I’m really fed up with all the op-eds emerging now, decrying those wimpy college students and political correctness and trigger warnings and safe spaces. They’re all from obnoxious ignoramuses who are really trying to defend their sheltered privilege from criticism, so they’re all playing a game of IKYABWAI. So here are a couple of strong rebuttals.

• “PC Culture” isn’t Killing Higher Ed (But Your Crappy Op-Eds Might Be).

  The last thing higher education needs is one more old white guy bleating about “political correctness run amok,” when it’s just a slightly more genteel phrase for “people not like me getting all uppity.” If you’re upset about other people winning in the marketplace of ideas, maybe it’s because your ideas suck. If you think today’s students are coddled, and don’t have “grit,” you either don’t teach or aren’t paying attention. To see students calling out power inequalities and inequitable behaviors is not some sort of failure, but a triumph of critical thinking and intellectual agency. If you think students calling institutions, their administrations, or other authorities out on bad thinking, institutional inequities, or general bullshit is “silly,” or “killing higher education,” maybe you’re the delicate little flower who can’t abide an intellectual challenge.

• Straw Freshmen: Why the War on Campus PC Culture is Bullshit.

  Take the “trigger warning” as an example. There are still no colleges or universities that mandate trigger warnings as a practice in any field of study. Most cases of them being used have been in teaching sensitive issues of rape, abuse, or assault to classes with young women. The overarching point in “Coddling,” that trigger warnings actually can’t improve mental health, misses the point of the reality of these women. A new study from the Association of American Universities finds that over a fifth of all college women are sexually assaulted at some time in their enrollment. Another 47% have experienced sexual harassment and another 12% have experienced intimate partner violence. This means that any given classroom with any significant amount of women could be composed of up to a third or more of women who are processing rapes, assaults, harassment, or violence. Given the absolutely horrendous state of affairs within colleges (and largely, the country) in handling rape cases and pursuing justice and health for these women, it is likely that most of these survivors have not received or are not receiving the proper therapy and healing in order to be able to process triggering images and words without suffering further damage.

• ‘Coddled’ students and their ‘safe spaces’ aren’t the problem, college official says. Bigots are.

  Therefore, whether one is suspicious of the merits of college as a whole or cynical about the existence of “safe spaces,” the truth of the matter is that “coddled” college students aren’t the problem.

  The real culprits — on campuses and in the real world — are the persistent effects of homophobia, income inequality, misogyny, poverty, racism, sexism, white supremacy and xenophobia.

  When students refuse to accept discrimination on college campuses, they’re learning important lessons about how to fight it everywhere.

That last one makes an excellent point: the anti-PC language does the opposite of what its obnoxious proponents claim. It’s not about advocating for free speech. It’s about using accusations of “PC” and mocking efforts to give minorities a voice to silence critics of the status quo.

I promptly put up a post about the Brussels attacks, but I didn’t say anything about the Ankara attacks. I have excuses: when Turks are attacked by terrorists, my various social network feeds don’t start screaming in panic when Muslims die. But it’s all part of the same phenomenon, our intrinsic tribalism, in which we all reinforce each other in our belief that our people, defined narrowly in a way that excludes much of humanity, are important, and those other people are nobody important. And, unfortunately, as a very privileged American, we have a tendency to not look very far past our own noses.

I don’t know what to do about it, either. If I weep every time someone somewhere within the great mass of humanity commits an evil against another someone in the great mass of humanity, I’d drown in my own tears. So we struggle.

One small thing we’ve done here on FtB is to try and enlist diverse writers, so that maybe as a whole we can fill in the gaps in our individual humanity. And I’m also trying to be more aware and conscious of the entirety of the human experience. But I’ll fail and continue to fail.

That’s no excuse to not try, though.

Matt Walters of Houston, Texas looks so normal and ordinary.

And then you read the abusive message he sent to a black woman he didn’t know on Facebook, in which he goes on and on with a violent fantasy in which he kidnaps her and tortures her gruesomely for months before killing her, and you realize that he’s simply a bad person. A horrible human being. A disgrace walking about in nicely groomed skin.

This is where free speech as a principle starts conflicting with the reality of the human condition. He is allowed to ramble to strangers about hanging them upside down in the dark and cut them and burn them, but at some point someone ought to take them aside and get them some help, and maybe explain to them that that behavior is inappropriate and vile, and that they should stop doing it. And while it may be nice for him to get off on telling people about the graphic abuse and mutilation and murder stories playing out in his head, it’s distressing to others and raises legitimate concerns about whether he is a threat to their safety.

He was quite reasonably reported to the police. They “brushed it off”. His target reported him to Facebook. They informed her that it violated no “community standards” (what community is that? The community of psychopathic assholes?). And then, when she shared his nightmare stories with others, Facebook blocked her for a week.

I guess all I can do is use my power of free speech to spread the word that Matt Walters is a nasty piece of work. Oh, and that his brother Buddy Walters is a barely literate dumbass.

Yesterday, I got some email from a Slovenian reader to tell me about a developing refugee situation there. I can’t say it better than they can, so I’m just posting it here without identifying information (if the author wants to speak up in the comments, I can verify).

I come from a little place called Slovenia. You can find it on google maps – but you need to zoom in really close. It’s there between Italy and Austria, smack in the middle of the refugee’s path into European heartland.

Recently six refugee children (under 15 years of age) asked for asylum in Slovenia. These kids have no one with them. They are completely alone. Our government is processing their applications but in the meantime they wanted to make sure they are house appropriately. So the ministry asked a local dormitory (Dijaški in študentski dom Kranj), housing high-schoolers, to offer rooms for these 6 misfortunate kids. The dormitory principal, Ms. Judita Nahtigal, agreed and apparently wanted to set up a meeting with someone from the government to discuss the particulars.

In the meantime she also sent a notification letter to the resident’s parents and the teachers employed at the local high school (France Prešeren Gymnasium) informing them of this development. What resulted is as outrageous as it is embarrassing for our country as a whole. The parents and the teachers united against the principal and absolutely refused to accept the fact that refugee children would be allowed to stay there. They put together a petition – signed by ALL 24 teachers to press their case. They then went to the local city council that offered its full support for their bigoted cause. They went to the National Skiing Association (SZS), since a number of the students at the dorm are prospective athletes, and they got warm support for their xenophobia there as well.

It seems like no one wants these poor refugee kids there – not the parents, not the teachers, not the local city council members, not the National Skiing Association – that is no one except the principal, Judita Nahtigal. She commented that, while she did expect some push-back, she never imagined the tenacity and ferocity of what happened.

This is what we’ve apparently come to. Professors at a high school named after our greatest poet, France Prešeren, the author of our national anthem that calls for the unity of all nations, unanimously signing a petition to ban six abandoned refugee children seeking asylum from staying at a dorm.

The reason? They do not want their dorm to get the “stigma” of a refugee center.

Well, I sincerely hope they all do get stigmatized for being bigots and xenophobes.

This is the developing story on our main national media outlet RTV Slovenia (came out yesterday)
http://www.rtvslo.si/slovenija/zaradi-sestih-prebeznikov-mlajsih-od-15-let-obsedno-stanje-v-dijaskem-domu-kranj/386511

and another website (posted today)
http://www.planet.si/novice/slovenija/po-protestih-starsev-mladoletnih-beguncev-ne-bodo-namestili-v-kranjskem-dijaskem-domu.html

It’s all in Slovene of course, as no one abroad is reporting on this yet. But they should be. I’ve tried to recount the facts with no distortions. Use google translate to get some glimpse of it as well. Or maybe you can find another native speaker to corroborate what I’ve said.

This is a national disgrace. Please let it be known. What we need is some well deserved public embarrassment. I can tell you that Slovenes are terribly touchy about their image abroad. We like to pride ourselves as being very accepting and progressive. And I hope most of us are. But the rest need a wake-up call or at least a warning. This is not want we want to be. And sometimes one needs a slap in the face to prevent going too far astray.

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Sady Doyle hits another one out of the park. She discusses the phenomenon of the angry white male public intellectual and their anxieties.

Rather, the root at the problem of this kind of online harassment is that political and intellectual authority has for centuries been the domain of white men. The rise of feminism and civil rights; increased cultural awareness of Islamophobia; and the very real possibility that a woman may soon break the 200-year-plus lock that men have had on the United States presidency are all challenging that authority. Intellectual spaces have become more accessible for everyone. And that’s caused some men to wield their authority more anxiously, and brutally, to those who challenge it.

These anxieties are profound and pervasive. We’re used to seeing them expressed by people with the luxury of anonymity and unaccountability. To see them coming from “legitimate” sources is depressing. But there is an upside. By bringing online harassment out into the open and signing their real names to it, Dawkins, the Bernie Bros and others have let us know that the people ready to attack anyone who threatens the status quo are not necessarily strangers or faceless losers. They can also be people with real power.

That shows us exactly how entrenched ancient attitudes about authority really are. What’s at stake is not simply one election, or what a few people have to say on the Internet. It’s whether marginalized people have a place in the public conversation at all.

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Justin Keller wrote an open letter to the mayor and police chief, demanding that something must be done. There are homeless riff-raff cluttering up his streets! They are howling and lying down and collapsing in despair everywhere; why, one even leaned up against his car! The horror…

I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day. I want my parents when they come visit to have a great experience, and enjoy this special place.

Yes, something must be done. Only I don’t think the solution involves hiding the “pain, struggle, and despair” out of sight of smug dudes with lots of money. It’s got to involve deeper changes that give poor people a living wage and an opportunity to better themselves that might also require fewer luxury cars for the wealthy.

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This ad was run in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I’m pretty sure it’s a damning example of what UnMinnesotans call the regressive Left.

Ally Fogg makes a very good point.

The first recourse of the racist fearmonger has always been to point to one atypical incident, a riot, a murder, a rape, and hold it to be typical, to be both representative of an entire population and the responsibility of that entire population. The left cannot win by pretending there are no criminals, no thugs, no rapists, no damaged people among the shifting sands of humanity. We can win by unequivocally condemning inappropriate and criminal behaviour while simultaneously and correctly insisting that we will not allow ourselves to judge the many by the sins of the few. We will not allow ourselves to be distracted and diverted from our humanitarian obligations by fear, because history shows us where that leads. We will not allow ourselves to turn our backs on those in desperate need, because we are smarter than that and we are better than that. That is the only way the argument can be won.

I would add that one thing that’s become obvious is that if you hesitate to condemn an act because the perpetrator is a member of an oppressed group, the racist fearmongers will then turn around and use that to condemn the entirety of the left of conspiring with the group that they hate. It’s what they do, and they’re very good at it — you might even say it is the dominant trait of fearmongers, that they’re adept at smearing everything into a giant category of blame.

It’s one of the things that makes addressing them difficult: anything you do will get you swept up into the burning shitpile of hatred they keep aflame. So you might as well just do the right thing.