented to, the opposite is true where third parties interfere with some event at a public university.
The other main difference is one of attitude towards opposing viewpoints. If the students at Liberty are able to sit and listen to speakers presenting views, then they’re going to end up with a more mature understanding of the issues than someone who has a knee-jerk “outrage” reaction and decides to shout that other person down before they’ve even had a chance to speak. Even though there are significant negative aspects of their restrictive policies, I don’t think the above is an insignificant point.
I don’t read Chait as coming out with wholesale support of Liberty’s approach, merely observing that a comparison demonstrates there are problems with the approaches at the other end of the spectrum.
Lirael:
If I am just slightly too old to be a contemporary of your mother, she still probably went there when the M:F ratio was around 10:1. I once met a alumna who had attended a few years after me. She said that the coeds had a saying about their male classmates and the imbalance: “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.” When she told me that all I could say was “Guilty!”
I disagree. When a venue is engaged for the express purpose of presenting a speaker, people have no right to hijack the audience to present their own views, nor do they have a right to disrupt it in any degree. The issue of “equal time” you offer is to my mind invalid. Who knows what the speaker’s schedule is? Who knows what the audience members’ schedules are? Who knows what the other arrangements for the hall (and the staff) are? You have no right to impose on any of those people. The fact that someone is speaking at a venue does not automatically invest you with a right to equal time. What of someone who has a view on the subject that opposes both you and the speaker – do they have a right to their 5 minutes as well? A variety of viewpoints on a given topic stretches that to absurdity.
They may be long-standing customs, but they are not honorable.
But for almost any speaker, it is possible to find out their views through other means–they will have given other speeches, probably written something or been interviewed. Indeed, it’s quite a harsh judgment to say that protesters’ reaction is knee-jerk outrage, rather than a decision based on actually understanding the speaker’s views.
@RonF:
I’m not sure how your position here isn’t Preferred First Speaker doctrine. At least in an academic context, I can see an argument, though I don’t agree, that academic norms around speech prohibit the disruption of a speaker. But something like an activism conference has different norms – it’s supposed to be advancing particular movements or causes, and that would naturally lead to different norms around speech (e.g. I don’t expect a BDS movement conference to accept a panel from AIPAC or vice versa, while because of norms around academic freedom, I expect most universities to be willing to host both BDS and AIPAC speakers). Other settings have different speech norms from either of those (I don’t think there’s anything inherently dishonorable about bloggers moderating their comment sections).
I stand by my view that as long as the people who came to hear Kissinger got to hear Kissinger, the protest would have been fine. I realize that this makes it hard to draw a precise line about how long of a disruption is too long, but as far as I can remember, most arguments on this are about either “Are any disruptions okay?” or “Are disruptions that prevent the person from speaking altogether okay?” trying to set a precise line seems a little, well, academic.
Indeed, my mom (who, along with my dad, lived in one of the first living groups to go mixed-gender) told me that saying before I started college. :) The odds are rather different now (worse for straight women and gay men, better for lesbians and straight men, varying for bi/pan/fluid/etc folks depending on the particular ratio of their attractions), but the goods can still be pretty odd across the expanse of gender possibilities.
It depends on the circumstances and it depends on the nature of the interruption. If an event has been organized for the purpose of having a particular person speak about their research, viewpoints, political or social philosophies, etc., then interrupting and blocking that person from speaking is interfering with the purpose of the event, which is for that person to speak and for the audience to hear. Whether or not you think you are limiting that interruption to something that you think is tolerable or fair is immaterial – you have no right to make that judgement for others.
If an event has been organized as a Q&A session or open debate with person or group “X”, that’s a different story – but even then, mounting a protest so as to prevent someone else from being heard (as opposed to asking a question or presenting one’s own thoughts as a contribution to the debate) is wrong.
Ron, your position seems to lack nuance. If twenty protestors go to my talk and chant “COMICS BAD, BOOKS ARE GLAD!” over and over, then I can’t speak and the people who have come to hear me can’t hear me. So yes, that does strike me as a problem for an ethic of free speech.
But if one protester yells “COMICS SUCK! ONLY BOOKS CAN BRING HAPPINESS!” and then is quiet, or is quiet after a brief exchange, that is something entirely different. I haven’t been prevented from speaking; the rest of the audience hasn’t been prevented from hearing me. In that case, preventing the heckler from having heckled at all seems anti-free-speech.
Do you not see the distinction between the two kinds of protests?
Well, in fact, the audience WAS blocked from hearing you – but only for a short period of time. I see a distinction in the effect, certainly. But the one protester is still an a$$hole. The folks didn’t come to hear what the protester – or protesters – had to say. A protester has a right to speak. They do not have a right to force people to listen. Your position is that the fact that the interruption was brief makes it right. It doesn’t. It makes it tolerable, but it does not make it right.
Where do you draw the line? Judging from your statement “brief” seems to be about 10 seconds. To lirael it’s 5 minutes. To someone else it could be 15 minutes. My position is that no one has the right to decide that a particular time is brief enough to justify such an action in this situation. The time period might be brief enough that we can tolerate it to the point of thinking “what an a$$hole” instead of calling the cops. But to tolerate something does not mean it is confirmed or accepted as legitimate, justified or right.
@34:
I sense Amp is asking if we should respect this style of protest as free speech, or condemn it as censorship. I’d note the Kantian categorical imperative to avoid actions that could not be made universal.
Imagine one protester jumps up at Amp’s speech and yells, “YOUR BOOKS SUCK! THEY DON’T HAVE ENOUGH RED! RED IS THE BEST! RED, RED, RED!” etc., but quiets down after a brief exchange. Then another protester jumps up to protest the lack of blue. Then one to protest the lack of purple (which seems kind of derivative of the first two protesters, but each to his own). Then pink. Then neon green. Then sepia tone. Then the sepia tone guy gets yelled at by the other protesters. Then….
I’m reminded of one of Amp’s cartoons in which a woman becomes frazzled by the volume of remarks – mostly of a complimentary nature – about her appearance she receives, only to find her male companion uncomprehending. “Gosh, I’d love to get some appreciation now and then….” Clearly he doesn’t understand (among other things) the cumulative nature of these remarks.
I may do little harm in offering an appreciative comment on someone’s appearance. But since I cannot anticipate or control for all the other comments a person may receive, I have developed a general rule of avoiding commenting on a stranger’s appearance.
Similarly, I may do little harm in interjecting to protest the lack of red in Amp’s books. But I cannot anticipate or control the other comments of other people in the audience. I guess we could adopt a rule that says we should respect the first protester’s protest, but not further protests – but that looks a lot like the dreaded Preferred First Speaker doctrine. So I end up with a rule that condemns this kind of protest as a kind of censorship, principally because I can’t think of a more workable principle.
That said: Come on – would a little more red kill ya?
John Boehner resigns — not just from the Speakership, but from Congress — effective no later than 11/1. Apparently enough members of Animal House were preparing to throw frat president Robert Hoover (James Widdoes) off the roof, so he opted to jump instead.
So who is gonna be the next Speaker? And what are the odds of a government shutdown now?
For #2, I totally agree with “AAAAARGGH!”
Pulling a gun on someone and forcing them to have sex with you is rape. Blatantly, obviously, no question about it. It doesn’t *matter* whether they have willingly had sex with you before, or even whether they were going to exchange sex with you for money.
What I find telling is that there aren’t any other situations where forcing someone at gunpoint to do something ceases to be a crime because they would potentially have accepted money to do the same thing. If I’m in my car, and someone pulls a gun on me and orders me to drive them somewhere, it doesn’t somehow cease to be a car-jacking if it turns out that I was driving for Uber.
For that matter, doing dumb things and making bad choices that are then taken advantage of by a criminal doesn’t turn a crime into “not a crime.” If someone grabs my wallet and runs off with it, it’s still theft. Yes, even if I was standing in a busy square waving hundred-dollar bills around. If someone punches me in the face, it’s still assault. Yes, even if I insult them, knowing full well that they have a short temper.
Rape seems to be the only crime where it’s viewed as perfectly acceptable to go straight from “that wasn’t a good idea” to “and therefore the person who committed the crime isn’t actually a criminal.”
If it’s “tough to see the unidentified prostitute as a victim” that probably has a lot less to do with whether she was raped at gunpoint, because that’s not in dispute, and a lot more to do with the idea that she “deserved” it because of her occupation.
“So who is gonna be the next Speaker? And what are the odds of a government shutdown now?”
Good question. Funding has to originate in the House. They have the initiative. So let’s say the House passes a continuing resolution that takes care of all the usual funding, but cuts out Planned Parenthood – which isn’t even a government agency. And let’s say it reallocates the money to other organizations that provide women’s healthcare but don’t do (or refer) elective abortion.
If the Democrats filibuster it or the President refuses to sign it, who’s responsible for a government shutdown? Because with Boehner gone, I think the odds are decent that exactly that will happen.
And do you think the American electorate will support holding up funding for the U.S. government’s operations over the issue of funding Planned Parenthood? Personally, I’m thinking not. But I bet we get to find out.
KellyK – based on Mitchell’s comment about trying to crack down on sex trafficking, I’m not so sure about your analogy. I think the issue here (which I disagree with in any case) is that she’s minimizing the offense of rape because the act of sex trafficking is a crime in and of itself. I think the analogy would be someone offering to sell someone illegal drugs, only to have the putative buyer pull a gun and steal the drugs. There are plenty of people who figure that it’s a null issue to commit a crime against a criminal.
RonF,
Boehner resigned effective October 31, not effective immediately. He’s still speaker and he’s made it clear he has no interest in subjecting the country to another government shutdown just to provide political theater for the anti-governance wing of the Republican party (and now he has even less reason to care what the radical fringe wants). The Senate failed to bring an anti-Planned Parenthood continuing resolution to a vote last week (I know that in a world that obeyed your interpretation of the Constitution strip-and-replace amendments would be forbidden, but in this world the Senate uses them whenever they want, even for funding measures). It wasn’t even a filibuster in the usual sense, the anti-PP faction couldn’t even get 50 votes to bring the measure to a final vote. On Monday, the Senate will pass a clean CR and then Boehner will bring it to a vote in the House on Tuesday or Wednesday, where it will pass with Democratic support. End of crisis until the debt ceiling approaches again later this Fall.
My bet is that, come 2016, Planned Parenthood is still allowed to be paid by the Federal government to provide medical care. Whether the Republicans will have damaged the economy and the lives of millions by engineering a government shut down or a debt crisis in the mean time, and whether they will have scored points with their supporters by doing so, I couldn’t guess. But Planned Parenthood has helped too many people and is too important in providing needed health care to millions for it to fall to the same sort of bullshit fake scandal that took down ACORN.
Yeah, I can see that, but I’m not sure the analogy of stealing drugs from someone who was going to sell them to you quite works either. Even in that case, wouldn’t pulling a gun on someone still be assault, regardless of whether you stole drugs, their wallet, or nothing at all?
But illegal drugs are a possession. You can have them taken from you without being physically harmed. But it’s not physically possible to rape someone without physically assaulting them. (The rape itself is an assault, even if no other force is used.)
If the argument is that because she was selling a service that it wasn’t legal for her to sell, she’s not a victim if that service is violently taken from her, then I think it would still apply to the boxer and the Uber driver, if they were also offering the service illicitly. If someone’s driver’s license is suspended, and they’re taking cash under the table to drive people around, does that mean that they can’t be carjacked?
I don’t think that’s her real argument, though. I think her real argument is that whores are bad and stupid people, who therefore deserve whatever happens to them, and that they shouldn’t complain about being raped because only virtuous women can be raped. Her standard for “virtuous women” isn’t Puritannical, since she does say she has no sympathy for the “she was wearing a short skirt” defense. But, it definitely includes “don’t be a prostitute” as a prerequisite.
Has that second part actually been suggested by any of the Republicans in the House, though?
If there are actual, legitimate women’s healthcare providers (that is, not crisis pregnancy centers who generally provide misinformation and over-the-counter diagnostics rather than any actual healthcare), and Congress wants to fund them to provide the same services Planned Parenthood is currently providing, that would be reasonable. Assuming that they can and do provide the same services, to the same level, in the same locations, with the exception of elective abortions. And assuming that by “elective abortions” you mean abortions on women who are completely healthy and expect to have healthy pregnancies.
But do such organizations even exist? Generally, if an organization is sufficiently opposed to abortion to not provide it or refer for it, they’re also sufficiently opposed to lie about it causing cancer and depression. Even Catholic hospitals aren’t going to fit the bill, since they don’t do contraception.
People who have tried to defund Planned Parenthood in various states have pointed to other community health providers as places that could take in Planned Parenthood patients, so I assume that’s the stance of people at the national level who want to do it, too. (The funding wouldn’t go away, and much of it is tailored to who provides services, not as block grants to specific organizations, as far as I can tell.) That doesn’t work, though.
Edit: In particular, Planned Parenthood accepts Medicaid; plenty of other places don’t. So even if there is available staffing to absorb the patients, some of the places that should fill in the gap won’t take them anyway.
Pursuant to the discussion on free speech; the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (a.k.a. F.I.R.E.) has launched a campaign to get colleges and universities to adopt the University of Chicago’s free speech policy statement as their policy on free speech on campus. I was wondering if any of you were familiar with that policy, and if you think your alma mater should adopt it. It’s certainly at variance with speech policies on many campuses. It reads in part:
Alma whatter, now?
Latin – literally “nourishing mother” or “kind mother”, allegorically used to reference the college or university one graduated from.
RonF is asking the readers, who include at least three MIT graduates besides him, whether they think that MIT, or the institution of higher learning to which they went, should adopt said policies. Personally I do not know.
I know that I have kicked people out of my parties for not liking what they say, sometimes by marching them out with their arm behind their back and throwing their car keys at the front lawn. I do not know whether I would approve the CP doing that to someone yelling when an invited speaker attempts to talk. Fuck, whom am I kidding. I would side with the CP if the speaker were Sarah Palin.
So, no, I do not believe that free speech means that I am allowed to disrupt an organized event on someone else’s turf without consequences. But I also believe that if the organizer says that it’s OK to boo the speaker so that he cannot be heard, ever, then I would be whistling over some people talking until I faint from lack of breath. When you create an environment where whistling is OK, you have to remember that some people are REALLY good at whistling.
Can I have an opinion on whether or not institutions of higher learning should adopt said policies if I don’t have an Alma Mater?
(It’s always a mistake not to include an end sarcasm tag and I always omit said tag)
Of course, you can have an opinion. Just do not expect anyone to pay any attention to it, except maybe other unfortunates with no Alma Mater… but who cares about them anyway?
—-
Sarcasm aside, I have felt like throwing someone out of an MIT auditorium, because he was bringing in his politics and wasting lecture time. He got shouted down, but violence at MIT is very rare, because of the Institute’s absolutely draconian policy. It takes a lot of work and preparation to get around it.
I actually object to people with super-long questions that require ten minutes of set-up, or maybe a political speech, before they get to their question, FAR more than I object to hecklers. Not in a logical or political way, I just viscerally HATE listening to them drone on and on and on. I especially hate it when it’s someone whose politics I agree with, because I feel irrationally humiliated that someone on my “side” is doing this in public.
Is the fossil fuel industry, like the tobacco industry, guilty of racketeering?
I’ve always thought the fact that the fossil fuel industry didn’t fund any serious climate science research was one of the most damning points against the denialists and the skeptics: if there were any hope of improvements in climate science disproving AGW, the cash-rich fossil fuel industry should be funding fundamental climate science funding hand-over-fist. Instead, it funds misinformation and cranks (the only exception I know of was the Berkley Earth project, but even that wasn’t cutting edge climate science, it was just replicating existing research). Now it turns out that the fossil fuel industry was funding cutting edge research 30-40 years ago, back when there was some faint hope that AGW wasn’t happening, and that it shut down its research and buried the results when its own research didn’t support its corporate interests.
Also, note this: “The consensus is that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from its pre-industrial revolution value would result in an average global temperature rise of (3.0 ± 1.5)°C.” That’s Exxon scientists in 1982. In 2013, the best estimate was 2-4.5 C. This has been pretty stable science for more than 30 years.
(hat tip to http://www.skepticalscience.com/ for the article).
“RonF is asking the readers, who include at least three MIT graduates besides him,”
Which makes me curious. Amp, if you will permit a personal indulgence:
’74, VII, PKT
Yourselves?
Amp @ 51:
Yep. I’ve felt like shouting out “Are you asking a question or giving a speech?” It’s really pretending to do the former in order to facilitate doing the latter.
Jake @ 49:
Go ahead if you like. I’d be interested in hearing it. But what I was looking for was a more personal viewpoint based on people’s experience at and knowledge of their own college/university/institution.
Pesho @ 48:
“When you create an environment where whistling is OK, you have to remember that some people are REALLY good at whistling.”
Is it still considered acceptable – hell, mandatory – at the Institute that if a lecturer makes a math mistake during a lecture the undergraduates hiss as loudly as possible (but only if they personally spot the error) until the lecturer finds and corrects it?
Not understanding that this was NOT a universal custom, I did this during a lecture at graduate school (actually at a medical school in a class I was sharing with medical students) and everyone else looked at me like I was f**king nuts. I actually had to explain myself (and point out the mistake. No one believed me until I was backed up by a post-doc who was an MIT grad.
Maybe you should reconsider your application to be the next president of Planned Parenthood.
Somewhat related to RonF’s post @45:
Will Black Lives Matter be a movement that persuades? Shutting down a college newspaper is no way to persuade critics
I think Conor Friedersdorf has some good points here.
I think that, similar to how free speech is a legal right, but you can also have a culture of free speech, etc., the idea of freedom of association is also important in online spaces. And actually, in a way RonF’s example of a person coming in to heckle/shout down a speaker is as much if not more about freedom of association–you have to be able to kick people out in order to have certain conversations and types of speech, whether that means having Henry Kissinger speak on campus or having non-101-level social justice conversations. But it’s important that people understand that that’s what they’re doing, and if you understand that the reason you’re kicking out people who want to ask “Why aren’t you as upset about dead police officers as about black people killed by police officers?” in your BLM discussion group is due to freedom of association, you’re more likely to realize that this justification doesn’t apply so much to a campus newspaper that is generally open to all students writing op-eds, not a pro-BLM-only discussion group.
I do think that Friedersdorf is lumping together two phenomena that should not be lumped together when he includes the “I ask you all to please take down this post” student with the ones who are destroying newspapers. One is basically asking them to reconsider their speech (in this case, not stuff they directly said but stuff they decided to publish), the other is forcibly silencing the paper. Presumably the newspaper reserves the right not to publish opinions that the editorial staff thinks are beyond the pale; based on the the quotes published by Friedersdorf I don’t think that op-ed was beyond the pale, but that’s something that reasonable people can have a debate about, and the request is done respectfully.
Ursinus College, 2003, BA in English. Then Utah State University, 2010, MS* in English (concentration in Technical Communication).
Is your “alma mater” the school you got your highest degree from, or any school you graduated from? The master’s program was online, so I would still call Ursinus my alma mater, but I’m curious if there’s an actual convention.
Well, one of my alma maters has already adopted it and seems to be doing all right. (At one point, I attended the U of C.) :)
I find it interesting that the U of C adopted this policy, because–at least in my experience–it didn’t have a particularly strong culture of disruptive protests, or protests of any kind. (If I had to describe the student body, I’d say: imagine MIT if everyone was a humanities nerd instead of a STEM nerd. A little more tuned into pop culture, a little better with social skills, but supremely nerdy if you hit on the right subjects–I was intensely amused to overhear a conversation once which by tone of voice and speech rhythm I assumed was typical frat boy banter, only to realize they were debating some theory of Noam Chomsky’s once I actually listened in.) So they produced this, and I think it’s a good document as guiding principles, but it’s coming from a culture where they’re not going to get a lot of pushback against it, too.
That said, while I think it’s good as guiding principles, I think it will depend a lot on implementation. What’s an idea? What’s an opinion? What rises to the level of disruption? (I think we’ve discussed here before a protest where students stood up and turned their back to a commencement speaker. That’s disruptive but also doesn’t prevent the speaker speaking. Where would that fall?)
Also, something about the wording strikes me as a little one-sided. This didn’t happen while I was at the U of C–again, not much of a protest culture that I ran into–but it’s certainly been my experience at other universities that protesters may themselves be suppressed or disrupted (generally by university personnel; an obvious recent example would be peaceful-if-annoying student protestors getting pepper-sprayed in the face). While I appreciate statements like “they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe”, I wish the document had been clearer about not obstructing or interfering with people expressing that they find your views loathsome. I think that is consistent with what they wrote. Still, the fact that it’s not explicitly stated–when they do explicitly mention, multiple times, objecting to others’ speech because you find it offensive–makes the statement, to me, have a bit more of a political position than I think the writers intended or realized, in the context of the ongoing debate about freedom of speech and civility in campus culture.
Given that Prof. Chomsky has been on the MIT faculty ever since before I matriculated it would not be unusual to hear such a discussion there, despite your apparent impression of the place. In fact, I went to one of his public lectures on the Vietnam war in the Sala de Puerto Rico when I was a freshman. I walked out thinking that a) that man is paranoid, and b) he sure does enjoy the attention of the co-eds.
Here is MIT’s definition of harassment (from section 9.5 of MIT’s Policies and Procedures:
Note that the qualifier of “unreasonably” is absent from “creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive … environment.” So if I as a member of the MIT community say something about #BlackLivesMatter or what the proper definition of sexual assault is, even off campus, that you as another member of the MIT community find offensive, apparently you can launch a complaint against me at the Institute and have it taken seriously.
That’s ridiculous. And oppressive. Compare that to “But it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”
Interestingly enough, a search for “free speech” in MIT’s policies and procedures gives 0 hits.
Speaking of #BlackLivesMatter actions, it seems to have something interesting in mind for the Twin Cities Marathon in St. Paul this Sunday:
This group of people believes that they are justified in stopping runners at the absolute end of their endurance from finishing a marathon. There are over 11,000 runners registered to run. I’m sure that some of them – and some of their relatives who are gathered at the end of the race – will take a dim view of this. Then there’s the point that at that point in the race a lot of the runners will be in a fairly serious cognitive and physical deficit. What could possibly go wrong?
“‘I don’t think that us allowing them to finish the race would make them wake up enough.’ ‘I think they’re going to expect us to be on the sidelines,”‘
If you want to shout or hold up signs from the sidelines, fine. But a warning should be issued – and enforced – by the police that if anyone not a runner or registered volunteer sets one foot onto the race track and attempt to interfere with the runners in any fashion they ought to be hauled off bodily by the cops and arrested for endangerment.
I ran the Boston Marathon because I was trying to impress a girl. She did not even come, but my future wife noticed me coming back to the dorm, so it was not a total waste. I can just imagine how peaceful things would have been if anyone had tried to prevent me from finishing the race for which I had trained for a year, up to one short month before the finals.
I have a feeling that if some protesters had made a line across the finish line, I would have tripped in front of them, and accidentally caught my shoulder on someone’s knee. Accidentally having my hands behind their heel, I should not wonder.
@RonF: That’s the dumbest awareness-raising event I can ever recall hearing about. As someone who feels mostly positive towards BLM and their goals, if I were running that race it would really piss me off–though I would of course try to remember that some of the activists being jerks doesn’t mean they all are, and I agree with their goals (just as I would hope they do when Bernie Sanders supporters act like jerks). I can’t imagine that it would help their cause with people who are already somewhat hostile to them. This seems like it can only do harm to their movement with anyone participating in the race.
I think “endangerment” is a stretch, but I assume that they normally have some sort of response to keep random pedestrians (not to mention traffic) off the racecourse. Maybe something like jaywalking or trespassing?
Pesho, my house while I was at the Institute was 2 blocks from the Marathon finish line. I know the area very well. And at the exact time the bombing happened my daughter was on the Green Line headed TOWARDS the finish line to see a friend of hers finish. She got out at Fenway when the line stopped. If they had waited another 15 minutes they might have killed her.
There’s cops there. More now than before, and I imagine that’s true for all marathons. I hope they don’t stand for any nonsense at the finish line. At. All. Jump in front of my daughter while she’s trying to finish a marathon and while your life may matter, your ass won’t be worth a damn.
Black Lives Matter-Saint Paul and Mayor Chris Coleman Come to an Agreement Regarding Proposed #BlackMarathon Protest:
Thanks for that, nobody.really.
Just to be clear, I was trying to highlight the similarities, not the differences, there! And I know there’s a lot of overlap, and a number of humanities types (and STEM people interested in the humanities) at MIT. But as a STEM type myself I did feel in the minority at the U of C in a way I haven’t at schools focused more on those areas. And I also felt the very deep, dedicated nerdery was a little more well-hidden among the humanities majors than it was among the science majors. (It’s true that I’m not as familiar with MIT as an institution as I am with a number of other STEM-focused places, so I might have been extrapolating incorrectly there.)
EDIT: I did an English minor & bunch of extra rhetoric and writing classes, so I’m fairly well-versed in the “science people have interests outside of science” thing, if that’s what had you hung up on my comment! :)
I feel like this supports my point that, on average, university administrations are at least as likely to be a danger to student free speech as other students are, and focusing on people trying to suppress speech by talking about being offended/hurt misses a large chunk of actual speech suppression on campus.
Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Age.
Moreover, Republican-nominated justices start out more conservative, but grow liberal faster than Democratic-nominated ones. “A typical justice nominated by a Republican president starts out at age 50 as an Antonin Scalia and retires at age 80 as an Anthony Kennedy. A justice nominated by a Democrat, however, is a lifelong Stephen Breyer.” By age 85, the Republicans would be more liberal than the Democrats — but few (no?) justices stay on the bench that long.
So as not to derail the ongoing discussion about the distinctions between people victimized by prejudice and people victimized by prejudice + power, I’ll ask this here:
Should crimes targeting the police be deemed “hate crimes”?
I’d say no, for the same reason that crimes that target, say, taxi drivers aren’t hate crimes. Hate crimes particularly incite fear into a group for the purposes of political suppression.
yrs–
–Ben
Also, re: Supreme Court Justices, what I really get from that data is “Boy, DW-Nominate works okay for Congress, but it does not work for the Supreme Court at all.” This doesn’t surprise me.
A thing has been going on in my professional community and spilling out a bit into the wider social media sphere; I thought it might be of interest. In short, UC Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy–probably the most well-known exoplanet scientist in the US–has been found by a university investigation to have violated the sexual harassment policy multiple times over many years; apparently, he’s been warned about his behavior with female students and told that further infractions could result in suspension or firing. Janet Stemwedel, who does a lot of interesting writing on philosophy and ethics of science, has a discussion of the community response here. Also worth reading is this post from John Asher Johnson, a former student of Marcy’s who witnessed his behavior.
I’m glad this is getting some publicity, since this has been a missing stair for years. I’ll be curious to see what happens next, if this will continue to exert pressure on the department and the university until something more severe happens to Marcy or if it just dies away.
Novant hospital discriminated against Dr.Ron Virmani when they terminated him from the hospital in 1995. Please see this website for the horrible actions of the hospital and sign the petition for fairness and justice.
So after spending time together a personal capacity multiple times, which Marcy may very well have interpreted as ‘dates’, Marcy makes a physical indication to clarify his (presumably) sexual or romantic interest, an interest which Ballard doesn’t share, and somehow this is ‘sexual harassment’? It seems in that case, the only thing Marcy did wrong was be unattractive.
Y’know, I debated posting that because I thought, “Someone’s going to debate whether what he did was really sexual harassment.” I thought the interesting part was more in Stemwedel’s and Johnson’s posts, about how the community responds (and doesn’t respond) to behavior like this, and what bystanders do and don’t do.
Yes, Marcy and his student were spending some time outside together outside of the department, as students and teachers sometimes do. But it seems that he continued to push boundaries even when she didn’t respond favorably. And the fact that they continued to see each other outside of work might itself have been an attempt at boundary-pushing: there are some people who will take advantage of others’ aversion to saying no to reasonable but discomfiting requests, such as, for example, an offer of a ride home, in order to give themselves space to try further impositions. In fact, check out John Johnson’s Serial Harasser’s Playbook, which, as he says in the post I linked in my first comment, is mostly derived from watching Marcy operate. You’ll find both of those interactions listed as common things done by the serial harassers Johnson’s known–though they can be innocent actions, too, as Johnson describes.
No, that’s not conclusive. But neither is your reading. And neither of us have as much information as the people who did the investigation. Also worth saying is that the report concluded that “[t]he evidence gathered supports the conclusion that the totality of [Marcy]’s behavior violated the relevant UC sexual harassment policies”–which means, I think, that any individual instance might have been permissible, but taken as a whole the cases describe a pattern of harassment.
***
Not sure I’m interpreting your “don’t be unattractive” thing correctly. Is the statement that the actions Marcy took wouldn’t have been harassment if the student had been sexually/romantically interested in Marcy? Is it more of a joke? Something else I’m not quite getting?
Speaking of voting (as we were in another thread), Governor Brown Signs Padilla Bill to Expand Voter Registration. This could massively increase voter registration in California, especially among low-income Californians.
BREAKING: California Will Automatically Register Millions Of Voters | ThinkProgress
Harlequin –
That’s pretty much what I took Desipis to be saying.
A widespread belief among MRAs that “it’s only sexual harassment if he’s ugly.” The claim they’re making is, women will charge an ugly guy with sexual harassment if he attempts to flirt with her, but welcome the exact same behavior from a good-looking guy.
There’s a lot of problems with this perspective. For one thing, it ignores that harassment involves ignoring the preferences of the person being harassed.
So yes, if X walks up to Y at a bar, and X and Y are chatting, and Y is smiling and welcoming and a flirtation develops, and they touch hands and they’re both obviously smiling and enjoying themselves; and then X puts their arm around Y and Y seems to be enjoying it and leans into X…
Versus when Z walks up to Y at a bar, and Y is polite but curt and turns away from Z as soon as possible, and shows no interest in talking to Z at all, but Z won’t stop talking to Y and then Z puts their arm around Y….
In that case, Z is acting in a creepy way, and in some circumstances (like if Z is Y’s teacher and this has been a persistent thing) Z is harassing Y.
Y has every right to be more attracted to X than to Z. And Z and X haven’t behaved in the same way; X was responding to Y’s interest, while Z was refusing to be deterred by Y’s lack of interest. Not at all the same thing.
That reads like someone trying to pathologize common flirtatious behaviour. I mean I’m all for educating young people that others aren’t entitled to expect them to be acceptable with such behaviour and appropriate ways to respond to such behaviour if its unwanted, but calling it sexual harassment seems a bit much (unless they’re done after explicit requests to no do so).
Ampersand,
Which is fine, as long as the reports of harassment include clear and unambiguous communication of a preference for things not to happen. Continuing to meet for coffee after someone has shifted the conversation to sexual topics without a clear expression that such topics ought to be avoided, implies openness to such topics and the possibility of further escalation. Absent any detail of the communication clearly rebutting that implied openness, I think it’s reasonable to interpret the report as not being harassment.
Desipis, how about this example:
Marcy denies this happened, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it did happen. If Complainant 3 failed to indicate a “clear and unambiguous communication of a preference for things not to happen” prior to this incident, does that make Marcy’s behavior okay, in your opinion?
No. Without some form of prior relationship or consent that sort of act (sliding a hand up a thigh or grabbing a crotch) would be sexual assault.
So if she had been his student (so there was “some form of prior relationship,”) would that have made it acceptable?
I should clarify that I meant some form of sexual relationship where such conduct was expected.
Thanks for the clarification – sorry I misunderstood you.
This works out to “if you’re careful to select a victim who will be intimidated away from making a “clear and unambiguous communication of a preference for things not to happen, then nothing you do is harassment.” And in the real world, there are tons of people who will try very hard to avoid making a “clear and unambiguous” statement – because they’re intimidated, or because they don’t want to give insult, or because they’re inexperienced and not sure how to handle the situation, or because they’re afraid of reprisal from the other party, or because they’ve simply been trained to put a very high priority on sparing the other party’s feelings. All these things are very, very common in our culture, and it seems callous to be throwing people under the bus because they respond in these ways.
In addition:
There are some situations where you should assume the default is “no, don’t do it” unless you’ve got a good reason to think otherwise. For example, as you’ve agreed, sliding up a hand into a graduate student’s crotch.
I’d argue that in a case with an obvious power disparity – like a professor and a student – the professor is obliged to be extra cautious, and to not do things like performing an unasked-for neck massage, or chatting to the student about one’s past sexual conquests, unless there is a “clear and unambiguous communication of a preference” for such things to happen. (And even then, it might be inappropriate or against college rules, even if it’s not harassment.)
Finally, it’s worth remembering that the professor we’re discussing wasn’t accused of just this one incident. He was accused of four different incidents, and it’s also seems very likely there are many people who felt harassed by him who have chosen not to come forward, as well. So he isn’t being criticized based on the one incident you’ve chosen to focus on; he’s being criticized based on a pattern of behavior.
desipis:
The behavior in the playbook is not explicit communication, whether it’s flirting or harassment. Most things in that list rely on body language and inferred motives. (Actually asking the person on a date is not on it, for example–only asking the person to outside activities with the cover of non-romantic activity.) So it is very asymmetric to say that any response must be explicit communication in order for it to count as a clear no or stop. Body language and other non-explicit cues should be enough to stop things if non-explicit cues are enough to start them. (And again–we have only the brief summary in the BuzzFeed article, so you can’t know for sure that some kind of negative response was not given.)
I’d agree with Amp, also, that explicit requests of consent need to be a part of any flirting in a student and teacher situation, because of the power differential and the potential for quid pro quo harassment. For example, Marcy was writing the student’s recommendation letters for grad school, and your letter writers have more power over your career trajectory than anybody: at the very least he should have been cautious around the possibility that she could interpret this as a quid pro quo exchange for a glowing recommendation.
For what it’s worth, the University of California faculty code of conduct forbids sexual relationships between faculty and any student they have academic responsibility for. When I first heard the rumors about Marcy–almost a decade ago, though I’ve never been associated with Berkeley, and though I don’t do exoplanets, just to be clear on how open a secret this was–it was only that he repeatedly engaged (or tried to engage) in consensual relationships with his female students, and even that was considered very unsavory. Whatever you think workplace harassment rules should be, it’s a widespread opinion in academia that they should be stricter for students and teachers than they are for other relationships, because of the power differentials.
(To be clear: I do know some happy relationships in which the partners met when one was a student and one was a teacher. But they require finesse and communication, and it’s a red flag that to all accounts Marcy engaged or tried to engage in such relationships frequently–even if many or most of them were consensual.)
Okay. So those are both arguments that this behavior should count as sexual harassment, even if it wouldn’t be harassment if he’d done it to a professor instead of a student; and the first one is also an argument that the student’s responses made it harassment, and Marcy should have known to stop earlier, as Amp said above in comment 76. But also your position does another thing that’s interesting. The broad strokes may fit either flirting or harassment, so it’s the going to be the subtler cues of behavior that make the difference. When you say it’s not harassment, with the accused harasser honestly believing that the harassed person was interested, you’re inferring the details of the harassed person’s behavior from what the accused harasser says his or her interpretation wast. Going the other way, inferring the accused harasser’s cues of behavior from the harassed person’s interpretation, should be as plausible, shouldn’t it?
Harlequin:
No. I think the concept of mens rea is important in establishing guilt. I also don’t think one person can give reliable evidence of another persons state of mind, particularly where it relies on presumptions about another’s subjective interpretation of one’s own subjective expression. The only way to practically rebut someone’s own assertion of their state of mind (i.e. show that they wilfully ignored the communication of another) is through objective analysis of the communication itself. This is why I think it’s important for a explicit words or actions to have been recounted by someone involved in order to make a judgement about whether an incident was harassment or not.
It isn’t so much that unclear communication makes it always acceptable for someone to continue their advances, but rather that clear communication is required to enable third parties to make a reasonable judgement on the matter. Without the evidence to make such a judgement, I think the presumption of innocence should prevail.
The symmetry comes from realising there’s a large middle ground between the accused wilfully ignoring communication and the complainant being responsible due to not being explicit enough. That middle ground is where there was accidental miscommunication.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to blame the accused in such circumstances. It is reasonable to take preventative measures to avoid repeats. However I think it’s important to note that if, for example, some sort of training is proposed as a preventative measure, it ought to be provided or recommended for both parties. If there is a pattern of complaints regarding a particular person, then it might be reasonable to bring in extra restrictions on their conduct (i.e. ‘you have a demonstrated record of poor judgement/communciation skills, so you need to refrain from behaviour that relies on those skills.’)
I agree there’s a conflict of interest involved, however I think a better way to handle such situations would be for both parties to have the responsibility to report the sexual relationship (or simply a sexual advance) to the university so appropriate steps can be taken to remove the conflict of interest, rather than having an out right ban on such situations.
Ampersand:
I’m not suggesting we throw them under the bus. I’m suggesting that they’re adults and need to take responsibility for their own actions and the natural consequences that follow. The natural consequence of failing to accurately communicate one’s preferences is that others may act on a mistaken belief of those preferences. At the very least, I saying we can’t throw someone under the bus because of someone else’s failure to communicate.
But again, to be perfectly clear: you have no information that this did or did not happen. You have a two-paragraph summary of what happened, given in a news article, and the fact that the total investigation found him guilty; you have entirely manufactured the following chain of thought:
1. They met outside of work, and occasionally he brought up sexual topics or touched his student.
2. Therefore, he was engaging in normal dating activities, and thought of this as a potential relationship.
3. Despite saying that she felt fearful, the student gave no negative or even ambiguous signals of any kind that he should have been expected to notice.
4. Therefore, he was stunned to discover that she had been frightened by his overtures.
You’ve got evidence of #1 and #4, but #4 is also the most plausible lie he could tell, so it’s not like we know it’s true, just that it’s possible. You have zero evidence for points 2 and 3, even though you are basing most of your conclusions on them. (I mean, even your point #2 isn’t obvious: it’s also fully possible that Marcy was just a touchy-feely guy who liked sexual jokes, and had no intention to have any kind of sexual relationship with the student.)
Things that we have no information about:
– Whether he engaged in other behaviors that made her uncomfortable or fearful beyond the ones described in the article
– What reactions the student gave at the time, verbally or nonverbally
– Whether he was actually interested in a relationship with her/hitting on her, or just thought this was regular friendly behavior
– Basically any information about their interactions, other than she took his class, they met at least twice outside of class in situations that made the student uncomfortable, and then Marcy wrote her recommendation letters.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’ve invented a narrative that fits the data but that is certainly not the only chain of events that explain them, and that contains substantial embroidery or fabrication beyond what we have evidence for; totally ignored the conclusions of the people that have more evidence than you; and declared that it’s all a misunderstanding and the student just wasn’t attracted to him, therefore it wasn’t sexual harassment.
If we had all the evidence you seem to think we have, and we established that it was reasonable that Marcy was telling the truth, then it would be reasonable to say that this was just a misunderstanding (as opposed to harassment, or a finding that we can’t say one way or another). But that’s so far away from what we actually know in this case that it might as well be on another continent.
And to be clear: when you say
you absolutely did not do that in your first comment in this chain of argument, where you just looked at the summary and said, “Oh, it doesn’t smell like harassment to me, must be bullshit.”
Not a statement of “oh we just don’t have enough information to say”–the implication that the conclusion is ludicrous.
I’m perfectly happy to say that based on the information presented I wouldn’t conclusively say that particular instance was sexual harassment, either. But that’s not the only incident, and it’s far from all the available collected evidence, and the people who have looked at that found him guilty. So I really have no idea why you’re trying to litigate this one particular incident in a longer chain of behavior based on a case you’ve more or less made up.
Announcing to every person that you come across that you would prefer they never touch you unless otherwise stated isn’t actually anyone’s responsibility, though, nor is it a uncommon “preference,” and it’s unreasonable to suggest that one’s fellow adults are somehow honestly “mistaken” when they themselves fail to behave responsibly with respect to bodily autonomy. Except when otherwise negotiated or within a relationship in which explicit, ongoing consent has been given, that’s the default. The natural consequence of failing to elicit explicit consent when touching people (by coincidence, this is all young women, of course) is that people identify you as touchy-feely and, when the behavior is common and egregious enough, a serial harasser. I agree we shouldn’t infantilize adults by pretending they don’t know this.
Harlequin:
My entire point was that the facts as described were not sufficient to demonstrate sexual harassment.
Consider an alternative story about a black man who was arrested for theft after a store owner noticed some goods missing and had seen the man ‘loitering’ in the area. Would it be an issue to point out the fact that the man hadn’t been seen taking or in possession of the goods, that merely hanging out in a location doesn’t equate to being guilty of theft and that perhaps there was some sort of bias involved in the interpretation of the facts?
I think it’s worth noting that 2 of the 4 complaints don’t even involve people complaining about Marcy’s behaviour to themselves. They’re complaining about his relationship and behaviour with other people. They seem to be ‘I don’t like what those people are doing over there even though I have no idea if its consensual or not’ complaints.
Given the immense political pressure to find people guilty, and the lack of integrity of at least one person involved to leak confidential documents to buzzfeed, I’m not inclind to trust the conclusions of those people who have the details.
Two side notes:
No? I do. I mean, not as much as someone doing it deliberately, but “Oops, I didn’t mean to sexually harass you, I just didn’t care enough to figure out whether or not I was doing it” is still you violating somebody else, through negligence instead of malice. So. Still a problem. Especially here, where Marcy was in a supervisory capacity, and had extra duties towards his student that, say, coworkers wouldn’t have towards each other. And as to this part:
By the timeline, Marcy had already had discussions at least once and probably multiple times about his inappropriate behavior. So it is very, very definitely a situation where he should have taken “preventative measures”, and didn’t, if you’re correct about the events.
***
Regardless of what you think the policy should be, such a ban was in place. I’ll also point out that this doesn’t prevent two people who want to be in a sexual/romantic relationship from getting together: if you do want such a relationship, you just have to stop the academic relationship. That is eminently reasonable.
As is so often stated in these conversations: reading social cues can be hard, and people aren’t mindreaders. People don’t know you’re about to touch them, unless you announce your intention and ask for permission. There’s nothing stopping anyone doing this. If a potential toucher wants to comfort a potential touchee, if a potential toucher assumes both they and the touchee will derive pleasure from the touching, all the more reason to pipe up first and give the potential touchee the chance to opt in or out. If one isn’t intending to harm someone, if one isn’t intent on touching irrespective of what the touchee wants, one will take the necessary steps not to accidentally harm them. The only reason not to ask first is because the answer might be “no.”
So we come back to basic personal responsibility: if you willfully omit asking and plough ahead, there’s no one to blame for the consequences but yourself.
That is not analogous to this situation, because the situation you describe had no investigation, whereas the situation we have here had an investigation that was not described to you. Also, your not-an-analogy describes an event where a crime was definitely committed and the criminal was unknown, whereas the thing we’re discussing here had a known accused person but the unknown was whether a crime occurred.
By the way:
No, your original point was that the facts as described did not constitute sexual harassment. You didn’t express skepticism of the results, you said they were incorrect.
Also incorrect. In both cases, the complainants were representing victims (in Johnson’s case, at least, multiple victims) who had come to them to tell them they’d been harassed by Marcy, in addition to witnessing inappropriate behavior. (And again, you’re saying that Marcy could tell consent or lack of consent by nonverbal communication, but nobody else had that ability.)
Ben Lehman sent me this link:
255 Astronomers and Physicists write to object to the NY Times’ coverage of the Geoffrey Marcey harassment case.
The NYTimes article didn’t bother me, personally, but I know a lot of people whom it did.
In any case, Marcy has resigned.
Harlequin:
If you’re talking negligence then I think you have to define the duty of care. I think the duty of care would be to make a reasonable effort to judge if the other person was open to your advances. I don’t think you can define the duty of care as reading the other persons mind to be 100% confident about their perferences. Nor do I think it’s reasonable to define the duty as formally asking if such advances are welcome. Wrapping up simple and natural human social interactions in Victorianesque rules of etiquette, as Mookie seems to be suggesting, would be an unhealthy approach for both psychologically for individuals and sociologically for the community at large.
From what I read in the article he had an informal discussion with a student representative based on anonymous complaints. The preventative measure that would come form that would be to be adjust his judgement when assessing people’s attitudes towards him in the future. It’s not until the most recent ruling that it seems he was given clear guidelines governing his behaviour going forward.
I criticised the connection between the described facts and the conclusion of harassment. The problem may lie in the reporting or it may lie in the reasoning of the ‘investigation’. I’m skeptical of both.
From reading the article, I understood the victims were anonymous. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to judge people on the basis of hearsay.
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Novant Hospital Racism