> In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.
> But do we really want every intellectual conversation to be scrupulously cleansed of any whiff of controversy?
The reactionaries on the side I lean to have mostly settled down, but the reactionaries to the reactionaries are still primed to explode.
One can't even gently suggest that a person's words, probably said with good intentions, support an -ism or -phobia without getting a tirade about censorship in response, and an accusation of being a "social justice warrior."
Such tirades are a necessary correction to the insanity that "social justice" has become. Once the influence of these so -called warriors declines then hopefully the discourse will settle down.
On my side, it calmed down because people criticized call-out culture.[1] How does one criticize reflexive fury toward social justice activism without being lumped in with the "warriors"?
> Such tirades are a necessary correction to the insanity that "social justice" has become. Once the influence of these so -called warriors declines then hopefully the discourse will settle down.
Well put. I think the only thing that will curb their ambitions to become the thought/speech/culture dictators of the world will to use all of their own tactics against them, in spades. They might not be so eager to destroy the lives and careers of others if it incurs the risk of having their own lives and careers destroyed.
Thing is, accusation of some -ism or -phobia can easily blow up. You may not have that intention in mind, but in the age of social media, such things can be very hard to contain, especially once the Internet mob forms. And consequences can be pretty severe (say, losing one's job). So, while any particular interaction might not involve this directly, it's always something that's part of the picture.
It's kind of ironic to write participation in public discourse is growing so perilous in one of the most prominent papers on the planet. She apparently does not feel particularly stifled.
The Millennials are not the ones rigging DNC elections. The Millennials are not the ones running the institutions passing absurd sensitivity requirements. It is unfair to make this a generation argument when in reality its much deeper. What it ultimately boils down to is to what degree an individual deems it appropriate to silence dissenting points of view. To some the answer is none and to others, legitimizing an opposing view is interpreted as a form of oppression in and of itself. Age doesn't appear to have much of a correlation with ones stance on that spectrum.
The media was given the objective of wrecking Sanders' campaign. Our theoretically independent media is, in practice, the propaganda mouthpiece of the powers-that-be in the Democratic Party.
"In Australia, where I spoke, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to do or say anything likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate,” providing alarming latitude in the restriction of free speech."
I really find it shocking that there are laws regarding supposed hate speech with such subjective terms as "likely to offend".
As a registered democrat, this author really captured my feelings about the left. It used to make so much sense, let everyone do what they want, that's being liberal. Now the radical minority is getting louder and more persuasive to younger generations as they dress up these ideas in comedy and media.
The author seems to be pulling things out of context in bad faith. It is unlawful, though not a criminal offense, in Australia to publicly say things likely to offend people of a different race, based on their racial group, provided the statements are not meant "(a) in the performance, exhibition or distribution of an artistic work; or (b) in the course of any statement, publication, discussion or debate made or held for any genuine academic, artistic or scientific purpose or any other genuine purpose in the public interest; or (c) in making or publishing: (i) a fair and accurate report of any event or matter of public interest; or (ii) a fair comment on any event or matter of public interest if the comment is an expression of a genuine belief held by the person making the comment." (as explained in 18D).
I disagree, the law does provide these exceptions but I (and presumably the author) don't find these exceptions to be comprehensive enough to render the unqualified statement of the author "out of context".
How is a person supposed to prove that their views are "fair and accurate" or a "fair comment" and a "genuine belief"? These are highly subjective, and none of them helped Andrew Bolt, a reporter who was sued under these laws.
Note that you won't even grant that the author is quoting the law in good faith. How is a person supposed to show that their "racist" views are held in good faith?
How so? Some of the time it will naturally arise by combining an adjective with a noun. I mean, there really are people out there communicating their hate for other people.
And who gets to be the judge of what's offensive anyway? If I were the judge, all kinds of speech would be illegal because I find it offensive: anyone saying anything good about Windows 10 or iPhones, for instance, would be locked up, because that offends me! :-) I had a coworker years ago who I overheard talking to another coworker, and he claimed that he was "offended" by gay marriage and any kind of obvious expression of homosexuality. I, personally, was extremely offended at having to look at him, because he was so fat.
While I agree with you that such a law is poorly constructed and should be fixed, that it exists is not worrying to me at all.
Until recently, it was legal in many places to rape your wife. It is still currently legal to release pollution into the atmosphere without paying for its ecological costs. There are a lot of bad laws on the books, and even more that were on the books 50 years ago. And we're ok. We figured it out.
If thousands of people start getting put in jail for offending folks, I'll get a little more worried. And we'll fix it.
What bothers me is that you are spending energy worrying about a law that may, theoretically, be misused in the future when there are people in prison right now because of bad laws that have been on the books for a long time.
You're lucky that you are in such a comfortable position that you can worry about hypothetical future prosecutions, but I might suggest using that privilege to help people who are already in the position that concerns you.
The reason why people worry about these laws is because of the trajectory.
Historically, freedom of speech was pretty much not a thing, and laws made all kinds of offensive speech (usually offensive to those in power) illegal.
For a while, we had a strong trend of getting rid of such laws and getting more free speech. Freedom of speech, including all kinds of offensive speech, was a key tenet of humanism, and associated social and political advances.
But now the trend is in the other direction. As time goes by, our societies acquire more laws regulating speech, compared to where they were even a few decades ago.
Many of the "it's bad right now" problems were started because at some point in the past someone was trying to solve a different "it's bad right now" problem without minding the consequences. Just to give an example, a "tough on crime" crackdown back in 90s to deal with a genuine crime wave, resulting in mass incarceration, especially of non-whites.
The 18C provision of the Australian Racial Discrimination Act he mentions was brought in in 1995, a little early for the "millennials" he wants to decry. Nor does someone walking out of a speech strike me as even tangentially linked to censorship--it seems quite the opposite, yielding a space to someone else because you don't want to either be there silently or interrupt and argue. Yeah, maybe the left would be better off if the young had a more nuanced view of privilege and controversy, but we'd sure as hell be better off if the older generation could contain themselves when making any criticism and stick to reasonable, evidence-based discourse, not a condescending string of random criticisms towards them dang kids.
What's wrong with older, more experienced people expressing an opinion about the politics and behavior of younger, inexperienced people. Seems like a reversal of common sense to assert that elders have nothing to say to or about the generations that come after them.
The parent may have been suggesting a spectrum instead. Tools like that found at politicalcompass.org can take us away from the currently oversimplified left-right notion of politics, while still being easy to understand.
Yep, the left will be just fine. It's important to understand the long game here-- I get the feeling that most commentators/people completely miss the long game view of the current identity politics crowd, so I'm going to spell it out.
A bunch of crazies getting upset about the naming of various identities actually serves the cultural purpose of advancing various marginalized groups away from alienation a bit. The best example of this is how the blacks were able to move the name for their people away from outright epithets to progressively more acceptable alternatives. If a name for a people has a heavily pejorative meaning, changing that name to something else is for the better, and it's very hard for that to happen without any organized interference in the language.
Sensitivity to ultimate meaning and taking offense at progressively more subtle and perhaps eventually illusory meanings is essential to making this organized effort. It's also why the SJW crowd is perpetually agitated-- they are looking for subtleties which are incongruous with neutrality/positivity of meaning. Making new terms is a good tactic. It's important to understand that newly created terms are relatively blank slates as far as their associative baggage goes, for a time at least-- rehabilitation of a word such as "gay" is pretty tough, but once in a while it can happen in a generation.
Sure, the social justice crowd leaves their shrill stink upon ever newly generated name/gender/whatever, but the fact of the matter is that ten years from now we'll be glad that we can acknowledge people without having to to use a term which unintentionally puts them down. We wouldn't want to be calling disabled people "retarded", would we? Making that cultural change took time, but we're better off for it. Of course, there weren't SJWs screaming about that change being mandatory, but whatever, it was a change for the better. Maybe the screaming makes it go faster. Probably not, but it's what we get.
There is an important caveat. The idea of terminology changes being fueled by sensitivity to meaning is limited by the reality of the constructs whose name is being changed or created. This is best illustrated by a few of the more out-there gender constructs that are proposed as necessary to describe certain configurations of human sexuality. Does "verangender" (defined as a gender that seems to shift/change the moment it is identified according to http://genderfluidsupport.tumblr.com/gender/) actually exist as a gender construct that we can characterize, understand, and confirm objectively? Or is it an ill-defined illusion generated by over-abstraction of the subtle elements of previously confirmed constructs? I would say that by the end of this push for "social justice" (estimate: winding down by mid 2018) the exhaustive list of items to be outraged about and new terms to keep track of will be organically culled down to the identities which are "real". By "real" I mean coherently and consistently characterized and understood traits which correspond to a real group of people, rather than by mis-identification of overly abstract rubrics. Don't try bringing up this idea to an SJW, as they find the potential that people could mis-identify themselves based off of exposure to third party ideas as invalidating, insensitive, horrendous, and offensive.
I'm going to say that for the most part, the SJW crowd doesn't even understand this game plan or their part in it. They don't get the game plan; they're the pawns. They're addicted to self righteousness, and they have no ability to make their case logically to the unconvinced. They are only able to move forward one square, or attack the limited issues that are within their range. This is why they end up wasting so much energy protesting meanin...
Yes, but there's a difference between showing offense, writing about it, boycotting, etc. and making it illegal, or in the terms of a college/university setting censoring.
I find it amusing how much talk goes into saying how much a given setting has diversity, or accepts diversity while trying to stifle speech, debate and interaction. Maybe I'm just too old now, but it clearly doesn't seem right. And while I really dislike the use of language to insight violence, riots or outright racist propaganda (that includes both the KKK and BLM in my mind), I wouldn't want to see the freedom of speech be limited in such ways. For similar reasons, I find the curbing of firearms rights alarming as well.
It's this obviously poor behavior and lack of self awareness on the part of some progressives that makes me think they aren't moving us in the right direction. Rather, they're creating more division by turning society into a "zoo of diversity" where each enclosed group is sheltered from the ideas of others and judged by different standards.
SJWs are obsessed with identity, which strikes me as being narcissistic. As you describe, they define new terms like "gender fluid" in order to give people new categories to define themselves by.
But if anything should be fluid, it's identity itself. Identity fluidity acknowledges that people can (and should) change as they are continually exposed to more information. It rejects the notion of a static identity defined by things like race, religion and gender, in favor of a fluid identity based on character and knowledge.
According to SJWs, identity is ego-based and needs to be protected from outside influence. Their model only creates a more divisive society where people express their fragility by being easy offended, rather than eschewing their current sense of self in favor of mental growth.
I like how you fairly characterized (and seem to be on board with) the endgame of progressive politics while completely and utterly mischaracterizing the majority of the people involved, and strongly implied there exists, but never proving the existence of, a high level conspiracy to create an inclusive culture.
I'd dispute that my posting was an ideological rant, given the depth and subtlety of my arguments as well as the ultimate admission that the demographic in question is useful and essential... it's also unarguable that SJWs are not shrill in opposition. I guess "stink" was too strong of a word choice for a word meant to convey pejorative association... but it sure reads as better copy.
"Better copy", a.k.a. sharp rhetoric, is what we're hoping to avoid. I understand the impulse, but experience has taught us that thoughtful reflection doesn't mix well with it. The effects are subtle. It isn't just that it tends to produce angry responses; it's that it makes the ecosystem more acidic, so fewer of the rarer plants can thrive.
dang, I know you always are acting in good faith but I really question whether that is true.
Killing a post with one word (which isn't on any ban list on any website I know of) that crossed the line is one where more plants thrive, especially given the effort and thought that went into that post?
I'm not sure what you mean by "killing a post with one word", but (a) users flagged that post (that's what "[flagged]" means), and (b) the problem with it ran all the way through it. I just quoted a sample.
>It was a monologue about the right to exploit the stories of “others”, simply because it is useful for one’s story.
I thought the talk was about fiction, which by definition is made-up stories, so how could they exploit the stories of others? Stories of other people would be non-fiction. I'm guessing the quotes around "others" is the key to the mystery here.
"Others" in this context refers to your out-group. For example, if I am a straight white male, then it is kosher for me to write a fictional story about fictional straight white males because they are part of my group.
But if I try writing about a fictional gay black women, then I am exploiting the groups of gays, blacks, and women.
> exploiting the groups of gays, blacks, and women
Ok, that I can follow (I don't really agree with it). But what she said was "exploit the stories" of your out-group. Since the work is fiction it's nobody's story. Not my group's nor my out-group's. I guess the claim is your "group" retains the exclusive right to produce works of art that feature a fictional representation of someone or something related to your group.
The whole "cultural appropriation" thing is, essentially, an assertion that there's some kind of implicit intellectual property like relationship that one has with one's culture and its collective experiences. So when you need to "use" a culture that's "not yours", you have to ask for permission, and conform to the rules that the other party frames their grant of such around.
That opinion piece in The Guardian was quite a read - a real view into how some progressives think. It was also mercilessly slammed in the comments section, which gives me hope that the dogmatic excesses of the left will not prevail.
Will the New York Times survive Baby Boomer hot takes?
The opinion piece is dripping with hypocrisy. If Yassmin Abdel-Magied wants to walk out of the author's speech and go blog about her discomfort, so what? That's a form of speech too, and we shouldn't be trying to discourage it.
I defend the author's right to say all this, but the shallow "Millenials should talk less and smile more" angle really doesn't speak to me.
What a useless comment. I personally think that self absorbed, histrionic people come in all ages.
Just look at the frequency of the use of the personal pronoun in that article (the article written by the person who walked out). It's "I", "I", "me" over and over.
The self-absorption displayed in that piece is a symptom of the success of the middle class in the 20th century. To put it bluntly, some people have become weak. Millennials cannot shoulder all the blame, either - it is also a failure of the people and institutions that raised them.
Well, the left sure won't survive millennials in the UK. The parties on that side of the political spectrum seem to be really bad at picking good leaders and unable to win popular support for a pretty long time...
Oh, it's about the social justice thing. In which case, it probably will. Social justice warriors are an issue, but there's still a decent part of the left who utterly hate them and their obsession with 'identity politics', and I can easily see a more libertarian left party or group getting popular in the near future.
This is about the left, not about millennials. In the past it was the right condemning behaviors, but now it's the left. The left has taken on the motto of "intolerance for intolerance"; what that really means though is, if I don't agree with it it shouldn't be allowed. The left aren't advocating for free speech, but for specifically allowed speech. And that's more dangerous than the alleged bigotry they think they're stopping.
This is like saying that the right wants a white-only country. Sure, some do, but not most. Very few on the left are against free speech.
Most of the people I've seen who make this argument don't seem to differentiate between "I don't want certain speech in my living quarters" or "I don't want certain speech in this specific course" from "I don't think this speech has any place in society".
Free speech doesn't mean you get to say whatever you want wherever you want. It means you have a right to say it somewhere. And I have a right to have conversations that exclude you.
66 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 98.7 ms ] thread> In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.
> But do we really want every intellectual conversation to be scrupulously cleansed of any whiff of controversy?
One can't even gently suggest that a person's words, probably said with good intentions, support an -ism or -phobia without getting a tirade about censorship in response, and an accusation of being a "social justice warrior."
[1] For example: http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/05/call-out-accountability/
Well put. I think the only thing that will curb their ambitions to become the thought/speech/culture dictators of the world will to use all of their own tactics against them, in spades. They might not be so eager to destroy the lives and careers of others if it incurs the risk of having their own lives and careers destroyed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wikileaks-dnc-bernie-san...
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/30/10_ways_the_democratic_prima...
I really find it shocking that there are laws regarding supposed hate speech with such subjective terms as "likely to offend".
As a registered democrat, this author really captured my feelings about the left. It used to make so much sense, let everyone do what they want, that's being liberal. Now the radical minority is getting louder and more persuasive to younger generations as they dress up these ideas in comedy and media.
Generally, that phrasing would describe civil wrongs. Criminal law isn't the whole of the law.
How is a person supposed to prove that their views are "fair and accurate" or a "fair comment" and a "genuine belief"? These are highly subjective, and none of them helped Andrew Bolt, a reporter who was sued under these laws.
Note that you won't even grant that the author is quoting the law in good faith. How is a person supposed to show that their "racist" views are held in good faith?
As a legal concept it is clearly more fraught.
So how do you enforce such a vague law anyway?
I find it shocking that you're shocked that hate speech is being defined exactly as its proponents meant it to be.
Until recently, it was legal in many places to rape your wife. It is still currently legal to release pollution into the atmosphere without paying for its ecological costs. There are a lot of bad laws on the books, and even more that were on the books 50 years ago. And we're ok. We figured it out.
If thousands of people start getting put in jail for offending folks, I'll get a little more worried. And we'll fix it.
What bothers me is that you are spending energy worrying about a law that may, theoretically, be misused in the future when there are people in prison right now because of bad laws that have been on the books for a long time.
You're lucky that you are in such a comfortable position that you can worry about hypothetical future prosecutions, but I might suggest using that privilege to help people who are already in the position that concerns you.
Historically, freedom of speech was pretty much not a thing, and laws made all kinds of offensive speech (usually offensive to those in power) illegal.
For a while, we had a strong trend of getting rid of such laws and getting more free speech. Freedom of speech, including all kinds of offensive speech, was a key tenet of humanism, and associated social and political advances.
But now the trend is in the other direction. As time goes by, our societies acquire more laws regulating speech, compared to where they were even a few decades ago.
The author is a woman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left
Not sure what direction it will take, it would surprise me to see the Newest Left revive Basic Income and other dormant redistribution ideas.
A bunch of crazies getting upset about the naming of various identities actually serves the cultural purpose of advancing various marginalized groups away from alienation a bit. The best example of this is how the blacks were able to move the name for their people away from outright epithets to progressively more acceptable alternatives. If a name for a people has a heavily pejorative meaning, changing that name to something else is for the better, and it's very hard for that to happen without any organized interference in the language.
Sensitivity to ultimate meaning and taking offense at progressively more subtle and perhaps eventually illusory meanings is essential to making this organized effort. It's also why the SJW crowd is perpetually agitated-- they are looking for subtleties which are incongruous with neutrality/positivity of meaning. Making new terms is a good tactic. It's important to understand that newly created terms are relatively blank slates as far as their associative baggage goes, for a time at least-- rehabilitation of a word such as "gay" is pretty tough, but once in a while it can happen in a generation.
Sure, the social justice crowd leaves their shrill stink upon ever newly generated name/gender/whatever, but the fact of the matter is that ten years from now we'll be glad that we can acknowledge people without having to to use a term which unintentionally puts them down. We wouldn't want to be calling disabled people "retarded", would we? Making that cultural change took time, but we're better off for it. Of course, there weren't SJWs screaming about that change being mandatory, but whatever, it was a change for the better. Maybe the screaming makes it go faster. Probably not, but it's what we get.
There is an important caveat. The idea of terminology changes being fueled by sensitivity to meaning is limited by the reality of the constructs whose name is being changed or created. This is best illustrated by a few of the more out-there gender constructs that are proposed as necessary to describe certain configurations of human sexuality. Does "verangender" (defined as a gender that seems to shift/change the moment it is identified according to http://genderfluidsupport.tumblr.com/gender/) actually exist as a gender construct that we can characterize, understand, and confirm objectively? Or is it an ill-defined illusion generated by over-abstraction of the subtle elements of previously confirmed constructs? I would say that by the end of this push for "social justice" (estimate: winding down by mid 2018) the exhaustive list of items to be outraged about and new terms to keep track of will be organically culled down to the identities which are "real". By "real" I mean coherently and consistently characterized and understood traits which correspond to a real group of people, rather than by mis-identification of overly abstract rubrics. Don't try bringing up this idea to an SJW, as they find the potential that people could mis-identify themselves based off of exposure to third party ideas as invalidating, insensitive, horrendous, and offensive.
I'm going to say that for the most part, the SJW crowd doesn't even understand this game plan or their part in it. They don't get the game plan; they're the pawns. They're addicted to self righteousness, and they have no ability to make their case logically to the unconvinced. They are only able to move forward one square, or attack the limited issues that are within their range. This is why they end up wasting so much energy protesting meanin...
I find it amusing how much talk goes into saying how much a given setting has diversity, or accepts diversity while trying to stifle speech, debate and interaction. Maybe I'm just too old now, but it clearly doesn't seem right. And while I really dislike the use of language to insight violence, riots or outright racist propaganda (that includes both the KKK and BLM in my mind), I wouldn't want to see the freedom of speech be limited in such ways. For similar reasons, I find the curbing of firearms rights alarming as well.
But if anything should be fluid, it's identity itself. Identity fluidity acknowledges that people can (and should) change as they are continually exposed to more information. It rejects the notion of a static identity defined by things like race, religion and gender, in favor of a fluid identity based on character and knowledge.
According to SJWs, identity is ego-based and needs to be protected from outside influence. Their model only creates a more divisive society where people express their fragility by being easy offended, rather than eschewing their current sense of self in favor of mental growth.
Please don't post ideological rants to Hacker News. We're going for civil, substantive discourse here, and these things aren't compatible.
Killing a post with one word (which isn't on any ban list on any website I know of) that crossed the line is one where more plants thrive, especially given the effort and thought that went into that post?
>It was a monologue about the right to exploit the stories of “others”, simply because it is useful for one’s story.
I thought the talk was about fiction, which by definition is made-up stories, so how could they exploit the stories of others? Stories of other people would be non-fiction. I'm guessing the quotes around "others" is the key to the mystery here.
But if I try writing about a fictional gay black women, then I am exploiting the groups of gays, blacks, and women.
Ok, that I can follow (I don't really agree with it). But what she said was "exploit the stories" of your out-group. Since the work is fiction it's nobody's story. Not my group's nor my out-group's. I guess the claim is your "group" retains the exclusive right to produce works of art that feature a fictional representation of someone or something related to your group.
The opinion piece is dripping with hypocrisy. If Yassmin Abdel-Magied wants to walk out of the author's speech and go blog about her discomfort, so what? That's a form of speech too, and we shouldn't be trying to discourage it.
I defend the author's right to say all this, but the shallow "Millenials should talk less and smile more" angle really doesn't speak to me.
You cannot control events that happen to you, but you can control how you react to them.
I sadly clicked through to the article where the millennial walked out of the talk. What a histrionic, self-absorbed rant that was.
Just look at the frequency of the use of the personal pronoun in that article (the article written by the person who walked out). It's "I", "I", "me" over and over.
I chose to stop reading after this:
It was a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension.
If I was a more motivated prankster I'd love to send this person a mirror.
Oh, it's about the social justice thing. In which case, it probably will. Social justice warriors are an issue, but there's still a decent part of the left who utterly hate them and their obsession with 'identity politics', and I can easily see a more libertarian left party or group getting popular in the near future.
Most of the people I've seen who make this argument don't seem to differentiate between "I don't want certain speech in my living quarters" or "I don't want certain speech in this specific course" from "I don't think this speech has any place in society".
Free speech doesn't mean you get to say whatever you want wherever you want. It means you have a right to say it somewhere. And I have a right to have conversations that exclude you.