Are We Becoming Too Sensitive

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/#disqus_thread

Read this interesting article on sensitive American college campuses.

Freedom of speech shouldn't be compromised for the sake of everyone's comfort.

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Even joking about microaggressions can be seen as an aggression, warranting punishment. Last fall, Omar Mahmood, a student at the University of Michigan, wrote a satirical column for a conservative student publication, The Michigan Review, poking fun at what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive microaggressions in just about anything. Mahmood was also employed at the campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily. The Daily’s editors said that the way Mahmood had “satirically mocked the experiences of fellow Daily contributors and minority communities on campus … created a conflict of interest.” The Dailyterminated Mahmood after he described the incident to two Web sites, The College Fix and The Daily Caller. A group of women later vandalized Mahmood’s doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.” When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.

it's a plague lately. since becoming fb friends recently with a few "social justice"-minded people, my whole newsfeed is full of emptyheaded internet sjw bullshit. it gives genuine social causes a bad name.

people need to shut the fuck up, step back and understand how to approach conflicting opinions productively.

one of the problems of living in the internet age is that every cunt with an opinion feels a need to express it loudly and proclaim it as the way. like, fewer and fewer people understand that it is possible for them to be wrong, and how to structure their thought around that distinct possibility. fools' certainty.

I've always been for the happy middle ground. I'm turned off by hyper-sensitivity almost as much as I am by blatant bigotry, if that makes any sense.

yes/no/maybe

Some of the article I can agree with (it was posted in a different thread a few days ago, was it you who posted it Danny? Good read regardless), some of it I disagree with.

I mean the stuff about asking someone where they were born - yeah it's a pain in the ass and also somewhat offensive to those kids who don't happen to look "'murican". So I understand that. While the authors don't specifically call that out as a bullshit "microaggression" the lead seems to indicate they might think of it as one. And while obviously fortune-telling should not be one's sole guideline in what to say or do, it doesn't hurt to anticipate that wearing a shirt that depicts Adolf HItler assfucking your mom might cause some adverse reactions.

THe other stuff though , some of the examples they give are fucking ridiculous. A prof should say this at the beginning of every course - "life is a trigger warning, if you don't like that, quit now".

The delusional arrogance of thinking that reposting a meme or using a Twitter hashtag is somehow going to end police brutality & discrimination is what bothers me the most about this wave of millenial minimal-effort armchair activism. There are plenty of tangible things that can be done to make a difference in this world and social media screeds & public shaming are not among them.

^ exactly. it's ironic that discussing social justice on social media is an utterly useless circlejerk.

get out into the real world and talk to people and do things, if you want change.

Raising awareness of issues is a valuable function of social media, but imagining that by itself is enough to create change is of course idiotic.

  On 8/18/2015 at 6:22 AM, chenGOD said:

"life is a trigger warning, if you don't like that, quit now".

That about sums it up

  On 8/18/2015 at 6:31 AM, chenGOD said:

Raising awareness of issues is a valuable function of social media, but imagining that by itself is enough to create change is of course idiotic.

yeah but everyone is broadly aware of the oldest and most entrenched social issues like racism, sexism, etc. what is posting a status update about your chauvinist barista taking 2 extra mins to make your coffee in the morning because he secretly hates your vagina going to contribute to the discourse?

I do agree with you about specific causes though, like what Humans Of New York is doing lately in Pakistan. HONY generally has been a rare example of social media being capable of doing right.

  On 8/18/2015 at 6:07 AM, usagi said:

people need to shut the fuck up, step back and understand how to approach conflicting opinions productively.

one of the problems of living in the internet age is that every cunt with an opinion feels a need to express it loudly and proclaim it as the way. like, fewer and fewer people understand that it is possible for them to be wrong, and how to structure their thought around that distinct possibility. fools' certainty.

Had to lol a bit at how these two sentences are right next to each other

yeah they don't really conflict if you look past the (admittedly) strong language, m9.

I'm just tired of internet bs. I should quit Facebook. for the fifth or sixth time.

  On 8/18/2015 at 6:41 AM, usagi said:

 

  On 8/18/2015 at 6:31 AM, chenGOD said:

Raising awareness of issues is a valuable function of social media, but imagining that by itself is enough to create change is of course idiotic.

 

yeah but everyone is broadly aware of the oldest and most entrenched social issues like racism, sexism, etc. what is posting a status update about your chauvinist barista taking 2 extra mins to make your coffee in the morning because he secretly hates your vagina going to contribute to the discourse?

 

I do agree with you about specific causes though, like what Humans Of New York is doing lately in Pakistan. HONY generally has been a rare example of social media being capable of doing right.

 

Yeah sure some of the stuff that gets posted is more about the person posting it than the overarching issue behind it, but sadly, there are still many people who don't get what institutionalized racism/sexism is really about. Just read the comments section on a wall street journal or even new york times article - there are some truly delusional people out there.

Well, if those bigots see enough #BlackLivesMatter in their feeds they'll come around.

  On 8/18/2015 at 7:40 AM, autopilot said:

Well, if those bigots see enough #BlackLivesMatter in their feeds they'll come around.

Would it be worth it if even one of them came around? What if there was a national shift in attitudes toward race relations? What if the #blacklivesmatter hashtag movement affects electoral politics? (I don't know enough about Sanders' policies yet to have an opinion about him, too busy trying to figure out who the fuck I'm going to vote for up here out of our 4 clowns upstanding politicians standing for office)

Like it or not, social media is here to stay - policy makers use it to communicate, opinion-making happens, it can definitely alter the public discourse.

I fully agree about the worst of the SJWs (although some of them can be highly entertaining), but I also believe that social media can play an important role in how we govern our societies (i.e. how we govern ourselves).

I'm all for improving my own relations with other races. The concept of microaggressions was pretty valuable to me in assessing how racism shapes my assumptions, feelings, and associations, and how that must affect people of lesser privileges. A better word I found for privilege is just "luxury." Being white is luxurious, while being black means you have to deal with racist shit every day - people avoiding you on the streets, people not knowing if you know that they're thinking about your race as they walk by you or talk to you, the good Samaritans who wish they could better heal the racial divide, people speaking out for you, but not really to you, and on and on. Not to mention more blatantly racist encounters - grocery clerks holding their breath around you, constant media portrayals of your people being killed for nothing, etc. etc.

I'll give it to SJWs - they really pissed me off enough to get me thinking about why I was so pissed off at them - and I did come to realize that racism was affecting me - as in... black lives do matter and there's something wrong with how minorities are perceived in our country (I'm USA). They're not considered equals in a broad sense. SJWs still piss me off, and I actually avoid social media - especially Facebook - these days, because my feed is just saturated in people writing stupid shit about racism over and over and over. I don't want to live in a bubble away from social change, but I don't want my brain saturated with la révolution either.

  On 8/18/2015 at 9:54 AM, D1Beard said:

I'm all for improving my own relations with other races. The concept of microaggressions was pretty valuable to me in assessing how racism shapes my assumptions, feelings, and associations, and how that must affect people of lesser privileges. A better word I found for privilege is just "luxury." Being white is luxurious, while being black means you have to deal with racist shit every day - people avoiding you on the streets, people not knowing if you know that they're thinking about your race as they walk by you or talk to you, the good Samaritans who wish they could better heal the racial divide, people speaking out for you, but not really to you, and on and on. Not to mention more blatantly racist encounters - grocery clerks holding their breath around you, constant media portrayals of your people being killed for nothing, etc. etc.

 

I'll give it to SJWs - they really pissed me off enough to get me thinking about why I was so pissed off at them - and I did come to realize that racism was affecting me - as in... black lives do matter and there's something wrong with how minorities are perceived in our country (I'm USA). They're not considered equals in a broad sense. SJWs still piss me off, and I actually avoid social media - especially Facebook - these days, because my feed is just saturated in people writing stupid shit about racism over and over and over. I don't want to live in a bubble away from social change, but I don't want my brain saturated with la révolution either.

Nicely written - and I agree with your last sentence as well - got to get your info from a diverse source.

  On 8/18/2015 at 10:14 AM, Mesh Gear Fox said:

 

2) people have always been asking "are we becoming too sensitive?". i think the internet has amplified things for sure, but this is hardly a new sentiment or idea. i think as a whole the world has never been sensitive enough, there's still casual discrimination on a daily basis that many people have to go through, so i think that alone makes this whole question kind of insensitive within itself. i get what the OP is saying in the context though so i'm not upset at them or anything, which leads me to the next bit

 

This is different from the Political Correctness back in the day. I mean, law students asking profs not to teach rape law? Or finding a student guilty of racial harassment because he was reading the book "Notre Dame vs. the Klan" (which is a book that "honored student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan when it marched on Notre Dame in 1924"). Yeah sure the admins apologized to the student, but it took them months to get around to it. Or claiming that a professor removing the upper case "I" from indigenous "was an insult to the student and her ideology..."

I mean for fuck's sake - that goes well beyond the political correctness of not calling your office colleague a fat fuck because he is one, or playing grab-ass with the hot secretary.

No.

I don't see anyone crying in the streets and really feeling the stuff that matters. More just online outrage at any given thing because folks are idiots. There is just more exposure now. I think if people were more sensitive there would be more empathy and understanding. Are we more cynical than ever? I think yes.

Man that article is kind of a mess. A lot of the parallels to psychology are hamfisted and unneeded.... that being said, CBT is great, but it should really be done with the patient's consent.

I don't mind the idea of people who have suffered abuse being forewarned on content of media to avoid it, but as the article points out, it's moved more the point where content is outright banned for all students regardless of mental health. It's nuts and only makes us dumber as a people. If a book or speaker or film is homophobic, racist, transphobic or whatever, colleges and universities are exactly the places to let those thoughts be known and talk about it, because each side is going to learn something from it if we listen and learn. Fuck safe spaces, feminisn, liberalism, civil rights etc were all considered considered dangerous and scary at some point (Some people still do think that and would happily bar them from academic institutions too!).

As for social media, the Internet as a whole is just hated communities of thought. Don't like someone's opinion? Just block em and forget it. Is a website known for being used by people with a particular political leaning? Why go there if you don't like that? We all do it, and it's not healthy for anyone. Just like academia, the only we can progress as a people is to understand each other and discuss what we think, and is exactly why the Internet is shit for social change, this is a well studied thing. It amazes me that SJWs point to sociology observations of privilege, yet think 140 char posts or Tumblr blogs are going to change society. It's probably why outrage and public shaming culture is so rife - just scream loud enough about one person together so you give the illusion of progress.

i think that stuff that's happening on the internet matters a lot. saying that it doesn't really affect peoples' "real lives" is kinda silly considering that there are probably zillions of people spending many hours a day of their "real life" online.

I think being a SJW is kinda the thing young people gravitate towards to because they want to feel like they are part of a social 'revolution'.

Obviously many things are valid but largely it seems to be an outlet for feelings of wanting to belong to a 'radical' movement (from my experience of knowing people who strongly involve themselves in feminism etc).

My opinion of the question is yes, the world is too sensitive... Unless you are a white male, in which case you aren't allowed sympathy or sensitivity because all white males are rich and evil rapists who cause all the problems society faces, right? ;)

People are too afraid of offending anybody and it can cause massive problems (e.g. overly politically-correct authorities. I don't have time to find articles but there are recent examples of Muslim pedophile rings in the UK being ignored/able to continue and also cases of horrible child abuse being allowed to continue due to 'cultural differences').

  On 8/18/2015 at 6:07 AM, usagi said:

it's a plague lately. since becoming fb friends recently with a few "social justice"-minded people, my whole newsfeed is full of emptyheaded internet sjw bullshit. it gives genuine social causes a bad name.

 

people need to shut the fuck up, step back and understand how to approach conflicting opinions productively.

one of the problems of living in the internet age is that every cunt with an opinion feels a need to express it loudly and proclaim it as the way. like, fewer and fewer people understand that it is possible for them to be wrong, and how to structure their thought around that distinct possibility. fools' certainty.

I was going to type something to this effect, thank you. It's become so bad it's spread outside of sociopolitical discussions and into pop culture and comedy. And I'll just go ahead and say it: the huge irony is a lot of the most active "social justice" people online are often well-off, white, and often in a bubble of privilege as academics or a nebulous media job in major urban cities like NYC or LA.

All this is complicated by the fact that other people are using this phenomenon to start saying offensive and ignorant things with the excuse of "you're just being politically correct / political correctness is ruining our country" - American right-wingers are a good example (i.e. Donald Trump). So as say, someone who is a moderate liberal or progressive, it's really hard to say anything edgy or snarky without either offending social justice warriors or gaining unintended support from actual assholes.

Checks out dank memes thread.

Nah I think we gud

  On 8/18/2015 at 6:00 AM, Danny O Flannagin said:

 

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When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response.

 

This is California in a nutshell.

This is what happens when your country goes on without a war for too long

Microaggressions isn't even a real word.