I think that’s the best Tardis dress I’ve ever seen. (I don’t know the name of the cosplayer, but her Facebook page is here.) (UPDATE: Her name is Sasha Trabane, and thanks to Daran for finding that.)
- Safe Space For Possibly Unpopular Thoughts on Feminism, Leftism — Crooked Timber
- Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement (Thanks, G&W!)
- Also the thought that men being hurt is okay or deserved so long as they’re being hurt at the hands of other men is pretty awful. Like, firstly, women police masculinity and enforce gender roles. But even if that weren’t true, are we really saying that we don’t care about people who are suffering because they happen to be the same gender as the people who set up the system that causes the suffering?
- A Jew in Paris | The American Conservative
- Did Falling Testosterone Affect Falling Crime? | Slate Star Codex The short answer is “no,” but (as the post points out) that just raises the question – why didn’t it?
- For Those of Us Who The World Is Not Ready, Qualified, Able, or Willing to Love: Happy Valentine’s Day –
- GOP’s Scott Walker so anti-science he can’t affirm Evolution | Informed Comment
- Drug Testing Welfare Users Is A Sham, But Not For The Reasons You Think | Slate Star Codex
- Obama’s “Limited” Perpetual War | The American Conservative
- The Revolution Will Not Be Plus-Sized | Tastefully Ratchet Amp’s comment: Although I thought about it for days, I don’t think I agree with this. The availability of clothing that fits well and is affordable is a basic necessity in our society, not the frivolous concern as this blog post paints it. And because the ability to look in a mirror and think there’s any positive value at all in what you see is one that has been systematically denied to fat people. The left should be advocating for both better clothing for fat people and better treatment of clothing workers; being in favor of the latter doesn’t require not advocating for the former.
- ‘I Just Had an Abortion’ – Wellness & Empowerment – EBONY
- Millennials living with parents: It’s harder to explain why young adults return home than you think.
- Anti-Feminist stereotypes about feminists haven’t changed much in 200 years, as these old political cartoons show.
- Who Should See Recordings From Police Bodycams? – The Atlantic
- “The acceptance of reason as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the earth, while you called it a slip loop, which I dropped over her face.” A Twitter account which mashes up John Norman’s Gor novels and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. (Via).
- The White House is taking a big step to let addicts get the medicine they need – Vox
- Obamacare is costing way less than expected – Vox
- CA: AG Harris Drops Appeal in Wake of Judge’s Suggestion Prosecutor be Tried for Perjury | The Open File
- Black teens who commit a few crimes go to jail as often as white teens who commit dozens – The Washington Post
- In ‘Mark of the Beast’ case, EEOC defends the religious liberty to belief it thereby proves to be factually untrue
- Could the Fast Food Industry Pay $15 an Hour? – Lawyers, Guns & Money
- Mike Huckabee: ISIL Beheadings Threaten U.S. More Than ‘Sunburn’ Of Climate Change | ThinkProgress
- My Fair Lady: A Series of Text Messages — Crooked Timber
- Why Have Jews in the U.K. Never Won a Reported Discrimination Case Against Non-Jewish Defendants? – Tablet Magazine (Note: This article is by David Schraub, who blogs at “The Debate Link” and has sometimes posted here at “Alas.”)
- Horrible Vanderbilt rape case shows how much we do have a “rape culture”
- Black Workers With Advanced Degrees, White Workers With B.A.’s Make Roughly the Same – COLORLINES
- “This was essentially a political trial designed to scare the bezeejuz out of anyone who goes anywhere near Anonymous”: Hullabaloo
Amp’s comment: I’m not saying there aren’t Democrats who are also fools. I am saying that no Democrat who was this blatantly anti-science would be a highly plausible contender for winning the primary and being the party’s candidate for President. See also Climate Change, of course.
Actually, G&W, I think there’s a considerable amount of evidence to indicate that there are misogynistic internet mobs who carry out large-scale harassment campaigns aimed at some women who speak out. There’s some things we can say that all or nearly all these events have in common; usually the women are feminist women, usually whatever the woman did to piss the mob off is connected in some way to a male-dominated, like software development or gaming or guns.
Thinking about this more carefully, my belief – and I’m certainly not the first person to suggest this – is that social media has made it easier and safer for groups of reactionary men who don’t like women entering into traditionally male fields to express their anger.
Could I be mistaken? Sure. But what I’m saying is supported by a great many examples.
It’s possible, as you say, that the mob that hated on Richards was set off, on the surface, by her not expressing repentance (or, rather, by expressing repentance but not expressing it completely enough or something). But even if that’s the case, the overall pattern indicates that something more is going on.
Your conditional semi-apology is cheerfully accepted. :-)
Trying to dance around and/or deny the racism and misogyny inherent in what they did is defending them.
The term “open minded” doesn’t mean what you think it means. If I say a house is blue, that doesn’t mean that I’m being close minded. Because even though I think it’s blue, new evidence could change my mind. (Perhaps the blue appearance is just a result of light reflecting off of pavement, and in better light I’ll be able to see that it’s actually green. That’s unlikely, but certainly not impossible.)
And if I refuse to concede that the house is probably blue, despite evidence, that doesn’t make me open minded. It’s the opposite; someone who refuses to let his opinion be altered by evidence is being close minded.
Ampersand, desipis:
I think your insight here is basically right on target. They are people who think “she’s a Black woman, so probably she’s vulnerable to being hurt by racist language, or sexist language, so that’s what I’ll use.”
The weird thing is, you don’t see how that thought is, in and of itself, evidence of misogynistic and/or racist motivations.
Yes. Not just racist effect–as Amp says, racist motivations.
Someone who routinely doesn’t care about the moral wrong they are committing because it benefits them is a sociopath. If they selectively don’t care when it comes to using racist/misogynistic weapons, then they’re at least a little bit racist/sexist.
(The infamous George Wallace’s racism was more about opportunism than anything else.)
To the extent that they’re the same types of people who would steal an ice cream bar from a kid if they are sure they won’t get caught because, hey, free ice cream, maybe they’re not racist or sexist.
As for Richards, what she did was slightly wrong because it was disproportionate, but the reaction to her has been primarily a misogynistic hatefest. A lot of guys who ordinarily feel constrained from expressing their hatred of smart, pretty women suddenly feel like they’ve been granted permission to be vile. How dare she not know her place!
And unfortunately, I think a lot of people who should know better get sucked in by this motivation. A lot of the targets of widespread internet condemnations–condemnation from both social justice spheres and more mainstream parts of the internet–seems to include punching down while punching up.
I don’t think the world is fallaciously just, for chrissakes. I only think that there is a link between Richards’ behavior and her outcomes. There’s a difference.
Does anyone who is influenced by the just world fallacy simultaneously believe that their beliefs are fallacious?
This video seems relevant.
Ampersand@201, given we seem to have quite different perspectives on the same basic piece of evidence, I’m not sure we’re going to agree on much. I suspect “epistemologically cautious” is a better term than “open minded” to convey my point.
Sure. I agree.
I don’t know about that. I mean, I’m sure you can probably choose a definition of online harassment and feminism that would make that true, but I don’t think feminism has much of a lock on this.
Sure, I suppose, but that is of limited value since “male dominated industry” is simultaneously large and incredibly vague. (Quick: is college a male dominated industry?)
I think it would be more accurate to say that social media has made it easier and safer for groups of people who don’t like anything to express their anger, whether it’s “comet shirt guy” or “AIDS in Africa social media woman” or “feminist” or “anti-feminist”.
Which is to say, your attempted framing as an anti-feminist issue is, IMO, inaccurate.
Yes, of course there are many examples of things happening in your categories. I have never said otherwise. But that doesn’t address the question of whether or not there are things happening in OTHER categories. I can’t entirely shake the feeling that you are sort of gerrymandering the classifications here, in order to support a theory that this is really antifeminist instead of a larger (and, it seems, well-acknowledged) issue with social media in general.
I mean, everyone thinks God is on their side, right? The people who went after Prop 8 supporters thought so; the people who go after gay rights supporters think so as well.
If you want to say it’s a problem, I’m with you. If you want to claim that feminists are mostly the targets–and especially in light of your use of “victim blaming,” which you seem to use in a manner that limits or deflects criticism of people you classify as “victims”–then I’m going to continue to think it’s a problem.
Basically: Sure. I think this is probably as close to agreement as we’re going to get!
Richards doesn’t identify as a feminist, for example.
I think Amp’s point might be more true if we say–going back to a thing I was saying on another thread–“usually women standing up about something that changes the (appearance of the) gender status quo”, whatever that happens to be, which often gets parsed as “feminist” whether or not it actually is.
It’s not always true. Michelle Malkin used to get some amazingly racist and sexist commentary (back when I paid any attention to her), although I don’t know if it ever reached the level of hate-driven Internet mob we’re discussing here.
***
g&w, you say that Amp can’t prove his point because he has no examples of people apologizing and still being mobbed. But you could prove your point with one or two examples of men being mobbed the way Richards and Sarkeesian and Wu et al have been mobbed–which is a far less restrictive criterion than “did something bad which could be apologized for, didn’t apologize, was then mobbed”–and I haven’t seen any yet. (desipis linked to some death threats against male game developers, which is, of course, disgusting. But I think it gets qualitatively different when we’re talking about large mobs that go on for years.)
It may be true that Richards in particular could have avoided this by apologizing. But if she was a man, she wouldn’t have had to. Your comments seem like victim-blaming because they’ve already conceded the ground that women need to apologize for saying ill-advised things in order to avoid years of death threats credible enough to make them leave their homes, and men do not.
Harlequin wrote:
I think you are onto something. The extra vitriol that outspoken women get isn’t tied to antifeminism per se, because it happens to women on both sides of the aisle. It’s rotten with sexism, but it isn’t particularly tied to antifeminism.
A few years back Megan Mcardle wrote on this topic:
If people above are trying to imply that men don’t get death threats and the like, I don’t know what world you are living in.
The problem is that they just don’t open up their mouth about it to the same degree. Sometimes you find out that a male blogger has been getting death threats when it is reported after he is killed.
It turned out that the blogger Avijit Roy had been getting death threats after he was hacked to death by a mob. The magazine Charlie Hebdo had been getting death threats since 2006 and was firebombed in 2011. Oh, I almost forgot, twelve people were killed there (11 men and 1 woman, Elsa Cayat) and lots injured in 2015.
Michael Arrington regularly got death threats, as does any controversial blogger or web site owner, but that fact only came to light when someone came up and spit in his face. This board’s favorite website and founder Paul Elam gets regular death threats. The Fox News facebook page got over 8,000 death threats directed against Blair Scott after he appeared discussing his group’s lawsuit to stop the erection of a crucifix at the World Trade Center Memorial.
ISIS has issued several threats that they are going to murder a number of (male) Western / American journalists. Those guys probably mean it, and I doubt that any “mea culpa” or “I’m really sorry about expressing my opinion on stuff” would change anything.
Men and women with antifeminist sentiments are also brutally targeted based solely on content. I personally remember – back in the days before the Internet – an appearance on the Johnny Carson show by an antifeminist named Esther Vilar. She got bombarded by death threats after her appearance, and the likely source of the bulk of those death threats (since she asserts that women sitting at home as housewives are exploiting men) … was housewives.
I just don’t get the point of singling out women as victims. I have long thought that if a giant comet was heading directly for planet earth, the newspaper headline would be: “Giant Comet to Hit Earth – Millions of Women and Children May Die”. I guess that would be technically accurate.
I endorse this rewording of my message!
Can you give a direct quote from this discussion which can be fairly taken as meaning “men don’t get death threats and the like”?
I mean, I’m probably the most extreme in this discussion, and I’d never say that, nor imply that. Because that would be ridiculous. Of course people of both sexes get death threats.
Thinking about this further, I’d suggest that there are four overlapping and related phenomenon going on when people talk about social media mobs.
1: Direct Hate Mobbing. This is when a large number of people attempt to directly contact a target with many hundreds or thousands of hateful messages. By “hateful,” I mean that the messages include such features as threats of violence or death, wishing for the target person to experience violence or death, the use of derogatory slurs (often racist, sexist, transphobic, fat-hating, etc), or the expression of extreme hateful sentiments (“fuck you, you worthless pond scum asswipe”).
2: Direct Non-hateful Critical Mobbing. This is when a large number of people attempt to directly contact a target with many hundreds or thousands of critical messages. An example of such a message might be “Ms. Richards, it’s hurtful and wrong to twitter-shame people with a photo for telling off-color jokes.” Although the individual messages taken on their own are reasonable, the cumulative impact of thousands of such messages can form a disproportionate and unfair response to whatever it is the target person said or did, and for some people can be extremely painful.
3: Indirect Hate Mobbing. This is like Direct Hate Mobbing, but instead of directly contacting the target, mobbers talk about the target on public forums such as Twitter.
4. Indirect Non-hateful Critical Mobbing. This is like Indirect Non-hateful Critical Mobbing, but instead of directly contacting the target, mobbers talk about the target on public forums such as Twitter.
Harlequin says:
March 10, 2015 at 2:44 pm
Well, I can’t prove my point either, because the data don’t seem to be there. It’s not just Amp.
Either I’m accidentally making a very complex point–which I don’t think I am–or I’m communicating it like shit, which is entirely possible. But this isn’t actually true. What do you think I am trying to say?
Meaning, what? I mean, I can probably find some men who have been subjected to a lot of online negative activity, right? Going purely from memory I might talk about “hank,” or perhaps Mozilla’s CEO, and the Brett Kimberlin guy, and so on.
But the answer seems always to be “those aren’t the same.” Which is why I tend to feel like it’s a bit of a definitional game, here: of course they’re not exactly the same; of course you can identify a set of things which are different if you try to do that with specific rules, but it doesn’t mean that there is not a general trend which is more compelling–or informative–than those rules.
I don’t dispute that women are treated generally worse in society, of course. Or that the sexes get differential treatment. So if all Amp was saying were “women are more likely to be the target of that type of online mobs” I would not be disagreeing.
But to use an example of why I think this matters: I am not an expert but as far as I understand things, men get SWATed much more often, and, also, are at much much greater risk of being shot as a result of it. I suspect you would probably acknowledge the horror of SWATing, and that you would also acknowledge that it has differential effects on men even outside any differences in frequency (since men are way, way, more likely to get shot as a result.)
If you think on that for a moment it seems like the questions you ask become pretty relevant, right? If you look at the question “do men get hate-mobbed just like Richards?” you get to one conclusion (at the feminist extreme, “this is mostly a problem for Feminist Women Who Stand Up.”) If you start with the larger view you might reach a wholly different conclusion (i.e. this is a actually a problem for anyone who gets on the wrong side of Anonymous and their ilk; the sexes are treated differently; the targeting of women, is more frequent, albeit less likely to get them killed as a result.)
So you may end up concluding that “the problems of online harassment are focused on feminists.” Or you may end up valuing “fear” too highly: not that it is acceptable to get tons of death threats from anonymous people, but rather that those threats, disturbing though they may be, are not necessarily in the same category as hostile armed folks actually showing up at your house. This is similar to the way that people who only look at swatting (and ignore the other stuff) may decide that “women don’t have anything to worry about, it’s just words.) That is, also, wrong.
I don’t really think you can functionall distinguish between “hate” and “non-hate,” because it’s so incredibly subjective. And amazingly (not!) it seems like everyone puts their opponents in the “hate” category.
Also, even when people do set up the categories, they quickly back down from them (“well, sure that is technically hateful speech on my side. But it’s not the same because my group is trying to defend all that is Good and Right, while their group is trying to dehumanize us,” or “well, hateful speech is OK so long as you’re punching up,” and so on.)
Direct and indirect seem to be related to whether or not people have public personae that can be affected by Twitter discussion, which is to say that it’s a question of where the targets lie. If you are the sort who is less likely to be put off by insults but you work for a sensitive employer, the “indirect” distinction becomes sort of spurious.
I will say, though, that you have left off a specific category: doxxing, hacking, DNS attacks, SWATting, and otherwise going beyond words to attack your target.
Sorry, yes, you’re entirely right. I lost the distinction between “disprove Amp’s point” and “prove your point”, which are not the same thing.
For the rest of your comment, Amp’s definitions at 212 are probably helpful (edit: this was crossposted with your comment #214). Thinking on this some more–and I’m not sure if this is a change in my opinions, or just a better way of phrasing it–I think there are lots of non-gender-specific types of hate mobs, and some that men probably get more than women (SWATting, as you note, because that seems to be an in-group thing more than an out-group thing as far as I can tell, although does anybody have statistics on it?), and some that women get more than men (what happened to Sarkeesian and Wu etc, which I was trying to describe with my last line in that paragraph: “large mobs that go on for years,” ie many different people who continue to harass in the same way long after the initial incident that caused them to begin. These generally start out as #1 and shift to #3 if the people in question withdraw. Sarkeesian may not be the best example there because she’s continued to do the thing that pissed them off, but Richards and Sierra, for example, suffered years of continued abuse after stopping).
Would you agree with an attenuated version of this argument, that there’s a particular kind of long-standing, large, virulent, direct hate mob that attaches to women who say certain kinds of things, but not to men who do the same, as one of a large set of ways people get harassed by online groups?
***
Tried to look up some info on SWATting, and as far as I can tell there have been two shootings related to those incidents: a police officer was killed when responding to a SWATting call when the (armed) homeowner apparently didn’t realize he was law enforcement, and the father of an intended victim was severely injured in a separate case. So, yikes.
Yes.
I think the world is full of functional but subjective categories, actually. There may be gray cases, but there are also lots and lost of non-gray cases.
Consider the example tweets “fuck you cunt, I hope you trip on a rock and die” versus “Ms. Richards, it’s hurtful and wrong to twitter-shame people with a photo for telling off-color jokes”. If I tell you that we’re classifying things into hateful and non-hateful comments, with the definitions I gave above, would you honestly have no idea how to classify these two comments?
Regarding “everyone puts their opponents in the ‘hate’ category.” IMO, that’s overly broad cynicism; in fact, many people can readily agree that there are non-hateful people who disagree with them and express that disagreement in non-hateful ways. Example:I hardly every agree with Ron F., but I’d hardly describe him as hateful. I don’t deny that the problem you describe exists, but it’s not as universal and unvarying a problem as you describe.
It’s not just a matter of public persona, although of course people who are unknown to the public are safer from hate mobs. But, for instance, if I was to criticize a journalist who is on twitter, I can choose between using their twitter handle – which means that they’ll get my comment in their notifications box or when they look at their twitter activity log – and mentioning them. There’s a difference between criticizing someone on my blog versus emailing them.
Regarding things I left out, thanks! You’re right, I should have included things like doxxing and SWATting on the list of things that can be part of hate-mobbing. And also, emailing or otherwise contacting someone’s employer should be on that list.
Of course, if we agree on the definitions and statements ahead of time, in this context, it’s simple. I don’t know you personally but I know you well enough to understand what you mean right now–at least well enough to understand with respect to those carefully-chosen, non-marginal, examples. Agreeing is simple.
(Though it’s not universal agreement, of course. You’re not attaching any consequences to the different definitions. If you’re classifying things into hateful and non-hateful comments, with the intent of punishing the hateful ones, I’d classify them both as “non-hateful.” In fact, in most situations I would classify them both the same way.)
And of course, it seems that usually folks make classifications, and then immediately want to do something with them. A hammer needs a nail. And so folks start saying Hateful Tweets Are Bad and Nasty Words Can Hurt, and Twitter Should Do Something.
Which sounds good.
At least, until someone tweets “I do not think that the Constitution requires us to permit same sex-marriage, and I think the darn homosexuals are just whiners, abusing political correctness. After all, the Founders were generally opposed to homosexuality, because it is sinful and a bad choice; there’s no need to condone and promote the gay lifestyle. They should seek God and renounce their sinful and horrific ways.” Which prompts an unsurprising reply of “fuck you, you discriminatory asshole.”
Who is hateful? Who gets kicked off Twitter? As I said in an earlier post about your Nazis v. grandmother example, I haven’t even started talking about “Nazi grandmothers” yet:
Consider the example tweets “Ms. Richards, it’s hurtful and wrong to twitter-shame people with a photo for telling off-color jokes”? and “fuck you cunt, I hope you trip on a rock and die.”
The second one is hateful. Right?
Now: Imagine the second one was posted by Richards. Just because. Still hateful?
By Richards, in a fit of anger, just after her doxxing and firing, in response to the first one. Still hateful?
Now, imagine the first one was posted by a known racist anti-Semite antifeminist, who is, without a doubt, one of the more appalling people you’ll have the pleasure never to meet. Does Richards’ response get a pass yet?
Following the ways in which people misuse the law–in particular, speech and conduct codes–is sort of a hobby of mine. Pretty much EVERYTHING gets called hate speech by someone, at some time–often on the opposte sides of the same argument.
Palestine supports see some Israeli promotions as hate speech, dehumanizing, contributing to war and slaughter in gaza, etc. Other folks see the hamas charter as hate speech, dehumanizing, contributing to the slaughter of jews, etc. Other folks think that talking in favor of a given reading of the constitution –say, supporting Prop 8–is hate speech. Other folks–almost half of Congress!–seem to think that burning a flag as a symbolic act is hate speech.
If you’re focused on politics (as are many folks) then you may only recognize the ones that go against your side, and may not see your side as a problem; if you’re sort of a free speech absolutist you’ll see all of them as the same problem and you’ll also see twice as many. You seem to think I’m overly cynical in this respect. I think you’re a bit naiive, or, at least, not seeing both sides.
One of us is not getting what the other one is saying. Or at least, it seems that way to me.
After all, this argument implies some sort of disagreement. Right? But it is hard for me to imagine (in the middle of a relatively polite argument, no less!) that you would actually ascribe the opposite, disagreeing, view to me. So do you mean NOT to imply disagreement? Or am I imagining things wrong?
It’s incredibly universal, though IMO you won’t see it unless free speech advocacy, irrespective of what side it’s on, happens to be your “thing.” And that is not a personal attack: people can be focused on outcomes or process, but its hard to do both well at the same time. I grok that I am more of a process person and you seem to be more of an outcome person, which is probably why you are (IMO) better than I am at recognizing some outcomes (this speech is better or worse), but sometimes you do not seem as good at recognizing some processes (attempting to suppress opponents is much more universal and prevalent than you seem to think.)
[shrug] again, hard to distinguish and little difference once you hit critical mass. Moreover, not really a distinction with a difference as far as classifications go. Would it be better or worse had Richards emailed Hank’s employer (which IIRC she did not) rather than posting to Twitter?
Cool, thanks!
“Everyone puts their opponents in the ‘hate’ category” and “in fact, many people can readily agree that there are non-hateful people who disagree with them and express that disagreement in non-hateful ways” are opposing views. As far as I can tell, I was putting forth a view that opposed the view you actually wrote.
Like many people, you’re assuming Hank’s employer heard about what happened from Twitter. We actually don’t know if that’s the case or not, as far as I know. It’s plausible he heard about it from Twitter, but also plausible he heard about it from other employees at the same conference (like the one sitting next to Hank in Richard’s photo), or from mutual acquaintances who were at the conference.
But to answer your question, I think that there are certainly some cases in which it wouldn’t make a difference. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t recognize that one act is more hostile and irresponsible than the other.
As an analogy, it’s possible for either a drunk driver or a sober driver to get into an accident that kills Charlie Brown. But even though the act of driving can lead to accidental death in either case, we put more blame on the drunk driver, and I think that makes sense. The drunk driver is being more irresponsible, even though it’s possible for the results to be the same in some cases.
@Desipis:
Thanks for the link! I really liked and agreed with that video.
I also agree that “epistemologically cautious” is a better term than “open minded” for what you were saying.
Harlequin:
I’m curious if people would agree that the media (both publications & social media) tends to report on and repond to women being victims in a way that can cause the individual women to become emblematic of a particularly devisive issue in the collective online consciousness.
I suspect the attachment is due to their (often involuntary) status as representatives of an issue, rather than being directly related their gender.
Amp,
How come you skipped over all of my replies to your comments (like the “this is hate; this is not” theory which was the core of your post)? You posted a specific example; I spent time specifically replying to you; it seems a bit strange to move on as if that never happened.
More accurately, I’m assume they heard about it and took action as a result of the tweets: whether the employer looked at Twitter or whether someone else looked at the #pycon tag and spoke to them is sort of a distinction without a difference from my perspective. No tweet = no firing.
Literally plausible, sure. Likely, no (assuming, that is, that you distinguish between “As a result of the twitter storm, Hank’s neighbor told the employer what had happened and Hank got fired” versus “Hank’s neighbor spontaneously decided to report Hank to Hank’s employer, for making a joke which could have been misconstrued by someone.”)
I’ve sort of lost track about which two acts you’re talking about, but still: Sure. Relative terms are almost always easier than quantified terms. Any two different acts can usually be distinguished somehow.
Er… sure. You knew I would agree with this, right?
Among other reasons, because I didn’t think I could respond quickly, and I didn’t want to not have time to do some fresh posts.
There was no twitterstorm until after Hank got fired, so there’s no way the twitterstorm caused Hank’s firing.
Here’s how Jon Ronson, who is certainly not in Adria Richards’ corner, reported it:
University of Oklahoma President David Boren has expelled two students for leading a racist chant. If you go to this link you will find a link to a letter he sent to the students that downloads with the file extension “.null” – change it to “.pdf” and you can see that it says in part “This is to notify you that, as President of the University of Oklahoma acting in my official capacity, I have determined that you should be expelled form this university effective immediately. You will be expelled because of your leadership role in leading a racist and exclusionary chant which has created a hostile educational environment for others.”
I’ve got a problem with this for a couple of reasons.
1) This seems a clear violation of the First Amendment to me.
2) The first link, which I highly recommend you read, addresses the question “Who gets to say what kind of speech is exclusionary and creates a hostile educational environment for others”? The author gives examples. I thought of one myself right away – I would rather imagine that the BDS movement creates a hostile educational environment for Jews. Does that mean BDS movement leaders are all going to get expelled?
About the U of Ok, I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure expelling those students violates the First Amendment.
I’ve seen arguments on both sides of the 1st amendment issue as well as a post or three that say we need to see the detailed justification to have a good idea of how it would/will play out in court. The phrase “hostile educational environment” certainly telegraphs the university’s strategy here. In any case, I lean towards this being an inappropriate response due to freedom of speech issues.
Jake, Can you link to some of the “it’s OK” arguments? I’m curious to read them.
In my experience the it’s-not-a-violation stuff often stems from an unintentional misreading–most commonly, a failure to know about the distinction between legal and lay differences in wording.
To use an example, the word “hostile” in the context of “hostile environment” doesn’t match lay definitions of “hostility.” In fact, hostile environment requires the hostility to be objectively “severe” and “pervasive” (which isn’t obvious) and THOSE words don’t necessarily match lay definitions either.
ETA: The other reason is that so many folks love to say “the First Amendment does not protect hate speech” that listeners have forgotten that is simply false. There is not a “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, in no small part because nobody has ever been able to define hate speech in any substantive and objective fashion.
desipis,
I…am not sure if I agree with that. I mean, first of all, publications and social media operate really differently; publications can’t seize on women being victims until they actually are victims, at which point you’ve got a chicken and egg problem. That could extend the problem, perhaps, but it’s not necessary to the dynamics, I think.
On the other hand, social media makes poster children all the time, I don’t think that’s limited to women. It’s not always true that women become emblematic even when involved: RaceFail in SF circles had some notable women but I don’t remember it attaching to a particular woman the way political disputes in gaming had attached to Sarkeesian (pre-GG, anyway). It’s possible or even likely that, if a person is going to be attached in that way, then it’s more likely to be a woman; but I wouldn’t consider that non-sexist, just sexist in a different way.
There’s also another confounding variable, namely that issues may become particularly divisive because there is a woman at the center of it.
Well, for better or worse, women do seem to often end up being more divisive because (on social media at least) often some SJWs will show up and assert that it all has to do with patriarchy/privilege. Irrespective of the truth of that claim, this often starts another argument which can even overwhelm the first one, based on people making, defending, and becoming angry at accusations of misogyny, racism, sexism, privilege, and so on.
Part of the reason I pushed back against the SJW stuff w/r/t Richards is because I think Richards was a jerk, but a big part of it it was also the claim that she should be given a pass on being a jerk because she’s a black Jewish woman “punching up.” Now, in her case she’s made that claim herself, but oftentimes it’s a third party who does it; that doesn’t matter in the end for most folks.
I’m having trouble finding the links to those arguments, g&w. I don’t remember how I got there or where they were. But you can look at this comment thread to find some arguments that lean in that direction.
Expelling those students also seems to be a violation of OU’s disciplinary procedures and their due process rights. See here for details, but the bottom line is that charges have to be brought first and then there are a couple of layers of hearings and appeals before an expulsion can be done.
Amazing that a University President would be so ignorant of the First Amendment – not just the basic principles of the law itself but how it’s applied – and his university’s own disciplinary procedures. Who does he think he is?
Ron, I read in a news story that the expulsion came with information about how the expelled students could file for an appeal, and if they do file for an appeal they will automatically be given a hearing.
Jake – thanks for that link, that’s an interesting comment thread.
The strongest case made for the expulsion, imo, is that the University president has information we don’t have, and that if it comes to a courtroom he’ll be able to show that this incident was merely one part of a longstanding pattern of racial harassment creating a hostile environment for Black students. I don’t know if that’s true or not, I have no reason to think it’s true; but from what I’ve read, that’s the only way what the U did could survive a court challenge.
More cynically, I think that the University may be hoping that the students will decide to cut their losses and start over somewhere else, rather than suing and dragging out their association with racism.
Lindsey Graham: as president I would deploy the military against Congress.
Let’s hope he’s just terrible at telling jokes.
Racefail was a dispute almost entirely between women. One woman criticized another woman, another woman spoke up in defense of the second, primarily female social groups launched themselves into the dispute… there were men involved, but overall it was definitely a woman versus woman conflict. You can’t use it to draw conclusions about sexism in woman versus man conflict.
Although the analogies between racefail and gamergate are ENORMOUS and cynically hysterical. Start with a kind of crap complaint about an established power structure, see the established power structure dismiss your kind of crap complaint, shift rapidly from advancing the kind of crap complaint to complaining that the “real” problem is that you were dismissed and belittled and treated like crap by the established power structure when they responded to your kind of crap complaint, go into an entrenched “us versus them” mode that allows the kind of crap complaint to vanish into the mists of time because it was always a bit of an embarrassment, but never actually watch it truly vanish because these sorts of groups can never completely separate from their roots… And ultimately get a pat on the head and an assurance that everyone respects you now, with no meaningful change.
The tragic thing about gamergate is that it can never reach it’s natural conclusion, because giving gamergaters a perfunctory pat on the head and an “Oh, we totally respect you! Honest!” is impossible since gamergaters have opposed themselves to feminists, and feminists are demanding, and receiving, the same condescending head pat. And there’s only one to go around, thus dooming gamergaters into a never ending spiral of radicalization, splintering, membership loss, and further radicalization.
Amp, on another thread, said something was a “shoe-in”, which seemed wrong to me (I thought it was “shoo-in”), so I went looking up etymology, and…ah, how words gain and lose meanings!
(Not to pick on your spelling, Amp, I just noticed it and thought I’d check my own intuition…I will never, for example, be able to say “you’ve got another think coming”, even though I’m reasonably convinced that was the original phrase.)
Patrick, that wasn’t at all my experience with RaceFail, particularly your characterization of the initial complaint as being “crap”, and of the end of it as being one group getting a “head pat”–my own perception was that it faded, slowly, into the background, and then these last few years the racial diversity of eg awards nominees has gone way up from what it used to be. I think you’re right that it’s mostly women, so that’s a fair point, though men were certainly involved. But, yeah. Probably a bad example case here. (Although desipis’s argument, which I was responding to, tied the phenomenon to female victimhood, which RaceFail surely provided in spades.)
The very beginning of racefail was a conversation between threeish women, but it very quickly expanded to a huge community. Are you in that community? If not, I’m going to trust what I’ve seen, read, and been part of.
Why the Gaye estate’s victory in the Blurred Lines plagiarism case is awful.
I don’t see enough similarity in the songs to agree. There’s a very similar percussive thread – though that’s not part of the suit – and two notes in the bass line. I think that The Specials have a better claim because it’s clearly the bass line from one of their songs.
In any case, the link is correct that this verdict opens up every songwriter to sue every songwriter. The commonalities between the two songs are too small to allow anybody to legitimately copyright a new song if this case sets a precedent.
Of course, if copyright law hadn’t been extended to absurd lengths of time this never would have been in dispute.
Harlequin- I think the several year lag time between racefail fading away and any measurable change in the industry is sufficient to demonstrate that the pseudo mea culpas that allowed it to fade away weren’t part of any meaningful social change. Re the complaints that started it- they were about a specific character in a specific book, and inferences drawn regarding the author’s character for having written it. Those complaints were… sketchy. Arguable, but sketchy. And they were non central to the actual war, so much so that even though I was reading several relevant blogs at the time and even though I personally remember tons of the drama, I had to google the fight to remember that it was Blood and Iron that kicked it off. Because Blood and Iron was central to the fight for about 30 seconds. Then it was all about who dissed who, who was or wasn’t a bigot, who was or wasn’t using identity politics as a cudgel, and most importantly, who was or wasn’t on your side.
And if you go to Kotaku in Action, do you find people fighting about Zoe Quinn and journalistic ethics? Noooope. You find trace amounts of that, and then overwhelming amounts of who dissed who, who is or isn’t a bigot, who is or isn’t using identity politics as a cudgel, and most importantly, who is or isn’t on your side.
Patrick– are you in the industry? Because there wasn’t much of a lag for there to be results from it. Pretty much instantly some of my black SF writer friends said they stopped getting questions at conventions like “oh, do many black people like SF?”
I’d list the guys who were involved, but meh. The whole *point* of racefail was that it was a social uprising about an issue that had been boiling under the surface. Bear’s book was a flashpoint, but there were several that followed immediately (some involving dudes), and it wouldn’t have gone on as it did without the fact that it was an issue that affected multiple populations, with multiple examples and flare points.
I mean, what do you think publicized Shetterly’s bizarre opinions on race? People who ran into him on progressive blogs already knew, but everyone else, not so much.
Some context for the question of, did Racefail change anything?
Patrick:
I don’t this is necessarily true. If we think of racefail as a turning point, it becomes perfectly possible to see things that happened years later as part of the changes Racefail contributed to.
An analogy: The Stonewall Riot was an important turning point in history that contributed to important advancements in lgbt rights, including such recent changes as transgender-inclusive anti-discrimination laws, and legal same-sex marriage in most US states (soon to be all US states). The fact that Stonewall happened decades ago is NOT sufficient to demonstrate that it wasn’t part of any recent meaningful social changes.
It’s incredibly universal, though IMO you won’t see it unless free speech advocacy, irrespective of what side it’s on, happens to be your “thing.”
This is not much more than saying that self-described ‘free speech advocates’ are the Golden Mean, and everybody else is just too mired in their own political morass to see clearly.
from here:
“THUS SPOKE CARLY RAE”: a song of friedrich nietzsche, sung to the tune of “call me maybe.”
After you click through, you have to scroll down to see the playable song. Listen to it. It is completely worth it. Lyrics are here (again, you have to scroll down a bit).
Nope. It’s simply recognizing a difference in training and focus:
Free speech folks are better at recognizing free speech issues, because they (a) care; (b) learn enough to recognize it; and (c) spend more of their mental energy on it, compared to folks who spend that energy on a different subject. It doesn’t mean they’re experts on the morals, but they’re experts of identification. It’s like walking in the woods with an expert bird watcher: they see birds everywhere, including a ton of birds which you wouldn’t see on your own.
Replace “free speech” with something else and the statement remains true. There’s nothing golden-mean about it.
Moreover, as you would grok if you thought about (c), the concept that people are good at one thing because that’s where they spend their energy tends to make them less good at other things. So it’s not claiming any overall superiority to talk about difference in specific subject matter expertise. I am better at recognizing free speech issues than Amp is, not because Amp sucks but because Amp focuses his energy on other things instead.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t you made the argument fairly frequently that it’s outsiders who are able to perceive a situation most clearly, being free of the self-interest and political bias that members of a movement might have?
I’m not going to go look for quotes or anything, but am I misremembering this?
—Myca
I don’t see those as conflicting here, because of the tradeoffs I mentioned:
To use the birder analogy: A birder may be an expert at spotting birds and describing them. A birder may also discuss government actions which affect birds. In that area, they are likely to over-value the relative importance of protecting birds.
IOW, if you want to know “why should we protect birds?” or “how will this choice affect birds?” then the birder is a good source. When it comes to “should we spend this government money on protecting dogs or birds?” then you should probably ask someone other than a bird specialist or a dog lover.**
To use free speech: I’m an expert in spotting free speech issues and describing them. I can also see how government actions affect free speech; identifying them is a benefit of my interest. But because it a pet issue of mine, I admittedly may over-value the relative importance of free speech as compared to other things, just like everyone else does with their own pet issues.
** Though whether you are an expert or a novice, you also have control over how much effort you spend in trying to recognize/counter non-objectivity, versus how much time you spend on goal-seeking and empathy.
Heh. It’s a bit like a D&D character build! Assign a limited # of points to:
EXPERTISE (in various subjects;)
OBJECTIVITY (ability to recognize things objectively, either generally or specifically. Putting points in this attribute costs more if applied to an “expertise” category, and gets prohibitively expensive if you try to combine them with empathy)
FEELING/EMPATHY, either generally or specifically. (Unlike objectivity putting points in this attribute costs less if combined with expertise. Still it’s are prohibitively expensive if you try to combine them with objectivity.)
Some people spend their mental points to constantly question their internal motivations and the value of their assumptions, in an effort to check their objectivity. (Good judges are in that category.) Those people are more likely to be objective than equivalent folks who don’t do that.
The trade-off for fighting for objectivity is that it’s much harder to end up truly having a fiery heart-raging involvement with stuff or feelings about it, because the internal questioning gets in the way. That’s a loss, of course. Whatever that spark is: some folks feel it all the time for a ton of choices, while other folks only have it with respect to a very small universe of things, like “immediate family.”
For someone who has assigned basically all their points to the “objectivity” and “expertise” categories, the tradeoff is a lack of ability to emotionally engage outside a few limited people/categories. For someone who is all about expertise and empathy (think “single issue zealous advocate,”) the tradeoff is a lack of objectivity. For someone who tries to balance them all, the tradeoff is that there are plenty of folks who are more expert and/or more empathetic than you in a lot of areas, although you have fewer very-blind spots.
Charles S., I don’t see how that clause is applicable. There was nothing in what those students did that affected the welfare and safety of other students.
And in any case, public university policies do not trump the First Amendment.
Harlequin – Thanks for the info on shoo-in. It makes perfect sense now that I’m reminded of “shoo, shoo!”
I had no idea about the horse racing connection, though, so I was glad I looked it up. :)
(This conversation sounds like one of those conversational snippets of passing characters in a TV show…)
I feel like this is an opportune moment to link to the Making Light thread “Dreadful Phrases”, showing the flexibility of people’s understanding of language.
Ronf,
Obviously it doesn’t trump the 1st amendment. However, you were wrong that the University President didn’t know University policy. Sure, you can argue that it didn’t affect the welfare of the University community (it would help if you got the wording right), but the University president could equally well argue that it did: being the subject of a national scandal is not good for a University community.
Interesting side note about SAE, their former chapter at Cornell U. was closed after its members were responsible for the death of a black pledge. Makes a chanted commitment to murder black people rather than let them join the frat a little more serious.
Two amusing quizzes:
1) North Korean propaganda or ted talk?
2) A quiz about things being older (best if you don’t read the title)
Also, for anyone who likes to read about science (in a humorous and well written way) I recommend
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/
I got 12 of 15 right on that quiz G&W posted! The one about how long humans have been on Earth if you compress its ~4.6 billion year existence into a year is actually something I specifically teach in my Evolution class since I think it’s so crazy and I hope it gives my students an idea of the time frames we’re talking about.
-first evidence of life in late March
-first multi-cellular marine animals in late October
-extinction of (almost all) dinosaurs and diversification of mammals starting Dec 26
-human/chimp initial divergence around 11:00 AM on Dec 31
-Common Era (AD) begins at 11:59:47 pm on Dec 31
-everything since the US Civil War is in less than the last second of the “year” of Earth’s existence
That’s weird, I only got 14 questions (and not that one). 11/14 right, though.
The quiz on which things are older gets the timing of Warner Bros and the Ottoman Empire bizarrely wrong: the answer shown if you choose the wrong answer is”The Ottoman Empire dissolved in the aftermath of WWI, well after Warner Bros was founded in 1923.” When exactly does the author think WWI ended? Actually, the ending date of the Ottoman Empire is somewhere between 1918 and 1923, and Warner Bros was officially founded in 1923. Maybe they meant to put in the supposed founding date of 1908?
Oh, two different quizzes! Ignore me. I got 11/14 on the North Korea vs Ted Talks one.
Yeah, I was confused about that one as well, Charles. Especially since I’m reading a book about the fall of the Ottoman Empire right now.
Yeah, I had that same issue. I couldn’t remember the exact date for either the end of the Ottoman Empire or the beginning of Warner Brothers, but I knew that they were both late teens or early twenties. Looks like Warner Brothers officially incorporated in 1923, but were producing films under the name “Warner Bros.” a few years earlier.
gin-and-whiskey: while that’s a pretty good analogy, the problem is that (sadly) we can’t look at our actual character sheets, and people tend to overestimate their own objectivity and expertise pretty badly.
Well, maybe you do. I don’t.*
But although I agree that it’s not possible to perfectly self-evaluate one’s outcomes, I think that you can have a pretty good sense of your intent: if you consciously attempt to spend your “points” in one area and not another, the chances are pretty good that you’ll end up biased that way compared to someone who attempts the opposite.
Interestingly enough, the balance between “trying” and “doing” isn’t the same for those three, in somewhat predictable ways.
Attempts at expertise are the worst. They’re not at all the same thing as actual expertise, much as people think so (hello, Dunning-Kruger effect!)
Attempts at objectivity are easier–still hard, but relatively easier. Because as soon as you start questioning biases and trying to balance things, you’re almost always going to improve your level of objectivity–even if you haven’t improved enough.
Attempts at emotion are even easier. Certainly, true understanding and empathy is difficult, but you can make enormous steps through a concerted effort, fairly rapidly, if that’s what your focus on.
[*Sorry, that was too perfect of a set-up to resist the joke. I don’t actually mean it though!]
For those who like such things, the Kindle/Android version of Carcassone is free on Amazon today.
To put into perspective just how worried Oklahoma University’s President David Boren is about making sure that the campus is a safe place last year an OU freshman football player was caught on video punching a female student so hard that he broke 4 bones in her face and knocked her out. He was convicted of misdemeanor assault. He was suspended from the football team for a year, but remained on campus and was allowed to rejoin the team the next season. Because second chances and all that.
But two kids leading a racist chant on a bus are immediately expelled.
Apparently convictions of violent crimes against students on campus deserves second chances, but abhorrent speech off campus does not.
Because second chances and all that.
Uh, no, because football team and all that. If the kids singing racist songs had been stars of the OU football team, they’d have gotten away with a very sorry song and ‘diversity training’. If the SAE idiots hadn’t been on video that went viral, they’d have gotten away with that, too; black students at OU were quick to point out this wasn’t a shocking aberration on an otherwise tolerant campus.
Well, of course. I was citing the President of OU’s stated reason for what happened, not the real reason. Sorry for the confusion.
When/where I went to school, we did not even HAVE a football team. It was dissolved in the ’30’s as being non-conducive to scholarship. As in actual scholarship, not “athletic tuition waiver”. If I were in charge of collegiate athletics, it would look very different. No student would get admitted to a university unless his or her academic record qualified them to do so regardless of their athletic abilities. If the NFL and NBA want minor leagues they can damn well start their own like MLB does. And at least 1/2 the NHL comes up through Junior Hockey, not college.
One day I was down in the cafeteria here at work and there was a new sandwich guy. I’m 6′ 2″ and 250+ pounds and he looked like he could throw me across the room. Turns out that he’d been an offensive lineman at the University of Illinois. His story in a nutshell was “They kept me eligible with bullshit courses, I played 4 years, I wasn’t good enough for the NFL, I’m f**ked.”
People should go to jail for this. I like to watch football but I’m doing some re-evaluation.
In a related note, last year’s top draft choice for the San Francisco 49ers, who was the teams top tackler last year and bound to be a star if he stayed away from injuries, has called it quits. Says that based on the number and kind of hits he took and the research he’s done on the effect of such on his body, it’s not worth it. I bet we see more of this.
There’s a problem with that formulation, though. If you can’t say racist things on campus, then the campus is NOT in fact “tolerant”. in order to be a truly tolerant campus, they have to be tolerant of all viewpoints, including racist ones. Not on an institutional basis, mind you. No one in an authoritative position on campus has the right to impose racist policies, they’d have to follow non-discrimination laws. But people in the U.S. have a right to be racist, and that includes students on a college campus. They don’t necessarily have the right to ACT on that racism. But they’ve got to have a right to think it and say it, or it’s not really tolerance – it’s only permission to think and say things that someone in authority approves of.
A campus cannot claim to be tolerant and then turn around and say “There are things we will not tolerate you saying and viewpoints we won’t tolerate you holding.” No one has a right to not hear things they don’t like, or that makes them feel uncomfortable or even “unsafe”. No one has a right to have authority shut those people up or remove them.
fascinating.
https://www.columbiamissourian.com/a/186044/msa-to-meet-with-muslims-veterans-about-screening-of-american-sniper/
Here’s the full letter
http://www.themaneater.com/stories/2015/3/3/american-sniper-has-no-place-mu/
Bringing this over here from the Pratchett thread so as not to pollute it:
Apart from whether or not this applies to Mr. Pratchett I find this fascinating. It’s always put forth as a validation of faith, yet it seems to me to be precisely the opposite. When facing death, people are often desperate for any way to survive. This is why, for example, people dying of various diseases will try snake oil cures. Yet we don’t hold that up as an example of snake oil being a good or true thing.
What kind of fallacy is that, anyway? It seems like an appeal to authority, though why the terminally ill are an authority on faith escapes me.
Weirdly enough, John Oliver was just on that last night (as part of a piece on collegiate athletics). EDIT: Two nights ago. I swear I can do math…
I’m frankly fed up with both the whole system of college sports and the whole system of fraternities.
South Park also has a nice episode about NCAA. IIRC, they equate the NCAA’s business model with slavery.
I was in a fraternity. It was nothing like the stories I’ve seen alleged. Yes, during pledge week we loaded up a truck with a garbage can full of ice and beer and drove down by BU and BC picking up girls. But no one got assaulted. No girls passed out or crying or being dragged off shitfaced into someone’s room. I never in 3 years living there ever heard the words “bitch”, “cunt”, etc. ever used in reference to a girl. I heard bragging about who did what sexual act with whom exactly once. I had my own female cousins over more than once with no worries about what might happen. The only time I remember any girls get sick was the one time, never to be repeated, that we had “Sloe Gin Fizz” night and gave them out free to the young ladies. We had to repaint the walls on the 4th floor lounge after that one, I admit. They WERE orange …. But it seems like at least 1/4 of the guys ended up with live-in girlfriends staying there (to the point we had to start charging them for meals). There was more weed than booze, and the latter was perfectly legal for anyone 18 or over at the time.
Also, no guys getting woken up in the middle of the night and run around naked or being paddled or any of that shit. No secret quasi-religous rituals, no “initiations”.
Of course, this was at the Institute. If we’d been drunk all the time we’d flunk out. Weekends started Friday night and ended Sunday night, they didn’t start on Wednesday and end Monday night. And we were about as diverse as you could get there at the time. We had kids from all kinds of foreign countries. Thailand, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, England, and Texas. There was a black kid (yep, “a” black kid – not too many black kids at MIT at the time, understand) and a Hispanic kid (ibid).
I suspect that the fraternity system overall is fine, but that it needs some cleaning up at some schools.
I suspect quite the opposite based on the decades of reporting of incidents up to and including death at fraternities nation wide.
GiW – yeah, I heard about that.
Of course it’s an attempt at censorship, at least on that campus. Showing that movie does not injure her humanity. It does not make her less safe. Freedom of speech absolutely does include the right to view and talk about you with disrespect and refer to you in an undignified fashion. This is America, and that’s what the First Amendment means.
That sounds rather anecdotal to me, Jake. Certainly there have been reports. There was a death at MIT many years ago, in fact. Tragic AND stupid. Someone talked a freshman into drinking an entire bottle of vodka, IIRC …. But how many fraternity chapters are there across the country, how many incidents have there been reported, and what’s their distribution among the schools (i.e., do they cluster at particular schools)? That should also take into account the results of any investigations so as to discount reports such as the Rolling Stone report about Phi Kappa Psi that hasn’t held up to examination. If there’s going to be an allegation that there’s a widespread issue with the university fraternity system – or even problems at a particular school – it should be backed up with some quantitation. I suspect that a certain amount of the animus against fraternities is based on politics or philosophy rather than on hard data.
As far as college athletics goes: if basketball and football are to continue to be minor leagues for the NBA and NFL, here’s a few changes I’d suggest:
1) No freshman eligibility. I suspect few of you are old enough to remember, but that USED to be the rule. Freshmen couldn’t play varsity sports. The idea was to ensure that they got used to actually going to school, going to classes, studying, etc. and would have a shot at continuing to progress academically during their college years and graduate. Then the people running schools decided they were leaving money on the table, so it became “We’re holding these kids back” – ignoring the fact that the vast majority of those kids would never see a pro roster, and the ones who did would have done so anyway, just a year or two later. That also meant that theoretically the kid could flunk out and not ever play….
2) After their senior year, their eligibility is used up – but if they choose to do so, they can stay as full-time students with tuition, fees and living expenses waived until they accumulate enough credits to graduate with a degree. I don’t care if it takes them another 4 years.
3) Schools can only grant a fixed number of athletic tuition waivers (the current situation), and until a tuition-waived athlete graduates or 7 years pass, whichever is first, the waiver cannot be replaced.
4) A portion of any money earned by the school during a given year from athletic endeavors (bowl payments, tournament payments, endorsements by any member of the athletic staff, ticket sales, parking, concessions, sales of logoed goods, etc.) gets put aside in trust for any student on tuition waiver for that year to be paid to him when he graduates or after 7 years, whichever comes first.
5) Said trust fund must also receive payments equal to that of the salaries of the coaching staffs for the sport the student plays in. Pay the football coach $5 million a year? The football students playing that year split $5 million. Say there’s 100 kids on the team – that’s $50K/student.
6) Any major or classes that has a significant number of athletes enrolled must have their curricula and actual course work audited by an outside agency to ensure the students are not being routed into “make work” classes, are not having their work done for them, etc.
Time for those kids to get a piece of the pie.
Look here as a starting point. I think a non-exhaustive list that contains more than 60 deaths over the last 35 years is indicative of a problem. But maybe your threshold for hazing deaths is somewhere above that.
Whenever this subject comes up, I also like to link to this lovely article about the large numbers of student athletes at Oregon who take sign language.
I went to a total of three fraternity parties my freshman year of college, and I saw girls crying, and close to passed out, and heard from a friend about seeing a guy leading a girl who could barely walk upstairs. Heard a guy call a girl a bitch. One of my female friends once asked a male friend if she could see the upstairs of his fraternity house, and he looked kind of panicked and said, “You really don’t want to.” I’ve heard similar things from friends who went to plenty of other schools. I’m pretty sure that MIT was the exception, rather than the rule.
I mean, just today, this was in the news. http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/penn-state-frat-suspended-facebook-page-nude-pics-29693942
RonF:
So… sort of a minimum wage guarantee and social safety net, for people who rolled the dice but whose best efforts didn’t pan out?
I have no objection in principle; I’m just intrigued at the source of the proposal.
Grace
RonF,
I think your proposals would probably be an improvement over the current state. If it were a choice between what you’re offering and the status quo, I would not hesitate to support what you’re advocating here.
That said… why not just simplify the situation by eliminating the ban on direct compensation? Let the players act as free agents and sell their athletic talents to any school willing to pay for them, whether that be through scholarships, subsidies for housing/food/etc., direct payments, or some combination of the above.
I just looked it up. The last time that the drinking age in Massachusetts was 18 was before I was born. Your experience might not be all that relevant to discussions of the current state of fraternities.
In fact, I think the drinking age, and the way that IDs are checked, contributes to a lot of the problems. At a lot of campuses, if you’re under 21 and you want to drink, a frat party is by far the easiest way to do it. They’ll have someone at the door checking IDs, but even pathetically bad fakes will be let through. Actual bars and clubs and liquor stores are usually a lot more careful about that — you need a really good fake, which is expensive, to get something to drink there, and you’re risking getting in trouble.
Not just frat parties, necessarily, but house parties too. I went to a big Midwestern state school, and there ain’t much to do in the Midwest besides drink, so you could always find some group of kids renting a house who were having a party. Of course, there were usually fewer bedrooms to hide in there, if you wanted to do something to somebody, and there are other problems with frats as well…
The house party culture was coupled with a lax ID culture, though: there were definitely bars you could get into, too, and my favorite story involves some friends who were 18 and trying to buy some beer from the gas station. They were in line with two 12-packs, and a cop came up behind them and said, “Excuse me.” They freaked out but turned around, and he said, “It’s way cheaper if you get a 24-pack; here, I’ll go exchange it for you,” and did.
I guess what I’m saying is, I think there are a lot of problems with frat culture, but the campus drinking culture, especially in non-urban areas, is a broader problem than that.
Oh, yeah, when I was in college, there were plenty of bars where we could get drinks. At most of the bars near the campus where I work now, though, they seem to be pretty strict about checking IDs, and a lot of them even run the magnetic stripe through some kind of scanner to make sure it’s real.
I don’t remember house parties when I was in college being open to the public the way frat parties were. They were usually more like things that you told your friends about, and maybe they told their friends, but it would be weird to show up at one without knowing anybody.
No one has a right to not hear things they don’t like, or that makes them feel uncomfortable or even “unsafe”.
Indeed. No one has a right not to have other people call them racist, or insist that others refrain from calling them bigots because doing so makes them feel uncomfortable or “unsafe”.
Also, speaking of contradictions, RonF, I was in a fraternity. It was nothing like the stories I’ve seen alleged is rather anecdotal, but you then turn around and defend fraternities against accusations of misconduct with “That sounds rather anecdotal to me” and ” it should be backed up with some quantitation”. So, which is it? Or are you again playing anecdata for me, but not for thee?
We do have some “quantitation”, though: insurance rates.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-03-28/frats-worse-than-animal-house-fail-to-pay-for-casualties
Asking that a film not be shown is not censorship.
Here, I will demonstrate: Ron, I’d prefer that you not screen “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” on your DVD player. Please don’t. Just as a matter of basic taste.
Now, maybe I’ve just changed your mind about screening Crystal Skull, and maybe not. But in neither case has an act of censorship occurred.
Funnily enough, the very first comment criticizing her after her op-ed says:
So he’s doing exactly the same thing she is – saying that the school’s media organs shouldn’t present thoughts he finds offensive. And you know what? That’s not censorship, either.
Then he goes on to say
Apparently, the meaning of the word “censorship” isn’t one of the things they teach at MU.
Oh, come on. it wasn’t that bad….
Bad analogy, Amp. I never said that I had any intent to watch that DVD. So you’re not trying to stop me from watching something that I had intended to see. However, the school has in fact scheduled the showing of the film, and she wants to stop that.
Mythago, you are quite right in that what I related was essentially anecdotal. I present it to show that the alternative exists. It certainly does not prove that all frats or even the majority of them are like where I lived – but then relating stories of sexual abuse at other fraternities does not prove that all frats or even the majority of them are like that, either. Hard data is needed.
From what my son (who went to Enormous Midwestern University) tells me, Harlequin is correct – you can get drunk at a frat, or you can get drunk at a bar, or you can get drunk at a house party. Legendarily the issue with presenting an ID at some bars is not whether it looks particularly valid but whether or not you are tall enough to see over the bar when you present it. Assaulting someone in a bar is not so easy, but outside a bar or in or outside a house party happens too. Binge drinking is a huge issue on campuses.
As it happens, my daughter went to college in the Boston area right around when that MIT freshman died drinking a bottle of vodka. Immediately afterwards a massive and pervasive crackdown on student drinking across the entire Boston area was put into effect, and from what she tells me (she still lives out there) it remains in effect to this day.
Ron, that’s a completely irrelevant detail. You’re dodging and weaving, not addressing the substantive issue.
Suppose that you had said you intended to watch that DVD. And I asked you not to, because it’s pretty sucky (sorry Lee). That is not attempted censorship. If you say “sure, I’ll watch Last Crusade instead,” it’s still not censorship.
I have a FREE SPEECH RIGHT to ask you (or a university) not to screen a movie, and to explain why. You – and a university – have a FREE SPEECH RIGHT to listen to me, if you want to, and to change your mind about screening the movie, if you want to. (Or to show the movie, too.)
It is bizarre and contradictory to claim that it’s censorship for this student to exercise her free speech rights. It’s bizarre and contradictory to claim that it’s censorship for the University to decide whether or not to screen the movie. These things are the exercise of free speech.
It’s interesting to note that when a legislature actively punishes a university for teaching a book that the legislature is ideologically opposed to, you denied that was censorship. So in your view, for the legislature to use the power of law to punish a school for teaching a book is not censorship; but for someone to write an op-ed asking a university not to screen a movie is censorship.
I don’t think you have a coherent notion of “censorship.”
Amp,
At heart, the ultimate question of censorship is generally whether someone is
1) trying to suppress speech, rather than trying to provide opposing speech; and
2) trying to go to the authorities/higher-ups rather than the ultimate listeners.
Whether or not it meets the level of actually imposing speech codes through government fiat, it’s common to refer to that as either “censorship” or, at the least, “arguing for censorship.” The reason is to attempt to distinguish that from the “competing speech” approach.
“it’s OK if people wave pro/anti abortion posters next to me, I am confident my points are better” is the competing speech approach. So is “It’s OK if you show this movie; I am going to show my movie and think my points are better.”
“Keep my opposition of the lawn” is the “censorship approach.” So is “don’t show the movie.”
If you have another term you suggest using here, I’m all ears.
But otherwise this seems like nit-picky semantics. This was unquestionably free speech; she has the right to say what she wants. That said, it’s also free speech in service of a censorship approach, rather than free speech in a service of a competing views approach.
People often call that “arguing for censorship” or “trying to censor things.” Which is normal because ACTUAL censorship–book burning, blackouts, literal prevention of data dissemination–is incredibly rare.
Jakesquid — it’s kind of an argument from *your opponent’s* authority. Because you’re saying, “You don’t agree with me now, but you ultimately will, so therefore why fight it?”
G&W wrote:
I think you actually pulled up a little short in your criticism here, G&W. I don’t think that only government suppression of speech can be considered ACTUAL censorship. It’s certainly the quintessential type, and Amp is not alone in arguing that only government action can be censorship. But sources as varied as the ACLU and (the master reference itself) Wikipedia do not limit the term to government action. Indeed a google search for “government censorship” turns up over 400,000 uses which would seem excessive if the word “government” can be read into the word “censorship.”
Following up with a second post…I found a resource on the PBS website that aggregates a number of definitions of censorship. My favorite comes from something called the Academic American Encyclopedia. I have never heard of them before, so this isn’t an argument from authority; it’s just me passing along how someone else said what I wanted to say, better than I ever could: