It’s Raping My Eyes
Students at the University of California, Irvine have denounced exposure to the American flag as potentially inflicting “hate speech” on passers-by. Indeed, the mere sight of it could make young intellectuals burst into tears and feel terribly unsafe. The potential emotional terrors of the national flag are articulated at length, and with great expenditure of gas, in a bill calling for the removal and banning of said items in the name of inclusivity:
Flags not only serve as symbols of patriotism or weapons for nationalism, but also construct cultural mythologies and narratives that in turn charge nationalistic sentiments… Flags construct paradigms of conformity and sets [sic] homogenised standards for others to obtain which in this country typically are idolised as freedom, equality, and democracy… Freedom of speech, in a space that aims to be as inclusive as possible[,] can be interpreted as hate speech… No flag, of any nation, may be hanged [sic] on the walls of the Associate Student main lobby space.
Despite their no doubt acute acute political consciousness, and references to constructed paradigms and “deep knowledge,” it appears the students in question have yet to master proofreading. Or basic grammar.
The students have a “social ecology representative”. We have to take them seriously.
Some people just need a good slap, you know?.
No flag, of any nation, may be hanged [sic] on the walls of the Associate Student main lobby space.
No, that’s correct. No flag of any nation will be executed on the gallows in the AS main lobby.
My dad told me a story about when he was at Queens University in Belfast in the 1960s. They’d built a new concert hall as part of the Students Union building, and the Students Union wanted to call it the Ho Chi Minh Hall. Saner voices prevailed, and it ended up being called the Mandela Hall, after a slightly more respectable anti-establishment figure. Since then everybody’s accepted that Mandela’s cause was just, he’s considered a great man, and it’s hardly out of the ordinary for a university to have a Mandela Hall. But at the time it was named, Mandela was a pretty controversial figure himself and naming a hall after him was a compromise aimed at stopping the worst excesses of the social justice warriors of the day.
Does that include the “rainbow” flag as well? I’m sure there is an exception clause in the fine print somewhere.
Or the Palestinian flag?
… it appears the students in question have yet to master proofreading
… along with logic, basic grammar, simple English expression, any familiarity with or understanding of history, ….
Curiouser and curiouser.
The ASUCI Legislative Council recently passed a piece of legislation regarding the display of the American flag and its prohibition of display in ASUCI common space. I stand firmly against this piece of legislation …
http://www.asuci.uci.edu/2015/03/statement-from-asuci-president-on-flag-legislation/
It is a power struggle!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh5Lh-tTSZQ
“No flag, of any nation, may be hanged [sic]…”
GAH! It’s people that should be hanged. And come to think of it…
Is there an international “precious snowflake” contest going on or something?
Is there an international “precious snowflake” contest going on or something?
If we assume the students are being honest and take them at their word – and we really shouldn’t, about anything – what they’re claiming is this: Some (unspecified, hypothetical) students are so exquisitely delicate that they may feel oppressed by mere proximity to the American flag. To some, in fact, the American flag may have an emotional effect and connotations akin to that of, say, the swastika. Therefore it will cause offence and undue distress to precious snowflakes who despise the American flag and all it represents, i.e., pure evil, and who nonetheless choose to study, at great expense, at an American university. Where a sane person might expect to occasionally walk past an American flag.
No flag, of any nation, may be hanged [sic] on the walls of the Associate Student main lobby space.
Oh, that is nothing . . . Really.
. . . I’ve always thought that was one hell of a loincloth . . .
No flag, of any nation, may be hanged [sic] on the walls of the Associate Student main lobby space.
Our high schools are doing a great job.
Our high schools are doing a great job.
Ah, but we mustn’t be so harsh. The students – tomorrow’s intellectuals – are much too busy being political, and sensitive, and righteous. They have to keep letting each other know how progressive they are. It’s what universities are for now, among the credulous, and it gets very competitive. Purity, and therefore superiority, is always over the next hill.
With all the posturing that’s expected, they simply don’t have time to check for grammatical howlers.
No doubt that if it were an ISIL flag an exception would be made.
The students claim that “any decorative item” deemed offensive will be removed. Followed, presumably, by a ritual scolding of whoever put it there. There doesn’t seem to be any interest in whether a claim of being offended or being made to feel “unsafe” is ludicrous or dishonest. And based on past experience I see no reason to suppose that the students will attempt to be fair in their cultivated neurosis. The sensitivity tends to be non-reciprocal and run in one direction only.
” . . . it appears the students in question have yet to master proofreading.”
Like so many others, you’re confused by our new concept of education.
They’re not there to become educated.
They’re there to educate the rest of us.
Now be quiet and get down on one knee, and just listen and become educated.
From the Atlantic:
‘If you want to start taking classes at an Ivy League university unenrolled and undetected, says Guillaume Dumas,
a 28- year- old Canadian, start with big lecture courses.
If you must sit in on a smaller seminar class, it’s important to show up consistently starting with the first session, instead of halfway through the semester.
Also, one of the best alibis is that you’re enrolled as a liberal- arts student. “That’s the kind of program that’s filled with everything and that you expect people to be a bit weird, a bit confused about what they do,” he says.’
http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/the-man-who-snuck-into-ivy-league-without-paying-a-thing/386917/
Never mind flags, boot camp is what these ladies need to be exposed to.
“There’s a lot of whiners in every crowd.”
R. Lee Ermey
(I’d pay ten dollars to see that movie.)
Whereas freedom of speech is a valued right that ASUCI supports.
Except:
Whereas freedom of speech, in a space that aims to be as inclusive as possible can be interpreted as hate speech.
Asked about earlier:
Let it further be resolved that no flag, of any nation, may be hanged on the walls of the Associate Student main lobby space.
The catch being that “Palestine”, ISIS, La Raza, and others of that ilk are not nations, so I am sure they are down with the flags of those fine groups.
Author: Matthew Guevara ; Second: Khaalidah Sidney
Of course.
“Despite their no doubt acute acute political consciousness, and references to constructed paradigms and “deep knowledge,” it appears the students in question have yet to master proofreading.
Doesn’t anyone detect a bit of irony in this sentence?
Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look. Really they require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions as do social and political liberty. The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the “Odyssey.” He is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside “Henry V.” Such a literary man is simply outside all literature: he is more of a prisoner than any bigot. For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out. What we want is not the universality that is outside all normal sentiments; we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments. It is all the difference between being free from them, as a man is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of a city.
The American Thinker reports that, according to a blog called the Everyday Feminist, proper english grammar is (wait for it) racist. So please, David, check your privilege. 😉
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/03/proper_english_grammar_is_now_racist_.html
@Steve E
Beat me to it. I wonder if the same holds true for proper grammar in any other language or if English is the sole offender here.
N.B. also, Ms. Fabello who makes the assertion, seems to believe that grammar rules precede language itself, as opposed to being derived from observation of linguistic structure. I picture a bunch of white guys staring at each other grunting, from which comes forth the rule that we should not end a sentence with a preposition.
BTW, Ms. Febello is an English teacher. Apparently, her education training program did not require a course in either the History of English or Comparative linguistics, both of which are required in my state in order to be certified to teach English.
Yo, David, this guy is killer: https://twitter.com/GodfreyElfwick
this guy is killer
I’m assuming it’s a parody. Though of course it’s so very hard to tell.
Oh, and UC-Irvine? Obviously doesn’t need any more U.S. currency to support it; nor do its students. Hope Author: Matthew Guevara ; Second: Khaalidah Sidney, have alternative means of paying for their iPods and Macs!
Second source confirms that grammar is racist.
http://www.westernjournalism.com/ucla-protesters-call-good-grammar-racist/#CAIvPdotd98G5AFg.97
Godfrey Elfwick is indeed a parody. The author is a fellow member of the legendary Slymepit.com.
The purpose of a university degree, outside the STEM arena, has of course for a long time been as a signalling mechanism rather than a credentialing mechanism, the signal being “this person is sufficiently smart/assiduous/disciplined to have completed four years of study, albeit worthless study”. Increasingly, however, the signal it sends is “this person is absolutely incapable of being employed in any productive capacity whatever.” Some of them might be able to eke out an existence battening on the bits of society that make and do things, or burrowed into its fatty parts like tapeworm cysts in measly pork, but not all of them.
The ludicrously overblown language is par for the course as well. It’s a rather adolescent trope: the youthful ideologue misunderstood by grownups, the elevation of the trivial, the ridiculous self-importance. P. J. O’Rourke (SWT) said “Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.” Sometimes these idiots grow up; sometimes they become Laurie Penny, for whom every minor affront to her sensibilities is a harbinger of the apocalypse.
according to a blog called the Everyday Feminist, proper English grammar is (wait for it) racist.
It’s not a new idea. We mustn’t forget the appalling race hustler Dr Caprice Hollins, a speaker on “multicultural issues” and until recently the Director of Equity, Race and Learning for Seattle’s public schools. Among her insights is a belief that individualism, grammatical English and long-term planning (or “future time orientation”) are “white values,” and thus dubious. The expectation that all students should be responsible individuals and meet certain linguistic and organisational standards is, according to Hollins, a form of “cultural racism.”
Hollins says she wants to “allow students of colour to see themselves reflected in a positive way,” yet she thinks they needn’t learn the grammar and fluency she herself employs – and which many employers will expect of job candidates – because those things are merely “white values.” Likewise punctuality, personal responsibility and foresight – these too, she says, are suspect. She thinks that treating students the same regardless of their pigmentation is wrong because doing so doesn’t “acknowledge racial and ethnic differences” as defined tendentiously by her. We must, she says, see people as “racial beings” and “teach [children] to view the world through a racial lens.” Again, as defined by her.
And so, instead of students learning to turn up on time and structure their writing – and their thoughts – she wants teachers to fret about “white privilege” and “the dominant Eurocentric perspective.” How this will help black students fulfil their potential is not at all obvious.
Incidentally, the flag ban has been vetoed.
Until recently?. So she was let go? (or kicked out, I hope).
So she was let go? (or kicked out, I hope).
I don’t know the particulars of her career change and as far as I can make out she’s still peddling the same obnoxious claptrap.
Dr Hollins was paid $86,000 a year to search out “institutional racism” in Seattle’s public school system. Three years in, despite finding no evidence whatsoever, she continued taking the cheques and blathering about “white privilege,” and insisting that further “investigation” (and cheque-writing) was needed. The total lack of evidence had no discernible impact on her grandiose assumptions. Eventually, she was venturing way beyond the school gates and turning over stones in the children’s summer holidays because this, she claimed, would reveal “systemic problems… within the school system.”
It didn’t.
That Hollins’ own “progressive” dogma might be at fault – and itself racially bigoted – didn’t seem to occur to her, or to her employers. Which, when you think about it, is quite remarkable.
You too can check your privilege with these fine Privilege Lists compiled by the esteemed Sam Killerman, a “comedian and social justice advocate…[who]attended Purdue University for his Bachelor’s degree, where he got started in both stand-up comedy and LGBT advocacy, and went to Bowling Green for his Master’s. He relies on all of those experiences (as well as Wikipedia) in his daily work.”
If you wish further to expand your political rehabilitation, explore the site liked above, or drink deeply from the well of wisdom at his other web site.
Alas, despite his being a “comedian”, this appears not to be a parody.
Well, it is certainly true that certain “liberal” arts degrees are indeed a form of social signalling – not only to those within the peergroup but also to potential employers. For instance, a job application by a graduate of one of the many varieties of Angry Studies signals to a potential employer “this person is a walking, talking potential lawsuit”.
The purpose of a university degree, outside the STEM arena, has of course for a long time been as a signalling mechanism rather than a credentialing mechanism, the signal being “this person is sufficiently smart/assiduous/disciplined to have completed four years of study, albeit worthless study”.
It’s sort of like the conspicuous displays that have evolved in animals like peacocks where the displays (are thought) to act as an advertisement of fitness – the reasoning going something along the lines of “the only reason I can support this ludicrous resource-wasting display is because my genes are so good and therefore you want to mate with me”.
The problem arises when the display starts being selected for its own sake and gets uncoupled from its original purpose. Imagine, for example, if the peacock’s fan got so large that the bird fell over on its backside when it displayed it. This is what seems to be happening in the universities.
Godfrey Elfwick just responded to a Laurie Penny tweet …
https://twitter.com/GodfreyElfwick/status/574628233095831552
put down any beverages prior to reading …
Heh.
Children’s shows like Peppa Pig need to do more to raise awareness of gender diversity and #LGBT issues.
I like that this is actually a plausible thing an SJW would promote.
OMG, won’t someone save Rian Brown of Kalamazoo College from having violence done to her body because she heard words she didn’t agree with?
“Like, understand the violence that occurs against our bodies when we have to hear our peers say things like ‘he wants to hold guns on campus,’” Brown said during Monday’s meeting. “Understand the triggering that that means for, like, students of color that have to sit at this table and hold a straight face, to hear that.”
Judging by this, the only “violence that occurs against her body” is her own dietary habits. Lay off the ice cream, babe.
Yeah, I know, “racist” “sexist” “size-ist” “body-shaming”, the whole lot. I shall report to the sensitivity training seminar forthwith…
Such sleazy language. There is no violence done to her or others by these words.
Children’s shows like Peppa Pig need to do more to raise awareness of gender diversity and #LGBT issues.
I like that this is actually a plausible thing an SJW would promote.
Nick Jr specifically promotes Peppa Pig as teaching children about the “diversity in the world;” they note that prior to the show. Interesting that the SJWs don’t find it ‘diverse’ enough, presumably meaning that they want the charming naivete the show (and their simple pleasures: pancakes, muddy puzzles, cowboys, carrots, etc.) replaced with sex/gender-focused activism.
I suppose the best way to invalidate that claim is to encourage them to write a few spec scripts. Get them to flesh out their ideas of how the show should be better. Then make a point of spreading the scripts around to parents.
I just got into a row on Facebook over a newspaper article about a report that purported to discern just why more Utah women aren’t in leadership. The report (all gussied up with statistical analysis and junk) concluded that Utah women have a mindset that “women don’t belong in leadership roles.” That was the headline.
I wondered what kind of survey would have prompted Utah women to provide such an answer, because in all my life I’ve never heard Utah woman disparage the idea of women holding elected office and suchlike. Utah just elected Mia Love to the U.S. legislature, and nobody criticizes Sarah Palin for being “uppity.” Our polygamous grandmothers were suffragettes, (women had the vote before Utah statehood; joining the union took away the franchise), and upon achieving statehood (1896) a woman was elected to the state legislature — after running against her own husband.
So upon reading the study (which the newspaper failed to link), it turns out that they surveyed women who were already in “women in leadership” organizations.
That’s right: they endeavored to “understand” one group of women by asking another group to speculate on the first group’s motives.
I was furious, but apparently the problem wasn’t with the article, it was with my tone. Also, I got told that Facebook isn’t a place for academic debate. (Perhaps not.)
Sorry, ladies, but there’s no civil way to speak truth to sophistry, no politic way to say “that’s a lie and you’re liars,” no polite method to point out the wolves in sheep’s clothing.
When you privilege civility in your discourse you give the edge to sophistry.
And homey don’t play that game.
Good work, di. I have to wonder, though, do you ever feel that arguing with these people is like tilting at windmills?
I suppose the best way to invalidate that claim is to encourage them to write a few spec scripts. Get them to flesh out their ideas of how the show should be better. Then make a point of spreading the scripts around to parents.
Well, yes. And even when parents give the nod to any such script it would still have the potential to draw the ire of some other group interest. You can add a lesbian and a gay couple, but did you happen to the forget bi-polyamorous couples?. And where is the wheelchair-bound disabled gender-queer neighbour who bakes vegan cookies for the kids?. These people all deserve a voice.
It’s like a russian doll of special interests.
“happen to forget”, not happen to the…
jeez
Good work, di. I have to wonder, though, do you ever feel that arguing with these people is like tilting at windmills?
The good gentleman Señor Quijano thought that he was battling giants, not windmills; acting on his delusion resulted in being tossed from his horse and sent head over teakettle down the hill.
I know exactly who I’m dealing with: A generation of vipers and whited sepulchers. Jesus didn’t employ a lick of civility when addressing them, either.
Oh, sorry, I guess that was, well, a piss-poor attempt at humor on my part. I hope you weren’t offended.
@ dicentra. It took me a few years to adjust to FaceBook and to realise that it’s not a forum to freely discuss ideas. Being a long-time usenet veteran, and having studied at the feet of some of the mightiest flame warriors, I gradually learnt over time that the cut’n’thrust style of unmoderated newsgroups is not the way to conduct oneself in FaceBook.
People who post any kind of political or “social grievance” view on their FB feed are not looking for any kind of counter-view or a robust discussion about their initial post. They are only seeking approval from their online friends and a means to display their superior moral worthiness (I know this is all self-evident for the denizens of this website).
The only way I can survive FB and make it a pleasant experience is to hide just about everything of a political nature. “I don’t want to see this.” “Hide all from The Guardian/GetUp/Senator Scott Ludlum? etc etc etc”. “HELL YEAH!!!”
It is a constant source of dismay to me that so many of my friends and peers who are my age (early 50s) are so intractably of the left, like they once chose a football team to barrack for when they were younger and then just abrogated their responsibility to ever critically think about anything anymore. It’s quite a lonely position to be in here, and I really do have to keep my powder dry as much as I can.
Sorry, rant over.
“In a letter uncovered by Campus Reform Tuesday afternoon, over 60 professors have endorsed the attempt to ban the American flag from an “inclusive” space on the campus of UC Irvine (UCI).”
http://campusreform.org/?ID=6349
over 60 professors have endorsed the attempt to ban the American flag
But of course.
But, but, but… if you ban flags, what have you left to burn in protest?
Der yoof really ought to think this through before squeaking.