Popehat

A Group Complaint about Law, Liberty, and Leisure

Safe Spaces As Shield, Safe Spaces As Sword

November 9, 2015 by

This may come as a surprise, but I'm a supporter of "safe spaces." I support safe spaces because I support freedom of association. Safe spaces, if designed in a principled way, are just an application of that freedom.

That's why I didn't flip out last week when someone announced they were building "Pillowfort," a friendlier version of the social media site Tumblr. The announcement was met with swift jeers from the usual suspects. Folks derided the idea of a social media site that, even more than the famously left-dominated Tumblr, lets you limit with whom you interact and control who sees your content. But why? Pillowfort would be self-selecting. Nobody goes into the fort who doesn't want to be there. It's not like somebody is wandering onto your social media account and building a fort around you and telling you how you can interact with others. Pillowfort represents something that conservatives used to support in other circumstances: a private club, run by its own rules, with admission limited as its members see fit. If I'm not a member of the club, how its members regulate discourse within it is of little interest to me. Similarly, though organized Twitter blocklists are troublesome to some people, they don't bother me. They, too, are an application of freedom of association. Do I think some lists are organized around silly principles? Sure. But people are like that. Freedom of association is the right to organize ourselves in silly ways.

In short, I support people creating "safe spaces" as a shield by exercising their freedom of association to organize themselves into mutually supporting communities, run according to their own norms. But not everyone imagines "safe spaces" like that. Some use the concept of "safe spaces" as a sword, wielded to annex public spaces and demand that people within those spaces conform to their private norms. That's not freedom of association. That's rank thuggery, a sort of ideological manifest destiny.1 It's the difference between saying "I shouldn't be forced to go to a talk by this controversial figure" and "this controversial figure should not be allowed to speak at my school."

This week's example of safe-space-as-sword comes, like many bad ideas, from Yale. Gallons of ink have been spilled already; consider the coverage at The FIRE or Reason or Simple Justice. I won't repeat it all.

There are two remarkable and dangerous things about the notion of safe spaces imagined by Yale students.

The first is the location of that space. It's not a self-selected community or an exercise of freedom of association, because it lacks the element of voluntary entry. It's the safe space of an occupier: students demand that everyone in the dorm, or college, or university conform to their private-club rules. Your right to swing your fist may end at my nose, but their asserted right to safety surrounds you.

The second remarkable thing is the definition of safety. For the moment, let's accept for the sake of argument that some speech can make people genuinely unsafe. Imagine, perhaps, speech advocating for the physical abuse of minorities or urging vulnerable people to commit suicide. But the Yale incident demonstrates that this core concept, once accepted, can be expanded to cover anything. The argument seems to be that because we can imagine truly threatening speech, we must therefore accept uncritically other people's subjective beliefs about what speech is threatening. The speech at issue here was an email acknowledging that ethic Halloween costumes could be hurtful but discussing whether it should be the role of a university to tell students whether to wear them. This is safety as Ouroboros — it is unsafe to question what is unsafe, unsafe to discuss the concept of safety.

The Yale incident is being portrayed, reasonably, as an example of liberal abuse of the concept of safe spaces. But conservative culture is not innocent here. What is the "War on Christmas" but a sort of safe-space argument, an assertion that we have a right to be congratulated for our religious beliefs by corporate America even out in public spaces? And conservatives have long matched the imagined right not to be offended with an equally fatuous right not to be called offensive. There's a difference between calling someone an asshole and calling for someone to be fired or expelled or otherwise silenced. Eager to score points in a culture war, some folks conflate classic more-speech remedies like criticism with actual censorship. That doesn't encourage a principled approach to speech by anyone, let alone college students.

  1. I was going to say lebensraum, but that's a little too trollish.

Last 5 posts by Ken White

Comments

  1. I'll go ahead and ask the obvious question: Yale is a private university. So how is this different than the members of a private club arguing among themselves about what the rules should be? If my group loses the argument, I am free to leave. Yes, there is an opportunity cost for me to do so, but that would be true of any private club of which I had been a member for an extended period.

  2. That Anonymous Coward says

    November 9, 2015 at 9:27 am

    It is amazing how different sides claim to be, yet they all seem to engage in the same things (just in different dresses).

    The "War on Christmas" is a prime example, yet those fighting in that war can't see they are doing the same thing they call others out for. Having worked in retail, the holidays are a frightful time because we are at the mercy of customers. If you use the "wrong" holiday greeting that's a write-up. It is a horrible feeling to make a customer feel uncomfortable, and we don't live in a nation with a state sponsored religion so its either interrogate them to assess the correct holiday greeting or just use the 'Happy Holidays' catch-all. Many people just accept the well wishes & move on. Then there are those who feel that you have to cater to their wants, and will tell you about it loudly for daring to not recognize them as one of the chosen ones. Perhaps if they wore a symbol on all of their clothes so we could identify them easier…. pretty sure historically that ends poorly.
    That being said, rather than demand everyone else only use 1 phrase, that will offend those of different beliefs, and screaming on TV about it… why not start a campagin to have them wear a quickly recognized symbol to clue workers into this is someone who would like to hear Merry Christmas. It is an easy nonconfrontational way to ask that your desires be noted, but you do not get to demand that someone who doesn't believe the same violate their beliefs just to appease you.

    We need to stop the entitlement on both sides, no one is more special than anyone else.
    Rather than demand speakers be driven away, why not ask for a speaker for the other side of the issue to have the full picture given. An actual debate rather than footstomping screaming is always beneficial.
    We are getting to entrenched in the it has to be my way or else mentality, and its destroying society. Confrontational demands just make both sides drive their heels in that much harder. We can't always get our way all the time, and it is time we start to accept we are not the center of the universe in control of everything. Even if you "win" in forcing your will onto the world, you lose. You remain less informed, more rigid, and more intolerant which will touch everything around you. Sounds like a crappy outcome.

  3. jaxkayaker says

    November 9, 2015 at 9:31 am

    Good summary of the situation. However, I think you meant to write "ethnic Halloween costumes" rather than "ethic Halloween costumes".

  4. Richard Gadsden says

    November 9, 2015 at 9:36 am

    Of course, the British solution to the holiday greetings question is, well, very British. This, at any rate, was how I was trained when I was working retail at Christmas.

    If the customer greets you in a holiday fashion, you return the greeting. Any greeting, regardless of you personal beliefs. If you initiate the greeting, you should always greet them neutrally, with "Hello, how can I help you?" or "How can I assist you, today?".

    But yes, if they say "Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!" to you, then you reply in kind.

  5. Ketchup,
    Yes, Yale or one of its colleges would meet Ken's definition of a private club. The issue is that a vocal minority of students are demanding a major change in the rules of that club which would be enforced on students and staff who were not part of that minority. That would represent a radical redefinition of the rules of the club from what many members signed up for. If the college had been founded on the principle of 'safety of the feels' over freedom and intellectual discourse, then members would have no one but themselves to blame. Such an institution at a university would deserve mockery, but it wouldn't be a violation of members' freedoms. Yale, however, is intended to be a place of learning and discourse. To demand that it cease to be so in the interest of a small fraction of its members, and to push that demand with intimidation tactics, is the undemocratic thuggery of which Ken speaks.

  6. That Anonymous Coward says

    November 9, 2015 at 9:50 am

    @Richard Gadsden
    Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

  7. Eric Anondson says

    November 9, 2015 at 9:53 am

    One could use their terms at them. They seek to not just occupy, but to colonize the public realm with their safe space needs.

  8. I think you are failing the principle of charity here.

    The idea behind the "War on Christmas," as far as it relates to corporate America, is not that Macy's is obliged to wish you "Merry Christmas," and should be shut down if they don't. Rather, the idea is that professional offense-takers are going round whining and kicking up an exaggerated fuss when anyone wishes them "Merry Christmas," not because they genuinely take offense, but because they want to secularise the public sphere. No-one wants a fuss, so Macy's wishes everyone a "Happy Holidays" instead, to placate this vocal minority. Therefore the response is to kick up a fuss when Macy's doesn't wish you "Merry Christmas;" that way Macy's will go back to saying "Merry Christmas."

    Personally, I think the "War on Christmas" people have a wrongheaded view of the world, and are making a mountain out of a molehill… but then again, they respond to corporate America in this way by criticising their behaviour and organising boycotts – the classic "more speech" – not calling for laws. You'd think the OP would be supportive of this – but then, it wouldn't be a Ken White post without a fatuous "but conservatives do it too!" tacked on at the end.

  9. That Anonymous Coward says

    November 9, 2015 at 10:02 am

    @Salem – but the students aren't demanding laws, they are demanding the school do what they want and change the world to suit their viewpoint… which is the entire shtick of the War on Christmas.

    Each of the examples has their own views and seek to make everyone else conform to them, if they want to or not.

  10. @Richard Gadsden: That's the most reasonable approach. Give a neutral "Hello" or "Good time-of-day" unless they indicate a specific preference.

    @Ken White: As someone who is considered to be "rightish" (ok, I piss off both the right and left depending on the topic), I can't fathom why anyone would have a problem with "pillowfort," save tumblr (and that's just because competition). I mean, I wouldn't personally use blocks against any but the most egregious of trolls, but if others want a "safe-space" (which frankly, usually in practice, can be spelt "echo chamber") that's noone's business but their own.

  11. There's a joke in here somewhere about ethic Halloween costumes being hurtful, but I apparently am not the person who can liberate it.

  12. @Salem

    "

    it wouldn't be a Ken White post without a fatuous "but conservatives do it too!" tacked on at the end.

    It also wouldn't be a Ken White post without puerile comments such as these. Thank god you saved this one.

  13. Thing is, Ken's point is not fatuous. Liberals indulge in this behavior over 'safety' and racism. Conservatives whine about flag burning and about not being able to censor gay people by firing them. Some of this behavior is constitutionally forbidden, but all of it tends to chill speech.

    Relatively few people exhibit a principled approach towards free speech, wherein defending the Westboro Baptist Church is a duty, probably not a gleefully accepted duty, but a duty nonetheless.

    The typical conservative or liberal rant about overreach is not productive and probably profoundly frustrating to Ken by now. To be fair, I hear of more liberal overreach than conservative, and that might reflect reality.

    But, I also suspect, that some portion of the frustration with conservative commentators may lie in the current reality of the conservative movement as a coalition of outright racist/populists, religious people probably more at home in Saudi Arabia, and exploitative capitalists all choosing to garb themselves as small government libertarians. So, basically, a pack of lying frauds busily lying to a bunch of yahoos.

    It isn't an accident that the Republican Party has been unable to build a decent electoral tracking solution – there simply aren't enough competent technical people who believe in them. So, apparently training in math and logic leads to a liberal bias?? Think about it…then consider Exxon debunking climate change research while planning around higher sea levels…

  14. Ken,

    I'm curious to hear your perspective on the NYU Law Halloween controversy. (See, e.g., Volokh, Above the Law)

    I thought Joe Patrice at ATL made a good point about how unreasonable it is to be offended by macabre images at Halloween parties:

    "

    First of all, Halloween serves as its own trigger warning. For better or worse, the entire holiday revolves around death, usually violent death, and more usually violent death at the hands of mental illness . . . Not that notice inoculates from offense, but it should gird people to expecting, contextualizing, and managing potentially unsettling images.

    But I have very little personal experience with mental illness, so perhaps I'm being insensitive.

    If nothing else, the NYU Law example and the good work of LaLSA has exposed me to the marvelous word "Latinx," pronounced "la-teen-ex," which sounds like an ill-conceived marketing campaign to sell tissues to Hispanics, but is actually a step towards la igualdad social:

    "

    *Because LaLSA is committed to fostering a safe and inclusive space for all members of our community, we use the term Latinx, pronounced "La-teen-ex", as a gender-neutral alternative to the usual gendered designation of Latino/a and Latin@

  15. @salem Which offense-takers are these? I have yet to meet a non-religious person who gives a crap about getting a "Merry Christmas" from the Macy's salesperson.

  16. @That Anonymous Coward:

    I think you have failed to make the distinction between "Shield" and "Sword" which was the whole point of the piece. The Yale students are not saying "Yale professors express opinions that make me feel uncomfortable, so I'm going to Cupcake University instead." Rather, they are saying "Yale professors express opinions that make me feel uncomfortable, so they should be kicked out." This is a particularly obnoxious use of "safe space" as "Sword" because Yale is (nominally) committed to free expression as a core value.

    The "War on Christmas" people are not (as far as I am aware?) trying to get stores that wish people "Happy Holidays" kicked out of town, or get executives fired if they set a "Happy Holidays" store policy. Instead, they are saying "Macy's gives me a greeting that makes me feel uncomfortable, so I won't shop there any more."

    There is no parallel whatsoever.

    @zinnia: As I said, I think the "War on Christmas" people have a misguided worldview – I agree that these offense-takers essentially don't exist. But that is what they believe.

  17. That Anonymous Coward says

    November 9, 2015 at 11:07 am

    @Salem
    I think there is a parallel while they can't run the stores out of town they attempt to cause economic harm to get their way. They demand boycotts and shout as loudly as they can conflating the issue with an attack on religion. They expect the entire world to conform to them, just like the snowflakes at the Universities who demand to not be challenged, and throw in whatever hot button issue will get them more support.

  18. @That Anonymous Coward
    A group of like-minded individuals grouping together to refuse to shop somewhere is not, "and attempt to cause economic harm" in any real sense of the phrase. To use it that way implies that Macy's is entitled to that sale. Am I doing Macy's economic harm when I don't shop there because they are overpriced?

    Agree or disagree with boycotters, but it's their right to boycott. If they went through the store smashing things up, that would be causing economic harm (toss the book at them). If they were trying to intimidate people to not shop there, that would be causing economic harm (toss the book at them). Organizing a boycott is not. Be it boycotting the pizza place that wouldn't cater a gay wedding or Macy's because they wished you a happy wrong holiday, it's your right to not spend your money with any establishment for any reason.

  19. @ketchup: Yes, Yale is a private university. But it is the job of any university to present students with a challenging variety of ideas. I believe a good case can be made that when a speaker is banned there, or shouted down even after he rented a hall in which to be heard, the students have been cheated of part of the experience they (and we taxpayers) have paid for.

    But you're right, "safe spaces" have a role to play in the world. And that proper role has a name. "Insane asylum."

  20. Regarding speakers at colleges, I understand those who protest against a speaker they find objectionable on the grounds that they don't want the "general fund /entertainment" portion of their tuition paying for "that person." To me it's the same as those who protest because they object to the government using their tax money to pay for that war or that education / welfare / veteran program.

    As for the other examples given, much as I hate to say it, I think most of the Christmas warriors are akin to those college students who don't want to be forced to attend a speech by someone they don't approve of, and don't rise to the level of those demanding that the speech not take place or that someone be fired if/when it does.

    (And I say this as someone who does support threats of/actual boycotts of the kind that caused Don Imis to lose his MSNBC morning show years ago or Brendan whassisname his tech company. You have a right to free speech, but no guarantee of a particular podium or an audience. If you offend enough of your employee / customer base, they will work and shop elsewhere. I think that falls under the definition of "more speech," just like it would if a college were to cancel a controversial speaker because no one bought tickets or signed up to attend.)

  21. @jdgalt,
    It is your opinion (and mine) that part of the role of a university is to expose students to a wide variety of ideas. But there are people who disagree with us. If those people choose to go to a private university that does not share those values, they are free to do so. They are also free to leave if they change their mind or if the university changes its rules.

  22. I think there's a fundamental difference between a university inviting someone with a challenging idea and a person who advocates something destructive to who you are ("gay people are fundamentally broken, immoral and destructive to civilized society and, like criminals, do not deserve a full complement of civil rights" v. "let's abolish affirmative action".) I would be unhappy with paying tuition so the university could pay speakers who are actively working to denigrate me and people like me. They are welcome to speak elsewhere, at their own expense, but free speech does not obligate me to subsidize that speech.

  23. I disagree with the premise. The modern left that has rotted our educational institutions and broken the back of our society should be mocked to the ends of the Earth.

    Modern Educayshun – A short film by Neel Kolhatkar
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM

    We are in for a long and bumpy ride, because these totalitarians are just in college now. But if every man does his duty and mocks them relentlessly, we may get a glimmer of fun to brighten our bleak future.

  24. "

    Gallons of ink have been spilled already

    Coulombs of electrons.

  25. I agree in the sense that the freedom to seek a safe space does not mean a freedom from criticism. People who invade a safe space, unless its a physical trespass, are not criminals, and they are not even necessarily assholes, though that second bit is entirely dependent upon their method.

    Nonetheless, that people should seek to insulate themselves in these ways concerns me. It seems to be a failure of education that these people have been so ill equipped to deal with challenging ideas that their recourse is to hide from them.

  26. You present a tu quoque. Under the patina of being non-partisan, you relieve the SJWs of guilt for their anti-free speech mentality by closing with "But the conservatives are just as bad". Given your experience, I hesitate to think your close of "But they do it to" is accidental. Almost every criticism you level at a left-wing trend has to be closed with the reminder "But this isn't a reason to vote against Democrats next year. Remember that our opponents are just as bad."

    Much of your content lately has this flaw. Every presidential election the partisan part of you comes out; where you suddenly can't criticize the left without making sure to hit the right. At some point the partisanship becomes so noisome and blatant that I quit reading for a while. This continues until after the election when at some point you return to largely unbiased commentary.

    Should you care? Perhaps not, but when the partisan bias becomes so thick you lose much or your gifted ability to persuade.

    See you in 18 months (or so)

  27. @brighter: We could argue over that distinction. But not at Yale, not without invading these students' self-defined safe space. Because to them, even dialogue over what role the school should have in telling students what to tolerate or not tolerate is unsafe.

  28. "

    "But this isn't a reason to vote against Democrats next year. Remember that our opponents are just as bad."

    I can't remember encouraging anyone to vote Democratic. It's possible — just possible — that you are super-sensitive to people criticizing what you see as your side. Did you go to Yale?

    You're probably not going to find this a safe space after 18 months, either. Sorry/not sorry.

  29. "What is the "War on Christmas" but a sort of safe-space argument, an assertion that we have a right to be congratulated for our religious beliefs by corporate America even out in public spaces?"

    Except that corporate America does celebrate Christmas, balls out, morning to night for two whole months. I am pretty sure Cinco de Mayo isn't the "holiday" in question, based on the timing and all. Can't be Ramadan either.

  30. "Christakis and her husband have since invited all Silliman signatories of the open letter, as well as any other Silliman students who might disagree with her email, to a lunch this Sunday. The invitation was sharply rejected by some, including one student who, in a Yale Herald piece published today, criticized the invitation and argued that Nicholas Christakis "needs to stop instigating more debate."

    I…I just….I mean….wow….

  31. Timothy A Wiseman says

    November 9, 2015 at 1:12 pm

    @Erwin

    Well said. I detest Westboro Baptist Church's antics. But my remedy is to ignore them most of the time and publicly denounce them when I fail in that. I would not try to to silence them. They too have the right to speak.

  32. John,

    I think you may be mistaken as to any sort of partisan bias. While Ken usually does illustrate that neither side has moral high ground when it comes to free speech, most of the time he is even handed. Case in point, I remember several articles attacking conservative censorious behaviors, that he balanced out by calling the left out for similar behaviors.

    I suppose in an ideal world, maybe one day we will be able to examine behaviors and judge them on their own merits and not focus on the political beliefs of the speaker/actor.

  33. Timothy A Wiseman says

    November 9, 2015 at 1:17 pm

    @John

    I'm not sure Ken has ever claimed that he, or this site, is non-partisan. He has every right to express his actual political beliefs here. That said, I am not convinced he is being partisan and I wouldn't be overly confident in my guess of which party he does vote for. He has been quite consistent in his support of free speech, but as he points out, many in both major parties claim to support it while trying to chip away at it.

  34. @jdgalt:

    "

    @ketchup: Yes, Yale is a private university. But it is the job of any university to present students with a challenging variety of ideas.

    Actually the job of any university appears to be to suck up as much federal student aid money as possible.

    ::scuffle ensues:: My apologies. My cynical side has been bum-rushed out of the room.

  35. Irony is someone who uses "SJW" without irony complaining about someone else's "partisan bias".

  36. @ketchup
    "I'll go ahead and ask the obvious question: Yale is a private university. So how is this different than the members of a private club arguing among themselves about what the rules should be?"

    My guess is (and I don't speak for Ken or know him beyond reading his posts here, so this is nothing more than a guess) that an important factor that pushes towards the "sword" side of the spectrum is the fact that these Yale students are trying to impose rules on a community that already exists and is comprised of a number of people who don't necessarily support the change and have already taken actions in reliance on the assumption that the rules would stay how they were. Transferring universities is no mean feat. If for example you were finishing your third year in a highly specialized program when unexpectedly the rules changed to ban all sex, then technically you have the option of complying or leaving the program, but the situation would still seem pretty unfair. You'd have to start over somewhere else where your credits may not fully transfer, your previous coursework may not mesh well with another program, and of course you'd largely be walking away from three years of putting down roots.

    Plus, universities are complicated. I'm not sure off the top of my head, but I think they have been treated as quasi-public fora in some circumstances. Also, even private universities accept some degree of federal funding, especially if you're a decent research university–and federal funding can come with strings. For example, a few years ago Harvard and some other schools tried to implement their own anti-discrimination rules that included sexual orientation as a protected class. These rules required on campus recruiters to sign an anti-discrimination pledge before getting access to on campus recruiting. Military recruiters declined to sign the pledge–Don't Ask Don't Tell was still in effect at this point–but said that they were entitled to full access anyway because the universities had accepted DARPA funding.

  37. "

    Yes, Yale is a private university. But it is the job of any university to present students with a challenging variety of ideas. I believe a good case can be made that when a speaker is banned there, or shouted down even after he rented a hall in which to be heard, the students have been cheated of part of the experience they (and we taxpayers) have paid for.

    If Yale truly is private, then it's not your job or mine to decide what their job is. If Pillowfort.edu can convince young adults to spend a quarter-million dollars on a 4 year stay in an echo chamber, they're absolutely entitled to do that.

    If you want to argue that entanglement with federal funding means that there is no such thing as a factually private university any more, that's a different argument.

  38. GuestPoster says

    November 9, 2015 at 1:53 pm

    Interesting. I think I support all sides re: Yale. I think the email was a good thing – tell people to think twice before dressing as what is often a substantially insulting caricature of a population. I support the SECOND email – suggesting that maybe it's not the role of administration to tell people how to dress. I support the complaint – saying that hey, we're paying $30k a year to stay here, and would like you to take our concerns seriously. I support the counter-point – actually, there are other things we focus upon more closely than dress codes once a year. I support the back and forth as (what I bet is a minority of) the students argue that they demand safety via exclusion of bad ideas, and the administration explaining that that isn't what they offered to sell, and would render the diploma worthless. It's good to let the business know what you want to buy, and remind the customer of exactly what you're willing to sell.

    As for safe spaces: I think the really interesting conflict is when two groups claim the need for the same safe space, yet one of those groups cannot qualify it as a safe space if both get access to it. We're seeing this right now with transgendered individuals wanting access to sex-segregated spaces that do not match their sex. Transgendered individuals insist that it is discriminatory to not allow them access to the facilities which they identify with, even if their genitalia do not match the sign on the door. Meanwhile, a not small portion of the other users of the facility insist that it is abusive to require them to share a sex-segregated space with members of the opposite sex, regardless of how they identify. Currently, building codes require these sex segregated spaces, and do not allow the option of unisex bathrooms in many cases. Similarly, the law seems to support both sides simultaneously: discrimination is illegal, but so is sexual abuse (and title IX makes it sound very much like a sexual-male in the woman's locker room totally counts there). Only one side can have its way. One side loses its safe space in order for the other side to get its safe space. And both sides talk past one another, rather than TO one another, trying to make their points.

    I find this fascinating.

  39. @Salem:
    Quoth Salem: The Yale students are not saying "Yale professors express opinions that make me feel uncomfortable, so I'm going to Cupcake University instead." Rather, they are saying "Yale professors express opinions that make me feel uncomfortable, so they should be kicked out."

    Are they filing lawsuits, trying to stretch the reach of some federal law or the meaning of some constitutional protection? Are they threatening violence? Or are they basically saying, "We don't like how Yale is now. We think it would be better if it changed in this way. If you disagree with us, I guess we'll have to leave, or keep complaining?"

    quoth Salem: "The "War on Christmas" people are not (as far as I am aware?) trying to get stores that wish people "Happy Holidays" kicked out of town, or get executives fired if they set a "Happy Holidays" store policy. Instead, they are saying "Macy's gives me a greeting that makes me feel uncomfortable, so I won't shop there any more."

    But aren't they? If you walk into Macy's, hear someone say "Happy Holidays," and immediately walk out, vowing never to come back again, that's clearly an economic choice with close to zero coercive component to it, but if that's all people did, the War on Christmas crowd wouldn't actually be a noteworthy crowd. Instead, these people are rallying their compatriots in an attempt to gather some sort of critical mass for a boycott, going on Fox News to tell everyone exactly WHY they refuse to patronize certain stores… to what end? Are they trying to tell the market that there's a potential niche for a new player to start a new chain of "Christmas friendly" department stores? Or is it more likely that their goal is to send a message to existing department stores–fall in line (whether it be by "kicking out" "anti-Christmas folks, or some other means by which shareholders/superiors exert authority over subordinates) or we'll do our best to bankrupt you?

    When it comes down to it, both of these groups are using the exact same tactics–drumming up publicity and using the threat of their own non-participation to try to change rules that will affect everyone else.

    The only difference is that… wait, there is no difference in reality. Some members of the Christmas defenders absolutely advocated tactics such as writing to shareholders and boards of directors to pressure them to replace management with people who are more Christmas friendly. Many of the people calling for boycotts explicitly stated that their goal was to change the behavior of the boycott target. The only difference is that the news outlets you favor chose to characterize the same situation as "concerned Christians publish Kwanza trigger warnings so that other Christians can avoid stores where they might be blindsided by non-traditional holiday greetings" rather than "concerned Christians boycott in order to achieve the same goal as every hated liberal boycott–changing a private actor's behavior through economic pressure."

  40. naturalized says

    November 9, 2015 at 1:55 pm

    Can we – and this truly is crazy, I know – go one article without the right showing up and, without any sense of irony at all, demanding a safe space for themselves?

  41. The solution to Universities is kind of like the solution to cigarettes, alcohol and other social ills. Don't ban them. Just tax them heavily and use the proceeds to pay for programs to help remediate the harm that they cause. There could be a superfund.

  42. @Fasolt:

    That's why you shouldn't attend any "University" that advertises on park benches and annoying pop-up video ads. University of Phoenix and the like suck up a disgrace amount of federal funding in the form of Pell grants, federally subsidized loans, and GI Bill funding.

    Having attended a school comparable to Yale (and a school far less comparable to Yale for law school), I feel pretty good about the comparable amount of money the well-endowed school seemed to be spending on me compared the amount I was on the hook for. And except for a few thousand dollars I earned as a research assistant working in a lab that probably received some DARPA funding, Uncle Sam didn't foot all that much of the bill.

  43. I support freedom of association, sure. And I think people should be able to make "private clubs" if they wish. However, I don't think it's a good idea for them to do that, or rather, I don't think it's a good idea for them to limit themselves to talking to people in those private clubs. I think it's important for people to be exposed to as many ideas and opinions as possible, to learn from each and come to their own conclusions. I don't think surrounding one's self with like-minded people is going to lead to a deeper understanding of anything. So while I think they should be *able* to do that… it's not something I support.

  44. @James,

    Certainly, it's a bad idea for such private clubs to comprise the majority of your human interaction, but I don't think that such clubs are universally good, or bad. Practicing explaining complex legal concepts to lay people is probably useful, but sometimes it's probably beneficial to debate those ideas in a forum where people won't be asking you to explain basic legal concepts every few minutes. Similarly, a conference of evolutionary biologists or Egyptologists might find their conferences more productive if held at a private club that bans all black people named Ben Carson.

  45. I agree that the war on Christmas folks are misguided.

    Christmas is winning, crushing out, really.
    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/christmas-is-kicking-ass-in-the-war-on-christmas/282515/

    The whole Solstice thing never really caught on. Kwanzaa has been a big bust. The problem is, you can't beat something with nothing.
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Festivus_Pole.jpg

    Modern leftists are such softies. If you really want to clean things up, you have to totally replace the calendar with a different calendar and decapitate anyone who disagrees. And even then, your changes might not stick.

  46. Dan said:

    "

    I disagree with the premise. The modern left that has rotted our educational institutions and broken the back of our society should be mocked to the ends of the Earth.

    Modern Educayshun – A short film by Neel Kolhatkar
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM

    We are in for a long and bumpy ride, because these totalitarians are just in college now. But if every man does his duty and mocks them relentlessly, we may get a glimmer of fun to brighten our bleak future.

    *Yawn* They said the same thing when I went to school more than 20 years ago. They said the same thing when the baby boomers were in college and I have no doubt they said the same thing when my parents attended college. You are a fool.

    I'll never forget my college graduation because of the speaker. He started off by telling us we'd all do worse than our parents, we wouldn't have jobs and the world was going to end anyway so it didn't matter. People have been preaching the end of the world since people started talking to one another. They are always wrong just like you.

    Moving on, one of things I find so humorous about the "War on Christmas" is how utterly ridiculous it is while how seriously it's adherents take it. Of course it's been elevated for political reasons, something that may be regretted by those politicians later. But in the end it's just so out of wack with reality that anyone taking it seriously just can't be taken seriously by anyone else. Christianity isn't even close to being a minority religion in this country but stores attempting to not offend others is somehow an attack on their beliefs. I'm not sure how that even works honestly. As I said the concept is so silly, but it's embraced by the echo chambers and cultivates that ever so American bias to "with us or against us". I reckon it's just so much easier to put everything into black and white like that, it allows you to dehumanize your opponents and not care what anyone other than you and your echo chamber think.

  47. @Manatee
    That's a fair point. I guess what I mean is people shouldn't use "private clubs" or whatever as their only source of debate. If you limit your debate partners to yes-men, you're not going to have a very meaningful discussion.

    I think that's different from limiting the participation of people without the necessary knowledge of the relevant subject for complex subjects. There's certainly something to be said for expertise in fields with a lot of complexity. In fact, I think most people could stand to deferring to expert opinion more often than they do (I say this as someone who works with computers for a living).

  48. "What more sacred, what more strongly guarded by every holy feeling, than a man's own home?" -Cicero

    "Home" the trigger here.

    People expect to be able to make their homes safe refuges from at least some of the rude bullshit out in the rest of the world. Almost no one ever decides, "Let's let everyone spew whatever amount of rude bullshit they want in our own homes because we really believe in free speech."

    When these young students arrive at their university dorms, they are not told, "You now live in a semi-public place where free speech is paramount and where you are powerless to control the amount of rude bullshit you'll have to live with."

    Instead they are told, "Welcome to your new home." They probably believe everyone entered into this shared home voluntarily-everyone applied attend this school and they don't see anyone being forced to live in these dorms. And they may believe the normal rules of "home" apply where the occupants of the home will reach an answer, often through discussion and argument, on what sorts of rude bullshit are not allowed in their home.

    They may be outraged when they are told that that, no matter how strong the consensus in the "home" might be, they have accept whatever amount of rude bullshit people want to spew.

    The moment these students realize that these university dorms are not really "their homes," these students might suffer a huge emotional loss. Other than losing a family member, there's little that's more stressful than losing a home–even moving to a nicer home is really stressful for people. It's possibly the first major loss they've ever had to deal with. In their grief at their loss, it's no surprise that they might get incredibly angry.

    The proverb goes: "a man's home is his castle." And these students may respond as if their castle is under siege.

    So what if their definition of rude bullshit might more sensitive than ours might be. So what if they might call it "making safe spaces" rather than "tossing the rude assholes who spew bullshit out of our homes". At it's core, it's really the same passion almost all of us share about making our "homes" refuges from the rest of the world–and most of us will fight hard against those who would try take away our refuge.

    I'm not suggesting that understanding why they might feel like they do gives them the legal authority to limit speech in public universities. I'm nearly an absolutest when it comes to the First Amendment. Which is why I'd like to see the government disconnected from the universities. Then each university could set it's own clear guidelines for how much or how little control students should expect to have over their "homes".

    In the meantime, I am working on distinguishing situations where "as a citizen I denounce these students for actually threatening my constitutional rights" as a opposed to situations where "I think these students at a private school are being stupid so I want to help shame them into submission". Joining in shame mobs against people for merely being stupid without presenting a serious threat rarely ends up being satisfying.

  49. @AH: Blocklists can matter to third-parties. The world of modern Internet email is bossed around by blacklists, who don't always use very discriminating tactics, sometimes using demands of cash, and often deteriorating into being put on the list for political reasons. The users of the lists are themselves not very discriminating.

    I'm not saying this is illegal, but it's a social problem only slightly smaller than the problem the spammers created. Mail is increasingly becoming the domain only of big players who can throw their own weight around, and who encourage the system because it creates barriers to entry.

  50. @Trent wrote,

    "*Yawn* They said the same thing when I went to school more than 20 years ago. They said the same thing when the baby boomers were in college and I have no doubt they said the same thing when my parents attended college. You are a fool."

    If you do not perceive the sharp leftward trend of campus politics, the abandonment of free speech that was once at the core of campus identity, your wattage is low indeed. I went to an Ivy league school in the 1990s and the campus climate of political correctness was nothing like it is now.

    The University of Missouri President just stepped down for… what? I cannot for the life of me figure out what he did. Apparently someone somewhere on a campus of tens of thousands is alleged to have used a slur. And? How is that the fault of the President? If University Presidents are supposed to apologize for each display of degeneracy by one of their students, each school would need hundreds of presidents, which would begin to add up.

    But on the other hand, there is much to be thrilled about. It appears that the apex of human civilization has come and passed in our lifetime. How likely is that? What an honor for all of us alive today!

  51. Wow, Dan, that's a powerful random anecdote you've got there. Next up, Dan diagnoses the problems of the American economy because he went to a McDonalds once.

  52. Just remember Total, some of us Dan's are perfectly capable of rational thought and non-anecdotal reasoning.

    #notalldans

  53. "

    If you do not perceive the sharp leftward trend of campus politics, the abandonment of free speech that was once at the core of campus identity, your wattage is low indeed.

    What would this world be without the "if you don't think like me your are obviously stupid". I didn't expect anything less than that from you, honestly. No I do not see any Leftward trend in our college campuses, They remain a bastion of center-left thought where students are challenged with both left and right opinions in the classes they take, often depending on the type of course with left ideas presented in the humanities and right views presented in the sciences and economics.. If anything colleges today are far to the right of where they were during the late 60's of the Baby Boomer college years and the time of free love. You are blind to that, I get that, no point telling me what anecdotal evidence your echo chamber has supplied. I know without a doubt you haven't been on a college campus in at least 20+ years and you don't realize that makes you blind to reality. And there is nothing more foolish than talking about an environment you don't have any personal experience with.

    "

    The University of Missouri President just stepped down for… what? I cannot for the life of me figure out what he did.

    It matters not why he stepped down other than that the student body had lost trust in him. That is a valid reason in and of itself without regard to how he lost that trust. If you want to know why he lost their trust you shouldn't speculate on motives you saw on TV, you should go talk to the student body and find out the real reason. In my experience with incidents like this, where the bulk of the student body walks out of classes they are paying money for, he did something viewed as egregious by the student body, though I will not speculate as to what. What I do know with certainty is that the press is not reporting the real motivation because it's not a buzz phrase that can be expressed in the less than the 30 seconds they talk about it on TV.

  54. "[E]thic Halloween costumes" is clearly a reference to dressing up as Plato, Socrates, or other dead dudes from history class. In other words, ancient philosophers. Represented, in the modern incarnation, by a toga party.

  55. Just remember Total, some of us Dan's are perfectly capable of rational thought and non-anecdotal reasoning.

    (squints suspiciously at this OTHER Dan through good eye)

    Yar. Alright.

    #notalldans #pirates #dontknowwhyIwentwithapiratetheme

  56. Tom Paine3 says

    November 9, 2015 at 7:14 pm

    Ken, I'm pretty sure you DID say "lebensraum." If you hadn't, I might be unsure how to spell it.

  57. Some fourth-rate intellect who goes by the name of Trent wrote,

    "No I do not see any Leftward trend in our college campuses, They remain a bastion of center-left thought where students are challenged with both left and right opinions in the classes they take, often depending on the type of course with left ideas presented in the humanities and right views presented in the sciences and economics."

    Could Trent be any further from reality? At my alma mater of Cornell, donations ran about 97% Democrat according to a 2015 study. The College of Arts and Sciences donations went 99% left. The College of Arts and Sciences houses both the sciences and economics (so much for your theory that science and econ skew right).

    Source:
    http://cornellsun.com/2015/10/15/cornell-faculty-donations-flood-left%E2%80%88filings-show/

    More sources:

    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/24/survey-finds-professors-already-liberal-have-moved-further-left

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/homo-consumericus/201202/is-there-liberal-bias-among-american-professors

    SJWs always lie and Trent is not the exception that proves the rule. He is more of the non-exception.

  58. @Trent accidentally stumbles upon a sliver of truth when he writes, "If anything colleges today are far to the right of where they were during the late 60's"

    There is one respect in which that is true: College professors were gung-ho about Communism throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, long after the death camps and the tens of millions of murders were revealed to the world. Only after Communism collapsed everywhere all at once in 1989 did that cause become kind of silly. Interestingly in 1989, Ithaca elected as mayor an Engineering professor who ran as a Communist.

    There is another aspect in which Universities are run by radical right-wing extremists that @Brent didn't touch on. When it comes to grad students, they actually believe in slavery! Which is just sick!

    "I know without a doubt you haven't been on a college campus in at least 20+ years and you don't realize that makes you blind to reality."

    I must sound far older than I am! I am honored!

  59. @Dan

    "Could Trent be any further from reality? At my alma mater of Cornell, donations ran about 97% Democrat according to a 2015 study."

    Not disagreeing with with overall assertion (necessarily) but this particular argument in support of it is weak at best. The left tends to skew young. It doesn't mean that colleges, primary schools, and wombs have a strong left bias, it just means that the language of the left has a certain appeal to the sort of people who haven't had a great deal of real world experience and do have a strong sense that they can/should do things better than people were doing things before them. Plus, Ithaca is basically Berkeley on ice–it's hardly representative of higher education in general.

    Also, judging by your writing, I'm guessing you went to Cornell in the early 90's at the latest. I'm guessing that the figure for your personal peer group is substantially below 99%. (You don't write like someone in your late 60's either, but if I'm wrong about that, I actually would buy 99% among your peer group.)

    Edit: I was only responding to what I saw quoted from you at the bottom of the thread, so I missed the part where you dated yourself, sorry.

    Also, it is worth noting that during the Vietnam War, when college campuses really WERE the bastions of the radical left Fox News rails, they were also at the forefront of defending free speech and political dissent at a time when the government was giving us the McCarthy hearings. Rather than quibbling over whether universities have drifted further right or left, perhaps we should be stop them from drifting further away from free speech.

  60. "

    SJWs always lie

    No doubt you have some views on the ethics of gaming journalism that you would like to share.

    "

    the exception that proves the rule

    If you going to use a cliche, please be certain you know what that cliche actually means.

  61. Speaking about trigger warnings –

    Yes, sometimes, when it comes to triggers, speech can have a quantifiable harm. Being triggered is harmful to the person who was triggered. Having a safe space is good.

    It's not even a case where it's the message being spread. At times, just the words or the person saying it can be triggering.

    But at the same time, I feel extremely uneasy when people's attempts to make a "Safe Space" essentially become "I should be able to go anywhere and do anything without being reminded bad things exist." Because really, it's disrespectful to the people who DO have serious issues. Living with an anxiety disorder or a panic disorder or what have you doesn't make you some weak person who needs to be protected from the world. It doesn't need to be disempowering. When I hear "Oh, we can't play that music, someone might be triggered" it seems ridiculous to me. Because it shows an outright ignorance on the part of people showing concern for what could be triggering.

    I have some problems, and I would indeed want to be warned if something that will spark a panic attack is going to come up. At the same time, those things, for me, aren't the 'obvious' ones. They include a particular type of knife, a couple songs, and most notably, fire and images of fire. I have a friend who is triggered by being near a particular fast food restaurant.

    Triggers can't be applied to a group level. That would be the time when speech is the most directly harmful, and yet, you CANNOT apply it to anything beyond a certain level. Having a disorder requires MANAGING your disorder. Not trying to hide away and demand everyone change for you. Triggers can only be reliably accounted for personally.

    I can ask that my friends not play those specific songs where I can hear. I can avoid making dishes that would require me to use that utensil. I can avoid open flames. I can not listen to radio stations that play those songs. My friend can adjust her route through the city so that she doesn't pass (Restaurant.) But I can't demand that my friends not listen to those songs ever. Just around me. I can't demand a radio station not play them. I can't ask that no-one make that food or have a fireplace in their home. I need to be able to take responsibility.

    I think a lot of the time, people don't WANT to take responsibility. If you know that a speaker is coming who will say things that upset you, you can choose not to attend the lecture. That's your choice. If you know a person who triggers you will be present, you can choose to be absent. Or you can go there and have a panic attack. I remember a DJ who got in trouble when some people complained that he had played a song that they felt was a bit too rapey. But come on. That song was popular at the time, and you were in a place music would be played.

  62. Random thoughts on a good thread:

    I don't know what planet people are living on where the "War on Christmas" brigade limit their hijinks to boycotts. They have been in a full-court-press to craft and pass policy, ordinance and statute – from local school boards to the US Capitol. It's not something that's new … am I the only one who's noticed?

    If their actions were limited to things like boycotting private businesses when not greeted correctly, I'd agree they were simply leveraging their basic rights. But these folks are actively trying to pass enforceable laws that demand government workers and teachers embrace their preferred greetings. When you look at the systemic nature of the campaign, what those folks have been doing is creepy as all hell. It's way worse than any than issues at a single university.

    @Christopher John Brennan:
    I don't agree with the way you are conflating "going to college" with a person's physical home. It doesn't hold up. A student doesn't move into a huge, empty facility as a sole stakeholder – somehow leaving their former two bedroom apartment to gain a fully stocked and staffed campus with obligation to bend and suit the full range of their individual emotional desires.

    When a student moves to college, their dorm room becomes their new home. This is the location in which they have an expectation to create their own individual personal space. Very few would disagree that a student should be empowered to kick whomever they like out of their room – for any reason they like. Just like any other castle.

    Outside their personal space's door, the dorm itself is the equivalent to an apartment building. It holds the private spaces of a large number of equally empowered students – who often disagree with each other (typically with organizational mechanisms to manage the frictions). Outside the dorm, the campus becomes the equivalent to an entire town – these days folks often say "a community". Whatever semantic one prefers for the structural dynamic … there is just no way to logically reduce it constructs where a single student's individual dictates can/should be enforced under the "my castle" doctrine. It's no more their castle than anyone else.

    @Dan
    You seem to be under the comic illusion Democrats = "left". Considering PhRMA has overwhelmingly donated to Democrats (in 2008-2010 anyway) – I guess you feel corporate execs who fund the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America have also taken a severe turn to the left? Kind of makes it hard to take you seriously.

    Although …. with that said …. the apparently legit lefties certainly have their foot in it today. I'd say University of Missouri's Melissa Click is destined to knock Yale off it's perch as top "Safe Spaces as Sword" offender presently – that lady literally called for muscle to shut down the press. And she's a journalism teacher. Sheesh.

  63. The only reason to even bring up the college you claim to have attended is to scream "I'm smart, I went to the Ivy league!". It's as tired as your other BS. The Ivy league leans left of the rest of the colleges and does not in any way represent even the most basic of college experiences. The further you are from the Ivy league the more to the center or even right of center the school with the average just slightly left of center but only because there are so many liberal arts schools.

    But it was nice of you to admit I was right though I think you did it without realizing you did it and will disclaim it in moments.

    "

    I must sound far older than I am! I am honored!

    You shouldn't be, to be as bitter, jaded and intransigent as you are and being so at your age isn't a sign of wisdom, it's a sign of a closed minded twit. And based on the "I'm smart I went to the Ivy league" you fall into that well liked group of "I'm better than you".

    "

    No doubt you have some views on the ethics of gaming journalism that you would like to share.

    Please don't encourage that, we'll get a lecture about gaming journalism that focuses 99.99% on how inferior women are and how much he hangs out on 4chan and how alpha he is.

    "

    If you going to use a cliche, please be certain you know what that cliche actually means.

    You are expecting way too much given what's been demonstrated.

    Sorry Ken, I'll quit feeding him.

  64. Isn't this kinda what Google+ was? And part of why Google+ failed? The default of limiting what you could see of other peoples' activity made it look like a dead zone.

  65. naturalized says

    November 10, 2015 at 3:04 am

    @Ken White:

    "

    This may come as a surprise, but I'm a supporter of "safe spaces." I support safe spaces because I support freedom of association. Safe spaces, if designed in a principled way, are just an application of that freedom.

    This reminds me of Jay Leno's satire of Bill Clinton's position as regards Barack Obama's qualifications to be president in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary. "Yes, of course he is," not-Bill-Clinton says in response to a question about whether Obama is qualified to be president. "He's above 35 years old and an American citizen."

    When people ask whether you support "safe spaces" they're not asking you if you think they are legal. They're asking you if you think they're normatively or empirically Good Things. Unless you're claiming that freedom of association is somehow a valuable end in itself, your answer here is a non sequitur.

  66. @Expo45 People do not go to college because they would want "freedom and intellectual discourse". Most go there because they perceive elite college degree as necessary prerequisite for good career or necessary step to acquire position of authority. The students who want good career form silent majority on campuses effectively bullied by the other group.

    These students act the way they act because student activism is their first chance on getting what they came for in the first place – power over other people. That is even how they have been selected. If elite college would really want to be about "freedom and intellectual discourse", the selection would focus less on conformity or "leadership qualities" in admission essay and extracurricular activities.

    People seeking "freedom and intellectual discourse" are not correlated with people who seek leadership positions. Oftentimes, they are distinct groups full of suspicion of each other. Those two goals are simply incompatible too often.

    Slightly unrelated, but note how there is not a single peep of complain when social justice crowd bully or enforce their rules outside of campus. The same people who complain about their behavior on Yale are perfectly fine of even support them when the target is lowly technical conference organizer or some kind of weir fandom subculture.

    Small group trying to force their rules by bullying on bigger group is fine, as long as the target is someone with lower social status. It seem to be objectionable only when the target are campus teachers or prominent bloggers. Everyone else is expected to shut up and comply.

  67. I see Dan is doubling down on his anecdotal evidence. Dan, the argument you asserted was that higher education as a whole as moved extremely left since you were but a wee sprat of an undergraduate. To demonstrate that argument you need the following:

    1. Evidence that shows that higher educations *as a whole* is leftwing. Not just one school.
    2. Evidence that this leftwing tilt is substantially lefter than what higher education was in the 1990s.

    You have neither of those pieces of evidence (and even your Cornell evidence is shaky because you warble on about how leftwing Cornell and Ithaca were around the period you went there, not recognizing that this *undercuts* your own argument). Oh, and that socialist mayor in Ithaca was Ben Nichols and he was mayor from 1989-1995, which further undercuts your argument.

    You're not very good at this, are you?

  68. Actually, with the war on christmas remarks, I think Ken is on to something. It is a very similar argument, but I don't think it's a safe space argument. I think it's a "cultural appropriation" argument. The commercial and secular institutions of our society are dressing themselves in the trappings of and enjoying the positives of a very religious and meaningful event and holiday for a certain group of people and then wiping away any of the actual meanings and identity and replacing it with an artificial (and, to the concerned, offensive) mockery.

    If you really think about it, that's essentially what the War on Christmas thing boils down to. Either the acceptance that these winter breaks, holidays and festivities are because of and for Christmas and Christian in nature and that we should stop pretending it's something it isn't (stop parading around in red-green face?), or that they are not and we should stop appropriating the symbolisms and celebrations.

    Of course, even putting it in those terms, it's still just as ridiculous.

  69. That Anonymous Coward says

    November 10, 2015 at 8:59 am

    @TM – Yep because it is horrible that they are appropriating the celebration that the Christians appropriated from another group after they decided it was the easier path to get them to join them to eradicate the group they disagreed with.

    Corporations merely are trying to appeal to the sentiment of the season, to do as little as possible to leverage everyones good will. Christmas was appropriated by society at large, there is no you must be Christian to celebrate this holiday requirement. Lots of people will celebrate without attending church or having a baby jesus appear in the manger on the mantle.

    Salsa is now considered a regular condiment, but that was appropriated from a different culture. I don't have memories of the great outcry over that happening.
    Culture has this silly habit of building on what came before, taking the parts they like and making them fit. Greek v Roman Gods anyone?
    More recently in our history has come those who claim to own things, and fight like mad to keep others from doing anything that might change it. Many of them reject others trying to build upon them while gobbling up others 'things' and locking them away as their own stealing them from the original culture.

    While some people might appropriate others cultures for less than nice reasons, others are lumped with that group for trying to emulate something that appealed to them. We are strictly trying to lock up what is ours and curse anyone else who dares touch our sacred things. We don't have discussions, we have screaming matches. Sacred cows make the best burgers, and trying to use the safe space to demand that no one dare ask why the cow is shitting in the middle of the square isn't of benefit.

  70. Ken:

    I just wanted to say that your essay convinced me. Before reading it, I would have said that I was strongly opposed to "Safe Spaces". Now I would agree with your position: that private "safe spaces" are a great idea for those who want them, but that transforming public space (or in any other way compelling people to participate in these "safe spaces") is a problem.

  71. Found a typo, I think.
    "ethic* Halloween costumes"
    *Seems like it should be "ethnic" instead.

  72. @Total,

    Funny enough, Cornell of all places is one of the most right-wing major schools on earth. After all – it's a freaking agriculture school. That's what it does better than anybody else – agriculture. Farming is about as right-wing as you get, when it comes down to it.

    I mean, honestly, there IS a *slight* left-wing bias in academia, but it's not because of some major conspiracy to educate kids in a left-wing atmosphere. It's because low-paid, high-community-service jobs tend to appeal more to lefties than righties. Research tends to appeal more to lefties. The search for truth, and education, simply appeals more to lefties. It's just like banking and business tend to be dominated by right wingers – making lots of money at the expense of having a less beneficial social impact tends to appeal more to the right-wing philosophy. Neither is a big conspiracy, or an attempt to kick the wrong ideology out. It's just where those who follow either philosophy tend to go somewhat more often.

    If the right-wing in the US REALLY wants more right-wing bias in colleges, all it has to do is pay college professors as much as bankers make, and stop acting like facts are the enemy, and saying things like "those who can, do, those who can't, teach". But every time it rails against 'high' teacher pay, and complains that tenure is just too MUCH of a benefit, it makes the job less appealing to those who think capitalism is a good thing, and more appealing to those who think that social service is a pretty good job benefit. Every time the right comes out and insults academics, and talks about ivory tower elitism, it drills into its base that these are dishonorable professions. Just like how when the left stages its protests against big business, and complains about CEO overpayment, it is convincing its own base to not pursue those job opportunities.

  73. @GuestPoster wrote,

    "The search for truth, and education, simply appeals more to lefties."

    **Belly Laugh!!**

    Nothing that emerged from sociology departments in the last 50 years has had any overlap with the truth. The crap comments on blogs, the chatter of your car mechanic, and even the Tourette's – type shouts of your friendly neighborhood panhandler have more overlap with reality than the output of these folks. If conservatives have avoided academia, it is to their credit.

    Can make sense of this remarkable bit of prose by Judith Butler, Lit Professor at Cal Berkeley? Please help us all out!

    "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. "

    http://denisdutton.com/calvin_hobbes_writing.jpg

    Since you seem to have a kind of gooey love-interest in the "truth" that these folks shine upon the world, here is more, for your personal enjoyment!

    http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm

  74. @Trent wrote, "you fall into that well liked group of "I'm better than you"."

    Actually then, we have found agreement, because this is in fact the case! I knew we could find common ground!

    @Total, I have already provide evidence of leftward movement over time recently, at college campuses, from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Please apply your reading skills, if you have such, and get back to me.

  75. I have already provide evidence of leftward movement over time recently, at college campuses, from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Please apply your reading skills, if you have such, and get back to me.

    I'll try, as soon as you actually post something from the Chronicle of Higher Education. If you mean the link you posted from Inside Higher Ed, well that's a different publication, now isn't it? Speaking of reading skills…

    But in any case, the Inside Higher Ed article you posted notes quite carefully that the pre-2008 data is not comparable because the composition of those being surveyed changed. Good try, though. Maybe next time.

  76. Tell you what, Dan, I'll translate what you quoted if you translate the following:

    "

    We also assessed renal outcomes, using a different definition for patients with chronic kidney disease (eGFR <60 ml per minute per 1.73 m2) at baseline and those without it. The renal outcome in participants with chronic kidney disease at baseline was a composite of a decrease in the eGFR of 50% or more (confirmed by a subsequent laboratory test) or the development of ESRD requiring long-term dialysis or kidney transplantation. In participants without chronic kidney disease at baseline, the renal outcome was defined by a decrease in the eGFR of 30% or more to a value of less than 60 ml per minute per 1.73 m2. Incident albuminuria, defined for all study participants by a doubling of the ratio of urinary albumin (in milligrams) to creatinine (in grams) from less than 10 at baseline to greater than 10 during follow-up, was also a prespecified renal outcome.

    (from http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1511939#t=article )

    Here's a hint, oh brilliant one: scholarly language is hard to understand because it's targeted at experts. That's true in medicine; it's true in literature.

  77. @Total, if you had been bullied more growing up would you be less insufferable today?

    I have some respect for the output of medical researchers seeking improvements in treatments for conditions like kidney disease, and you do them a disservice by comparing them to the clowns I cited. Although my technical background is not in biological sciences, I understood that medical abstract in under a minute, after looking up the acronyms eGFR and ESRD. Straightforward, honestly.

    If you pretend that those "bad literature writing" examples I cited are intelligible to anyone, you are lying, as we know that SJWs are wont to do. Slow down, for the sake of your schnoz!

  78. @That Anonymous Coward

    "

    Culture has this silly habit of building on what came before, taking the parts they like and making them fit.

    Indeed, which is why to my ears 99% of the "cultural appropriation" arguments sound like so much bullshit. Culture is all about appropriating things from others. Cultures that don't get appropriated die. Certainly there is value in wanting to preserve original meanings and history, but expecting cultures to not be appropriated is simply conservative cultural thinking with a new name.

  79. if you had been bullied more growing up would you be less insufferable today?

    Well, look at you, trying to be clever. Keep working at it. Perhaps someday you will get off a remark that a reader will have the faint, trailing hint was actually somewhere in the same zip code as "funny."

    I'm not optimistic, but I do like to see people striving to better themselves.

    Although my technical background is not in biological sciences, I understood that medical abstract in under a minute, after looking up the acronyms eGFR and ESRD. Straightforward, honestly.

    Did you do the same thing with the Butler quote? I.E., look things up that you didn't understand? I'm guessing you didn't because you've already decided that they're incomprehensible.

    If you pretend that those "bad literature writing" examples I cited are intelligible to anyone, you are lying, as we know that SJWs are wont to do

    I know that it's inconceivable to you that anyone might actually understand the point Butler was making. It likely always will be. Going forward, you might avoid men in black with vials of iocane powder.

  80. TM at 1:46, great point, I agree. Having your culture appropriated is a sign of success. The fact that the language of a tiny, damp island in the North Atlantic just might be the language of the whole world in a few more generations is a sign of tremendous sign of success. The fact that corporate America spends two whole months in celebrating the birth of …. well you get the idea, huge success.

    The ones who aren't having their culture appropriated are losing out in the great game. If Dan Snyder ever changes his team to the Washington Football Klub, it is native Americans who will be taking the biggest hit. For the time being, the nation's capital rocks out native American every Sunday in Autumn. Leave it to SJWs to completely misunderstand the cause-of-five-minutes-ago that they just picked up.

  81. Jesus you Americans are just rabid fools barking at the moon, I swear.
    While your military spends your country into bankruptcy and China destroys your manufacturing base, all you do is throw the "ultimate insult" back and forth – one calls the other a political term, the other throws it back. Neither party cares as it is the truth – or at least they shouldn't. Yet you all do.

    Your country is undermining itself with the right not to be offended, and all you can do is throw insults. Weak insults at that. Left or right, who cares? Try fixing the actual problems!

  82. @Total —

    I am delighted! You genuinely are in respectful awe of that Judith Butler quote! Amazing! You have made my day! I feel like Charles Darwin on discovering a new species!

    If there is one thing leaving me feeling incomplete, it is that you are unable to join me in my mirth, for you are not the observer.

  83. GuestPoster says

    November 10, 2015 at 3:07 pm

    Oh Dan. So, you've picked the sentence that won the first contest for bad sentence writing (run by someone who, like yourself, evidenced a distinct lack of respect for studies of the liberal arts), and are using this, as well as a link to the contest site, as well as the indication that you, personally, can not understand the sentence, as evidence that academia has distanced itself from the truth, and is thus liberalized.

    Now, had you bothered to, oh, track the sentence back to its source (note how you post a link to a 'contest' site, while Total counters with a link to a paper. Notice how you bothered to look up terms to understand Total's cited paper, and then refused to do that same work with the 'worst sentence ever written' that you propose is representative of 50 years of academic output) you'd find that the sentence was part of a letter to the readers. It was talking about a conversation between the author and another person, which had been reproduced a few pages earlier. The reasonable assumption is that the reader would be familiar not only with the surrounding paragraphs (notice how Total provided more than one sentence, ie: context, while you removed every last scrap of context available) but with the article the prose was describing.

    However, since you ask: she is basically examining the difference between saying something ONCE, and reinforcing it regularly by outside information. And applying that to how economics impacts relationships.

    "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways" – one can look at how money changes relationships in the same way every time, according to a particular author (say, Marx).

    "to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation" – or one can look at how leadership arises via the views of everyone other than the leader.

    "brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure" – one can realize that any structure, such as a power-relationship, changes over time, and is not static.

    "and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects" – a theory in which a structure, such as a language, is effectively just imaginary.

    "to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power" – sounds to me like she's saying that once you see that power can be taken, people may wish to lead for the sake of holding power.

    I'm probably wrong about a lot of the interpretation, of course – I only skimmed the article, and am not part of that academic discipline, and am assuming common definitions for words like 'articulate', which clearly are being used in a technical sense. But it's a reasonable interpretation, took only 15 minutes to learn enough background to make, and is certainly better than your approach – fail to understand it, so laugh at the author and decide that the prose you cannot understand must have no meaning at all.

  84. I wrote earlier,

    "I am delighted! You genuinely are in respectful awe of that Judith Butler quote! Amazing! You have made my day! I feel like Charles Darwin on discovering a new species!"

    Even better, there are two of them! Maybe they will mate!

  85. @zinnia: the Jews, of course. The dogwhistle of the War On Christmas is that certain people who have a holiday right around the same time as Christmas don't like to be assumed to be Christmas-observers, and so they, and their atheist fellow-travelers, are trying to ruin the good cheer and happiness of everybody else by Grinching away Christmas, with milksop merchants catering to them.

    @Erwin: I think it's that some of us remember when conservative groups claimed to stand on principles (like judicial restraint, or states' rights, or the marketplace of ideas), and placed the protection of these principles above remedying various social ills. When the tide of society began to turn somewhat and the smarter liberals started to use these same principles as weapons – states' rights to justify assisted-suicide laws, or medical marijuana, or same-sex marriage – suddenly those principles turned out to be, well, not so rock-solid. Orrin Hatch's famous quote "States' rights, when they're right," for example. Or the Equal Access Act, passed to protect student Bible-study groups in public schools, being used to force schools to recognize atheist groups or Gay-Straight Alliances. Or being unable to shut down people using terms like 'bigot' and 'homophobe' because, well, free speech is robust and if you don't like it you should free speech right back at them.

    This isn't, to be clear, meant to say that hypocrites only come in one flavor; only that I think what you're seeing is a lot of angst over "principles" being conveniently discarded when they also protect the other guy.

  86. @kent

    For most people their bathroom is part of their "home", and in dorms people often do share bathrooms. They also often share rec rooms (very much like family rooms). Combined with the fact that the message is "the dorm is your home, and all these other students are like your family," it's not surprising that they react the same way you would if someone tried to take away your control over your own "home."

    It doesn't mean their legally correct. They're not. But they are not crazy to feel like it is their home under the circumstances.

    I'm suggesting we may be holding them to an unfairly high standard of rational behavior when it comes to something, "home," that almost everybody gets passionately emotional about.

    I think the focus should be more on the teachers and administrators (especially in public universities where they are agents of the government)–like the one Missouri who tried to get the photographer thrown out of a public place, shouting "I need some muscle over here."

  87. Yeah, there are a bunch of different campus housing configurations I've seen over the years – none of them exactly like living in the real world. Let's not wander too far into the weeds exploring the minutiae of specific variants.

    In most manifestations I've seen of the basic shared bath/common room setup, it's very much segmented – by floor or whatever. It still seems very difficult to reasonably project expectations very far beyond the student's door.

    The other part of those dorm setups that you ignore is the extant conflict-resolution structure. There is always one in place with articulated approaches and principles. In my observation, they typically break down in a hierarchy starting along the bath/common room sharing segments and working upwards to dorm-wide mechanisms. In many ways the "offensive" email can be seen as a suggestion students utilize such mechanisms to work out proper social norms based on mutual understanding rather than issue a list of costume themes that white students are now prohibited from wearing.

    In your own home, sometimes your little brother does stuff that pisses you off. Sometimes, he'll even wear a costume for that specific purpose. Sometimes mom and dad tell him to take it off …. sometimes they let him wear it even though it pisses you off because it's from his favorite video game. Sometimes you then yell at your parents "I HATE YOU!!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!! This is CHILD ABUSE!!!".

    Youth are certainly capable of great damage. Being young – even with a nominal emotional excuse – doesn't work as a justification or shield from criticism when actively wielding impactful weapons. By the time one makes it to Yale, it just feels they should have acquired the coping skills to at the very least avoid that last tantrum bit when "parents" say something they don't want to hear.

    You don't get to be an activist in a vacuum. What they're doing has real life impact on real adults that have put a lot of effort into building real careers. It isn't something that should be taken lightly by anyone. If an issue is serious enough to legitimately end someone's career, it should be taken seriously. If it's really not, trying to destroy someone's career for disagreeing with you *should* garner a ton of negative attention from all thinking adults.

    In my view we're still basically dealing with a reddit mob. It's just Gamergate with a different face and different set of excuses to engage a targeted professional destruction of the day's selected "offender".

    The WU teacher is indeed troubling, but it doesn't feel like an either/or situation. To me it is appropriate to criticize both. But it also seems appropriate to address that situation in a different comment.

  88. @ zinnia: "@salem Which offense-takers are these? I have yet to meet a non-religious person who gives a crap about getting a "Merry Christmas" from the Macy's salesperson."

    It's not the atheists that stores worry about offending with "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays" – there just aren't that many atheists who have any outrage left to spare after walking through stores and public spaces full of Christian symbols, handling money with generic Judeo-Christian mottos, and being repeatedly told they're immoral by bigots right up to the POTUS. It's all the _other_ religious people that "Happy Holidays" tries to placate: Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Scientologists, and so on.

    And perhaps the most offended of all are certain Christians. As my Jehovah's Witness grandparents would put it if they weren't such nice, humble people, they don't celebrate the birth of the Messiah on the wrong day, with barely disguised pagan festivities. They never got upset about what other people were doing, but if a far touchier member of such a sect manages to keep up their outrage about Christmas all the time from October through New Years, "Happy Holidays" will also upset them. They don't want to be invited to join in undisguised pagan festivities, either.

    You might as well just say "Merry Christmas" – or keep your mouth shut around strangers until they say something revealing which way their beliefs swing.

  89. I'm honestly still trying to process the teachers/admins situation. That MU video was stunning on several levels.

    My initial reaction was 100% focused on the acute interaction – the 1st Amendment/assault/obstructing journalism thing. And that still bugs me. As does the fact that she probably influenced the impressionable students' understanding of constitutional rights in painfully horrid ways.

    But something else is starting to bug me too. In that video, there were adult organizers occupying crucial point positions that certainly appeared to be providing leadership for this "student" protest. How does that work?

    Kids are kids and can be excused their passions – and quickly move on from an institution. Teachers (or any staff) are a part of the institution itself. They stay. They also have personal interests, objectives and rivalries that play out as a career progresses. And they sure as hell aren't kids.

    It is one thing to say "As coach, I respect my players' choice not to play". It's a totally different thing for a teacher to be actively engaged in the process of marshaling a student army to remove another member of the institution's faculty. That sure adds a whole new level to the tactics of getting ahead in academia, no? I'm not even sure how to articulate the concern exactly.

    I get that there can be frictions between teachers and admins that impact the teacher's ability to work – where teacher/admin conflict can become a workplace issue and at the same time be a student issue. But that doesn't seem to be the usual case at all. While teachers working with students to get other teachers removed from their jobs seems more difficult to justify in any situation.

    Instructors are in a position to put an idea into a kid's head, give them the arguments to articulate, instruct them on the tactics to project, and then support them in action (like, by calling for national attention on social media) … and then maybe order them around for a bit like an army after victory. And it's pretty easy to get kids to think it was all completely their idea.

    There seems to be a major conflict in the core mission when teachers blur the line between their role as instructors of students and allow themselves to become co-participants in non academic student political movements – especially ones aimed at the job of other faculty members (as opposed to approaching policy). Acting as the initial leaders/organizers feels beyond the ethical pale.

    It really makes me wonder at what point those MU teachers started advising the protests … and to what degree other faculty members have been involved in leading and organizing the witch hunts at Yale (pun intended).

  90. More succinctly: it bugs me that a professor who's area of study centers on impacts and approaches in social media leveraging looks like a major ringleader in a protest that appears to have been fomented in no small part by leveraging social media.

    At the most extreme, makes it looks like using her area of academic expertise to help take out coworkers she finds disagreeable.

    It doesn't help that everyone remotely involved has gone radio dark.

  91. @Dan: "The ones who aren't having their culture appropriated are losing out in the great game. If Dan Snyder ever changes his team to the Washington Football Klub, it is native Americans who will be taking the biggest hit. For the time being, the nation's capital rocks out native American every Sunday in Autumn. Leave it to SJWs to completely misunderstand the cause-of-five-minutes-ago that they just picked up."

    Just curious, what specific benefits do you think the Native Americans get from the existence of the Redskins that will cease if the team is ever renamed? For the life of me, I can't think of a single benefit Notre Dame fandom has bestowed on the Irish. St. Patty's day, at the very least, is nominally a celebration of Irish culture, even if it's a skewed and superficial presentation of it. The Fighting Irish don't really accomplish much–culturally speaking–beyond reminding drunk people of the word "Irish."

    I'm sure African-Americans all over are praying fervently for the day that Dan founds the Birmingham Lazy Niggers as an NFL franchise, for that will be the day that they know they've truly transcended a history of institutionalized racism and that whole slavery thing.

  92. @mythago: "I think it's that some of us remember when conservative groups claimed to stand on principles (like judicial restraint, or states' rights, or the marketplace of ideas), and placed the protection of these principles above remedying various social ills."

    Some still do, but the problem is that humanity is in generally pretty lacking in moral fortitude. It's far easier for people to succumb to self-serving demagoguery and petty tribalism than to keep standing on principle even when doing so opposes your self-interest or incidentally benefits people you dislike. Simply stated, far more people join the groups that revel in hating immigrants/libtards/SJWs/blacks/[just read one of Dan's posts, you get the point] than the ones that will defend the free speech rights even when it's NAMBLA, or the due process rights of a terrorist. And the more members join the more mainstream groups, the stronger they get, and the more appealing they are to the weak willed.

    Plus, it's a frustrating reality that you'll be judged by idiots who don't understand the fallacy of composition. It's perfectly believable–as you point out–for example assert that you have nothing against social equality for blacks, but oppose regulation of the free market as a means to achieve that goal because you oppose regulation of the market on principle. But when so many of your compatriots are quick to turn their backs such principles when market regulation might benefit them or score points against their ideological rivals, it becomes easy (and honestly, quite reasonable) to infer that the free market principles might have been a pretext to justify (unpopular) ideological opposition to the whole racial equality thing. And then–as you can sometimes see right here in the comments–when somebody does something like oppose the Public Accommodations portion of the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds, you just know someone else will accuse him of racism, because quite frankly a lot of the most vocal critics of that particular law are pretty unabashedly racist. And dealing with that crap just gets frustrating after a while.

  93. But what are we arguing about, about that Butler quote, exactly? As far as I can tell, it was presented as evidence that her studies are ridiculous. But honestly, I can't make heads nor tails of it, so I can't really comment on that. She might have had some good ideas in there, and she might not have. Whatever they were, I'd say they were presented confusingly.

    I mean, if we're arguing that that was hard to understand, I'm all aboard that. But I can't comment on the ideas conveyed until I understand what they are.

    I mean, it'd be silly to give something a pass just because a respectable scholar said it. I have a friend who works in translation, and one of the most 'respectable scholars' for years was a shitty translator whose work would be confusing as hell, since she translated loanwords in the context they'd be used in the language she was translating from, instead of to the language she was translating to. So that ironically, in order to follow her translations into English, you'd need to speak Japanese, or you'd be wondering why the lower-middle-class were living in mansions. :P

    Can someone maybe clue me in on this so I can join the conversation?

  94. GuestPoster says

    November 11, 2015 at 6:54 am

    Wolfman,

    The Butler quote was provided as evidence that academia is full of liberal idiots, that nothing of value/truth has been created from liberal arts departments in the last 50 years, and that anyone who claims to understand anything from said departments is a liar.

    I tend to disagree that it proves any of those things, but, well, your mileage may vary.

  95. Now, had you bothered to, oh, track the sentence back to its source (note how you post a link to a 'contest' site, while Total counters with a link to a paper

    He also missed my "Princess Bride" reference, which makes me very sad.

    But what are we arguing about, about that Butler quote, exactly?

    Dan is arguing that the Butler quote is bad writing because he can't understand what it means. I am pointing out that not understanding highly technical jargon without any background in that field of study is a silly thing to do. Butler is making a highly technical argument in her field and is using highly technical terms to do it. (I should note that Dan is also revealing his bias–as he consciously or unconsciously doesn't think Lit could be highly technical.)

    So, saying this is bad writing

    "

    First principles DFT calculations were performed using the Vienna Ab-initio Simulation Package (VASP) [19, 20] within the generalized gradient approximation (GGA). Perdew Burke Ernzerhof (PBE) pseudo-potentials [21] were used to describe the electronic structure of palladium, hydrogen and helium atoms, with the palladium 4d and 4s electrons treated as valence electrons. Van der Waals interactions were not included in our calculations, as Piris et al [22] have shown that the Van der Waals forces between He atoms are weak and should therefore not significantly affect the formation of the He clusters in the palladium tritide lattices. The number of Monkhorst–Pack k-points was determined by performing individual DFT calculations on a PdT system with an increasing number of k-points. An appropriate number of k-points was deemed to have been reached when a total energy convergence of 1 meV per atom was observed, and as a result a 6  ×  6  ×  6 k-point grid was used for 2  ×  2  ×  2 supercell calculations (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-8984/27/47/475002)

    because I don't understand it, is just silly. Thus, also, thinking Butler is bad writing because you don't understand it is silly.

    tl;dr: Dan is an idiot.

  96. I am pointing out that not understanding highly technical jargon without any background in that field of study is a silly thing to do

    Should have been

    I am pointing out that not understanding highly technical jargon without any background in that field of study is not surprising, and claiming it is bad writing is silly.

  97. @Total, I thought the examples I gave were so extreme that folks would get it. And most do. But you and others stubbornly plow on, sweating and furrowing the brow to find hidden gems in a latrine.

    Complex jargon is not evidence of insight, and this is a huge problem in the Academy. Those examples I noted are instances (among many) where whatever insight there may be is buried in bad writing. What insight can there be? There is no empiricism, no data, and not even an anecdote.

    I used to write like this, filling pages and pages with fluff words, and my humanities profs loved it. My Russian Lit professor freshman year ate it up and I was her star student!

    And then I had a T.A. in a technical writing class, a grad student who was not much older than me. He ripped me to shreds, and my ego stung a bit. He lined through my precious flowery prose and showed me how I could get my point across in a tenth of the space.

    Wasting readers' time, as Butler does, is disrespectful. The great ones, such as Richard Feynman or Albert Einstein or even Martin Luther King in the realm of human relations, could convey complex topics with clarity. Those with real insight are eager to be understood.

  98. @Total, I have worked in intellectual property for the last 14 years. I read dozens to hundreds of patent specifications per day. I can understand (with some effort if the material is new as most patents are) almost any scientific and technical material that is before me. I would never claim technical writing is bad writing just because it uses heavy jargon.

    This may be why I have such scorn for bad writing. I am not fooled, precisely because I am able to comprehend complex writing so much better than most people. It is what I do, and I my salary is embarrassingly high because most people can't deal with this complexity.

  99. > Complex jargon is not evidence of insight, and this is a huge problem in the Academy. Those examples I noted are instances (among many) where whatever insight there may be is buried in bad writing.

    I don't know how much I'd agree on that, because I'm not familiar with the terminology she's using. And I don't know why experience with technical writing would help in a non-technical field. Technical writing (as in for engineering, like what you do) uses a different format than writing for humanities, so I'm not sure why that is what helps you understand what she wrote. But then again, it seemed to have worked, since you did manage to follow it well enough. I really was just asking what she SAID, so I can tell if the idea made any sense or not.

    > What insight can there be? There is no empiricism, no data, and not even an anecdote.

    Again, I was utterly mystified by it, so I can't tell if there was any of that in there. The best I could tell, she was analyzing something that had to do with maybe a change in the way literature is criticized, or perhaps how criticism is responded to?

    Or is literally this conversation about whether, on a technical level, the writing demonstrated something skillful and concise?

    > The great ones, such as Richard Feynman or Albert Einstein or even Martin Luther King in the realm of human relations, could convey complex topics with clarity.

    Usually when people like that were doing that, they were trying to speak to a wider audience than just their colleagues and students in their specific fields, though. There's a reason Feynman and Einstein are science popularizers, as well as scientists, and King of course was an activist.

    Okay, maybe I was missing context.

    Was this intended to be read by people who WEREN'T studying lit-crit at a doctoral level?

    Because in that case, I'm in 100% agreement with you. It's incredibly shit. But I really can't speak to it if I'm not in the target audience.

  100. Complex jargon is not evidence of insight

    How would you know? You've already admitted that you didn't understand what Butler was saying.

    As to Richard Feynman…this Richard Feynman?

    "When the frequency cj is less than 2uo it is clear that the absolute magnitude of A is unity. Therefore, for all u0/ u so that the amplification falls off (but the phase shift is constant) at the rate of 6k decibels par octave. Different rates of cutoff are obtained by using different values of k. The ampli fication and phase shift for this function are plotted in Figs. and 2."

    I don't understand that. But unlike you, I realize that he's using jargon and concepts in a field alien to me, and that just means that I would have to do a fair bit of research to figure it out. So I wouldn't say that it's _bad_ writing, just technical.

    almost any scientific and technical material that is before me. I would never claim technical writing is bad writing just because it uses heavy jargon.

    And you have decided that when you *can't* understand something that it's bad. That's not Butler's problem, that's yours. You're limited and outside those limits, you get scared and decide things are "bad." You're creating your own version of a safe space, actually, except it's a safe space inside your own head. And no one can get through the noise of your fear to point out that you're wrong.

  101. Was this intended to be read by people who WEREN'T studying lit-crit at a doctoral level?

    No. It was a journal article in a scholarly journal, intended for folks who had already earned their doctorate in Lit.

    I randomly searched for a piece of Butler writing that was intended for a larger audience (if still an erudite one — it's in the London Review of Books). Here's an excerpt (it's an article about a court case over Kafka's saved correspondence — http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-kafka )::

    We find in Kafka’s correspondence with his lover Felice Bauer, who was from Berlin, that she is constantly correcting his German, suggesting that he is not fully at home in this second language. And his later lover, Milena Jesenská, who was also the translator of his works into Czech, is constantly teaching him Czech phrases he neither knows how to spell nor to pronounce, suggesting that Czech, too, is also something of a second language. In 1911, he is going to the Yiddish theatre and understanding what is said, but Yiddish is not a language he encounters very often in his family or his daily life; it remains an import from the east that is compelling and strange.

    Pretty straightforward and understandable and it suggests that Butler shapes her prose to her audience. Her prose is more technical for a technical audience and less so for a more general audience. I realize that's a shock to people like Dan, who have fear humming in their ears, but it should be extremely uncontroversial to anyone who's not utterly terrified of things they don't understand.

  102. GuestPoster says

    November 11, 2015 at 9:17 am

    @Wolfman,

    As a VERY brief summary: essentially, Butler and Ernesto Laclau were working in similar, but distinct, areas (gender identity/equality and socialism, respectively), and their work often overlapped. They were both particularly interested in power struggles inside certain social contexts, and in 1995 a third party (Reinaldo Laddaga) put them in contact via email (which was still in its infancy at the time), and posed them a question.

    The two then corresponded, at length, about that question and others which arose. The journal Diacritics in 1997 reprinted this conversation – an exceptionally dense, academic discussion between two experts, and each of the two wrote a small letter to follow and reflect upon what they had done, and what they had learned, in that conversation. So the target audience wasn't even just doctoral students or the like – it was people who could follow a one-on-one conversation by the top experts in the field, who had no reason to water down their language for a general audience.

    Now, the sentence in question is very dense. It's hard to follow. I think everybody here is happy to admit that. The key difference is that Dan is using this as an indication of the average state of philosophical output, while Total and I are able to understand that it isn't even a fair example of the average content of the article in question – the REST of the article is, by and large, quite easy to parse even without special training.

    Essentially, Dan is claiming that, having found a single apple with a soft spot on it, and as an expert in rocks, all fruit on earth is rotten garbage. Total and I are claiming that it is better to view it as a single flaw on a single apple, and that with just a tiny bit of effort the soft bit can be removed, and the rest of the apple eaten, and that further even if this were not true, one rotten apple would not actually say much about the fruit orchards of the world.

  103. Total and I are claiming that it is better to view it as a single flaw on a single apple, and that with just a tiny bit of effort the soft bit can be removed, and the rest of the apple eaten

    Not quite — at least on my part — well, in honor of Diacritics, let's do this as a mock dialogue:

    Dan: This apple is disgusting. You left liberal progressive SJWs grow terrible apples.
    Total: Dan, it's a kiwi.
    Dan: It's awful. Why can't you grow better apples? It's a sign of the decay of the left and America.
    Total: Dan, it's a kiwi. It's an entirely different fruit than an apple. You shouldn't expect it to taste like an apple and judging it that way isn't fair.
    Dan: I've had oranges too, so I should be able to taste it just fine. It's a really nasty apple.
    Total: Dan, it's a kiwi.

  104. That's a good analogy too, and apologies for mis-speaking for you. Honestly: I think it IS a bad sentence – but it can still be understood. It DOES stick out as the hardest sentence in the whole piece. But then, for me, that's sort of the big point: it's being held up as representative, not only of the author but of the field in general, yet it seems to be the single worst sentence the author has ever written, by a huge margin.

    Either way, your earlier tl;dr is right on the mark.

  105. Either way, your earlier tl;dr is right on the mark

    Absolutely.

  106. I looked up that quote which was supposed to be a paradigmatic example of 'bad' writing, and all I can think is "Why am I supposed to find something wrong with the way this sentence is constructed?" Sure, it dumps a lot of philosophical terminology on the reader and employs some pretty extreme hypotaxis, but as long as you're familiar with the underlying ideas such as Marx's notion of the base and superstructure, Althusser's theoretical development of Marxist thought, and how in postmodernist philosophy these deterministic views of power relations have been challenged, then it's not hard to understand at all. Since I presume Butler's audience in this scholarly journal would be familiar with all these philosophical developments, I can't see why she should be dinged for bad writing when all she's doing is getting her point across in the least amount of words (but not necessarily subordinate clauses) possible. (For the record, I'm a biologist, so this isn't even my field, so if I can get this stuff, then people whose business is actually philosophy should have very little excuse.)

    Not only does this not strike me as particularly bizarre, it looks utterly normal for philosophical discussion. I can even think of works intended for a lay audience that are more taxing. Anthony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy, for example, while remarkably clear does have passages that, if taken out of context and with the explanatory portions removed, could appear to be as impenetrable as this. Right now I'm in his Metaphysics chapter in the second volume, dealing with medieval philosophy, and Kenny is covering the metaphysics of Duns Scotus. Many passages in this book require close reading, even with Kenny's illustrative examples, and sometimes rereading in order to get the distinctions at issue and fully grasp the usages of certain philosophical terms (not always easy with medieval philosophy: as Kenny himself pointed out, words like objective and subjective have virtually reversed their meanings since first coined in the Middle Ages). Philosophy has always operated at a deeper level than "commonsense" approaches, and very often parsing the errors or oversimplifications we're led into by "commonsense" use of language requires a more complex and technical explication than can be readily understood.

  107. @Wolfman wrote:

    "Because in that case, I'm in 100% agreement with you. It's incredibly shit. But I really can't speak to it if I'm not in the target audience."

    No, the intended audience is @Guestposter and @Total, and now @Nullifidian. They are eating that $hit right up and pretending it's delicious! They are too committed now to their brand new SJW cause of the moment, which is that some random sentence widely recognized as bad writing is in fact superb! Watch them go!

    This is beautiful! I am thrilled! I managed to get a herd (flock, school, gaggle?) of Internet SJWs to attach themselves to a new cause, created by me out of thin air! Admittedly it is not as much fun (or public, or red) as the 4chan free-bleeding stunt, but for me it's a great start, since I am new to this.

  108. @Null:

    I don't know a darn thing about any of that, but it sounds like my interpretation wasn't terribly off base. Maybe I should call it a 'hard' sentence rather than a bad one. hrm.

  109. Nullifidian says

    November 11, 2015 at 1:10 pm

    Dan:

    "

    No, the intended audience is @Guestposter and @Total, and now @Nullifidian. They are eating that $hit right up and pretending it's delicious! They are too committed now to their brand new SJW cause of the moment, which is that some random sentence widely recognized as bad writing is in fact superb! Watch them go!

    How is it "widely recognized as bad writing"? One guy creating a "bad writing" award (a.k.a. "passages of whose rhetorical strategies I disapprove and whose subjects I am ignorant") does not translate into universal acceptance of his assessments. It's like saying that the late, unlamented William Proxmire's monuments to his own scientific ignorance—a.k.a. the Golden Fleece Awards—were in themselves sufficient justification for saying that it was "widely accepted" that the scientific research he smeared was worthless.

    Furthermore, I didn't claim that anything in Judith Butler's quote was particularly brilliant, but merely that it wasn't outside the norm for scholarly philosophical writing in any area, and that I could think of other works that would be just as opaque if their sentences were lifted out of context and the background information was unknown to and concealed from the reader. To me, it's not apparent how saying such things is equivalent to writing Judith Butler's hagiography.

    And I'm amused to find myself inducted into the ranks of "SJWs" for making the obvious point that the passage requires background knowledge in philosophy that readers of this journal could be expected to have, and that philosophical writing from all periods and covering all subjects can be pretty abstruse at first glance, especially if you don't know the background. If you've ever read Hegel, this quote looks like a masterpiece of concision and clarity by comparison.

  110. *tiptoes quietly out the back, looking for other forums ripe for mayhem*

    (With deepest apologies to Ken White, our gracious host. I can't help myself. Your commenters are so… juicy!)

  111. Nullifidian says

    November 11, 2015 at 1:28 pm

    One further thought that came too late for me to edit it in:

    Dan, when people tell you that you're being ignorant, it's not necessarily because they all share a common viewpoint that motivates them to say such a thing. Sometimes they say it merely because you're being ignorant

  112. I managed to get a herd (flock, school, gaggle?) of Internet SJWs to attach themselves to a new cause, created by me out of thin air!

    I have to hand it to you, Dan: you've managed to create a discussion on the Internet.

  113. Nullifidian says

    November 11, 2015 at 1:39 pm

    Yeah, what a discussion. By refusing to accept that scholarly philosophy frequently makes use of jargon, he got three or four people trying to explain to him why he was being a ignorant buffoon. He sure pulled one over on us!

    I'll never understand the mentality of the internet troll. "I've made myself look like an idiot, and you've all been suckered into pointing out what an idiot I've been! Ha ha, losers! I sure got you good!" How is it not obvious to him and all the rest of his ilk that this is a pathological way to behave?

  114. GuestPoster says

    November 11, 2015 at 1:45 pm

    We also got a little experience in a field outside our own, and learned a bit about how philosophy looks at the academic level. And I, at least, browsed the journal a bit and found out that philosophers consider Efraim Racker to be pretty badass too, so there is that as well.

    Overall, yeah. Demonstrating beyond all doubt that one is a blithering moron, and holding this over the head of others who entered into a fairly interesting conversation, is something one CAN do… but it does seem a bit silly.

  115. Very butthurt, I sense you are. Box of tissues, for you I have.

  116. Nullifidian says

    November 11, 2015 at 4:38 pm

    Dan,

    As ever, very wrong you are. A constant need for self-aggrandizement your view of things distorts.

  117. Snowflakes get upset when left off Starbucks Xmas coffee cups.

  118. My thoughts on the Mizzou portion of this issue, looking mainly at First Amendment issues, is here (and let's not forget the First includes freedom of assembly): http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2015/11/journalism-vs-mass-communication.html

  119. @Dan

    "Wasting readers' time, as Butler does, is disrespectful… Those with real insight are eager to be understood."

    So why do you troll?

  120. @Manatee, I could expound on the long and important history of satire, the social value in ridiculing the ridiculous, the pompous, the SJW. But I do not seek self-aggrandizement.

    But, you ask, how can you enjoy recognition of your good deeds when you toil in anonymity? The truth is, the satisfaction of a job well done is all the reward I need.

  121. "

    But I do not seek self-aggrandizement.

    You obviously thought my observation applied well enough to you to remember it two days later and implicitly deny it in response to another person. I'd say that particular shaft found its mark.

    "

    The truth is, the satisfaction of a job well done is all the reward I need.

    Aside from successfully playing the fool and making yourself look ignorant and deaf to rational explanations, what exactly do you think you accomplished here? I'm asking in all earnestness, because I really don't understand what motivates an internet troll.

  122. @Nullifidian. you fall apart into foaming-at-the-mouth ad hominem and you imagine that I am the troll? Calm down. You'll be okay. Perhaps a little time looking at autumn leaves will soothe your nerves.

  123. Nullifidian says

    November 13, 2015 at 2:16 pm

    Dan,

    What you call "foaming-at-the-mouth ad hominem" wasn't even me being rude, nor was it an ad hominem. An ad hominem fallacy is a fallacy of relevance where one argues that the characteristics or background of the person making the argument invalidate his or her argument. It isn't a handy Latin tag for "Mommy, the bad man was being mean to me!" Your irrelevant and laughable claim that I was a "SJW" and that's why I said what I said about Butler's quote was far more ad hominem in the strict sense than anything I've said.

    I posted a detailed response as to why I didn't find the quote an example of egregiously bad writing or even noticeably out of the ordinary when compared to other examples of academic philosophy. In so-called response, you then committed the fallacy of the appeal to numbers, misstated the claim I was making, and my motivation for making it (the aforementioned "SJW" ad hominem). If any of that was supposed to be an argument, it failed miserably at being one, so nothing in my latest reply could possibly be ad hominem. And after my response to that bit of nonsense, you didn't try to cobble together anything that even pretended to be a rational rebuttal, but just made a dubious declaration of 'victory'. How else am I supposed to characterize such a performance?

  124. As soon as Dan started losing the argument, he decided that he had been trolling the whole time, and thus losing was intentional. It's a cute rhetorical move.

  125. I'll will never understand why seemingly intelligent people engage with trolls on internet discussions – all you have to do, is stop.

  126. @Total, @Nullifidian —

    Although trolling was not the original intent, my inner troll was summoned when you donned your glistening SJW armor to valiantly defend examples of muddled writing as the new object of your Internet affection. Who labors so hard at something so ridiculous? Was I to wrinkle my brow and plow through that morass along side you?

  127. Nullifidian says

    November 16, 2015 at 1:01 pm

    Sigh….

    Oh, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan….

    You're still doing it. Here's a little hint for you: people who disagree with you on one matter do not have to have adopted every other set of beliefs you disagree with (not that I think your idea of what constitutes an "SJW" is is coherent enough to amount to a credo). I know that ideologues find it difficult to envision, but not every disagreement is motivated by agreement with an alternative set of dogmas. I don't have to be an "SJW" or agree with Butler in any way to observe that this example of her writing is actually straightforward provided you have the philosophical background she is assuming of her academic readers. What we are trying to get across to you is that there is a difference between bad writing and technical writing. And just because you found someone on the internet too ignorant to recognize the difference is not prima facie evidence that the sample of writing is bad.

    Remember when I said I could find examples of writing that is equally opaque from every era, provided one is ignorant of the background? I wasn't kidding. Here's something I read just last night:

    "

    The maximum ‘no more is than is not whatever is conceived to be. It is one thing in such a way as to be all things, and it is all things in such a way as to be no thing. And it is maximally thus in such a way as to be minimally thus’ (DDI 1. 4).

    (from A New History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny, p. 494, Oxford University Press.)

    Is that passage that consists of a quote from Nicolas of Cusa an example of bad writing or not, and if you don't know the subject under discussion how can you possibly evaluate it?

    Here's the problem: when I read that quote of Judith Butler's, I understood it at least in general terms (of course, I can't have understood it in context, because I haven't read the paper). Therefore, I'm finding it difficult to see why either you or the other guy thinks this is an example of bad writing, except that you may not have the philosophical background to comprehend what she's referring to. If that is the case, though, then the fault hardly lies with Judith Butler or anyone else who writes on topics of which you are ignorant.

  128. @Dan

    "

    @Manatee, I could expound on the long and important history of satire, the social value in ridiculing the ridiculous, the pompous, the SJW. But I do not seek self-aggrandizement.

    That's alright. This is popehat. We understand the value of ridiculing the pompous and ridiculous. In fact, that's the main reason so many people have responded to you.

    "

    But, you ask, how can you enjoy recognition of your good deeds when you toil in anonymity? The truth is, the satisfaction of a job well done is all the reward I need.

    Umm, I never asked that at all. I guess the juxtaposition of quotes wasn't enough to help you read behind the lines, so I'll make it more explicit: I first quoted you asserting that fluffy writing is bad because it's disrespectful to waste the reader's time, then I asked why you troll with the implication that trolling (an activity with the specific aim of annoying readers and wasting their time, rather than facilitating any meaningful exchanges) was inherently disrespectful and that you thus seem to be behaving hypocritically.

  129. @Nullifidian —

    "What we are trying to get across to you is that there is a difference between bad writing and technical writing."

    LOL! You have no idea how vast my experience with technical writing is. I have spent my career devouring highly technical writing full of complex language on a daily basis. Technical writing deals with explaining concrete things, and aims for clarity. The high compensation I receive doing this helps me support my large family. Do you read and write for a living? Do you even have a proper job?

    You apparently don't even understand what technical writing even is, if you would group Judith Butler's writing with technical writing. I don't say that in disparagement of Butler. Technical writing is a specific category and Butler's writing is not in that category.

  130. "

    Technical writing deals with explaining concrete things, and aims for clarity.

    I'm glad we're agreed. Now, apply that concept to this sample of writing. I found this quote perfectly clear at first glance, and nothing you've said has persuaded me that I didn't actually understand it. Instead, your responses seem to consist of nothing but trying to bluff people out of the position that this quote can be understood. Well, unless you can crawl inside my head and persuade me that you know my mind better than I do, I'm not going to go along with you on this.

    Do you read and write for a living? Do you even have a proper job?

    As someone who reads and writes for a living, you should be aware of the fact that I already addressed this question in a parenthetical remark above. If you run your finger under each word and sound each word out, I'm sure you'll find it eventually.

    P. S. You never did say what you thought of that quote from Nicolas of Cusa, whether it was an example of "bad writing", and whether you had the knowledge base to evaluate it as such. Just think that the Middle Ages was full of philosophers who wrote like that, because they were writing in (medieval) Latin for their fellow educated men, not in the vernacular for a wide audience. It isn't until the 16th and 17th centuries that we get advocates—and practitioners—of writing philosophy in the vernacular like Machiavelli, de' Vieri, Descartes, and Hobbes.

  131. "

    LOL! You have no idea how vast my experience with technical writing is. I have spent my career devouring highly technical writing full of complex language on a daily basis. Technical writing deals with explaining concrete things, and aims for clarity. The high compensation I receive doing this helps me support my large family. Do you read and write for a living? Do you even have a proper job?

    I'm guessing that as a (patent agent or technical advisor, I believe?) you don't get many opportunities to apply ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority, so you're getting it out of your system here?

    "

    You apparently don't even understand what technical writing even is, if you would group Judith Butler's writing with technical writing.

    Semantically, you might be correct, simply because people in STEM fields tend to like to remind everyone that they're very different from the social sciences and [spits] the humanities. And perhaps in this case it's also useful to keep arguing this semantic point to detract from the fact that, despite his mistake in terminology, his last point is a valid one. You may look down on Butler and her entire field of study (in fact, you revel in making it clear that you do.) But it is, nonetheless, a field of study, one requiring at least some level of specialized knowledge, and employing specialized terminology to convey ideas with more specificity than you can do using lay language.

    Your argument was essentially reading a passage, making no attempts to look up unfamiliar terms, and saying "See, who could ever understand this," and then comparing it to a piece of technical writing from a field that you have at least passing familiarity with, looking up all the unfamiliar terms and providing them to us, and saying "See, if you just look up a few things, you can understand exactly what's going on here." Of course, I'm getting the sense that you know exactly how disingenuous this argument is, and it's being done with the intent of trolling, and I have no idea why I'm continuing to treat you with more respect than you're showing everyone else, but it's been a slow week and I can't help myself apparently.

    "

    I don't say that in disparagement of Butler. Technical writing is a specific category and Butler's writing is not in that category.

    So why'd you decide to stop now?

    Also, would you feel better if Nullifidian used the term "specialized writing" instead to describe writing that isn't directed at a lay audience, but relates to a specialized field that isn't "technical?"

  132. @Nullifidian, nice try, but you and @Total both confused Judith Butler's writing with technical writing, showing that you did not even grasp the different kinds of writing.

    But I will engage you on the topic of Nicolas of Cusa, because it is an excellent example of what I would like to say.

    The topic Nicolas was discussing with that quote is the simultaneous existence and nonexistence of God (see Medieval Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy, Volume 2). But that doesn't even make sense logically. The trap that Nicolas fell into, which modern scholars of the humanities often fall into also, is to mistake words for reality itself. Nicolas reflected how God is the union of opposites, so therefore God must also be the union of existence and nonexistence, since 'existence' and 'nonexistence' those are also opposite words!

    Some logic! It could be out of Monty Python, but this is quite real. Could this be why Medieval scholarship made so little progress for centuries? Is there a lesson for the humanities today?

    @Nullifidian you argue my side. Do you need me to argue your side for you?

  133. Nullifidian says

    November 17, 2015 at 1:24 pm

    "

    @Nullifidian, nice try, but you and @Total both confused Judith Butler's writing with technical writing, showing that you did not even grasp the different kinds of writing.

    Right, we don't understand because you say we don't. To quote you, "Some logic!"

    Of course, that's how you've been arguing this whole time, so at least you're consistent. Just as you said that "If you pretend that those ‘bad literature writing’ examples I cited are intelligible to anyone, you are lying…", thus demonstrating a comprehensive grasp of the mental states of every human being on the planet. Very impressive.

    Of course, I did understand it, so there was nothing for me to do but chuckle at this absurd suggestion and then post my response, the meat of which you have not once addressed with anything other than a string of fallacies (a guy on the internet said it was bad writing, therefore it's "widely accepted" to be bad writing—not that it would matter if this were a widely accepted proposition or not, because the proportion of the population that could comprehend the majority of academic philosophy papers is assuredly quite small—that I'm only 'defending' the quote because I'm an 'SJW', etc.).

    "

    The trap that Nicolas fell into, which modern scholars of the humanities often fall into also, is to mistake words for reality itself.

    It's very ironic that you should say that, because post-structuralism, which is a broad field that includes the work of Judith Butler, strongly critiques the idea that words can ever be a the 'key' to 'reality' and a sufficient mediator between reality and abstract ideas. Indeed, it critiques all these absolute categories.

    Anyway, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that God is part of "reality itself": how would you describe him or suggest we come to know him, since you clearly reject the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysus the Aeropagite, Eriugena, and Nicolas of Cusa? Do modern definitions like Paul Tillich's "Ground of Being" do it any better?

    "

    Could this be why Medieval scholarship made so little progress for centuries?

    What makes you believe that "Medieval scholarship made so little progress for centuries"? By what standard are you measuring their "progress" or lack of it? In fact, medieval scholarship anticipated some issues that wouldn't resurface until the 19th and 20th centuries. I'm not saying they were all equally brilliant and far-sighted pioneers, but there are ebbs and flows in all philosophy all the time. Sometimes certain fields decline while others prosper, and then they switch. Medieval logic was highly developed and fell into a decline until the 19th century, whereas critiquing Aristotle's physics in the 17th century allowed us to make progress that wasn't achieved by Medieval scholastics. It all depends where you're looking.

    "

    Is there a lesson for the humanities today?

    What? That anti-intellectual attitudinizing on the part of poorly informed people often leads them to attack fields they know very little about?

  134. @Manatee wrote,

    "I'm guessing that as a (patent agent or technical advisor, I believe?) you don't get many opportunities to apply ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority, so you're getting it out of your system here?"

    Close but not exactly. My role in intellectual property is judicial, which means I am used to receiving deference and delivering the final word. (True.) I suppose I like to argue without the benefit of my normal authority because it is more sporting.

    @Nullifidian, I wrote,

    "Nicolas reflected how God is the union of opposites, so therefore God must also be the union of existence and nonexistence, since 'existence' and 'nonexistence' those are also opposite words!"

    I merely noted that Nicolas of Cusa foolishly used elaborate word games to arrive at a logical impossibly (simultaneous existence and non-existence). I did not take any position, but pointed out the glaring logical flow. And then you responded,

    "Anyway, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that God is part of "reality itself": how would you describe him or suggest we come to know him, since you clearly reject the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysus the Aeropagite, Eriugena, and Nicolas of Cusa?"

    At which point I realized I was engaging in a back-and-forth with a computer that had been cleverly designed to pass the Turing test. This is kind of a relief, since I had been worried how you would support yourself in the real world after leaving philosophy class behind and graduating.

    In case you are real, I hope you have a father who has something lined up for you, because memorizing faulty medieval logic while not even noticing the flaws doesn't normally bring reliable financial remuneration.

    Meanwhile, I will steadfastly refuse to consider Judith Butler on the merits because I am certain that she wrote the way she did in order to puff herself up before the easily impressed, rather than to be understood.

  135. @Manatee: Though, of course, sometimes it isn't the fallacy of composition, or even abandoning principles when it's demonstrated that they help the other guy (cf. Ken's previous post about a plaintiff-friendly law cutting both ways). Sometimes it really is that the principles were never any such thing, but were simply an excuse for something much less admirable. (And yes, it's very irritating when you do actually hold those principles to get lumped in with the mass of yahoos who used them as a fig leaf.)

    That's in part what I am talking about, because there is a contingent of folks who took the attitude of "it's unfortunate we have to support this seemingly harsh or unfair position, but a Greater Principle requires it" – and who then revealed that, really, they were totally on the up with the harsh or unfair position, but hey, it's much nicer-seeming to pretend you had no other ethical choice but to take it.

  136. GuestPoster says

    November 18, 2015 at 7:08 am

    This is quite fascinating, really. I think this conversation has hit ALL of the internet genetics so far discovered. We have somebody who made an incredibly poor assertion, using a non-primary-source link to a commentator to assert the factuality of it. Upon being called on this, the poster then asserted to be an expert in a parallel discipline, and to in fact be one of the top experts anywhere (with a paycheck to match, naturally). Said poster then proceeded to compellingly prove that no such expertise was present. Upon being alerted to this, said poster then proceeded to double down, being not just an expert but an authoritative expert, and a person who gets to decide what the correct answer is as a matter of course, despite having compellingly shown a total lack of knowledge on the subject. All the while, the poster very carefully avoided actually engaging in a discussion of any of the key issues at hand, each time diverting, complaining, or insulting a new path through them.

    In parallel, we have a logical argument being advanced (that technical writing is hard, especially if one intentionally refuses to bother to try and understand it), and the argument was assaulted by said poster on semantic grounds. Even better, the semantic argument was incorrect, since it IS a result of technical writing – the poster is misunderstanding 'technical' writing, which is quite simply defined as "any form of communication that exhibits one or more of the following characteristics: "(1) communicating about technical or specialized topics, such as computer applications, medical procedures, or environmental regulations; (2) communicating through technology, such as web pages, help files, or social media sites; or (3) providing instructions about how to do something, regardless of the task's technical nature" by those responsible for making such definitions and declarations – and the second half of definition (1) clearly fits here, as does all of (2), since the article is online. A point could be made that this is not TECHNOLOGICAL writing, as no technology was discussed, but that is not the point being made. Further semantic arguments included arguing something based on words which had opposite meanings, even while ignoring that the concepts COVERED by said words ALSO had opposite meanings.

    Best of all, midway through these arguments, the poster claimed to be an intentional troll, thus attempting, and failing, to hide the simple fact that the poster has far less knowledge than said poster wishes us to believe.

    Truly fascinating – we should co-author a paper on the phenomenon. Certainly the discovery of an internet troll lacking in intelligence or wit is hardly novel, but this one seems to have mutated to include most of the mimetic information found in such situations all at once – typically, one must examine several different comment threads to see all of these memes in play. This is especially interesting as it occurred in a dusty corner of the internet, and not someplace like 4chan or facebook. A manuscript should be acceptable for a moderate tier journal, I would think.

  137. @GuestPoster,

    Even if you copy-paste from Wikipedia, you are still supposed to have a citation. Your plagiarized text actually came from "Defining Technical Communication" by the Society for Technical Communication.

    And @Dan is quite correct by your own copy-pasted definition. Judith Butler's quote is not technical writing, and those who categorized it as such were way off.

  138. GuestPoster says

    November 18, 2015 at 7:37 pm

    @Bystander:

    Oh, goodness, my sincere apologies for forgetting to say who wrote the direct quote contained between quotation marks which you were able to easily place. Clearly you were entirely unable to figure out who said it, given that you reported who said it. My mistake has rendered the argument worthless!

    Also: are you choosing to argue that the writing was not on a specialized topic, thus qualifying for part (1), or that the online pdf was not in fact a pdf file found online, thus qualifying for part (2)? Good luck with that.

  139. "

    I merely noted that Nicolas of Cusa foolishly used elaborate word games to arrive at a logical impossibly (simultaneous existence and non-existence). I did not take any position, but pointed out the glaring logical flow.

    The point was that you accused Nicolas of Cusa of mixing up word games with "reality itself". I wanted you to realize that Nicolas thought that God was a part of "reality itself", and indeed the foundation of "reality itself" (Nicolas uses the term ratio essendi, which can be pretty accurately translated by the Tillichian term "ground of being"). So given that he thought God was "reality itself", he was struggling with a way of describing God that would not impinge in his maximal qualities. This is a problem that any theistic philosopher of religion must face, so either we can demand that theistic philosophers stop talking about God and impose a fiat atheism on all of them in the name of of "reality", or we have to admit that sometimes philosophers will have to use language that is abstruse to define the subjects of their investigation.

    You may not realize it, but by critiquing Nicolas of Cusa's quote on the basis of a "logical flow" that doesn't reflect "reality", you're treating logic as a property that transcends not only nature but the supernatural and thus applies to even God himself. That is not, to put it mildly, an uncontroversial proposition. There are many theories of logic, and few of them would go so far. Aside from theistic accounts where logic is bestowed upon humans by God and thus God preexists reason, there are non-realist accounts where logic becomes something to an extent that humans invented and use. If humans invented it, then God also pre-exists reason in these accounts (assuming God exists, of course). If you pointed out to Nicolas of Cusa that his statement was contradictory, I think the response would be the Latin version of, "Well, duh!" And I imagine that if you were called upon to defend the implicit claims you're relying on, your account of where logic comes from might turn out to be even more mystical than Nicolas of Cusa.

    In any case, this is all irrelevant, because the point was not to present "writing that Dan approves of", but to show that writing that appears difficult on the face of it can be found in philosophical works of any era, not just in modern academia.

    "

    This is kind of a relief, since I had been worried how you would support yourself in the real world after leaving philosophy class behind and graduating.

    In case you are real, I hope you have a father who has something lined up for you, because memorizing faulty medieval logic while not even noticing the flaws doesn't normally bring reliable financial remuneration.

    I can see you still haven't found out what it is I do for a living, even though I said so already. Otherwise, you might have inferred that I already had my degrees and known that these degrees would be in a completely different field. (I suppose it's possible that I could have gone for a double-major with philosophy at some point, but I didn't.) I haven't been writing academic prose, so you should at least be able to discover what I do for a living. I'll give you a hint: it's mentioned in my first post.

    "

    Meanwhile, I will steadfastly refuse to consider Judith Butler on the merits because I am certain that she wrote the way she did in order to puff herself up before the easily impressed, rather than to be understood.

    That's exactly why everyone has a problem with you. You see something you don't understand, and you assume that you don't understand it because it's content-free, giving no thought to the possibility that it might be clearer if you had relevant background information. You'll stick to your position and call everyone who understood the quote liars because it's an article of faith with you that there is nothing to it. And because you're so sure that there's nothing to it, you evade every substantive discussion of the quote that might prove you wrong. Instead, if you make a 'response', it's to attack the person for what you assume their motivation is and to say that someone else on the internet said it was bad, therefore it must be. This is not the way intellectually honest people behave.

  140. Nullifidian says

    November 19, 2015 at 6:23 pm

    As I was out shopping today, it dawned on me what this conversation is like: it's like a conversation with a creationist. They too 'know' the subject of their ire (namely, evolution) is all nonsense, that if I claim to accept it it's because I've been seduced by pseudoscientific propaganda with no real empirical or intellectual content, and they say that my only reason for accepting and defending the scientific validity of evolution is because I'm an atheist who doesn't want to be answerable to my Creator for my sins. And they won't bother to listen to or respond relevantly to a single objection or counterargument.

  141. @Nullifidian

    "

    As I was out shopping today, it dawned on me what this conversation is like: it's like a conversation with a creationist.

    Funny you should mention creationists; I was re-reading a Scott Alexander post that touched on debating creationists just today. I think he put his finger on something important:

    "

    http://squid314.livejournal.com/333353.html

    III. Because your ability to model each other is different

    All your life you've probably been exposed to straw man versions of creationists. If there is a creationist literature, you have not read it and probably have no idea what it says. If creationists have been coming up with debating points in their dark lairs for decades, you have not heard any of them. You are still boggling at the fact that you are meeting an actual creationist, something that seems only slightly less fantastic than having Hitler rise from his grave and start shambling towards you.

    On the other hand, if the creationist has ever turned on a TV, she knows exactly what the state of the non-creationist world is. She knows what arguments they use, she knows what culture they have been brought up in. She's probably argued with hundreds, maybe thousands of evolutionists before. She knows exactly what debating points they use.

    You have no expectations beyond that she is going to shout "Duurrrrr, the Bible says it so it must be true!" When she starts talking about the amino-acid structure of the bacterial flagellum, you are totally confused and discombobulated and your most likely response is "You people always just say if the Bible says it it must be true! But that's wrong!" because you had been waiting to say that line to the first creationist you met and you actually don't know anything about flagella.

    The entire post is worth reading; it very much encapsulates a lot of the Popehat-commentariat-experience.

  142. "

    What is the "War on Christmas" but a sort of safe-space argument, an assertion that we have a right to be congratulated for our religious beliefs by corporate America even out in public spaces?

    So totally mischaracterized that you lost all credibility. You were on a roll (sort of) up to that point, but then you jumped the shark. I hope you fare better in court with these vacuous arguments, little guy. Meanwhile, take your meds.

  143. @G Joubert
    "This is a Christian country!" looks very like a safe-space argument to me. Did I not see the shark again?

  144. Protest Manager says

    November 23, 2015 at 12:25 am

    "Pillowfort represents something that conservatives used to support in other circumstances: a private club, run by its own rules, with admission limited as its members see fit."

    When Conservatives are allowed to have private clubs, I'll be in favor of lefties getting their own, too.

    But since the lefties won't let us have ours, I can't see any reason to let them have theirs.

  145. Protest Manager,

    CPAC hasn't been cancelled. The National Review is still getting paid for the dubious privilege of being stuck in the middle of the ocean with its columnists. Looking around, I'm not seeing any sudden dearth of conservative organizations and events, so can you explain precisely how "lefties" have suspended conservatives' right to freedom of association?

  146. "

    "What is the "War on Christmas" but a sort of safe-space argument, an assertion that we have a right to be congratulated for our religious beliefs by corporate America even out in public spaces?"

    Except that corporate America does celebrate Christmas, balls out, morning to night for two whole months.

    That just seems like a distinction because the "so they have to do it how I like" is silent.

  147. @Clark —

    "

    I think he put his finger on something important:

    Yes. And it's that if an ideologue spends an entire post doing exactly what he's accusing others of doing, people who are blinded by the same ideological bias won't notice.

    "

    it very much encapsulates a lot of the Popehat-commentariat-experience.

    No argument here.

    FULL DISCLOSURE: When a creationist starts talking about the amino-acid structure of the bacterial flagellum, my most likely response is, "How on G-d's green earth does that prove creationism or disprove evolution?"

    Seems more on-point.

Trackbacks

  1. […] Safe Spaces as a Shield, Save Spaces as a Sword. Although Ken let's his blinders get in the way and doesn't realize that those of us undesirable types aren't saying that safe spaces shouldn't exist, but rather that we're mocking people for needing one. […]

  2. […] protected from ideas they don't like and from ideas they do like being challenged. And, as Ken at Popehat points out, they want that safe space forcefully extended […]

  3. […] Several writers have written intelligently and thoughtfully about the dire and ironic implications of 21st century activists using (1) community membership to (2) create areas of censorship which (3) silence others from speaking. Among them are Ken White over at Popehat: […]

  4. […] freedom of association to organize themselves into mutually supporting communities," Ken White wrote prior to this controversy. "But not everyone imagines ‘safe spaces’ like that. Some use the concept of ‘safe […]

  5. […] the situation, I would recommend (sorted by brevity) this video, reading Popehat's two posts here and here, Robby Soave at Reason, Jonathan Chait in NY Magazine, and for a longer piece, Connor […]

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