Friday, February 19, 2016

Crisis At Brown: About 10% of Professors Still Demand That Student Protesters Do Their Coursework; Protesters Break Down In Response

   Obviously this is racist, sexist, and, in general, x-ist for all conceivable values of 'x'. How dare professors demand that students with crucial social "justice" obligations complete their coursework like any other student? That's like...I dunno...privilege or rape culture or something, amirite?
   Columbia's private. It can be as idiotic as it wants. Public universities, however, need to make sure that, if they're going to routinely grant extensions for one stupid type of activity, they do so for all similar stupid types activities. And certainly they shouldn't favor any one type of political cause over any other.
   Another aspect of this story, of course, involves the carefully-cultivated, largely-but-perhaps-not-entirely-mythical emotional fragility of the PC lefties / social-justice warriors. There's no doubt that they're mostly just making this shit up...but I'd bet a bit of money that some of it is psychosomatic / quasi-real--they've genuinely convinced themselves that their commitment to crackpottery is so passionate that it's driven to the breaking point. Whatever the case--whether they are actually far on the tail of the curve with respect to actual emotional fragility, or easily self-deceived, or lying--these are exactly the people who cannot be allowed to set the standards for what counts as emotional harm. PC assertions that even rather minor and civil differences of opinion (etc.) cause people intolerable psychological distress are easier to understand when one realizes that these claims are coming from people with radically distorted conceptions of what constitutes emotional harm. And understanding what's going on here makes it clear that such folk cannot be allowed to be the arbiters of what counts as intolerably harmful ideas and speech.

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