Open Thread and Link Farm, Smells Like Good Art Edition
- Donald Trump’s supporters are LESS likely to be affected by trade and immigration, not more – Vox
- New Study Shows Reading Harry Potter Lowers Americans’ Opinions of Donald Trump | Annenberg School for Communication
“Even when controlling for party identification, gender, education level, age, evangelical self-identification, and social dominance orientation — all factors known to predict Americans’ attitudes toward Donald Trump — the Harry Potter effect remained.”
- 30 U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies – The New York Times
Indirect link.
- Ali-Liston 50th anniversary: The true story behind Neil Leifer’s perfect photo.
The surprisingly interesting stories behind a photo of a knocked out boxer.
- How the first liberal Supreme Court in a generation could reshape America – Vox
I hadn’t realized that (even without another liberal justice) the Court is likely to restrain the use of solitary confinement by prisons sometime in the next few years. Nonetheless, nothing about a Clinton presidency excites me more than changing the direction of the Supreme Court.
- Speaking of private prisons: Ramen is displacing tobacco as most popular US prison currency, study finds | The Guardian
“Cost-cutting measures by private facilities have led to subpar food quality and fewer meals, making noodles a commodity that trades well above its value.”
- Helping Rape Victims After the Brock Turner Case – NYTimes.com
“…inflexible mandatory minimum sentences, like the kind the California legislators want, are not the answer to our anger.” (Indirect link.)
- Stop Killing Coyotes – The New York Times
What I find interesting about this is the notion that our attempt to eradicate the coyote has only had the effect of spreading coyotes into more and more territory. I thought the argument about how photos of beefy middle-aged men tarnish middle America’s image was incredibly stupid, though. (Indirect link).
- How To Be A Thin Ally On A Plane | Dances With Fat
- What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists | Aeon Ideas
- Galactic Tick Day – Celebrate Existence
“The first Galactic Tick Day was one Galactic Tick (1.7361 years) after Hans Lippershey filed the patent for the first telescope on October 2nd, 160.” But do Federal workers get the day off?
- ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES: Fun With Economics: The Politics of The Gender Gap in Wages and also the followup post: The Challenge: Prove That Discrimination in Labor Markets Exists
- Alex Powell – “You know in Toy Story 3 when Mr Potato Head puts his face bits on a tortilla and escapes? Really bothers me. Where is Mr Potato Head’s consciousness located? Is he an assortment of bits? A swarm?” (More at the link.)
- Hillary Clinton has eased one of the biggest doubts about her capacity to be a good president – Vox
One of my biggest doubts about Clinton was that her campaign organization in 2008 was notably poorly run. But she seems to have learned from that experience.
- Brewer Says Calling Clinton A ‘Lying Killer’ Was A ‘Stumble Of The Tongue’
Not the Onion!
- UCB comedy club banned comedian Aaron Glaser for alleged rape | Revelist
- Breitbart Editor Milo Yiannopoulos Takes $100,000 for Charity, Gives $0 – The Daily Beast
I suspect some combination of incompetence and not-giving-a-shit-ness, rather than a deliberate scam.
- The gender wage gap isn’t about women’s choices. It’s about how we value their work. – Vox
- A Hit Man Came to Kill Susan Kuhnhausen. She Survived. He Didn’t. – Willamette Week
- Donald Trump Adviser Al Baldasaro Calls for the Execution of Hillary Clinton – The Atlantic
- People are saying Amy Schumer “failed women” because she’s blocking critics on Twitter. That’s silly.
- God’s stealing the credit again
Interesting stats on Alcoholics Anonymous not working.
- Trump Encourages His Supporters to Patrol Polling Places, Says He Will Lose Pa. Only If There is Cheating | Election Law Blog
This is the sort of rhetoric that makes violence after Trump loses more likely to happen.
- The Five Worst Roberts Court Rulings
- The Cost to States of Not Expanding Medicaid – Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
- Etiquette About Accidentally Misgendering Trans People | Thing of Things
- Larry Wilmore on Alton Sterling: the punishment for being a black man shouldn’t be death – Vox
It’s disappointing that Wilmore’s show has been cancelled.
- You can vote for Hillary Clinton and not be too thrilled about it – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money
- Textbooks and the Civil Rights Movement – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money
- Box Turtle Bulletin » Today In History, 1948: “Homosexual Ring Broken Up” At Mizzou
- New ‘Green Giant’ Mural by Blu on the Streets of Naples | Colossal
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That physics article is fascinating and cool. I’m glad she manages to have sympathy for her clients.
Many years ago when I was still studying physics, I used to get some of that from acquaintances. It was definitely a strange experience. People have some pretty weird beliefs about physics sometimes.
I’ve gotten a bunch of those random “Here’s my ground-breaking mathematical formula, which the government is trying to suppress!” emails over the years. I just deleted them. A pretty significant number seem to come from people in Russia.
Yeah, I get new physics theories in my inbox every once in a while. Got an actual handwritten letter once–wish I’d kept it now. I like what Hossenfelder’s doing, though. And breaking down somebody’s ideas like that and finding out what they need to fix it is a really difficult teaching task–a lot of people couldn’t do what she’s doing.
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A friend of mine pointed me to this interesting article about a lawyer fighting the death penalty in Alabama and about a new lynching memorial being installed in Montgomery, which I found pretty interesting, especially the description of the memorial itself.
Yes, heaven forbid we do the absolute bare minimum required to comply with the UN Convention Against Torture. I mean, let’s not go crazy here. We’d never go that far!
So somehow I ended up on Amp’s twitter feed and noted a reference to a letter that the Dean of Students at the University of Chicago sent out to all incoming freshmen. It says in part:
So it sounds like the U of C – renowned for being one of the best schools in America – intends to actually honor concepts such as free speech and intellectualism.
You can read the entire letter here
Well, looks like Amp’s Twitter feed anticipated the Chicago Tribune. The story about the U of C’s letter to incoming freshmen was on their front page today.
U. of C. tells incoming freshmen it does not support ‘trigger warnings’ or ‘safe spaces’
“At the University of Chicago, fostering the free exchange of ideas helps build a welcoming campus, Ellison told students in the letter, ….” That statement seems to be completely opposite to what I have read from many of the proponents of ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘safe spaces’, who appear to me to hold that failing to warn of and protect people from the expression of various ideas makes a campus unwelcoming and oppressive to various demographics.
My first impression on reading that letter, RonF, was that the Dean has no idea what a Trigger Warning is.
Pharyngula pretty much nails my feelings on the matter.
RonF:
That’s not at all the way I’d put it. First of all, protection is not the primary goal of content warnings*, and often not a goal at all–more “brace yourself before you read this”, less “skip this if it’s too emotionally/psychologically hard” (although sometimes the latter happens as well–but in most educational contexts, at least, the first thing is closer to the standard usage). Second, it’s weird to describe this as addressing “the expression of various ideas.” I mean, depicting a rape isn’t an idea. Such a depiction might be sensational or it might be part of a feminist tract arguing about the severity of certain kinds of rape, and both of those things would likely get labeled with the same warning if they were the same kind of explicit. Someone criticizing Lovecraft’s racism, with quotes, would get a racism warning just like those quotes themselves. Etc.
Edit: I guess these are, strictly speaking, ideas. But not ideas with any particular political import, which seems to me to be a common objection to warnings.
* As has been pointed out here before–not by me–the things we usually call trigger warnings tend to get applied to a broader class of things than just actual PTSD triggers, and the terminology also makes people with PTSD into political footballs for broader issues. I prefer content warnings/content notes as terminology for this reason. Probably a losing battle, but I’ll try!
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And as others have said, the relationship between UChicago and the surrounding neighborhoods (and non-university-associated residents in Hyde Park) makes the contempt for safe spaces particularly galling.
The link Jake Squid provided @7 pretty much says it all for me, too.
Ooh, that is good–I thought I’d read it already, but it must have been another blogger. Thanks for the link, Jake Squid.
Yes, thank you for that, Jake.
Here’s another, from Noah Berlatsky:University of Chicago trigger warnings ban is a reminder that intellectual freedom on campus is a myth — Quartz
I don’t understand why content notes are controversial for non-fiction. I mean, who is being hurt by being told “today we’re covering lynching?”
My thing, of course, because I’d be teaching lit stuff, is how to do trigger warnings for fiction (or memoir or something, but I’m calling that fiction for right now). There are stories that rely on surprise turns, and some readers will not appreciate the spoiler effect of “this story is covering lynching,” and it can sometimes (depending on the story) undermine its ability to make its point.
So, I figure I’d probably do a content note sheet for people who feel strongly that they want content notes, and then staple it to the syllabus, folded in half, so the students who want it have it on hand without having to tell me anything, and the students who don’t can rip it off and toss it in the trash. College students are (by and all) adults; I trust them to make that judgment.
Ideally, I’d love films, and books, and etc etc to have extensive content notes, sort of like tags applied to posts, which could be searchable. Seems like it could be possible? Then the part of the Christian right that feels strongly about these things can put their own content notes on stuff: “positive depiction of divorce,” “three instances of the word f***,” “gay kissing” — or whatever it is they want to know about.
Like, Mike has panic attacks when we see depictions of certain kinds of sexual assault. So, sometimes I have to screen media before he sees it, to see if that kind of assault is treated. But a lot of times it’s not, so I’ve just wasted the screening time. And even then, I don’t always know what to screen — for some reason, I didn’t expect Downton Abbey to be like “yo, all the buttons, let me press them.”
A tag I can search that turns up “discusses rape” would be a huge favor so that I could know what to screen.
And if I don’t want to know about something because I don’t want spoilers (“deals with disability” or something), or because I think it’s trivial (“contains 112 instances of the word f***), I can just not enable those tags.
Someone would have to do the tagging, but surely we could open source it for a lot of stuff, at least non-ephemeral media.
Of course, content notes won’t help out for idiosyncratic triggers, like “orange wallpaper” or “Barbies,” but there are common things that people react to — whether that’s something they just want to brace for, or an urgent trigger.
I don’t really understand why this is controversial, once you have a solution for things that require surprise.
How did the “we don’t support so called trigger warnings” in the original letter become a “trigger warning ban”? It seems to me that some of the criticism has been directed at imaginary wrongs.
I read the letter as opposing mandatory trigger warnings. I think it’s indicating that students who request/demand trigger warnings won’t get support from the administration for imposing their will on the lecturer, not that the administration will impose limits on lecturer’s providing trigger warnings of their own volition.
Popehat suggests how the key paragraph of the U of C letter:
could have been better written:
Although I might quibble with the phrasing, I do think that’s a huge improvement. I’m curious, Ron and anyone else here who liked the U of C letter; would you have liked Popehat’s alternate wording as much?
I agree that the letter isn’t a formal ban on trigger warnings. However, given the language in the rest of the letter, which frames trigger warnings as an assault on free speech and exchange of ideas, I think reading a suppressing effect into the letter isn’t a stretch.
What’s more, this comes in the context of people declaring trigger warnings and safe spaces a danger to free speech. I don’t think that’s true. But if you’re going to read “assaults on free speech” very broadly in that way–where even mild social disapproval counts–then the letter counts too. (And I would say it should count more, given that it’s coming from a person with a fair amount of power.)
Amp,
Generally I liked the original letter, but I prefer Ken’s proposed language to the original.
Ampersand:
I think Popehat’s version is much better. However, I would also expect that someone who was educated enough to teach at university would be able to do that translation for themselves.
Harlequin:
If you think there’s a suppressing effect from this letter, then surely you can see the concern about the suppression effect of trigger warnings. Who do you think is going to be more affected: a university lecturer by a vaguely worded political letter not even addressed to them, or a young, impressionable student who sees the person in authority clearly implying that discussing certain ideas is dangerous?
I don’t think it suppresses anything as it stands. If the administration doubled down on not allowing trigger warnings, that would be something else. No, my problem with the letter is the profound lack of understanding about what warnings and safe spaces are.
That isn’t what trigger warnings do. A trigger warning is just a content note (a term which I prefer to use with my students) so that people will know that material which might be upsetting is going to be addressed so they can mentally prepare themselves in advance. That’s it. That’s what all these cries of “censorship” are about. It is absurd.