The linked piece is better, as a whole, than the excerpt which I completely disagreed with.
It ultimately reminds me of John Emerson's comment*, way back, that living in a society with various day-to-day frictions, minor offenses, and cultural misunderstandings is that it means to live in a pluralist society. He's saying that, as somebody with various social anxieties, living in a society which makes him uncomfortable is just life.
That's both true, and not very satisfying, in that people who are trying to get people to dial back the offenses and correct some of the misunderstandings are doing good work and should be supported. I genuinely don't understand the point of the excerpted comment -- yes there's always going to be shitty parts of life, but isn't it worth asking if there are simple things which can be done to reduce that shittiness?
* Violating the analogy ban . . .
What percentage of the debate about trigger warnings consists of people with completely different ideas about what the term means yelling at each other? 98% or 99%? It is a stupid name, which is the problem. If it was just rephrased as "description-in-advance on a syllabus" no one would give a shit.
The linked piece is idiotic. The writer may not be a bad person, just confused, but what he's saying is wrongheaded and incoherent. It's extremist privilege to try to create spaces where you're comfortable? He makes literally no argument beyond flat assertion that 'safe spaces', whatever he thinks they are, are harmful.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to create spaces, and spend time in spaces, where you're not going to be attacked for behavior/characteristics that aren't wrong in themselves.
2: I'm not sure that no one would give a shit -- I think that lots of the people who whine about 'trigger warnings' would pivot right back to whining about PC -- but you're right that it's not a great name.
2: It took some time before I was clear on the matter.
2 is correct. The discussions about this are unending and every discussion is either 100% people who are familiar with the concept and in favor of it berating people who are unfamiliar with the concept, or 100% people who are unfamiliar with the concept berating people who Go Too Far.
Which people are doing the berating depends on which people are on the defensive, which depends on which type of person wrote the linked article that is being "discussed".
What percentage of the debate about trigger warnings consists of people with completely different ideas about what the term means yelling at each other? 98% or 99%?
99.999%.
I will note that the linked piece seems to be mostly about 'safe spaces' rather than 'trigger warnings'. Which is a concept that's less confusing, I think, because it's not borrowed from PTSD. And the article is still dumb.
I will note that the linked piece seems to be mostly about 'safe spaces' . . . And the article is still dumb.
But less dumb than the excerpt in the OP by itself.
These guys always bring up the "real world" but nobody is forcing anybody to read any of those trigger warning books in the "real world". Go ahead; try to make someone read a book with rape in it in your office job and HR will teach you how the "real world" works.
The safe space thing is even dumber. Obviously not every space should be a safe space. Also equally obviously some spaces should be. I'm not going to go to your house with your grandparents and six year old niece and talk about rape, or maybe I will because you must be CONFRONTED with the HARD TRUTHS found in my brilliant DISCOURSE.
This guy seems very, uh, taken with the idea of society collapsing and The Revolution coming.
The guy is totally nuts. He wrote that hyperbolic 'programming is hell' thing that did the rounds a while back.
And pretty much every space can be expected to be safe from some stuff -- New York State is an institutionally enforced 'safe space' from direct threats of violence. The people in the blue uniforms who are supposed to enforce this are imperfect and not omnipresent, but there are rules, and an institution enforcing them, and I'm good with that. The question isn't whether there should be safe spaces, the question is which spaces should be safe from what and how should it be enforced.
The guy is totally nuts.
Is this the rtcb approach to recommending readings?
15 - only TRUE and direct threats of violence, which is the loophole I like to work online.
I think the general form of this argument is "life isn't fair, so I don't get why I have to be." It is related to the parenting theory that says "life is going to punch you in the face, so I should punch you now, so that you can learn how to handle it."
I will note that the linked piece seems to be mostly about 'safe spaces' rather than 'trigger warnings'. Which is a concept that's less confusing, I think, because it's not borrowed from PTSD.
It boils down to the same old thing.
"In my day we didn't have this and we were fine."
"No, people in your day weren't fine and you didn't realize it."
"Oh, you're saying I'm an asshole then."
I am in favor of safe spaces. I like the idea of walking down a city street and not having to be armed and ready to fight off footpads. (Damn, that's a weird word.)
My footpads are now mostly calloused.
My feet killed the blog. Sorry. I'll get one of the pedicures where a fish chews off whatever isn't supposed to be there.
New York State is an institutionally enforced 'safe space' from direct threats of violence.
I'm choosing to interpret this to imply that across the state border it's The Purge 24/7. Lower taxes, though.
I've driven in New Jersey, but I thought the taxes were high.
I keep forgetting we border New York. It's easier to remember Ohio and West Virginia because they're so *there* all the time.
1) Are there any good and (reasonably) authoritative accounts of the subject of "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" that people frustrated with the lazy versions can recommend?
2) I think there are people who, for various reasons, derive pride and satisfaction from withstanding confrontation and annoyance, and feel that it's not just an annoying part of life but an important part of self-mastery or self-fashioning or however it might seem. Such people are naturally unsympathetic to the idea that self-protection might have an upside. That's the part of it I find interesting: I think views, and intuitions, differ widely on whether "sheltering" is a knee-jerk obvious form of evil or whether it's beneficial.
3) As a person with various mental "illnesses" (not sure if plural/discrete), I get "triggered" all the damn time. Warnings are neutral. Most of the time they'd probably be impossible to administer. My coping mechanism is isolation and quiet self-pity. I don't think it's ever inconvenienced confrontation-seekers. That too is neutral.
I keep forgetting we border New York.
We're looming over your entire state like a hat. We're the only thing protecting you from Canada. How do you forget that?
How do you protect us from Canada since their spies took our boat technology?
But, getting to New York really seems to mean either blowing the whole day or getting on a plane. Getting to Ohio is just a matter of a little bad luck and an hour.
1) Are there any good and (reasonably) authoritative accounts of the subject of "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" that people frustrated with the lazy versions can recommend?
I don't think so -- that is, I think everyone's working off the same vague understanding, so there's no rigorous way of figuring out what it means in general. It's always going to be context dependent.
Oh good, this is a safe space to say the except is garbage.
So I have to do the research and write up my findings? Thanks, mom, jeez.
Looks like it really did derive from insular online communities and pass to larger blogs and from there to mainstream journalism & academia; it really is fairly recent as a mainstream thing (this is almost never true, but I don't see much discussion before the Obama years on a quick search); and a lot of it is the story of how subjectivity and community are understood in a world of social media, representations of all sorts, and asynchronous interpersonal encounters. What. a. mess.
The excerpt in the OP is shameless uncritical moralizing, IMO exactly the wrong response. Not that there's anything wrong with the idea that, ceteris paribus, we should all take our punches like men.
I'm just so glad to have gotten out of school before I was expected to have an opinion about any of this.
That handwavy "representations of all sorts" should in fact be limited to two in particular: how individuals represent their communities or identity groups; how individuals represent themselves on the godforsaken Internet.
This isn't a scholarly text or anything, but it at least goes back further than "having read something on Jezebel once" and draws plausible links with dodgy 1980s psychiatry and how those psychiatric trends filtered into small online communities (BBS support groups) and fandom (with quotes from 2000). No one is surprised that academia is now a BBS, right? The fact that I find this account unsurprising doesn't make it true, though.
The safe space concept is something I remember from the early 90s, specifically associating it with high school friends involved in feminist consciousness raising, and applied in the context of small groups of people sharing personal stuff.
So would you say that the trigger warning concept has weaponized the idea of a safe space? (More seriously, were you earnest or ironic with the word? Or both?)
Last thing: the OP excerpt would look different if it included the previous sentences:
"Safe spaces" as we know them are ideological safe spaces, and ideological safe spaces are bad. Emotional safe spaces are good, and they are comprised of whatever you can find when you're alone or with people you're 95 percent sure like you, but these spaces should not be institutionally provided. If they are institutionally provided, they are ideological safe spaces. If you intend to interact with the world...
Here I get more of a "confused college student" than "asshole" vibe.
Christ, what an asshole.
I first heard the term "safe space" as an undergrad in relation to LGBTQ campus resources. In fact, my own personal work office is a university-designated "safe space" for LGBTQ students because I voluntarily attended a two-day campus workshop on understanding and supporting students in this demographic. The little sign I have outside my campus door tells students that I am not a homophobic asshole and that they can safely mention having a same-sex partner, or struggling because their religious parents kicked them out, or what have you. It's fucked up that this isn't true of all faculty, but that's a separate matter.
"Safe space" is a concept I first encountered online. "This is a safe space for those who have experienced sexual assault" meant something like, "what about false accusations?" comments would be deleted, because this was a place for people to process their experiences without dealing with that kind of shit constantly in the background. Likewise, various identity based safe spaces (trans, for example) had ground rules that basic 101 type discussions that seemed to call into question the legitimacy of the identity at issue were not welcome, again so people could talk openly without being forced to justify everything they said about themselves.
I'm hard pressed to see how anyone could object to designated safe spaces like that on a college campus or elsewhere. Declaring public shared space such as a quad or in particular a classroom to be "safe" for a particular group is more problematic, unless by safe you mean basic ground rules of not allowing people to be abusive assholes.
Everything gets coöpted by abusive assholes. Soon we'll see the "Josef Mengele Appreciation Society and Safe Space."
Bah. This is something I've thought a lot about, what with teaching college students and being at an institution with an official anti-safe space policy.
My feeling is that extremes on both sides involved whiney entitled assholes, but the anti-side involves whiney entitled assholes with bad politics.
As I understand it, reasonable people take a trigger warning to mean a specific heads up for material that would widely be considered upsetting and potentially unexpected. So, a graphic rape scene in a novel not titled "Graphic Rape" in a literature class not titled "Sexual Violence in British Literature." A course titled "The Holocaust" wouldn't need a trigger warning, because it's reasonable to expect that students will know the course content is upsetting. Conversely, there may be a student triggered by cheese sandwiches, but that's not a widely accepted trigger and so it's not expected that a professor should know that in advance.
A safe space in a classroom as I understand it is about making the space equally accessible for students to participate. It means paying attention to verbal participation dynamics, and making sure students who are most confident don't dominate the conversation. It also means laying out respectful ground rules and then enforcing them, including (if applicable). It also means my role is to shut down offensive stuff rather than putting the onus on a student who is the target. E.g., it's my job to shut down a racist conversation rather than wait for the one black kid in the class to point out something is racist.
Soon we'll see the "Josef Mengele Appreciation Society and Safe Space."
Soon? That's basically the Trump campaign.
"material that would widely be considered upsetting and potentially unexpected" - I suppose the next question is what is included on this list. Violence generally? Graphically described violence? Strong language?
I suspect a lot of the antipathy is because people see things like that and think "what, now I need to start a discussion of Hamlet with "triggering for suicide"?" Which is a bit pathetic for a play that most of us encounter as children.
Someone should do a thinkpiece comparing trigger warnings to spoiler alerts. Maybe someone already has.
I was going to rent it this weekend, but I guess I won't bother now.
Trigger warnings basically serve the same function workaday content warnings did and should be completely unexceptional.
The idea that there are spaces in culture wherein one can be expected to be non-hostile and teat everyone with respect is centuries old. People who flip out at the mere concept because now women and POCs now want such spaces are fuckheads pure and simple. It's #AllLivesMatter crap in a different casing and nothing more interesting than that.
Heh. "Teat everyone with respect."
40-43: I mentioned before that we had an awful work meeting with a business development consultant, who started the meeting by saying "This is a safe space. We can talk about business development without fear."
You know he collects Nazi memorabilia.
39 (parenthetical): It was all very earnest and I think was probably a benefit to the people who participated.* I never really understood it and wasn't really comfortable with it, but it didn't seem wrong. I didn't socialize much outside of my small group of friends and didn't really understand how different having a safe space was from most social situations.
* I learned about it on a high school backpacking club trip and participated that time - it was one of those sit in a small circle and talk things - but didn't really "get" it.
A course titled "The Holocaust" wouldn't need a trigger warning
And yet, I bet many courses on the Holocaust have long had the equivalent of trigger warnings, especially before showing photos or film footage.
Trigger warnings basically serve the same function workaday content warnings did and should be completely unexceptional.
It seems to be nearly a precise synonym for "content warning", except with an implication that viewers will not just be "offended" or "shocked" in some , but suffer permanent mental trauma. Which obviously, as the presenter, you don't want to acknowledge that some topic you think is important will have that effect, because then you would have to stop talking about it.
56
Yeah, thinking about it I would warn students before showing any film footage of the holocaust.
There was a while when I taught a section of a course that required students to watch Triumph of the Will, and IIRC before the screening the director gave a little warning that students my find it upsetting.
When I did the summer Russian program at Middlebury about a decade ago, one of the films they showed as part of the cultural/educational programming was a documentary about the Solovki prison camp during the early years of the USSR. I don't think there was any content warning although the title and summary should have been enough to tell people they were about to watch a film about a forced labor camp under a totalitarian dictatorship. But a lot of students were completely shocked.
More links: the Jeet Heer piece seems informative.
The thing i always remember in this context is reading the Iliad in college: it was miserable, not because of any past trauma, but because my messed-up brain would latch onto anything ghastly and amplify it for hours that year, and there aren't too many breaks in the carnage for rainbow-Pegasus dance interludes (or Socratic dialogues or what have you). I took a leave of absence after that quarter, having left the book unfinished, and slogged through it at home. But my reaction was basically: well, if it's torture to read Homer, long live torture.
I never know where to slot this in the trigger warning discussions. Did I have a moral right to take my time reading the book? The university granted me a leave of absence. (Not over that, of course, but because I was unfit to work in general.) Obviously that's going to exact an educational cost, which I knew and accepted. As a grown-up, even a mentally ill grown-up, you make tradeoffs. I can't draw too many moral lessons from it.
I may have traumatized my students with the opening of Imamura's Black Rain; I was a little sorry about that. (The book is so, so, so great -- that's really all you need.)
I teach historical social science texts, and I always warn my students about language and how I want them to read. I teach texts that use outdated offensive language, and I both want students to recognize that language is wrong and outdated while still recognizing how the texts are/were valuable or progressive in their time.
There's a way it's kind of a trigger warning, because I don't want students to read outdated language with no warning, either because they then think that using outdated terms are ok, or think that I have a classroom that condones using outdated or offensive terms.
For ridiculousness on the the other side, a center I'm affiliated with through a safe space happy hour in protest of our administration declaring our university anti-safe space. For the flyer, there was a picture of a safe, and a picture of outer space. At the happy hour, an undergrad came up to the director and said she was offended that someone would dare trivialize the important concept of safe space by making a pun on the flyer.
There's a way it's kind of a trigger warning
But that seems like a strange back-formation. Isn't that just, you know, education?
if it's torture to read Homer, long live torture.
Homer is turgid crap. I loved the Iliad but fuckif it isn't just the same damn crap about "and he fell like a tree and his armor clattered upon him." It's great and all, but tedious.
You seem a bit conflicted there togolosh. Iliad is literally my favorite thing ever but I've still never finished the Odyssey.
It's the kind of self-importance in 62 last that annoys me.
I mean, think what mock would be made if some pious undergrad did the equivalent of 62 last for say an MPAA rating.
What would the equivalent of that be for an MPAA rating?
But outer space isn't safe. It's a cold lifeless vacuum.
I prefer the Odyssey, but then I have a rich inner life like that./snark
Ur dudnt help that my introduction to the Iliad was Alexander Pope's translation which I read at a very impressionable age (14 or 15). I have nursed a life long hatred for Pope ever since
70.2 it didn't.
Fucking autocorrect is worse than useless when it's not playing mind guessing games. (And I'm not yet btocked though I've just landed in Zagreb). Croatian dude 1 seat over on the plane drank 3 beers for breakfast like a champ (at like 8 am). I stuck to coffee.
Although, as I mentioned in an earlier thread on this subject, this whole topic first burst into popular consciousness with an article in which students were quoted as claiming that The Great Gatsby should come with trigger warnings.
If there really is an epidemic of instructors holding surprise in class screenings of The Accused or A Clockwork Orange I'd love to hear about it, and I'll happily sign the petition saying that people shouldn't do that.
But I've also seen someone suggest that a "reasonable" compromise would be for professors to go through their material and flag "just the 100 most common triggers" (literal quote). So the silliness isn't all just on one side here.
I'm completely unable to care about undergraduates being silly or self-important at all. That is, anything they get involved in, they will definitely be silly and self-important about, but this is neither a surprise nor a problem.
I'll worry when undergraduate silly self-importance actually seems to be doing anyone any harm, and I can't see any evidence that trigger warnings or safe spaces do that. (Like, someone said that the domestic violence in The Great Gatsby should get a trigger warning? Seems a little overstated. But it also doesn't seem like the beginning of a slippery slope leading to anything that's going to be a real problem.)
I'm just relieved they stopped seeing how many of themselves they could cram in a phone booth.
Undergraduate silliness and self-importance has always been with us, sure. I think the concern, at least for those of us who actually teach classes, was administrator self-importance and silliness. As far as I'm concerned, trigger warnings became a non-issue a year or 2 ago once it became clear that administrations were not, in fact, going to try to impose some sort of top down policy.
Of course the subject is now guaranteed to generate hundreds or thousands of comments, so The Atlantic and Salon are going to run a "So, how about those trigger warnings?" article every 6 months like clockwork for the foreseeable future.
Undergraduate self-importance and silliness also plays out a bit differently in the era of social media. Stuff that, when we were undergraduates, would never have gone further than the campus newspaper can now explode into national news. In general, I think that's worse for the undergraduates themselves than for anyone else.
Stuff from the campus newspaper used to explode into national news. Or at least local news. One of my editors got raked over various coals for one of her front pages.
She was literally the one person in the editorial room who wasn't a deliberate asshole at every opportunity. I learned something. Don't bother about not being an asshole.
The other thing I learned was put the most important bit at the top of the story. Then I had to unlearn that for academic writing because now the most important bit goes at the first sentence of the last paragraph of the introduction.
...go through their material and flag "just the 100 most common triggers" (literal quote).
Did they give you a list? If not I suggest you ask for one.
If somebody adds a comment on where you put the most important bit in a court pleading, we can apply for CLEs.
There was a while when I taught a section of a course that required students to watch Triumph of the Will, and IIRC before the screening the director gave a little warning that students my find it upsetting.
IME more likely to cause them to die of boredom. Maybe it's different if you understand the German.
64: I have a sneaking suspicion Terry Pratchett would have agreed with you.
'Well,' said Copolymer, and launched into the story of the Tsortean Wars.
'You see, what happened was, he'd taken her back home, and her father - this wasn't the old king, this was the one before, the one with the wossname, he married some girl from over Elharib way, she had a squint, what was her name now, began with a P. Or an L. One of them letters, anyway. Her father owned an island out on the bay there, Papylos I think it was. No, I tell a lie, it was Crinix. Anyway, the king, the other king, he raised an army and they . . . Elenor, that was her name. She had a squint, you know. But quite attractive, they say. When I say married, I trust I do not have to spell it out for you. I mean, it was a bit unofficial. Er. Anyway, there was this wooden horse and after they'd got in . . . Did I tell you about this horse? It was a horse. I'm pretty sure it was a horse. Or maybe it was a chicken. Forget my own name next! It was wossname's idea, the one with the limp. Yes. The limp in his leg, I mean. Did I mention him? There'd been this fight. No, that was the other one, I think. Yes. Anyway, this wooden pig, damn clever idea, they made it out of thing. Tip of my tongue. Wood. But that was later, you know. The fight! Nearly forgot the fight. Yes. Damn good fight. Everyone banging on their shields and yelling. Wossname's armour shone like shining armour. Fight and a half, that fight. Between thingy, not the one with the limp, the other one, wossname, had red hair. You know. Tall fellow, talked with a lisp. Hold on, just remembered, he was from some other island. Not him. The other one, with the limp. Didn't want to go, he said he was mad. Of course, he was bloody mad, definitely. I mean, a wooden cow! Like wossname said, the king, no, not that king, the other one, he saw the goat, he said, "I fear the Ephebians, especially when they're mad enough to leave bloody great wooden livestock on the doorstep, talk about nerve, they must think we was born yesterday, set fire to it," and, of course, wossname had nipped in round the back and put everyone to the sword, talk about laugh. Did I say she had a squint? They said she was pretty, but it takes all sorts. Yes. Anyway, that's how it happened. Now, of course, wossname - I think he was called Melycanus, had a limp - he wanted to go home, well, you would, they'd been there for years, he wasn't getting any younger. That's why he dreamt up the thing about the wooden wossname. Yes. I tell a lie, Lavaelous was the one with the knee. Pretty good fight, that fight, take it from me.'
He lapsed into self-satisfied silence.
'Pretty good fight,' he mumbled and, smiling faintly, dropped off to sleep.
Teppic was aware that his own mouth was hanging open. He shut it. Along the table several of the diners were wiping their eyes.
'Magic,' said Xeno. 'Sheer magic. Every word a tassel on the canopy of Time.'
'It's the way he remembers every tiny detail. Pin-sharp,' murmured Ibid.
"Safe space", around here, means that a location/environment is a place where LGBT(etc)/non-conforming students can feel safe to talk honestly about themselves. E.g., I can come out to my philosophy professor and she'll keep it confidential; no one is going to tattle on me to the local religious authorities for holding a different view, etc.
The rest of the whole trigger warning mess is basically what Ned said plus an uncomfortable feeling that the University of Chicago thinks its target audience is teenagers on Tumblr. I am required to have a content warning on my syllabus -- but it's intended to prevent religious students from having to see anything contrary to their values. Surprising, isn't it, that the conservative wankfest doesn't care about that extremist privilege!
The Iliad is a hideously violent bloodthirsty mess. So is most of Gilgamesh, apart from the bits that are about rampant sex, and the episode about the great flood, which was probably tacked on quite late. So is the Niebelungenlied and Beowulf. Conclusion: heroic societies were hideously bloodthirsty and violent when they weren't just raising crops, and it all gets a bit repetitive, tbh. But nobody is going to go there without a good idea of what they're going to find, because it's too obscure.
I am required to have a content warning on my syllabus -- but it's intended to prevent religious students from having to see anything contrary to their values. Surprising, isn't it, that the conservative wankfest doesn't care about that extremist privilege!
Honestly I'm not sure Jonathan Chait would be a whole lot more charming if he added religious exceptionalism to his list of complaints. It's all so deeply dumb. Liberalism has always looked shabby in moralism's clothes.
Dude I'm not sure moralism is a word. Oh well.
Are you saying I have a fat ass?
87.
1
a : the habit or practice of moralizing
b : a conventional moral attitude or saying
2
: an often exaggerated emphasis on morality (as in politics
Look at that. Thanks, "opinionated" meme! Nothing about a fat ass in Merriam-Webster, so you're cool.
Mom always like Deontological Ethics best.
I saw some tweetage today from someone who was blaming rape culture in classical literature for the rise of Trump. "Look at the books we venerate!" Well, yes, classical literature is plenty rapey, but oh, honey. Somehow I don't think the Trumpkins are suffering from an excess of Homer or Hesiod and Theognis.
93: You're right. It's that damn rap music.
After all little Donald was at a very impressionable age when that rap started to become popular.
Oh and this:
plus an uncomfortable feeling that the University of Chicago thinks its target audience is teenagers on Tumblr
No, I don't think it's that, quite. The U of C has been like this for a long long time. It's where snark goes to die. It's like an ivory-tower sky island for forms of pompous self-importance that died out long ago everywhere else.
93 makes me think of Dialectic of Enlightenment for some reason.
||
Completely off-topic:
I was trying to to decide, again, just how many of the lyrics of "Honeysuckle Rose" are intended as double entendres*, and listening to different version. Most of them treat it as a jazz standard and emphasize the sound of the words over meaning.
But, is it just me, or is this Sarah Vaughan video quite hott?
* I realize that the correct answer is most likely, "all of them" but it isn't something that most versions emphasize -- for example this is fun, but not exactly hott.
|>
It's like an ivory-tower sky island for forms of pompous self-importance that died out long ago everywhere else.
Can I recommend this for a student t-shirt?
Usually they just say "Where fun goes to die."
Whoa, what a weird coincidence that I used such similar phrasing (but with a playful performative contradiction).
More vague, unclear rambling about the problems caused by people being too sensitive and how that created the environment for Trump . . .
The problem is this: Our society has sunk so far into sensitivity and guilt that it has relinquished the liberalism that both liberals and conservatives espouse. I mean the liberalism that gives people a bit of room to think what they want to think; that doesn't automatically define one's character by one's politics or religion; that accepts human frailty and forgives people for brief lapses into racism, sexism, and any other prejudice.
I can't click or I'll drop dead. Who wrote it?
Some asshole I never heard of. Mark Bauerlein.
Bauerlein is German for "peasant". Somebody's ancestors sucked at Ellis Island forms.
Some asshole I never heard of. Mark Bauerlein.
"author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30."
An asshole who is on record as an intended Trump voter, in fact. Was his article arguing for this course of action?
Stay tuned for more of The Valve: Where Are They Now? (Archive for the uninitiated, featuring SEK, Bauerlein, and a bunch of other people, not me incidentally.)
Really, though, I'm not encouraging people to read the linked article -- go watch the Sarah Vaughan video instead, your day will be better for it -- my point is that even if some of the calls for trigger warnings or safe spaces are poorly thought out, the arguments against them are so bad that they're embarrassing.
I mean, how could somebody write this and not feel embarassed:
It certainly seems that overly delicate feelings in the citizenry are less important than a $19 trillion debt. But civic thinkers from the founders forward have understood that the American experiment depends upon what they called the "national character." If individuals lose that rollicking independence hailed by Emerson and Whitman, if touchiness becomes an acceptable American trait, a reduction in the debt won't help. As for the resentment Mr. Trump emits, yes, it is there, but it's a different kind. His resentment counters the resentment found in identity politics, class envy, and anti-Americanism. And in a culture war, as an opening salvo, it's a better weapon than the nuanced, policy-minded approach of professional politicians.
Bauerlein's been a hack at least since he was campaigning as the respectable representative of the Horowitz line on liberal academics circa 2004. As far as I can tell, he's a perpetual political loser. Should have stuck to writing stuff about pragmatism that no one reads.
lurid, if you're still checking this thread, I thought this was a good take on trigger warnings. I'd have posted it earlier but it took a while to find and reread it.
Sarah Vaughn blowing her nose would probably be hotter than any music video by almost anybody else, tbh
111: Right. Back in the early 00's, Bauerlein was playing the role of "reasonable" conservative in various venues around the web. "I'm not really interested in partisan politics, I just think it's a darned shame that people don't appreciate Virgil and Dante like they used to".
He managed that for about 2 years or so before he started endorsing David Horowitz.
112: His sister posted that the family is not going to be releasing any medical information, so there may not be much for a while. Dunno.