magnet
4881
I guess so!
Milton is challenging.
Romeo and Juliet is tragic.
A video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading is upsetting.
I haven’t watched that video. Why the hell would I?
Because they might learn something.
But you’ve probably voluntarily watched videos of bulldozers pushing piles of corpses around in liberated concentration camps, or read the Drowned and the Saved, or the equivalent. “Why the hell would anyone look at a photo of a little girl getting burnt alive by napalm?”
magnet
4884
“You might learn something” is true of almost any activity, from putting a pet to sleep to shooting up some heroin.
But if you really want to learn something, there’s almost always a way to do so without trauma.
As an older leftist, I am dismayed at the emergence of terms like “triggering” and “safe places”. How can you fight against something if you have no understanding of what it is. I frequently listen to Limbaugh and Hannity - not because I agree with them, but because I disagree with them. It is useful to listen to your adversaries so you can understand where they are coming from. Dr. Laura can be a hate-mongering loon, but she also makes good points about parenting (sometimes) and dealing with relationship difficulties (sometimes). I am not worried about this leaking into normal culture outside of the college environment, but it is shocking that this kind of “thinking” (actually, lack of thinking) is endorsed by college administrators. There has always been a certain skepticism regarding the value of a college education among the working class (misguided IMHO, since education is of benefit to everyone) and behaviors like these certainly reinforce those beliefs.
Well we can turn it around and say that we bear witness precisely to avoid trauma, and that sanitization precludes witnessing.
CraigM
4887
^^^^THIS (minus the older leftist bit ;) )
It really isn’t, I am a recent grad and there is strong pushback against trigger warnings everywhere and especially from LGBTQ faculty. You can’t do interesting work with inert texts. Yes the etiquette has changed a bit, there is a lot more conscientiousness about pre-flagging material dealing with sexual violence (which itself is of questionable utility and may even exacerbate a person’s trauma depending on their particular situation) but reading lists are not changing and there’s no sense in which students are entitled to demand revised course content or special evaluations beyond the generous accessibility accommodations already available.
And also what would you even read if you scrubbed the curriculum of anything racy? Software manuals I guess. You can’t even do philology without getting into who conquered who and the various postcolonial traumas associated with history.
The issues isn’t forcing people who have suffered trauma to relive their experiences because someone else wants them to do so. The problem is this idea that failing to warn people who have experienced trauma that they might encounter something that reminds them of that trauma is the same thing as wanting them to be traumatized. It’s how discussions about racism are declared to be racist or lists of traumatic things are declared to be traumatic. PSA posters warning kids about the dangers of date rape might be considering triggering of memories of date rape, anti-discrimination posters might be triggering memories of discrimination. At some point the recursive loop hits maximum absurdity.
Because being close-minded and insular is more damaging than being confronted with disagreeable ideas and content.
It’s how broadly you define offensive “content” that’s the real issue - nobody has ever said that videos of beheadings should viewing that’s compelled, or accessible without reasonable warning. But restricting the use of “physically fit people” because fatsos might feel bad, or the use of certain colors, or ordinary words, or non-active roles, etc. is obviously ridiculous and a tad demented.
Everybody has a different threshold. I enjoy hearing other points of view…until I don’t. But I acknowledge that it’s my threshold and don’t hold anybody else responsible for enforcing it. But then again, I’ve also never experienced a really severe trauma in my life.
As with most things, I think there’s a distinction between actual trigger warnings (for people with things like PTSD) and the “culture of trigger warnings” for people who don’t like to be challenged. It would be great to get to the point where we’re respectful and cognizant of the former without kowtowing to the latter.
Snarky language aside, I assume that that’s the opinion held by most of the contrarians in this thread. I guess I’m not internet-native enough, but I constantly remind myself how poor a medium for community asynchronous text is and try to give people the benefit of the doubt.
That display was pro-lifer, so has a political element. This would probably be a better example of what you’re going for:
It seems like ‘comfort’ politics is a weird and unanticipated outgrowth of a certain aspect of women’s studies. I can say that now with some degree of plausibility since, at this point, virtually every case of this being reported that i have seen has been complaints brought by women attending women’s studies programs. That probably puts me in hot water, but i’ll stick my neck out on this one, since it seems to be true.
Good lord. Well, it seems clear that’s politically motivated as an objection to the beliefs of the people setting up the display rather than the contents of the display itself. So, it’s just using the terms of the day to do what they would have wanted to do all along.
Actually, I think pwk’s example was a good one because it contained a political element. That’s exactly the kind of head-in-sand refusal to allow discussion that’s problematic in my view. The display didn’t have graphic images of abortion from what I can see in the image.
Well if you see it as an example of using new terms to win old battles, then yea, i see the point being made.
How about where safe spaces turn into segregation?
And, of course, don’t you dare read to your kids and disadvantage others.
bedtime stories activities . . . do indeed foster and produce . . . [desired] familial relationship goods,” he wouldn’t want to ban them, but that parents who “engage in bedtime-stories activities” should definitely at least feel kinda bad about it sometimes:
“I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,”
other things parents do to give their kids the best education possible — like sending them to “an elite private school” — “cannot be justified” in this way.
At one point, Swift even flirted with the idea of “simply abolishing the family” as a way of “solving the social justice problem”
Is this person in an institution for the irrevocably insane? Nope, a lauded liberal priest, er, Professor, Adam Swift, of Warwick University.
Quaro
4899
How do you keep finding this stuff? Are you actively searching for random college professors professors to get really mad at? Are there news sites that report on this stuff? How does what a priest at some University said come across your eyeballs? Was this something they said in class, or a paper? Does he have a gamergate blog?
Timex
4900
The idea that reading to your kid, because you care about them not being a dumbass, somehow disadvantages other children is something so idiotic that any professor who says such a thing should lose their tenure.
