- The Roast Duck Bureaucracy – Open City Local governments are often much more harmful to free enterprise than the national government. There’s also some ugly racial implications of having mostly-white Americans certifying the healthiness of immigrant cuisines that they may not understand at all.
- Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions – NYTimes.com
- Guest post: The moment he realized how horribly wrong he had been
- Study: White people see “black” Americans as less competent than “African Americans” – Vox
- A Free-Market Argument for the Social Safety Net | Thing of Things
- A lot of people are discussing Scott Aaronson’s comment 171, in which he argues that the acute pain he suffered as a male nerd means he doesn’t have male privilege.
Here’s another post on the same subject, from a different blog: Compassion, Men, and Me
And here’s a third: Neither empathy nor trauma are zero sum | Inexorable Progress
- A cultural history of inflation in America – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money “Overall prices in the American economy were about the same at the beginning of FDR’s presidency as they had been at the end of George Washington’s second term.”
- 6 Police Interactions That Were Different When They Were White | Scott Woods Makes Lists
- Ancient Trees: Beth Moon’s 14-Year Quest to Photograph the World’s Most Majestic Trees | Colossal
- Bizarro Back Issues: Batman’s Deadly New Year! (1972)
- The odds of Greece leaving the euro have never been higher – The Washington Post
- Want to reduce teen pregnancy and abortion? Start with long-term birth control. – The Washington Post
- “Trigger warnings are designed to help survivors avoid reminders of their trauma, thereby preventing emotional discomfort. Yet avoidance reinforces PTSD. Conversely, systematic exposure to triggers and the memories they provoke is the most effective means of overcoming the disorder.“
- Obama is unpopular. He’s also accomplished an incredible amount. – Vox
- Michael Ramirez’s Pro-Torture Cartoon – The Atlantic
- How an embryo turns into a baby, in one hypnotic GIF – Vox
- Tamara Loertscher: Wisconsin mother is thrown in jail for refusing drug treatment she says she didn’t need.
- Forbidden Topic in Health Policy Debate: Cost Effectiveness | The Incidental Economist
- “The complaint claims that administrators read books written by sex-differentiated teaching specialists who believe that boys are better at math because their bodies receive daily jolts of testosterone, while girls have equal skills only “a few days per month” when they experience “increased estrogen during the menstrual cycle.”“
- Rape apologists, in an attempt to silence victims, hurt an innocent man
- When Speaking to Men about False Accusations
- Rolling Stone didn’t just fail readers — it failed Jackie, too – Vox
- Rolling Stone and UVA: How sensationalism has betrayed survivors of sexual violence
- New Evidence Emerges of Wage-Fixing by DreamWorks, Pixar and Blue Sky | Cartoon Brew
- The Backlash Against Serial’s ‘White Privilege’—and Why It’s Wrong – The Atlantic
- Book Review: On The Road | Slate Star Codex “I too enjoy life. Yet somehow this has never led me to get my friend to marry a woman in order to take her life savings, then leave her stranded in a strange city five hundred miles from home after the money runs out.”
- Chris Rock is right: White Americans are a lot less racist than they used to be. – The Washington Post
“Afterwards, poking around the corpse, it was discovered that it was 185 years old, and that it had survived the Civil War — its hide contained 9 musket balls that had been shot at it by Confederate troops. And the hunters are smiling, without a hint of shame or guilt or even doubt that it was appropriate to butcher such a magnificent beast.” Update: Hoax, hoax, hoax. Thanks to Doug S. for the correction.- Why Orson Scott Card Should Keep His Job | Thing of Things A reprinted post on Ozy’s blog gives me and some other folks a chance to rehash some old arguments about free speech.
- “And if Rolling Stone was so eager to keep Jackie’s story in the piece that they were ready to run it against her will, that suggests their willingness to bend their fact-checking standards may have had less to do with some feminist “sensitivity” to a survivor’s request and more to do with not wanting to risk losing a particularly shocking tale of a gang rape that would help their article go viral in the way it ultimately did.”
- I love this wonderful 1904 comic strip by the immortal Windsor McCay. (Source)
As usual, feel free to post what you want, when you want, in whatever state of undress you want, and accompanied by whatever music you like. (That link is to a youtube mix I played while putting this post together).
Anyone got any plans for 2015? I plan to finish the third Hereville book in February, and it’ll be in stores in November. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll burn down my room and start anew, if I can figure out how to do that without catching the rest of the house on fire. Look for a LOT more political cartoons from me in 2015, as well, and also a new comic called “Superbutch,” which takes place in the 1940s and features a Lois-Lane-style reporter trying to uncover the secret identity of a lesbian superhero, to be drawn by Becky Hawkins. And more blogging, I hope.
The comments on the inflation piece are also quite interesting–I especially liked the discussion of differential experienced inflation rates depending on what kinds of items dominate your spending.
I have to disagree with the piece on trigger warnings, though. I mean…I can see how that could be a danger, but I don’t think it is a danger of that sort. For one thing, they’re not that common outside of the social justice blogosphere (and I know many more people who promote trigger warnings than I know people who actually use them). For another…of the people I know who do use them, it’s often a “picking the right time” sort of calculation rather than “avoiding it entirely.” And sometimes that “right time” is then! Like, it’s perfectly possible to ignore a trigger warning (I do it all the time, not being a PTSD-haver: my eyes glaze over till I get to the closing parenthesis).
Some of this is informed by my fanfic background (where discussions of reader warnings can get pretty heated), but I like to point out: in professional media you get all sorts of clues about what’s coming up, content-wise. Movie trailers, book blurbs, “up next on the news” bits, newspaper headlines and photo captions, etc. On the Internet, though, you might get a deliberately uninformative blog post title, or somebody dropping a link without a lot of context, or whatever, so you’re just providing the kind of meta-information that’s usually provided by other common sources of media. (Not always…but then again, not everybody trigger warns.)
Do some people go overboard on trigger warnings? Yes! And I think it’s most worrisome at, like, the education level, not the blog level; and there I think we either decide trigger warnings are inappropriate (as in a history class), or a simple “there may be sensitive stuff in this class, and I’m not going to tell you when it’s coming” should be sufficient (by which I mean “would, in an ideal world, be sufficient”, not “would be enough currently to prevent somebody complaining”). And I would probably have a different opinion if trigger warnings were much more common than they are. But as things stand, I don’t see a problem with making social justice spaces a little less anxiety-causing for people who’ve been hurt.
(Er, this may be a hot-button issue of mine. :) Also, as a millennial, I have to immediately take offense to any article that starts with “my graying Gen-Xer suspicions that kids these days are entitled precious overdramatic snowflakes too poignantly damaged by their not-very-harsh lives to conduct adult conversations about adult topics”!)
[edited to remove copious adverb mold and clarify the education paragraph]
Apparently the alligator thing was fake…
Harelequin:
Really good points about trigger warnings.
And rightly so! Geez, now I’m regretting having linked that.
What fandoms do you write fic for?
Doug: And speaking of regretted links – and clearly, on a story that should have caused my BS sense to tingle. Thanks for the correction; I’ve updated the post.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2673
desensitization is a core part of ptsd counseling. Trauma resilience training is an interesting field, if anyone is interested I can pick some good resources out.
21 is just…. oy. Bad in so many ways.
Even if you ignore the fact that the whole thing is basically one big “I have a lot of anecdotes which I would like to list, and then conclude that they are indicative of a larger trend” it still makes no sense.
Which is best summarized by this, perhaps, in the conclusion:
Yup.
The statement “I’ve been falsely accused” is not really evidence of being falsely accused, insofar as pretty much everyone who is accused (rightly or wrongly) claims to be innocent. Even if they’re actually a rapist.
But that isn’t the “gotcha” which the author might imagine.
Because if you follow that logic then you would also believe that the statement “I was raped” is also pretty bad evidence, insofar as everyone who makes an accusation (maliciously false, plain old wrong, or true) will also say “I was raped.” Even if they weren’t.
Or to put it more generally: liars are a subset of speakers.
It doesn’t sound like such a brilliant conclusion when you look at it that way, though.
So when he says
it would be more accurate to suggest that we can’t afford to take people at face value.
As somebody who has both PTSD (though trigger warnings are kind of beside the point for me, personally) and physical disabilities, I am really annoyed by the Dish article. It reminds me of the appallingly-common argument against crutches, wheelchairs, and elevators. You know. Because using your legs makes them stronger, so people who have trouble using their legs just need to use them more.
Your link title says “systematic exposure to triggers” sometimes help people recover from PTSD. Sure. Systematic physical therapy exercises sometimes help people recover from joint injuries. The key word in both cases is “systematic.” Pretending it’s anything like the same thing to just force injured people to exercise/confront triggers whenever it’s convenient for others? Wrong.
I’m one of those who find clowns pretty creepy sometimes, and I find the clown in that comic strip really creepy. I’m not even sure why – I don’t think I could point to any single aspect of his appearance that’s creepy on its own, but something about the whole package….
I had a bizarre experience with a very angry clown when I was a kid (probably ~10 years old) vacationing with my family in New Orleans about 30 years ago. My sister and I briefly (like a minute or two, I think) stopped to watch a clown performing on a sidewalk, and when we started to walk away he demanded that we put some money in the hat he had as payment for the entertainment. My sister (who would’ve been about 15) put some coins in the hat, which was all she had, and we walked into a restaurant nearby to meet up with the rest of our family. Several minutes later the clown comes in, throws the coins on the floor in front of our table, and says “I don’t work for change!” then storms out. Angry, angry clown.
Oh, I was mostly kidding about the generation X quote…I have more friends in gen X than millennials, really, and some of them say stuff like that to me just to be funny, so I find it amusing. :) And it reminds me of that piece about how New York Times trend articles about millennials rarely feature actual millennials. In any case,I like a good excuse for a rant, and it’s also got me thinking that there’s probably a good essay for someone (not me) in the use of trigger warnings as group identity cues and solidarity with victims even when no victims are present…
My main fandoms have been Harry Potter, the BBC Sherlock, and two celebrity (real person) fandoms I’m a little too embarrassed to name! I’ve also written for some other things, certainly Avengers and Stargate Atlantis and probably others.
It occurs to me that some of you might find the trigger warning policy of one of the major fanfic archives interesting. There are four major warnings people are expected to use: major character death, graphic violence, rape, and sexual situations involving minors; you can of course select multiple of those. But there’s also an option that says “chose not to use archive warnings”. You can’t put something up without one of those five options, but one of them is essentially equivalent to no warnings.
Lee1, that’s interesting and bizarre about the clowns. Reminds me of an assertion I heard once that fear of clowns wasn’t common until John Wayne Gacy made the news. Which also reminds me of the time Sarah Palin spoke to an audience in Waterloo, IA and said she’d heard John Wayne had lived there, and while John Wayne did come from Iowa, it was John Wayne Gacy who’d lived in Waterloo!
That was Michele Bachmann, actually.
“To me, clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kind of scary. I’ve wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad.”
— Jack Handey
Re #25:
I totally agree with Connor on this. It’s not that Sarah Koenig doesn’t have white privilege, of course, but that she generally seems aware of it and does her best to be as sensitive and careful as possible in her reporting as she can be. Serial told an important story, I’m glad she told it, and I think she tried to tell it as well as she could, and in as non-racist a way as she could.
And I’m with Connor also on the diary issue. When Koenig said, “Her diary, by the way—well I’m not exactly sure what I expected her diary to be like but—it’s such a teenage girl’s diary,” Jay Caspian Kang (Koenig’s critic) seemed to think that Koenig was surprised that a Korean girl would have such a stereotypical ‘teenage girl diary.’ That wasn’t my read at all – I heard it the same way I might hear a comment from someone reading some of my goofy teenage poetry, “God, he was such a teenage boy.”
Not as a contrast (What else was I going to be but a teenage boy? What else was Hae Min Lee going to be but a teenage girl?), but as self-conscious commentary on the way in which these particular cultural artifacts call us back to the petty drama/trauma of teenage life.
I thought it was humanizing. Of all the major players in the case, Hae is the only one without a voice, because she was the victim. We’ve all been silly teenagers, and I think it was important for Koenig to remind us that she wasn’t some faceless name or subject for forensic inquiry – she was a person, who’d tragically died as a silly teenager.
—Myca
Adrian:
Bingo. Systemic exposure to spiders can help cases of arachnophobia. Unexpectedly tossing a bucket of tarantulas onto someone with arachnophobia isn’t the same thing. That’s not therapy, that’s sociopathy.
Of all the things we’ve disagreed about here, the backlash about trigger warnings may be the thing I’m most mystified by. It’s as if there was some vocal contingent who was just furious that restaurants label dishes containing peanuts and shellfish, because after all, they’re not allergic to either of them. So childish. So hateful.
—Myca
Er. So it was. (Which in a way is worse, because Bachmann was born there!)
Michele Bachmann is the kind of character that I would find unbelievable if she were in a novel, never mind the House of Representatives. At least she’s no longer in office, though I think Louis Gohmert (R-Asparagus) had eclipsed her regardless.
I think my finding many clowns creepy pre-dates that incident in New Orleans, but to be honest it’s all kind of lost in the mists of time at this point. All I know for sure is that was an angry, angry clown (who thankfully didn’t kill my dad).
as a millennial, I have to immediately take offense to any article that starts with “my graying Gen-Xer suspicions that kids these days are entitled precious overdramatic snowflakes too poignantly damaged by their not-very-harsh lives to conduct adult conversations about adult topics”!
Seriously. Because back in “the old days,” we spoke so freely about everything – you know, back in those days when you kept a cancer diagnosis a secret, rape and “unwed motherhood” was vigorously hushed up, and you couldn’t even show Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz owning a double bed, never mind say the word “pregnant” on television.
Well, now we know why lingerie sells so well.
That Amanda Marcotte piece in “RawStory” is pretty interesting.
“Rape apologists generally claim their motive is not to excuse rape but to protect the innocent who are falsely accused.”
What’s a rape apologist? And where is this group of people who are trying to “excuse rape”?
“But rape apologists needed to “prove” Dunham lied about being raped and so they went on a manhunt to find “Barry.” And sure enough, they found a guy who has that name but is probably not the guy in Dunham’s story. And they’ve been making his life pretty damn unpleasant.”
What I read is that people who figured he was the guy in the story were harassing him, hacking at his Facebook page, etc. Of course, the sources I’ve read have their own point of view, and it’s likely not Marcotte’s. On what basis does Marcotte presume it’s “rape apologists”? Because she doesn’t say why in her essay.
As far as why there are a plethora of people checking out this story, Marcotte seems to think that it’s “rape apologists” trying to keep women from telling their stories of sexual abuse. Perhaps she has not read about Rolling Stone’s “journalism” where actual journalists have found the report to be, shall we say, fact-deficient – and where numerous people have sprung up to say that such a fact-deficient story is important because it serves a higher truth. It seems quite reasonable to me that if someone with a pronounced point of view reports a story that serves to emphasize that point of view – regardless of what that point of view is or whether I agree with it or not – it should be thoroughly vetted.
Two articles on trigger warnings in academia, one for, one against—well, not really against. Maybe wary is a better word, since I think the authors are more interested in not taking the value of (the institutionalization of) trigger warnings in an academic context for granted than they are in dismissing the value of using them outright. This piece is also interesting.
I think warnings are a good idea for all the reasons cited in the pro article. I don’t include a general trigger warning on my syllabus, but I do give them when I think they are merited by the material we are dealing with in class. It has always seemed to me good pedagogy, even before the notion of trigger warnings had a name, to contextualize material that students might find personally difficult or problematic as fully and deeply as possible. Trigger warnings in the classroom make the most sense to me in that context. Nonetheless, I think the other piece raises some important points about the institutionalization of trigger warnings within academia that should not be dismissed.
W/r/t trigger warnings:
It is difficult, I think, for something to land in that happy medium of “it’s good to do but not worth lecturing/punishing/calling out/etc. people who don’t do it.” But that is where trigger warnings should be.
The push against trigger warnings is, I think, based on the very real fear that the pro-trigger folks are not at all satisfied with that happy medium. Rather many pro-trigger folks are attempting to add triggers to the category of things which are becoming “formally prohibited.”Notably, the pro-trigger folks are also usually the same people who are trying to cut down on other speech and expression, and trying to move other things from the “try your best” category to the “formal” category, through things like speech codes. In their mind they’re protecting people; in my mind they’re dangerous.
I am not inherently offended by triggers (why would I be?) and in an ideal world I would be neutral and might occasionally do them myself. But we don’t live in an ideal world. I distrust the goals of the pro-trigger folks to an enormous degree (and for good reason, I think) so therefore I oppose them and refuse to participate in using them.
In other news, white guy publishes book against heavy odds! So much for white/male privilege.
http://fair.org/blog/2015/01/05/white-man-publishes-book-usa-today-mistakes-this-for-news/
(Sarcasm alert, as you’ll see if you read FAIR’s discussion.)
This paragraph sums that up:
I wish my contacts were as bad as that.
Re: Duncan @21 – in a similar head-slapping vein:
http://www.thebaffler.com/odds-and-ends/brats
Short version: Privileged white guy lies to his employer in order to get extended paternity leave, can’t think of anything to do because his wife is “so good” at child care, develops drinking problem out of boredom, brags about it on the Internet.
(I suspect that men who work on, say, the janitorial staff or in the library at Boston University don’t get similarly generous leave.)
g&w, sorry, I got a bit confused in your paragraph up there since you seem to be mixing the words “trigger” and “trigger warning”–is this the right sense? (bold additions mine)
@Elusis:
Have you seen this hilarious parody of the Giraldi nonsense?
Via Scott Lemieux.
Thank you. I think I grew a tiny piece of my shriveled, withered hope back.
(do you mean “an absence of trigger warnings” here?
YES.
Or, literally, triggers?)
NO
Thanks for the clarification, g&w.
There are a lot of discussions on this blog that seem to end with some of us saying “if this bad phenomenon (as a side effect of a desired thing) was really common I’d be worried, but it’s not so I’m not” and you saying “I think the bad phenomenon is really common, so I am worried.” I wonder if that’s a difference of data, or a difference of evaluation?
I don’t think it’s common per se. If you ask a random person about trigger warnings I doubt they’ll even know what they are.
I think it’s increasingly common in spheres of left wing influence: colleges, lobbyists, political groups, and the like. I also think it’s increasingly common among the groups of people who are generally trying to reduce what they think of as “offensive” or “troubling” behavior.
gin-and-whiskey:
Or among people who want to enable injured people to participate in what’s going on (whether effectively or not, cost-benefit-wise). Sometimes it’s just as simple as that. It’s a way of saying, “I want you to be here, and I will try to make that possible by enabling you to make whatever safety call you need to, sooner rather than after the hit.”
I think that a large part of the debate is not over trigger warnings per se, but over where to draw the line. To what extent should we accommodate other people’s traumas or sensitivites, and to what extent do they simply opt out? A lot of that judgement relies on what you think is a trauma and what is merely a sensitivity, or even mere distaste. And the ability to do THAT is very situational, relying on detailed knowledge of an individual person’s history (often on very private matters) and current state.
Years ago, I was at a seminar where one participant lit incense during a break. During discussion, another participant asked if we could not do that, since incense often gave her migraines. As far as I know, she lucked out, that time. But it sure would suck, for her, to be constantly getting migraines, and wouldn’t it be nice if she could know in advance when someone was going to light up, so that she could ask that they not, or leave before she was exposed?
Awhile back, I was auditing a course in which one of the texts was the first book in the Game of Thrones series, which I’d heard lots of people raving enthusiastically about, but about which I knew little detail. Turns out there’s a lot of rape in the series. Now I know. That’s where I stopped auditing. It’s not that I can’t discuss rape; I sometimes investigate rapes. It’s just that I don’t need casual and routine rape popping up casually and routinely when I read for pleasure. I found myself not enjoying the experience of the story, and then wondering why the hell I had to put up with it, and with offhanded-and-casual discussion of it by students who apparently thought about rape in the same way a desert-dweller thinks about getting wet when it rains, as something which happens to other people, far away.
So I stopped reading, and called that audit done. Good thing I hadn’t paid for it. I don’t know if the professor got any feedback on it, but if he did, perhaps he won’t casually assign such a rapetastic text, next time, when he really wants to talk about mythological elements in fantasy world design, or whatever. (Clearly assigning such a text for a class about rape in literature would be a different matter.) I can’t help but wonder: what if I were a sexual assault victim not coping successfully with the trauma, and I needed those class credits? I would be in a shitty situation, which I don’t think most professors would want.
So, y’know, it’s multifaceted and intersectional and complex and all that. And I don’t know that I’d mandate content warnings in most settings, but I do sometimes appreciate them. And when someone says something like, “I don’t do content warning on principle, in order to push back against the stifling effect they have on the free and open conversation,” well, that person is not making a consequence-free choice; the choice is between participation by the sort of people who thrive in a mosh pit and the sort of people who thrive where the dancing has a few more rules.
It’s a lot like moderation policy, actually. There basically aren’t any worthwhile spaces which are completely unmoderated, because very quickly assholes make it intolerable and either the space shuts down or people who want to have a more, ahem, moderate discussion step in and lay down some rules.
Of course you’re going to have people who try to weaponize trigger warnings and bend you to their will. People weaponize everything, and whether it’s okay or not is situational, just like touching someone physically. Judgement calls, discussions like these, first approximations, discussion of results, adjustments, context — all parts of the process.
Grace
Elusis @16:
Yes, seriously, because the “old days” you describe were not the ones most Gen Xers experienced.
We saw blended families (Brady Bunch), inter-racial marriages (Jeffersons), racially diverse families (Different Strokes), single parent families (Alice, One Day at a Time), cars that could talk (Knight Rider), TV shows that dealt with rape and sexual assault (Archie Bunker-All in the Family, or whatever it was called at the time), child molestation (Different Strokes), alien invasions (Alf and Mork and Mindy), abortion (Maude), platonic shacking-up (Three’s Company), and the unfortunately short-lived run of The Ropers.
Yes, we saw it all, and no one warned us about anything (although, I think I recall that there was a warning before the Different Strokes episode that dealt with child molestation; but that was not a trigger warning as much as it was a parental notification).
-Jut
When I was in college, in one of my classes, we watched the rape scene from The Accused as part of a lesson. (I don’t remember exactly what the broader topic was.) Anyway, before putting the video on, the professor said something like, “This is graphic. If you don’t think you can handle it, then you’re free to go wait in the hallway, and come back in when you’re ready. If you want to leave any time while it’s on, that’s fine.” And I thought I could handle it — I’d seen rape scenes on film before — but this one was worse than I’d thought it would be, and it got to the point where I had to leave the room, and I was very glad that the professor had said that before she’d started the clip. And that clip was just one class day. If the entire course had been stuff like that, then I would have really appreciated having some kind of warning ahead of time, so that I could decide for myself whether this was a class I wanted to take or not. Much better to let me decide that before registering, or at least on the first day of class, than to get past the drop-date and end up with a choice of either staying in a class that would effect me like that every day or drop the class and lose the credits and lose my scholarship.
I remember a whole lot of Very Special Episodes in the late eighties and nineties that had warnings at the beginning. The episode of A Different World that dealt with date rape had one. Every Simpsons Halloween episode had one. And nowadays, TV shows have ratings, so that you can just glance at the screen at the beginning of the show (or press the “info” button on your remote, if you’ve got cable and a reasonably new TV) and see the list of letters that tell you whether the program has sex or violence or suggestive dialog or whatever.
I’ve had several veterans with PTSD in my classes. (Two of them talked to me about it, when they were having problems that interfered with them doing their homework.) There are plenty of books that are commonly assigned in college English classes that include graphic descriptions of battle scenes. It would be cruel to just hand one of those books to one of those students without even a “be careful” in a class that the student needed to take.
In and of itself that’s not an objectionable question, since we all ask it every day. But not everyone is as reasonable as you are.
And FWIW, the question that is much more problematic is usually “to what extent should we put procedures in place to accommodate other people’s traumas or sensitivities.”
It does? I hadn’t considered the question of whether/how people qualify their responses differently if they think it’s a “real trauma” versus an equivalently troubling “sensitivity” because I don’t really distinguish between them. If Jane breaks down crying when ___ happens I’m going to accommodate her or not; I’m not interested in the root cause of it.
Of course, that doesn’t address the question of efficiency/benefit (which you already mentioned elsewhere in your post.) But in any case, both cost/benefit and trauma/sensitivity answer “what is the best solution to this problem? or “how do we balance the solutions?”
But w/r/t to trigger warnings, that jumps ahead of the larger question: “even if we assume that there’s a problem here, is it a problem that we should address through rules and regulation at all?”
I certainly hope not! I hope to change behavior and set social standards I agree with, just as I post about Kirby Delauter (hi, Kirby!) and Mohammed cartoons (all hail Charlie Hebdo!)
the choice is between participation by the sort of people who thrive in a mosh pit and the sort of people who thrive where the dancing has a few more rules.
Well, that may be the well-intentioned ideal of some (or most!) folks, but all too often the result is something like the town in Footloose. Because it is very very hard to say “you should list this, but not that” or “that trigger doesn’t count,” and that leads a pile on.
I hate to use personal examples but I want to respond; hope this works out OK:
So to look at this problem, you have to ask
1) Should society care at all? Is your experience something we need to make rules to prevent?
Trigger folks don’t usually have “no” on the table. Which is to say, the discussion about triggers is usually a question of “which” or “how,” not “should.” (I concede that this impulse usually stems from a well-meaning desire to help people, especially those who are perceived as needing extra help. But so be it.)
2) If we want to even try to solve the problem, should someone else be responsible? After all, you hold (or can get) almost all of the information on your own. In theory, you’re the one who best knows what you don’t want to read and what the effect will be on you. You can call the professor, try to track down the syllabus, and use Google to find out that GOT is a rape-filled tale. If the syllabus is not available, you are the one best-placed to consider the possibility that you’ll read something you don’t like, what the effect might be, and whether it’s a good idea to sign up for an unknown syllabus.
You used the analogy “dance floor or mosh pit.” But a better analogy would be “familiar dance hall, dance hall which you have scouted out, or unknown dance bar.” Although you take your risks with the third one, those usually aren’t mosh pits.
3) If you’re going to stick a burden on a third party, how much? Is this “hey professor, please post the syllabus online before the class if you have a moment, please” level of burden? Or should it be “be prepared to take phone calls and personally explain the content of the books to any potential students who ask” burden? Or, perhaps, “once you have been notified of a set of triggers you are obliged to provide appropriate alternate readings and assignments;” or “you are prohibited from including those triggers in any new books if the syllabus changes” or, worse yet, “you should not permit discussion in class which might potentially be triggering” or…?
4) What happens if the third party fails–intentionally or not–and someone gets triggered? Is the approach “oh well, whatever, trigger warnings were just a favor anyway and I was never entitled to them so I won’t complain about the lack of one?” (if I was confident in this response I’d be relatively unconcerned. I’m not.) Or is it “you have failed me, you ___ist, and the results are your fault?” You’re a cop: you know that if you make something a guideline, it gets enforced.
5) How do you avoid the slippery slope? What doesn’t count? Can you list things which should not be trigger-warned? If not, can you list a criteria? I can’t. And since this acts as a multiplier for every other problem, that’s very concerning.
gin-and-whiskey:
I started to write a post which engaged with all of your questions, because I know you’re worried about enforcement and coercion. But in this particular case I’m not worried about enforcement and coercion. Maybe I should be. But so far no one has ever tried to force me to trigger-warning anything. Once or twice someone has added one (for which I felt gratitude) and once or twice someone has asked for them. But coercion around trigger warnings is not something I have experienced, and I simply have other fish to fry.
I was trying to mull over the cost/benefit analysis. It seems to me that trigger warnings (or content notices or whatever you want to call them) are hugely useful for the people who need them, somewhat useful for the people who simply want them, and not a huge inconvenience (I know, coercion and enforcement) for the people who may or may not provide them. They are a bit like handicap spaces. Yeah, for the able-bodied person who just needed to run into the store for a minute and got distracted, it’s not even worth remembering, but for the wheelchair-bound side-access-van-using MS patient, not having them, or having them occupied, can be a daily event which leads to urinary tract infections (real example from my professional life). I know they’re a pain, but my reflex sympathy is with the handicapped person, who feels the full load of all those collected minor impositions, day in and day out. I, as a very able-bodied person, would consider myself an asshole if I did not accede to carving out a little space in the parking lot for people who have to spend the effort getting out of the car which it takes me to get out, buy groceries, grab a sandwich, and get back into my car.
I’m not saying the analogy is perfect in all cases, nor am I calling you or any other content-warning-skeptic an asshole. I’m just saying that when it comes to questions like these, one of my methods of analysis is “On whom does this have a disparate impact?” and my reflexive sympathy is with the people who carry a bigger burden. So, that’s where I put the presumption, and if someone wants me to take a stand against them, they need to beat that presumption. A good way to do that is to show me a greater competing harm.
Also, just thinking out loud, I think my society’s take on what’s important is whacked. I’ve seen no warnings at all on violent scenes, even in children’s movies, while I’ve seen serious content warnings on content where two consenting adults kissed or had artfully-concealed sex. (People DO THAT? WHO KNEW?!)
Grace
[edited for grammar and clarity]
This thread, continued here on a racially charged law school exam question, I think provided an excellent discussion of the issue of triggers and trigger warnings in that context.
The links above are broken. They’re an interesting read, so… First link, Second link
By the way, I do not think that I have ever spent more time fighting a text editor for a shorter post, ever.
G&W:
Sorry, you’re right; I should have said “more common than desirable”, which is (as you note) quite different from “common”.
Well, as part of your argument here seems to be that we’re misestimating the ratio of well-intentioned to badly-intentioned people wrt trigger warnings… Just because you’re a reasonable well-intentioned person who doesn’t care about the supposed difference between “sensitivity” and trauma, it doesn’t follow that every anti-trigger-warning person feels that way!
Grace:
Have you seen This Film Is Not Yet Rated? It’s an investigation of MPAA warnings. Has some really interesting stuff on what counts as allowable and what doesn’t (includes, eg, filmmakers asked to reduce number of thrusts in sex scenes, plus a bunch of very sexist things, and nobody caring about violence). There’s a bit of a weird digression in the middle about the private investigators the director asked to track down the MPAA judges, but otherwise, well worth watching.
What they could possibly be thinking? Well, here are (excerpted) notes from a conservative religious confab:
[E]verybody is intensely concerned and pessimistic….
[T]he disaster of the Iraq War and the failed Bush administration, … as well as the overwhelming cultural tide in favor of same-sex marriage, has left all of us on the religious and social right dazed and confused….
The “radical” school [of Catholicism] rejects the view that Catholicism and liberal democracy are fundamentally compatible. [L]iberalism cannot be understood to be merely neutral and ultimately tolerant toward … Catholicism. Rather, liberalism is premised on a contrary view of human nature (and even a competing theology) to Catholicism. Liberalism holds that human beings are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility. [L]iberalism is not a “shell” philosophy that allows a thousand flowers to bloom. Rather, liberalism is constituted by a substantive set of philosophical commitments that are deeply contrary to the basic beliefs of Catholicism[:] that we are by nature relational, social and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which we experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation; and that both the “social” realm and the economic realm must be governed by a thick set of moral norms, above all, self-limitation and virtue.
Church[] leaders have to pick … their battles carefully, and … should prepare the flock for the possibility of a season of persecution….
America has gone so far from its Christian roots, with no reasonable hope of recovery anytime soon, that orthodox Christians would do well to step back from trying to shore up a liberalism that cannot help but be antagonistic to them, and instead build up their own communities and institutions to withstand the chaos ahead.
[H]ow [can] Catholics … get excited about the Church when they have an abiding sense that the Church is losing ground steadily[?]
[T]he most confounding thing about what the Church faces today is “the invisibility of the challenge” — meaning that the kind of liberalism that presses against orthodox Christianity today is so ubiquitous that people don’t readily grasp what the big deal is.
[T]he relationship between social and religious conservatives on the one hand, and the GOP on the other, is headed for the rocks…. 2016 is going to be the year the Republican Party stiffs Christian conservatives. [T]he longstanding tension between libertarians and traditionalists … is breaking out into open contempt by libertarians…. The libertarians have all the money, and … believe they can win without … social conservatives. [T]he Republicans may be bad, but … they are all we’ve got. Said one man, glumly, about how the GOP can take the social conservative vote for granted, “We are the African-Americans of the Republican Party.”
Oh, the irony. Trigger warning for Kate’s links!
One of the commenters on those pages uses one of Charlie Hebdo’s controversial covers as her avatar.
Oh man! I forgot to make my joke about how I don’t mind clowns too much, and even like certain kinds, and how that’s a surprise to most people but probably, given my handle, not a surprise here :D
Harlequin is NOT a clown! He is the arch enemy of the clown, his nemesis – the thuggish stupidity of the clown is overcome by Harlequin’s sophistication. You can say that Harlequin is a trickster, even a devil, but a clown?!
Harlequin punishes evil doers, deflates egos, manipulates others into furthering his aims, and pursues Columbine. He is no clown, and shame on anyone suggesting that.
Kate, those were interesting links. I’d read Eugene’s before. Have you seen the one about the law school students who wrote a letter asking to delay exams because of ferguson?
Grace, to me a handicap space is clear as well: it’s the epitome of a simple fix with low relative cost; high overall utility (there are tons of people who use them;) less potential for abuse (you need to get a placard from a doctor and there are fines for those who misuse them); and (most notably) crystalline and simple clarity about what someone can (park w/ placard) and cannot (park without placard) do.
In comparison, a trigger warning policy would have high relative cost to implement, assuming it isn’t a meaningless step like a poster “college may be triggering;” much lower overall utility (everyone has different triggers and different levels which trigger them;) higher potential for abuse (how can you ever disprove it?) and relatively unspecific terminology.
I think most of the people are probably well-intentioned–but dangerous. Just like the folks who have passed anti-hate-speech laws in other countries are well intentioned but dangerous.
You’re too polite, perhaps, to point out that the reason I don’t need to distinguish is, in large part, because I’d often be opposed to it either way. If anyone was trying to formalize it–or to include it in a curricula or school behavior code, or a policy which affected my local paper, or pretty much anywhere else where I might think it might spread–then I could certainly use that difference as an argument, though I don’t personally feel that way.
The rules and regulations already exist, though. To use the example of a college, a student with PTSD or generalized anxiety disorder has the same legal right to reasonable accommodations as a student with hearing or mobility issues. I think trigger warnings should be treated much the same way as any other disability accommodation should be. It doesn’t seem at all unreasonable for a student to be able to ask a professor before signing up for a course if it will cover X and Y sensitive topics, and find out whether arrangements for alternate assignments are possible if so. And issues like rape and graphic violence are such common triggers that it would make sense for professors to identify those in their curriculum in advance–the same way you don’t wait to build a ramp until someone shows up in a wheelchair.
You talk about who the burden should fall on. It seems to me that it’s a lot easier for the professor who’s familiar with the material, frequently because they’ve chosen it, to provide the student with an idea of the kind of content they can expect than for the student to go hunting for potential triggers on their own. The professor, after all, has the reading list well before the student does, and has probably read most of the material multiple times before they even consider teaching it.
For the student, they usually don’t know the course content beyond a very sketchy overview until they show up the first day and receive the syllabus. Once they get the syllabus, they then need to find summaries of every single reading assignment and go through them in enough detail to see if anything jumps out as potentially triggering. (I’m sure for someone with severe PTSD, that can be a hurdle in and of itself—if reading the material is triggering, reading a detailed enough summary to spot the triggers might also be.) All of this has to be accomplished *and* discussed with the professor if there’s an issue *and* a decision made before the deadline to drop classes. Usually, that’s within the first couple weeks of class. Not to mention finding a course to replace it that hasn’t filled up, and starting that course a week or two behind.
Pesho, I’m not as up on the history of this as I should be (mostly I know–or knew–stuff about folk trickster archetypes, with some dips into harlequin and clown characters) but AFAIK that distinction between harlequin and clown is pretty much just the Victorian harlequinade plot, not found in the original commedia dell’arte (which is a precursor to modern clowns)? (And commedia’s harlequin is borrowed from French devil characters before that, IIRC.)
Ah, I see. I was mostly just amused at the way you were pointing out the worst-case scenarios of trigger warnings, and then responded to Grace’s point with what seemed like a best-case point of view.
RJN, I just noticed that I never read your links on trigger warnings on academia–will try to get to those soon, thanks for the pointers.
If you go by the French tradition, Harlequin and Columbine were separated from the clowns as early as the 17th century… The French like to make the distinction between the sophisticated characters and the braggarts (Rodomont, Scaramouche, etc…) You’d have to go back to the 16th century’s masters/servants/lovers division and classify all zanni as clowns to make Harlequin one.
On the other hand, English speakers seem to draw a parallel between clowns and slapstick, and Harlequin is the original wielder of the actual slapstick. But that makes Polichinelle and Punch clowns, and I think that they, like Harlequin carry a bit too much wit and menace.
So, all I’m saying is that I think that tricksters should not be called clowns… “Clown” is a mild and condescending insult in every language I speak. “Trickster” indicates someone of whom you should be wary.
Thanks out to Kate for those links, and to Pesho for fixing them and conquering the text editor in so doing!
This is the bit which stood out to me as being very much along the lines of what I was trying to articulate:
Grace
Assuming you’re talking about the ADA, that requires a specific diagnosis and a specific accommodation as well as a balance of reasonableness. The fuss involved is self-limiting, at least to some degree. It’s also private (by law) and available only to those people who need it (you can’t argue for accommodations for someone else because it’s private.)
And even the ADA gets abused all the time, especially in academia, and ironically mostly by rich privileged people.
I have not had a chance to read through the links that Kate provided, but it strikes me that the excerpt quoted by Grace reads like good pedagogy, independently of whether you use the words trigger, trigger warning, or triggering.
I don’t want to dismiss or in any way diminish the importance of being sensitive and considerate of others—and I think it’s important to remember that the trigger warnings you find on blog posts, for example, are precisely that—but the question of how to deal with shocking and/or potentially inflammatory material in the classroom has to be rooted first in questions about the best way to teach that material. And there is no question that the best way to teach that material includes contextualizing it by letting students know it is shocking and/or potentially inflammatory, placing the nature of that shock, etc. in a social, cultural, political, what-have-you context, and finding ways to measure what student’s have learned that does not require them to demonstrate that learning while at the same processing/dealing with the emotional impact of the material (whether it is triggering for them or not). In other words, the approach that faculty member outlined, while it is of course sensitive in the way he or she described, would be appropriate even in a class where no one could possibly be triggered. (This is obviously different from what happens when dealing with someone who has a PTSD diagnosis, who is legally entitled to accommodations, and so on.)
I linked to this article above and it’s worth reading. This is the concluding paragraph:
It’s important to read the entire piece because these authors are not saying that faculty should not include statements about the potentially triggering nature of classroom material. They are writing in response to movements on some campuses to institutionalize trigger warnings, and this paragraph comes at the end of a list of suggestions for how campuses ought to be dealing with the issues that trigger warnings are intended to address such that any trigger warning a faculty member might want to give exists in the context of services and resources that will truly help students who need them.
The posted “don’t trigger” response in Grace’s quote is certainly a valid opinion. As is the original “don’t sugarcoat” opinion. But I’d bet a goodly amount that the original folks would never try to control the other classes, to force the other teacher to give exams in their preferred method.
The reverse isn’t true: As RJN notes, there have already been “movements on some campuses to institutionalize trigger warnings.” This is why I find those folks scary: Things like this have a tendency to fly right by the “wouldn’t it be nicer if” stage, to the “we should make a law” stage.
In fact, you might notice something, in this very thread: we’ve moved from trigger available notice (Grace’s “I had no idea about GOT” example) to trigger warnings (Ruchama’s movie example) to trigger avoidance (the “you shouldn’t put triggers on the exam” example) to institutionalized prevention (the attempts to formalize it.)
If folks really dispute a slippery slope, perhaps you should reconsider.
And you should not view the outcomes as cost-free. As Grace correctly noted, NO choice is free of consequences. There are consequences here, to be sure.
So for example, some folks (or rules) will aim to accommodate the most sensitive, and potentially deny people who aren’t triggered the opportunity to discuss relevant and sensitive information in the context of academia, with an instructor.
And that would suck. I wanted controversy in my law school classes. I learned more when it was controversial. I gained more experience and practice that helped me later on in my career. I like GOT, irrespective of the unpleasantness.
More to the point, I think it is a good and valuable skill to be able to step back and talk dispassionately about something, even when I care about it very strongly.
I don’t think my opinions are the only correct ones–plenty of people feel otherwise–but they’re mine. Accommodations can be a cost to people like me, and there are a lot of people like me.
That cost is too easily brushed off–or more accurately, often ignored. It is not our problem to change our behavior to accommodate everyone else’s potential trauma; and to lose out on our own opportunities as a result. Especially when we had no hand in causing it.
Criminal law is… criminal law. Nasty stuff. If you can’t deal with triggers, you probably won’t do well in criminal law. Why is that a problem?
People are different. Some law benefits (among other things) dispassionate folks who aren’t easily triggered. Just like some some law questions benefit folks who can suss out complex interpersonal issues; sometests benefit folks who can easily understand and apply complex rule systems; and so on.
If someone can’t be dispassionate, and is triggered, can they be a kick-ass, outstanding lawyer? Heck yes. They might be the best transactional lawyer in the country some day.
Are they likely to be a kick-ass, outstanding, CRIMINAL lawyer? Well, maybe not. And to the degree that you think those things are good crimlaw traits, perhaps they should not be getting an “A” in criminal law. Even if the reason is that they can’t test as well because they are triggered.
Man, this entire discourse (re: trigger warnings) makes me enormously sad.
I have PTSD, I have a lovely suite of triggers, and I cannot think of way to enter into this conversation, to describe what triggers are like, at all. It seems to me so wildly disconnected from the facts of my life. It’s a weird bind.
Hrm. Here goes.
Generalized trigger warnings (as in, not for a specific crazy person’s specific set of triggers, but more general “any descriptions of this thing are triggering to any one”) are, to me, utterly worthless at best and counterproductive at worse. The culture which deems certain topics”triggering” outside of the context of a specific person with a specific mental illness is explicitly harmful to me, because contains a moral judgement (this is triggering, therefore it is wrong.) This makes discussing actually triggering stuff (pool tables, teddy bears, particularly polka dot patterns, particular smells, etc) really hard to talk about, because of course none of those things are morally wrong. But, when you hear “triggering” as a synonym for “morally wrong,” your response isn’t going to be “oh fine I’ll put the teddy bears in the closet” it’s going to be “what the hell is your problem with teddy bears?”
(There is an aside here, which is that this culture is also an excellent way of preventing survivors from talking to each other, because Good Survivors are supposed to avoid triggers, and talking honestly and openly about your life experience is, of course, a trigger. I have seen places, trying to be safe, saying “no triggers” which in practice means “no survivors allowed.”)
This is by no means a universal experience of people with PTSD. But it is shared with more than just me: a lot of survivors I talk to have similar experiences. People with other triggered mental illnesses seem to have an easier time with it, perhaps because their triggers are less arbitrary?
But, and this is a really important but, the mainstreaming of talking about triggered mental illness has produced another culture, one where it is totally okay to request the ability to avoid something without judgement. I now have a social group where I feel perfectly comfortable asking people to, say, tag their pictures of teddy bears so I can avoid them. I can do that, and no one will think me weird or strange at all. That is great, and I enjoy having access to that, and this whole “this is bullshit, toughen them up” backlash is utterly counterproductive to its continued existence.
I feel, honestly, that the debate about institutionalized trigger warnings doesn’t have much to do with survivors at all, on either side. It’s a debate about civility, moral limits on public discourse, decency, and so on. Which are all very useful things to talk about, I just wish that I wasn’t the token being fought over in the process.
I know that arguing is the norm for this blog, but I don’t really want to argue about this, and so I want to ask people to please not expect any further responses from me. It’s just too personal for me. I’m fine if you disagree with me, or think I’m wrong. Just take this as an account of one person’s experience of the debate.
yrs–
–Ben
How private and individual it is depends on the accommodation, though. There are certainly accommodations that exist to help disabled people with specific diagnoses that can also be utilized by other people who might find them handy. To give an obvious example, once you have a ramp or an elevator, it can be used by people with minor injuries or people carrying heavy backpacks or small children, in addition to just disabled people. Likewise, if a professor already needs to have a good handle on what material in his/her course might be triggering because there’s a student with PTSD, that information can also be provided to a rape victim or someone with undiagnosed anxiety who asks for it, even if the student with PTSD is the only one who has the option of an alternate assignment.
Do you have some examples?
That’s a good point. The idea of less “arbitrary” triggers matches my experience as someone with generalized anxiety disorder. The main things that are really likely to trigger a panic attack for me are graphic depictions of violence, particularly against children and animals. I would guess, in a layperson musing kind of a way, that that’s a pretty common split between people with PTSD who have a very specific and personal trauma, and people with anxiety disorder who tend to have disproportionate reactions to the same sort of things that scare or worry most people.
Anyway, I wanted to thank you for sharing your experiences. It must be really crappy to feel like a token in an argument that isn’t really relevant to you.
Also an incredibly good point.
http://randazza.wordpress.com/2015/01/09/nous-sommes-charlie-phillipe-honore/
Not off hand, though they’re widely available if you look into them on Google with search terms like “disability” or “accommodations” or “extra time” or “ADA,” combined with “lie,” “fake,” “cheat,” etc. Here’s one for “students fake disabilities extra time” to start you off.
The short summary is that some (NOT ALL!!!!) elite and near-elite students have a huge amount of incentive to try to get ADA-mandated extensions, and to have access to performance-enhancing stimulants. So the system gets gamed (which usually involves private testing, which is expensive, which is also why this generally applies only to relatively rich people.**)
It isn’t surprising. Extra time (the most common accommodation AFAIK) that you don’t “qualify” for is a HUGE benefit. With rare exceptions, most students (accommodation-eligible or not) will do better in most cases when they have extra time.
**Personal experience: I have a kid in SPED, who I got tested. When the tester wrote a report she put in that my kid needed every single possible accommodation, including some which I had not even asked for (like unlimited test time.) I asked why, and she said “I assumed you wanted me to; most parents want their kids to have absolutely the most accommodations that the school will allow so they can get the best grades possible.”
It’s really not surprising, since the tests are often subject to a wide range of interpretations. And also they tend to give very granular results. There is not any test which will conclusively say “your kid should have 15% longer on multiple choice tests; get one extra page of scratch paper for the SATs, and be normalized everywhere else.” It’s much broader than that: I’m not saying it couldn’t happen but I’ve never heard of an “extra time” student who had less than 50% extra time.
Moreover, the school has no ability to challenge it unless they want to pay for their own testing, which they can’t afford. And for all I know they can’t challenge it anyway–in any case I’ve certainly never heard or seen it. It really is pay-to-accommodate, in many cases. (I made her take that stuff out, though, before she sent it to the school.)
I’ve never considered the idea that trigger warnings or triggers contain a moral judgment before reading this sentence. That kind of came out of an alternate universe at me. I mean, I can see how that would work in theory but I can’t understand how to do that myself. Maybe this explains my puzzlement over the argument taking place.
I no longer know how to consider the subject. I guess I’ll stick with my opinion that trigger warnings are a good thing to include if you’re aware of the trigger/it’s viable to have while reserving space in my brain for the knowledge that triggers and trigger warnings have a completely different definition for some unknown portion of the population.
Same for me. Like, many of the common trigger warnings are for discussions about things that most people would consider morally wrong, but the actual discussions aren’t. Which is also why the “slippery slope to banning it” makes no sense to me. The point of trigger warnings is to say “This is a place where we are having this conversation; if that’s not for you, then you don’t have to come in.” The people who are in favor of trigger warnings are often people who write a lot of stuff that they put trigger warnings on — are they trying to ban their own work? A trigger warning isn’t a “this is bad” label.
Richard, I think that article made good points about the potential for trigger warnings to promise more than they can deliver, or to be used as a band-aid, or to put responsibilities on professors that really belong to counselors or doctors.
I did think some of the concern about reducing the impact of the material by warning about it (which was mostly hashed out in the comments) was misplaced. (And this is my opinion both as someone with an English degree and as someone with anxiety disorder.) From the literary side of things, if the value and impact of a work is that dependent on “shock value,” to me that says something about the quality of the work. If you wouldn’t reread, for example, Bridge to Terabithia because you already know Leslie dies, then why teach it? That’s not a criticism of the specific book–I haven’t read it recently enough to have an opinion on its literary merit. But in general, if spoiling the surprise spoils the work, then to me that’s a sign that the work isn’t all that great. Pieces that are really good hold up to rereading or re-watching.
And from the “person with a mental illness” side of things, I’m not a fan of a dismissive attitude toward traumatizing students, or of the conflation of being sad or challenged with having a panic attack. (And as panic attacks go, mine are pretty mild.)
I do think it’s possible to institutionalize some general trigger warnings without going overboard, and I think it’s worth considering if a lot of students are experiencing trauma related to their coursework. The only kinds of triggers it would be effective to give a blanket warning for are common ones like graphic violence or rape, but I feel like even that would be useful. Anything else would have to be dealt with in an ad hoc, “ask the professor if you have concerns” fashion. And it should obviously be made clear that it’s not a substitute for counseling or medical treatment, any more than a rating on a movie or a “viewer discretion advised” note on a TV show is.
None of that is censorship—just giving students information so they can decide whether they want to take a course or brace themselves to deal with disturbing content. I wandered over to this Shakesville comment thread from the link Richard posted, and I noticed a pretty common theme of preparation rather than avoidance. Lots of commenters said they didn’t necessarily avoid content with trigger warnings, but that they appreciated the opportunity to brace themselves for it. I think “I’d like a heads up” gets really easily conflated with “I don’t ever want to be exposed to this” or even “You should never discuss this.”
Essentially, I think information about potential triggers should be available to any student who asks for it, but that accommodations like alternate assignments shouldn’t be automatic. I think a lot of the fears about abuse stem from an assumption that trigger warnings mean that any student who doesn’t want to work with that material gets a free pass, when I don’t think that would have to be the case.
Yeah, I think the “ADA accomodations” analogy is even better than my ‘peanut allergy’ one … what with it not even being an analogy and all. :P
And sure, disability accommodations get abused, and I don’t like that any more than anyone, but I think that occasional abuse is inevitable, and that refusing to build ramps out of resentment at the idea that someone with two working legs might use it is awfully silly.
—Myca
Sure, everything gets abused. Every system gets gamed whether it’s a big system like, say, disability or a small system like our bonus program at work. The question is whether we’re willing to absorb the cost of those gaming the system to provide a benefit we believe that significant numbers of people need to live marginally decently. That’s the question I ask about trigger warnings. I think the answer is pretty clear, but there are obviously people who think I’m wrong.
I’m not sure about this. Going back to GoT, I read the whole series a while ago, and now a few friends and I are rereading and discussing each chapter in a facebook group, because we are giant dorks. Re-reading is a totally different experience — I know what’s coming up, so I can spot the foreshadowing, and I can pay more attention to symbolism and things like that because I’m not as caught up in rushing to see what happens next. But I think that non-specific trigger warnings can deal with this adequately — for Bridge to Terabithia, something like “this book deals with death” would suffice as a warning, without spoiling the plot. (As for Game of Thrones, you’d kind of need “Every violent thing that has ever happened anywhere in the history of the world probably happens somewhere in these books” if you wanted to cover everything.)
Ruchama, that’s fair. I was thinking more in terms of teaching a book in a college level class, where things like the symbolism are focused on more than what happens next. I meant “good” in a “literary merit” way rather than a “fun read” way, not that they’re mutually exclusive.
So, after the killings in France we of course see some strong expressions of support for free speech. But we also see both Muslims and non-Muslims holding forth arguments that freedom of expression does not equal freedom to offend, that Muslims have a right to not be offended and that there needs to be some limits on freedom of speech. I’ve seen an article holding forth the idea that the French government must bear some responsibility for these killings because they were predictable (which I can agree with) and that it was therefore the responsibility of the French government to restrain the publication (which I emphatically cannot agree with). In fact, a definition of freedom of speech that would include a constraint that forbids offending people on the basis of religion has been seriously set forth in proposals before the U.N. by Moslem-majority countries.
It seems on many campuses and other left-dominated areas that the concept of a “safe space” is important, said “safe space” seeming to me to be one where people can feel free to express certain ideas because they will not have to hear opposing ones. Many campuses have “speech codes” which include banning the expression of ideas that a listener might find objectionable, demeaning or offensive. In fact, some hold that a right to not hear offending opinions or see offending graphics is so strong that there has actually been one case where a professor led her class out to an anti-abortion protest and shoved protesters and seized and destroyed their signs (i.e., their property) – and has repeatedly justified it on the basis that she had been “triggered” by them. To my knowledge, this professor has not yet lost her academic position.
We can debate on how short a trip it is from these kinds of things to what happened in France. But it does seem to me to be a direct line, in any case. So while I can understand that someone who has been exposed to genuine trauma may need to avoid something that will trigger an emotional or even physical issue, we need to be damn careful how we use the concepts of “trauma” and “trigger”. We have to be explicit that there is no right not to be offended. We have to ensure that everyone understands that the idea that somehow you can ban “hate speech’ and yet have freedom of speech simply isn’t true.
President Obama in a speech at the U.N. on Sept. 25, 2012 said “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” In context he followed that by saying that people who condemn that (generally Muslims, after all) should also condemn destruction of churches or incitement against Christians or members of various Muslim sects. True. And yet it gives me pause. Because the statement seems to equate slander – which is speech only – with physical violence or destruction or an incitement to perform such acts. That indeed is an equivalence that these extremist Muslims hold – that such slander is indeed violence against Islam, is intolerable and is justifiably answered with violence. A free people cannot agree. I don’t think it was deliberate on his part, mind you. I don’t think it was a conspiracy or code language from a crypto-Muslim. But I think he didn’t think it through, and I think he got it wrong.
[Link added by Amp.]
Though I broadly agree with your post, Ron (There is no right not to be offended, free speech is most important for offensive speech, there can and should be no compromise on this, etc.), when you say:
RonF:
I think you’re conflating (and I suspect GNW is conflating) “don’t say things that upset me” with “don’t make my class grade contingent on things that make me flash back uncontrollably.” And I understand how it could happen, because of the abuse of the system that GNW was bringing up earlier.
Or maybe you’re not conflating it. I dunno. I guess I just believe that PTSD is real, and that combat isn’t the only thing that causes it.
Also, a minor nitpick. The quote was:
Obama:
I agree with you that including destruction of churches in there was a mistake, but “desecration of images of Jesus” and “Holocaust denial” both fall under the free speech banner, and I don’t see the cited “incitement to physical violence against people” included.
—Myca
Out of order:
So do I. I hope I didn’t suggest otherwise. My position regarding the social obligation to accommodate triggers is in no way based on a claim that they don’t exist; that they’re not serious; or anything of the sort.
To me they are part and parcel of the same thing, because the movements are extraordinarily resistant to saying “no” to any claim of need. I keep harping on this for a reason, which is that I am trying to get folks to look around at the people who want warnings and ask themselves “do these people
actuallyever express an opinion that a given request for a warning is ridiculous, totally unjustified, or irrelevant?” In most cases I think the answer is “no.” Trusting those folks to end up with some reasonable outcome is like trusting the “1 in 5” folks to make sure that all accusers get due process.It starts with “don’t make my class grade contingent on things that make me flash back uncontrollably.”
It’s a small step to “don’t make my class grade contingent on things that might make me flash back uncontrollably,” and from there to “oh, screw it, I don’t want to get in trouble for triggering my students so I’ll just do my best not to upset anyone at all, OK?”
I’m not conflating them (I agree they’re technically different) but I’m treating them similarly.
I can easily see this happening with an adjunct or an instructor, but not with someone with tenure.
KellyK:
I didn’t actually read through the comments, but you make me think that it is not necessary to give away the specific details of a plot in order to prepare people for the kind of material they are going to read, which–I would stress again–is good pedagogy independently of whether or not it would qualify as a trigger warning. I have not read Game of Thrones, but let’s use that as an example. Assinging that book for a class–meaning that there will be assignments on it that students will get graded on–and then expecting student to be able meaningfully to discuss the sexual violence in the book without providing them with some kind of context is a sure recipe not just for shallow conversation and shallow writing about the book, but it is also more likely to lead to discussions that people will find offensive, hurtful, etc. And I think this is true whether you are talking about freshman, seniors, or graduate students–though the kinds of contextualization that happen, obviously, will be very different for each level.
Still catching up and chewing on things in this thread, but quickly:
G&W
Depends where you start contextualizing the conversation: I was discussing institutionalized prevention (trigger warnings in education, or as official policy of a large website) way back in comments #1 and #8, and RJN was linking to things on that topic in comment #19. And you were discussing formalization just after Ruchama’s movie example, but before the exam-avoidance example.
Pesho:
Ah, this may be a language usage difference thing. I’ve also heard “clown” used with a categorizing meaning in English, involving prankster and trickster types in certain kinds of costumes, in addition to its mild-insult usage. They are, at least, branches of the same lineage, which is mostly what I was getting at with my mild joke. :)
Looking at articles that present the debate rather than coming down on one side or the other – such as the links I’ve pasted at the end of this comment – I’m not seeing anyone say “a given request for a warning is ridiculous etc etc,” but I’m also not seeing anyone on the anti-trigger-warning side put the question to them, which makes your standard seem unfair.
Can you link to a documented case of a “ridiculous, totally unjustified, or irrelevant” trigger warning that was requested in an academic setting in real life?
The people making the arguments, on both sides, don’t all seem as completely thoughtless or unyeilding as your arguments imply they are, especially when the people talking are professional academics rather than professional pundits. (For examples, see the two articles focusing on the Oberlin debate, in my links below).
Finally, I’m not aware of any “1 in 5 folks” who oppose due process. I’m an example of a “1 in 5 folks,” I’d imagine, and I’ve said many times that I’d favor rules requiring due process in college judicial proceedings. Could you link me to an example of someone who explicitly opposes due process?
Links:
Feminists Talk Trigger Warnings: A Round-Up | The Nation
Oberlin backs down on ‘trigger warnings’ for professors who teach sensitive material @insidehighered
The Oberlin Review : College’s Trigger Warning Proposal Incites Media Backlash
Also worth reading, by Roxanne Gay:
The Illusion Of Safety/The Safety Of Illusion – The Rumpus.net
Assuming by “due process” you refer to bedrock legal principles like the presumption of innocence, Amp, then I think this qualifies.
On the Nov. 3 edition of The Current on CBC Radio, there was a discussion about the Twitter hashtage, #BeenRapedNeverReported. Former Crown prosecutor Sandy Garossino made the following comment (at roughly the 18:35 mark). (I’m including extra material here than I might otherwise so there won’t be questions as to whether her remark was taken out of context.):
The above link goes directly to an mp3, BTW. Here is the program podcast page you can find it on (at least for the next couple of weeks).
Amp:
Off hand, I’d list the Wesleyan statue; the Bill Maher brouhaha; the Oberlin rules; the article on teaching rape, which referenced a request that people not use the word “violated.” but I haven’t had coffee and don’t want to spend a ton of time googling this early.
Regarding the “1 in 5” folks: I did not say that they “opposed” due process; that’s entirely your term. I said that they should not be trusted to ensure due process. The movement is inherently one-sided, which is to say that process isn’t one of the main goals and it tends to be a very low priority to the degree it’s considered at all.
To use an analogy: there are plenty of prosecutors who don’t “oppose” a failure to convict innocents, but absent the work of defense attorneys a prosecutor cannot usually be trusted to ensure that doesn’t happen. The “1 in 5” folks are like overzealous prosecutors.
Thanks for those links, Amp. I’d read a couple of them, but not all of them.
Throughout this discussion, I keep coming back to the question of distinctions. If I choose to put a trigger warning on a blog post that I’ve written, I think of it as an entirely voluntary act of concern and courtesy, something akin to the way I might check in with someone I was having a face to face conversation about whether or not he or she was comfortable discussing a certain topic. And since, more often than not, the people who read what I post are (often anonymous) strangers to me, that kind of checking in feels very necessary, again as a kind of concerned courtesy.
If am planning to submit the same piece of writing for publication, I do not bother with a trigger warning, not just because using them or not will be a matter of the publication’s editorial policy, but because formal publication means, for me, putting the work out there to be experienced on its own terms, for people to read and use on their own terms, and there is no way that a trigger warning does not set, or at least shape those terms, by highlighting certain aspects of the content. Concern and courtesy, in other words, are no longer the issue. Once the piece has been published, you are not encountering it in “my space;” I am under no obligation to let you know the kinds of things that get written about or discussed in “my space.”
In the classroom, however, I find little or no disctinction between the functions that are supposed to be served by trigger warnings–with the exception of a student with a PTSD diagnosis, who comes with official documentation telling me that this particular thing is triggering and that I need to be aware of it in the classroom (something that has never happened, by the way)—and good pedagogical practice. I keep coming back to this for a couple of reasons: First, the classroom is not a therapeutic space; nor is it supposed to a safe space, in the sense that feminist blogs, say, define the term “safe space.” In other words, it is not a space to get away from, even temporarily, the ideas, ideologies, images, etc. that you find oppressive, triggering, difficult to deal with, disruptive or whatever. Indeed, the classroom should be a space where those clashing ways of being and seeing can–within reason–coexist. When students say explicity sexist or racist things in my classroom, for example, I will call out the racism and sexism, but it is also my job to make sure, to the best of my ability, that those students remain comfortable enough in the class to learn, that the space remains, in that sense, safe for them.
Good pedagogy means being honest and transparent about the nature of the material you are going to teach and the ways in which you intend to make it possible for students at different comfort levels (for want of a better term) to deal with that material in a meaningful manner, which is not the same thing as giving away plot points so that students know what to expect or offering alternative readings for students who might be overly offended (again, excepting the case of a student with a diagnosis and documentation) or anything like that.
Ballgame –
She was speaking off the cuff and I think what she said there is actually ambiguous; maybe she’s talking about reforming legal principles, but maybe she’s just talking about how we should act “outside the court system.”
I suspect it’s the latter, because she’s also quoted in this October 2014 story saying this:
That seems unambiguous.
Oh, the same way that critics of the “1 in 5” figure cannot be trusted to actually oppose rape in any meaningful way. That would be fair for me to say, right?
Is there some reason you’re escalating the snark level here? It isn’t as if I attacked you for misquoting, and I just reread my response, it’s perfectly polite.
Anyway, you can say what you want, and I don’t want to argue about what “fair” means in this context, but I don’t think it would be accurate. Largely because the “1 in 5” opponents are taken from so many different communities, including, most obviously, a whole community of people who are focused on accuracy, and who want to spend a lot of time making sure that the common reporting “1 in 5 women are raped during college” doesn’t drive policy, seeing as it is a misreporting which is not actually true.
And of course there is also the general “civil rights” community, who oddly enough tends to be relatively liberal and pro-feminist-values. (lots of feminists like civil rights folks, up until they start treating rape like other crimes–at which point the same pro-defendant pro-rights anti-conviction stance that gives feminist cred w/r/t accused people rapidly turns into “rape apology.” But I digress.)
Anyway, that isn’t accurate. Many opponents were/are, in different contexts, either neutral or actually supportive of changes, and are highly opposed to rape, and are supportive of victims. The common slander that opposing ridiculous laws is akin to being pro-rape or not opposed to rape is beneath you. Or at least I thought it was.
Of course, there are some MRAs in the group. And as the insanity level increases there will be some snark to match, at least from some folks. But the majority of folks are raising different arguments.
Is there some reason you’re escalating the snark level here?
This schtick is getting about as tiresome as it is predictable, g&w. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but you keep having these discussions where you must aloud about how people on the ‘other side’ of your opinions (“SJWs”, “one-in-fivers”) are probably malicious and dishonest, and their supposedly well-intended actions are merely the first goosestep in the Parade of Horribles. (Here, drawing a direct line to ‘maybe warn people if something ooky is coming up’ to radical jihadists executing cartoonist in France, for fuck’s sake.) Then when you get called on it, you pull a face and complain about the level of snark and discourtesy. To steal a line you’ve used before, I sure hope that you don’t write briefs or argue in court that way.
Regarding trigger warnings, it never fails to amaze me how some people take any suggestion of social courtesy (trigger warnings, maybe not saying the first thing that pops into your head) as a harbinger of government-enforced thoughtcrime to the point of actively refusing to engage in social courtesies, e.g. g&w’s comment about trigger warnings in #20. Academia, of course, is a hothouse of half-thought-out social experiments and often even less-well-thought-out reactions to them, so it’s not surprising (as Richard links) that there are going to be problems; but I’m not following how we should therefore assume voluntary heads-ups are Orwellian.
@Ampersand, the fact that you were linking to Andrew “Racism Is TOTALLY Science” Sullivan should have been a clue, no?
I’m really not. What I’m trying to do is match your snark level – and by doing so, I hope, make you realize that you said something which was snarky and obnoxious.
And
…are not meaningfully different in their level of snark. The only difference is that you don’t acknowledge the snark when it’s aimed at people you disagree with.
I’m not certain what you mean when you say that the 1 in 5 statistic isn’t “true.” It’s true in the sense that the statistic actually exists, comes from a legitimate study done by respected researchers, and doesn’t represent a huge (by “huge,” I would mean order of magnitude) departure from what many other peer-reviewed studies of rape prevalence have found. It’s not true in the sense that we can generalize from this one study, without reference to what many other studies have found, and without considering the limitations and strengths of its methodology.
I also know that I follow rape activism, and in particular rape research, very closely, and that most
(but not 100%) of the people I’ve noticed leading the “1 in 5” criticism are the same people who have in the past floated extremely dishonest criticisms of past rape prevalence studies, while never supporting any serious research or anti-rape activism in any meaningful fashion.
*shrug* I guess. Although it’s not like I always fuck up when I use links found at The Dish; a lot of the links there are interesting. I try to make a point of reading good blogs that I don’t always agree with, and that includes The Dish.
But yes, if I had a do-over, I probably wouldn’t include that link. :-) But on the other hand, I’ve found a lot of the discussion of trigger warnings on this thread really interesting and enlightening, so maybe it’s good that I did. If I were right 100% of the time, we wouldn’t need a comments section. :-)
Your linking to, and having civil discussions with, people you don’t agree with is one of your very admirable qualities. But when somebody has shown themselves to be emotionally attached to the idea that racism is OK because it’s ‘scientific’, deliberately ignoring and minimizing all evidence to the contrary – and in fact doubling down on their bigotry when proven wrong out of a sense of egocentric contrarianism – we’re no longer in agree-to-disagree territory. We’re talking about somebody who’s just a shitsack of a human being. (Also, one whose intellectual value is incredibly overblown, unless ‘curates other people’s content on his blog’ is a rare quality.) And let’s also be blunt, Amp, that one of the awesome things about privilege is being able to shrug off the bigoted behavior of others who share our privilege when it doesn’t directly impact us, like continuing to happily hang with my good buddy who always shits on waiters because, hey, he’s never rude to me, right.
Yeah … no, Amp. Read it again:
Emphasis added to help clarify what she actually said.
That unambiguously indicates that she thinks we need to “reverse the onus” within the court system … which is about as straightforward an admission to wanting to undercut due process as you can get.
Your quote, on the other hand, was in fact ambiguous and entirely consistent with her stated desire to undercut due process:
Again, emphasis added.
Now, had she said, “You don’t want to lower the burden of proof, despite the fact that it really places women in a terrible situation,” it would have been the “unambiguous” statement that you claimed it was. However, she said “but” not “despite,” suggesting she thinks we should lower the burden of proof (or is at a minimum consistent with the idea of lowering the burden of proof, i.e. is an ambiguous statement at best and not the “unambiguous” statement supporting the presumption of innocence you claim).
However, I do think your response here — dismissing the import of an unambiguous call to reverse the burden of proof while claiming an ambiguous-at-best statement supposedly supporting it is “unambiguous” — provides an excellent illustration of why gin & whiskey is wise to be skeptical of the biases of the people likely to adjudicate ‘trigger warning’ disputes.
Disagreement aside, I do think this has been yet another excellent Alas discussion thread, FWIW.
Ballgame, I agree that read literally, the quote you provided is unambiguous. However, that it was spoken off-the-cuff (if I understood what you said about its contexty) means that we should consider if there’s a more charitable reading. As the last presidential election showed (in examples involving both Obama and Romney), even two of the world’s most experienced speakers, when talking off-the-cuff, can say things that they don’t mean if read literally. So when someone says “This person believes something extraordinary,” but the “evidence” they show me is an off-the-cuff statement that might easily have been a misstatement, I think that’s ambiguous.
That’s why I said “off-the-cuff” in my previous comment; I thought that was relevant. Sorry I didn’t explain that better.
Regarding the second quote, it is standard, in newspaper articles of the sort I quoted, to switch between paraphrases of the interview with direct quotes. When the reporter wrote “She says there isn’t really anything [that] can or should be changed,” that seemed to me like the reporter paraphrasing what the subject had said, and it also seemed unambiguous, unless we’re assuming the reporter got things completely wrong.
In fact, I can’t see any way of interpreting that except as a paraphrase of something Garossino said. Of course, I could be mistaken – or the reporter could have screwed up and paraphrased Garossino to mean just the opposite of what Garossino said. But it is because of that phrase, in conjunction with the other stuff I quoted, that I said it seemed unambiguous.
If you could resist writing passive-aggressive attacks like this (or denying that’s what they are, when called on it), I’d find dealing with you more pleasant. Not that I haven’t also been an asshole to you, at times, but it’s not as much a one-way street as you’ve sometimes suggested.
Mythago:
Thanks! I’m glad to hear that, coming from you (because I know you’re not a person for idle flattery). And – please take this in the complimentary spirit I intend- your willingness to give me shit about my choices is one of your very admirable qualities.
I agree that Sullivan’s “scientific” racism bullshit is a huge problem with The Dish. It doesn’t come up often, but when it does come up it’s infuriating and foul. I don’t link to it (from Sullivan or any other writer) or allow it to be advocated for on “Alas.” I also make a point of, when I read a good rebuttal of “scientific” racism, echoing it on social media and/or on Alas.
But I don’t see what purpose is served by me refusing to link to or read Sullivan on other topics. His particular form of “scientific” racism is extremely popular in the USA, so it can’t effectively combated with boycotts, any more than we could beat pro-life with boycotts.
I take seriously your point about privilege making it easier for me to shrug off (actually, scream at my monitor with rage, but then decide I can’t write about it in a way that actually helps things) Sullivan’s racism, but I’m not sure it leads to the conclusions you’re making. Yes, it’s easier for me, and I’d never criticize anyone who decided not to read The Dish for this reason. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not actually helping fight racism, in any way at all, by not reading The Dish. (Also, for what it’s worth, I regularly read and link blogs that infuriate me because they’re bigoted against fat people – although obviously, racism and anti-fat aren’t identical and exchangeable.)
I am convinced by this exchange that after I finish Hereville (end of February-ish), I should make a point of producing some more anti-racism political cartoons, including trying to make up cartoons attacking the “scientific” racism and “just asking questions” racism that Sullivan favors (and maybe I’ll draw the white dude in those cartoons to look like Sullivan). That’s not much, I know, but as insignificant as political cartoons are, I’ve had several of my anti-racism cartoons used by professors, reprinted in anti-racist books and newspapers, circulated by anti-racism activists, etc.. I mention that to explain why I feel that trying to make more cartoons is the main thing I know how to do that seems to be even marginally helpful. I’ll also continue to do anti-racist blogging, as time allows, and continue donating to anti-racism orgs.
To me, those seem like better responses than a boycott of The Dish that I don’t think anyone would even notice.
[shrug] One of these things is not like another. One of them is much more true.
I follow a ton of people on the side you say “doesn’t oppose rape in any meaningful way” and, well, that isn’t true. Mostly because a lot of those folks–say, the ones at FIRE and Volokh and so on–come from the general “civil rights” arena, not from the “MRA” arena. And in fact, if you look at the arguments that the lead folks have when it comes to answering the “well, if you’re opposed to this, what’s your solution?” question they often have answers, ranging from “increased police investigations” to “more funding for rape kits” to “cheaper civil access” and so on. Suggesting they’re not meaningfully opposed to rape is insulting because it’s wrong.
Perhaps this is why you seem to have modified what you said to this:
Not sure how you would expect someone to read “opposed to rape” and think they would interpret it as “failed to support research and activism,” though.
But OK. Sure. Is that what you mean? That doesn’t bother me a bit because it’s pretty much accurate. For example, I am highly opposed to rape and yet I rarely support (and often oppose) a lot of things that are tagged under the “activism” banner, because, for example, unlike Jessica Valenti, I think that “writing the names of accused rapists on school buildings” is not a good solution. And while I rarely oppose good research, supporting it for rape in particular isn’t where I spend my time. Trusting folks like me to ensure funding for rape research and activism would be a big mistake. (See? THAT’S an actual analogy, based on what I actually said, and I don’t disagree with it at all.)
However, the lead folks pushing for the changes on college campuses have, repeatedly and reliably, demonstrated that they aren’t really thinking about process issues at all. It doesn’t mean that they actually think it’s irrelevant inside, and it doesn’t mean that–if pressed–they wouldn’t make process concessions. Just like I might agree that some research should be funded or some activism performed, even if I’d never think to fund or start them. But there are vanishingly few people on that team who proactively enter into the conversation saying “hey, what’s the process angle here?” until/unless pushed; there are also a lot of people on that team who view process arguments as fundamentally pro-rape and who equate process with “failing to oppose rape” like you did, or “rape apology,” which you didn’t do but which is more common than you might realize.
This is why I analogized the 1-in-5 folks to prosecutors–who are in not actually opposed to process, and who are highly respected, but relatively one sided in what they do.
.
.
Seriously, and this is getting increasingly frustrating, perhaps if you’re uncertain you should read what I actually said instead of what straw-me is saying in your summaries?
1) The “1 in 5” statistic is perfectly accurate, albeit limited in application and subject to normal scientific challenges. I haven’t read the study since it came out, but I remember that it looked like it was done just fine.
2) The “1 in 5” statistic is generally and commonly misreported and misinterpreted, especially w/r/t to broader applications.
3) Also, in common parlance the “1 in 5” statistic is frequently converted to “1 in 5 is raped,” which is not actually correct as we both presumably know.
And so what I actually said was this:
Seriously, WTF, Amp?
Straw-me and real-me ain’t the same, and I’d appreciate it if you could stop pretending otherwise.
I almost have to laugh at the people trying to demean others for not being anti-rape enough.
To me, loudly proclaiming you are “against rape” and thus better than all the rest of men is not much different than not loudly proclaiming you are “against rape”.
Because the people who are really doing something about rape are the cop who has to go in and arrest a rape suspect – who may well be quite dangerous and may not be enthused about being taken away to jail or prison, maybe for years – the prosecutor who puts in a lot of time to get a conviction and those sorts of people.
People who are NOT doing something about rape: Hugo Schwyzer loudly proclaiming that he is against rape, the people banging pans early in the morning in front of the Duke “rapist” house, on-line feminists insinuating that most if not all men are rapists and the like.
The latter bunch of people is more worried about positioning themselves as progressive better-than-thou people. That’s all they’re doing. In other words, worse than nothing.
re 83: If his love of scientific racism were the only troubling aspect of Sullivan’s writing, I might read him more often. But it’s not. He also distorts gay history in order to vilify and misrepresent the gay movement. He lies about people like Noam Chomsky by misrepresenting their political positions, and he makes fun of liberals and progressives because of the way they look, though he’s in no position to cast the first stone. (I noticed when he first became well-known in the US that a lot of older gay men I knew were infatuated with him, and overlooked his very serious failings because of it. Now, I have always found him totally unattractive, but that’s not why I think he’s despicable, and I wouldn’t bring it up if my peers hadn’t rated his intelligence and competence way too highly because they found him attractive.) He’s less than honest, or well-informed, about religion. In general, his usual pattern is to pontificate first and inform himself later. And he did great harm to The New Republic as its editor, by bringing in a slew of dumb right-wing writers fresh from college and the right-wing support network, who had no journalistic ethics at all, and he gave them free rein.
Sure, he’s done some good pieces here and there, such as his big piece on torture. I figure I’ll hear about the good ones from other people so I can have a look at them. But I see no reason to look at his site with any regularity on the chance that he’ll be having one his good days.
Myca, Re: #65:
“I don’t see the cited “incitement to physical violence against people” included.”
It was the next thing he said after the applause:
Which, after all, we should condemn – but the distinction between that and slander was not give it’s due in context. There are many Sunnis who view Sufis and Shiites as apostates (hence the many conflicts between the two) and killings occur on that basis.
Myca – I do believe that PTSD is real and that combat isn’t the only thing that causes it. I just want to make sure that in a day where we now have “microaggressions” and “safe spaces” that the definition of “trauma” doesn’t get stretched into “hearing something I don’t agree with”. “Hearing something that makes me start shaking uncontrollably and gives me nightmares for days”, OTOH, would seem to qualify.
We take a different view of history than you do. Because we see free speech declining across the globe, in concerning ways.
Many of the policies and thoughts behind trigger warnings are the same ones who were behind some of the other campus speech codes (the ones making it illegal to “offend” people; the ones which require people to adhere to certain worldviews; etc.) and which were also behind things like hate speech laws, which I also oppose; and which were behind the move in other countries to clamp down on speech; and so on.
Once something becomes an expectation, it often becomes a right–and too many of the rights “not to be ___” can be very very bad. I think the risk here is surprisingly high. Moreover, it’s proven to be very hard to UNDO those laws once they’re in place, so “wait and see what happens” doesn’t work.
So even if I thought there was only a 20% risk of it happening I would still say that the cost is high enough to justify some proactive steps against it.
Why do you think that fear is unjustified?
Do you think that the groups are different? That the potential outcome is not to be feared at all? That the risk of actual things happening is minuscule? That the cost of fixing bad decisions is minimal? Something else?
Duncan, that’s fair enough. But I’m not asking that you visit his site with any regularity. Rather, I’m saying I don’t see the problem if I visit his site regularly.
So, for example, you get things like this:
http://chicagomaroon.com/2015/01/09/land-of-the-free/
Which sounds nice, at least at first. Because who could argue against such reasonable-sounding rhetoric:
Right? Makes perfect sense.
Of course–and unsurprisingly–the author takes a… “broad” view of hate speech, if you mean “broad” to include pretty much everything.
I know, I know, I’m crazy to be worried about this stuff. Right? I mean, all these people arguing for a right not to be offended or insulted or threatened SURELY wouldn’t follow the almost-universal human tendency to think that their opponents’ speech is extra-special-offensive, threatening, or insulting. Or a challenge to their mental well-being (hello, trigger warnings.)
Out of curiosity, Mythago, at what point would you actually agree that things start to get problematic? You seem to be pretty confident that this isn’t a problem; what would you define as a problem?
G&W, to consider it a big deal because an editorial in a student newspaper used vague language – on a campus in which an official committee on the matter has literally just issued a very strong statement in favor of free speech – does seem overblown. It doesn’t look to me like free speech at UChic is actually in danger. Quite the opposite, since I assume that the official committee’s view will carry a lot more weight than a student paper op-ed does.
What am I missing?
For contrast’s sake, let’s look at Harvard’s speech code, which is listed as a “red light” speech code on FIRE’s website, which means (if I understand the code correctly) that they consider it one of the most objectionable speech codes in the nation. And it seems self-evidently fairer to look at an actual speech code, rather than playing the game of finding a poorly-written student op-ed to rip apart.
Could you tell me what is so objectionable about Harvard’s code?
G&W, fair point on me missing that you were talking about the reporting, not the 1-in-5 statement itself, in one of your later comments. Mea culpa, seriously.
However, you didn’t say any such thing in your original, very snarky comment where you brought up 1-in-5, and I don’t apologize for my response to that comment.
And speaking of free speech issues, here’s a law that Pennsylvania passed in October. I can’t believe I didn’t hear about it until now.
ACLU Challenges Law That Says Convicts Lose Free Speech Rights If Their Speech Upsets Crime Victims | Techdirt
I mentioned Harvard’s speech code. So this critique of Harvard’s code on sexual misconduct is a little bit relevant. I don’t agree with every bit of the critique, but I agreed with a lot of it.
The author also said that Oberlin College’s code could be a positive model for other schools.
FIRE will red-light any policy which can technically interpreted in a manner that is significantly problematic. Their concept is that even if the policy is not actually interpreted in a bad way, the existence serves to stifle speech. Both red light and other policies can be broad, but the red light ones are usually both broad and lacking some sort of limiting language.
FIRE is also unusually concerned with policies that relate to subjectivity. Any policy which relies on subjective experience is usually overbroad.
Clicking to FIRE’s Harvard data shows this: (all emphasis added)
To use a deliberately-extreme example: Bert decides to talk about the fact that black men are, by most measures, prone to commit more crimes. Bert could well be violating that harassment policy. Also, it appears to be subjective; does not contain any limiting language (i.e. it does not need to be severe, hostile, and interfere with education) and so on.
Similarly, their free speech guidelines say this (broken into multiple quotes)
Perhaps there are! But those don’t really have anything to do with free speech.
Perhaps true again! But the emphasis on things like “civility” and “dignity” have shit-all to do with free speech.
because as you and I both know, “calling a racist a racist” is not generally in the “civil” category, and “publicizing the name of your rapist” is not preserving the accused’s “dignity” and…
Again: The directive not to “dishonor…religious belief” is basically anathema to the concept of free speech.
What the hell does that even MEAN? Who measures such things as “respect” and “dignity?” how?
And there you have it, for the win. If there were ever a poorly named “free speech policy” this may well be it. It certainly deserves a red light rating.
Now, moving on to sexual harassment:
Quite literally, telling a dick joke can get you written up. Asking someone out on a date: same. Suggesting that someone might like a book: same.
What’s missing here are any objective criteria–ideally those matching the current state of the law, which is much more specific than this.
Because it has no objective foundation, Harvard’s policy essentially means that all sexual behavior, interpreted liberally, CAN BE illegal. Of course, I suspect that usually isn’t true. But then again, sometimes not–remember Adria Richards?
that’s also a good policy to red light.
For comparison, here’s part of a “green light” policy from Arizona State. The italicized language makes the difference.
G&W, I don’t particularly disagree with anything you wrote about Harvard’s code, although I don’t understand why subjective words are bad when Harvard uses them and unobjectionable when Arizona uses them (“unwelcome” “sufficiently” “offensive”…). But, in general, I agree that Harvard’s language could be overly broad in several cases.
Thanks, also, for quoting an example of what you’d consider a good policy. That makes your point much clearer to me.
However, “language like this could hypothetically be a problem, and should be tightened” seems to me to be very different from saying that there is an ongoing free speech crisis on campus.
There are actual people being fined or having their speech removed or even being sent behind bars over copyright laws that limit free speech. Artists receive “cease and desist” letters for incorporating past art artifacts created by people who have been dead for generations. Librarians are afraid to preserve some audio and visual works because they’re afraid that reproducing them onto more durable media may be illegal – meaning that those works may end up being lost to the public forever.
When it comes to campus free speech, elected officials have attempted to directly stifle campus free speech at least three times in the last year that I can think of (Pennsylvania’s anti-Mumia law, the law passed to punish a college performance of “Fun Home,” and NYC city counsel members threatening to punish Brooklyn College for hosting a pro-BDS event). Not to mention what happened to Steve Sailada (sp?).
I’m not disagreeing with you that campus speech codes should be tightened. I’m just not seeing, with all that’s going on today, why I should consider this to be the incredibly urgent and immediate problem that (judging from your posts) you consider it to be.
Oh, and yes, I do remember Adria Richards. She was the woman who was in a public spot (a crowded auditorium) where she couldn’t be expected to leave, and so was forced to listen to the guys seated a row behind her loudly telling dick jokes, which were against the rules of the private event. Richards reacted by tweeting about it, with a photo of the guys, which I think was an overreaction, but one that was certainly protected free speech. (Richards did not call for them to be fired.) So far, so even: The guys shouldn’t have been acting boorishly in a room where other people had no choice but to be their audience, and Richards shouldn’t have responded with a public tweet.
The conference organizers spoke to the guys. Their employer fired one of them – saying that this event had been the final straw for that employee – but not the other.
In response, thousands of people – I think it’s safe to guess, mostly men – sent Richards a torrent of abusive email and tweets, including death and rape threats, which are not protected free speech. (Oddly enough, the men who actually decided to fire that dude got almost no criticism or blame, although the choice to fire the man was entirely theirs.) They also targeted Richards’ employer, demanding she be fired, which she was.
So the main thing I take away from this story is that there were two minor instances of bad behavior (the guys’ boorish behavior in a public hall, Richards’ public tweet) that in a better world would have been fairly quickly forgotten, a firing that might or might not have been reasonable, and a truly disgusting example of social media mob justice. Yet the only person anyone ever blames for any of this is Richards. That seems sexist to me.
This has nothing to do with the subject we’re discussing. but I think you will be amused:
http://www.lolwot.com/10-amazing-dc-comics-superhero-selfie-illustrations
The terms match the current terms used in cases that define the law. It is practically saying “don’t do anything illegal.”
I hate to go down this road, but what I said was more akin to that there is a GROWING free speech crisis on campus: the pendulum is swinging in a bad direction. Obviously we’re not there yet.
But let me ask you this: In all seriousness, can you find evidence that the campus free speech stuff is improving? Whether you’re asking Chris Rock or FIRE or, well, most people who follow this stuff, there are vanishingly few “we have more free speech every year” articles. There are, however, a ton of people who are consistently documenting what appears to be increasing burdens on speech. Do you think that’s relevant?
Sure. Unsurprisingly I am opposed to copyright extensions and overuse of copyright (and the similar DCMA) laws. but we don’t talk about them much here, so I didn’t bring them up.
I agree that is a free speech issue as well, albeit sometimes in an ancillary sense. However, copyright seems–to me at least–often to be less about free speech then about money.
Because campuses are very powerful drivers of policy. Not only are they valuable in their own right, but they also do a lot to affect students’ beliefs.
I don’t know that I think it’s an “incredibly urgent and immediate” problem, but it’s a big one. Mostly that is because free speech limits tend to have an exponential effect: the more of them that exist, the harder it is to lobby against them at all. So it’s very hard to go backwards, which justifies an unusually harsh response at the early stages.
And again, as you note, with all that’s going on today, there are obviously other issues. Yet I’m not asking you to stop focusing on the ones you prefer; I’m asking you to leave the club of folks who treat this as “not an issue at all” and change to “issue, albeit not one where I choose to spend my energy.” And of course, sometimes the world links to this. Like when you ask questions such as “should college media outlets be allowed to publish any of the Hebdo cartoons?”
Actually, that’s wrong; they usually are protected. It’s a common misconception, but the frequently-repeated “there’s no protection for hate speech and abuse” is not true, mostly because there’s no DEFINITION of hate speech and abuse which has passed constitutional muster. Since everything is free speech until proven to be in the limited exceptions, even threats are free speech until they cross a certain level–though there is a level of threat at which they can cross the line into illegality.
I can get into this is you want, but I used it as an example of “bad consequences from bad rules.” The rules gave Richards the excuse to react as she did. The rules encouraged her to classify that as “unacceptable” or perhaps “harassing” behavior rather than ordinary boorishness. The rules are mentioned in her tweet. The rules are what drove her to take an action which (even according to her own post) really wasn’t about her own protection or discomfort, but was about her desires for other social justice issues (like theoretically protecting the girl from “young coders,” etc.)
If there had been different rules, would there have been a different outcome? Maybe. Perhaps Adria would have sat there and stewed about it. maybe she’d have done what she apparently has done before and confronted them, or asked them to stop, or demanded an apology. There’s no need to speculate what WOULD have happened, but it seems pretty likely to me that with different rules that didn’t try to create a utopian offense-free zone this whole stuff WOULDN’T have happened.
Because here’s the thing about those rules:
1) The probability of that being the only dirty joke or comment which was told anywhere at the entire conference was probably “zero.”
2) The probability of being reported for a rule violation for telling a dirty joke was probably also pretty small. Because usually people don’t complain about rules; they mostly act to protect themselves and most people are not incredibly offended personally by a dirty joke, boorish though it may be (I think you mischaracterize Adria’s stuff, by leaving out the impersonal social-justice rules-based aspect of it that led, IMO, to a lot of the flak. To use a childhood analogy it’s the difference between a crying seriously upset kid and a tattletale; whatever happened in reality, Adria presented as the latter.)
3) The probability of a technical violation was very high, due to the very restrictive writing in the rules.
Rules which set up a lot of violations and rely on subjective enforcement are bad rules.
Fair enough, thanks.
Frankly, in most ways it seems to me to be about the same now as it was in the 1980s. In the 1980s, I heard all the same complaints about how students today are oversensitive and you can’t say anything and blah blah blah. The terminology has changed – people talked about “political correctness gone overboard” in the 1980s, nowadays they’re more likely to talk about “callout culture” and “trigger warnings” – but the complaints are pretty much the same.
(And – then and now – a lot of the complaints are bullshit. FIRE spent a huge amount of time in the last year arguing that there was an enormous free speech issue brought up when students protest against commencement speakers – it’s my subjective impression that they spent more time on this topic than any other. But there really is no free speech issue there; students have an ironclad free speech right to protest commencement speakers. Meanwhile, it’s been months since PA passed legislation which penalizes colleges that invite prisoners or ex-prisoners to speak – one of the most blatant acts of government censoring campus speech so far this century – and FIRE has yet to write a single word about it. So yes, this sort of thing makes it a little harder for me to take FIRE’s camp seriously, even though I agree with FIRE often.)
Yes, a professor got mad and stole a pro-life banner/sign, and she shouldn’t have done that, and I find what she did embarrassing to me because I’m a pro-choicer. But that’s nothing new – there have been occasional stories of one side ripping another side’s posters down or stealing their newspapers for at least a century now.
One big improvement, when it comes to campus free speech, is the freedom of lgbt students to advocate for themselves. In the 1980s, students could only do that and be assured of protection at the more liberal universities, and it was even worse before the 80s. Nowadays, it’s only the Christian colleges that would kick out a professor or student for advocating for lgbt rights or lgbt love, and students who would attack or harass lgbt students can’t be nearly as assured that the administration will turn a blind eye.
The main way things have gotten worse for campus speech, imo, is that our political culture has become more polarized (there’s strong evidence for that) and less forgiving (that’s just my subjective opinion). Alas, the less forgiving our political culture is, the more that thin-skinned people will feel unsafe to contribute to political debate. (But I’m not sure that you’d even count this as being a “free speech” problem, like I would.)
Did you know that the current movie “Selma” (which is excellent, btw) couldn’t legally use MLK’s words? MLK’s estate owns the copyright and has sold the rights to Dreamworks, and Dreamworks didn’t produce “Selma,” so copyright forbade the use of any of MLK’s actual words in a movie that is largely about MLK. In fact, the King estate has used copyright law to sue networks and newspapers for publishing or showing video of the famous “I have a dream” speech. To me, that seems like a massive infringement on speech. And the fact that these restrictions may be motivated by money doesn’t make it any less of an infringement on speech.
(MLK’s words will become copyright-free in 2039, unless Congress extends copyright yet again between now and then, which they probably will.)
In theory, btw, the same copyright protections could prevent college classes from showing films of MLK. I don’t know if the MLK estate has actually ever gone after a college, though.
Honestly, the fact that copyright censors are often motivated by money just makes things even more frightening, imo. Because that makes copyright censorship the form of censorship lobbied for by big corporations and wealthy people, and they have FAR more political influence than any other group.
Of free speech policy? And campuses in general, rather than – say – what is written in influential law reviews? I don’t think this is true. Is there any evidence for this?
Again, is there any evidence showing that this “exponential effect” exists?
Done and done. As I said, I’m persuaded that campus speech codes and sexual harassment codes should be made tighter, and that the lack of due process protections is a real problem.
I was thinking of laws against “true threats,” which exist (and have passed constitutional muster) in all fifty states, afaik. (It’s true that some courts have found that a threat delivered over electronic media can’t be a true threat, but I think that’s obvious nonsense that is unlikely to stand the test of time.)
Also, whether or not they were legal, my point is that what happened to Richards was by far the worst thing that happened to anyone in that particular event, and is impossible to justify by any reasonable standard. She acted like a jerk, imo, but what happened to her was INSANELY DISPROPORTIONATE to the offense she committed. You call her a tattletale, but I don’t see how that’s relevant; even if she was a tattletale, what happened to her is completely, 100% venal and completely unjustified.
Whenever people start going on about what an awful person Richard was or how her behavior was wrong, I want to ask, “do you think what she did justifies thousands and thousands of attacking tweets, including death threats and rape threats, and a similar deluge to her employer demanding she be fired, which she was? Does that seem like a proportionate and just response to you?” Because if the answer isn’t “yes,” then I don’t see the relevance of trashing Richard’s behavior, because my argument is not that her behavior was flawless.
That people (in general, not saying you) focus so narrowly on ripping Richards apart, and so obviously do not give a damn about the far, far greater offenses committed against her, is ridiculous and seems misogynistic.
I think that when we change from “no rules” to “rules exist,” it is inevitable that some of the early rules will be imperfect and require improvement. Improvements generally happen as the result of years of trial and error. Even five years ago, it was nearly impossible to find a convention that had, and enforced, rules against sexual harassment (and many cons still don’t). That caused major harms to the free speech of harassed women (and, less often, men) who felt unable to deal and were chased away from attending cons.
So I agree that the rules are imperfect and should be improved. But I also think being at this place, where imperfect rules exist and need fixing, is inevitable unless we stayed with “no rules” forever, which would have been a worse outcome.