I see where you’re coming from, but to be blunt you are over-abstracting the issue.
Sure, once a case (if we are talking crimes) goes to trial skepticism and all the rigorous methods of inquiry should be used.
The Listen and Believe concept is simply asking what is on the tin. Basically employ some empathy, compassion, insight, and a willingness to inhabit/walk in someone’s shoes for a moment.
When someone says that their house burnt down, or car was broken into, or they lost their job is the first reaction skepticism right out of the gate? If someone says “I just lost my job” should our response be I’ll listen to you of course, but I sure as hell won’t believe you until I know, without a doubt, that you aren’t fabricating this story? Then why has it been so hard for our society to apply empathy in cases of online harassment or sexual abuse, etc.?
-Todd
LMN8R
1582
That full sentence is so unbelievably uncontroversial.
Sad (but not shocking) that it’s being used as evidence that, quoted verbatim, “she built up that resistance over a long period of time of conning people, lying, and trying to impose her ideology on the world, quite without the slightest hint of self-awareness.”
If that’s seriously the best you got against Sarkeesian, when it comes to declaring her an “SJW” based on the definition shared a couple pages ago, then you have a pretttttttty weak argument.
Timex
1583
Critical race theory was the thing I was thinking of before, and I kind of find it bullshit.
1:30 “They really buy into a culture that doesn’t value what we’ve feminized.”
Translation from doublethink: only feminine values are empathic.
Name an area where women are legally discriminated against.
Well, if it’s so “unbelievably uncontroversial” that “women are often told they are asking for it or inventing it”, then it ought to be easy to point to several examples from, say, the mass media, in which “women are told that they are asking for it or inventing it”.
ShivaX
1587
Wages? I mean that was pretty hard wasn’t it?
The law doesn’t enforce lower wages for women.
The legal framework for equality has been in place for years now, thats why third wave/white feminism is more about manspreading and complaining about bikini posters and why NFL teams can’t field more women.
It’s movement without a cause, the second wave achieved most of their goals.
If a woman is discriminated against wrt wages, that’s against the law. Equal pay for equal work has been a thing for decades.
An interesting article on PsychologyToday opines on the causes of snowflake/crybully/anti-freespeech culture.
Great, an Adjunct Professor wrote a blog post after leaving the military.
Oh what, did your SocJus Goskomizdat not add the writer to the list of approved authors?
I have an idea, since you are treading down this oft used route, why don’t you pour through 10 years of her social media output looking for badthink and problematic statements, and then bring those up instead of addressing the points in the article?
I mean, isn’t that all you do?
Teiman
1594
We are where we are now, we live the lives we live, we don’t die the first cold winder, because we have rejected this idea.
Because we think “No belief without evidence” we hare able to explore space, build engines, detect waves on the fabric of spacetime, cure childrens with illnes, transplant hearths, and so on.
“No belief withouth evidence” is on the root of the western culture, and is why the western culture is so succesfull.
Asking for “belief withouth evidence” is regressive.
Somebody saying we have to believe whiteout evidence, is not a friend of humanity.
Don’t fall for these siren songs.
Don’t let them enter.
Timex
1595
The washington post today has an article about how college campuses are becoming increasingly hostile to free speech.
Of note, is the video of the Yale student who throws a tantrum in the quad, screaming about how it’s not about creating an intellectual space, but it’s about creating a home.
This type of discourse is detrimental to the college, and effectively lowers the value of the education they provide.
Well, if you accept that colleges aren’t about education but just a means to get credentials, and move up in the world, people just want to do their work, and not deal with stress that hate speech causes. Besides, that questionnaire used was very broad, even if an opinion fluff piece in the Post.
Um, yeah but I would argue that people keep interpreting the Listen and Believe concept way too abstractly and placing it in the wrong context. Listen and Believe is not threatening the foundations of western civilization, the principles of rigorous scientific inquiry, 2 millennia of philosophical probing, or making David Hume roll in his grave. I mean it is a noble cause and keep fighting the good fight but you are in the wrong ring altogether.
Listen and Believe is more about the social fabric, the day to day interactions between people. Having a measure of emotional intelligence and empathy. David Hume himself understood the limits of reason and posited that impressions and passions were necessary as the motivators of action; the underpinning of our will. We actually listen to and believe people all the time, dozens of times in any given day. We probably don’t even consciously realize it but in talking to people we listen to and believe them as a matter of habit. It is part of social cohesion, having a good will towards others, and being neighborly.
I would suggest that the core tenet of Listen and Believe is asking why cannot society extend that basic daily practice of emotional intelligence to gendered topics (as one example). Why does our society have an artificial barrier where if someone says their dorm room was broken into and laptop stolen we listen and believe there but if someone else says that they were the subject of online harassment we have to turn into 17th century British empiricists. It is a very simple and harmless idea and is asking for change in our social interactions. A tiny shift really. Just extend what each of us do daily to gendered topics.
-Todd
I wish peoe would listen and believe climate scientists. Am I right? Up top!
It’s about giving the benefit of the doubt, at least until the evidence says otherwise. This is actually how most crimes are treated (i.e. a reported crime is generally assumed to be real).
My entire career has been working in U.S. Higher Education and I see this issue as more of a media scare tactic than anything widespread or problematic. It’s akin to a Fox News segment scaring elderly. It looks dramatic when an article strings together a series of events, but they are a miniscule drop in the bucket of the broader college population. Sure there are moments of it here and there, but the vast majority of students are not acting in any way hostile to free speech.
It might be easy to slip into a false equivalence (not saying anyone here is) to see something like that Yale student and think that represents the larger body of students at Yale, Yale culture, or even higher education as a whole.
Most students I interact with are just trying to get through the day, week, semester. They have a ton of work and worry about things like the value of a bachelor’s degree in our current workplace market, the burden of their student loans, or their social life.
As a society we should stay alert to attitudes that threaten a free exchange of ideas but I really don’t see the epidemic that some media outlets are trying to conjure up.
-Todd
