You Can Either Concur Or Agree
Some thrilling developments at Edinburgh University:
Ms Imogen Wilson, 22, was subject to a “safe space complaint” over her supposedly “inappropriate hand gestures” during a student council meeting.
Thug life. No, wait. It wasn’t that kind of gesture.
Ms Wilson said she raised her arm in disagreement.
And such reckless provocation simply will not do.
According to the association’s rules, student council meetings should be held in a “safe space environment,” defined as “a space which is welcoming and safe and includes the prohibition of discriminatory language and actions.” This includes “refraining from hand gestures which denote disagreement,” or “in any other way indicating disagreement with a point or points being made.”
Ah, the student left and its adorable tendencies.
According to the [students association] safe space rules, only gestures that indicate agreement are “permissible”.
And so,
A complaint was made against Ms Wilson, who was then subjected to a vote on whether she should be removed from the room.
I can’t help thinking these students are just a tad overwound. But at least things can’t get sillier.
Although the vote went in her favour, with 18 people voting to remove her and 33 voting for her to be allowed to remain, she was later threatened with another complaint after shaking her head while someone was speaking.
Burn the witch!
You know, I don’t think I can top this one today.
Update, via the comments:
Dr Cromarty notes,
Turns out Imogen Wilson is just as much of an intersectional halfwit as the rest of them.
Yes, hoist, petard, and all that. As leftism is premised on presumed, often ludicrous categories of ‘victim’ and ‘oppressor’, this kind of incoherence and opportunism is pretty much inevitable. And yet Ms Wilson, who piously signals her disdain for “white men” as some supposedly malign and oppressive group, is somehow surprised when the same mindset of implausible delicacy and question-begged categories – the same glib piety – is applied to her for being insufficiently conformist.
But maybe the thing to take away from this is the fact that someone involved in leftwing student politics was sufficiently keen to exercise power over others that they made a formal complaint about a woman quietly shaking her head in disagreement and then called for a vote on whether said woman should be banished to the outer darkness. An expulsion that 17 other students saw fit to endorse. As if this were something that sane people do. Because even small head movements are something to be punished.
According to the [students association] safe space rules, only gestures that indicate agreement are “permissible”.
If these are the brains of tomorrow we really are screwed.
I denounce the voting. The expressions of disagreement in the 33 to 18 count require me to repair to a fainting couch. The entire council should be summarily expelled!
she was later threatened with another complaint after shaking her head while someone was speaking.
Fu. King. Hell.
Sad.
A cradle of The Enlightenment gone to the dogs
Isn’t restrictions on using your hands when talking a micro aggression against italians, greeks, etc.?
Isn’t restrictions on using your hands when talking a micro aggression against italians, greeks, etc.?
Or the flamboyant.
The only safe space is a safe space of one, clearly.
Also, this all sounds terribly…patriarchical?
Perhaps this generation of university students is far funnier than we’ve been led to believe?
Could an entire generation be tolling us?
Turns out Imogen Wilson is just as much of an intersectional halfwit as the rest of them. Hope the term ‘halfwit’ doesn’t trigger her.
https://mobile.twitter.com/eusavpaa/status/715923239990599680
Turns out Imogen Wilson is just as much of an intersectional halfwit as the rest of them.
She doesn’t seem to grasp that the authoritarian idiocy to which she was subjected is a consequence of the fallacy and mindset she endorses, albeit presumably in slightly milder forms.
It does seem that Political Correctness is making the word “University” particularly appropriate – no Diversity of thought or opinion is allowed.
For better news, let’s compare these idiotic pampered students with someone who left school in 1986 aged just 14 and who is making a genuine difference:
https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-the-frontlines-of-the-blue-green-economic-revolution-d5ae171285a3#.kdtyoep47
Of course he’s one of those horrible white working class types that make the Lefty PC brigade shudder. He might even drive a white van.
“Isn’t restrictions on using your hands when talking a micro aggression against italians, greeks, etc.?”
I don’t know, but surely talking is a microagression against the hearing-impaired? We should all just sit motionless in complete silence. Can’t get safer than that, right?
Unless you’re “triggered” by complete silence, of course.
(I can’t help wondering what the Pythons would have made of all this. It really is the 21st Century equivalent of the People’s Front of Judaea/Judaean People’s Front, isn’t it? And they did kind of predict it all with the bit about Stan having the right to have babies.)
Related.
Where was I?
I think you were finished.
Oh, Hi there, Sam!
Next time I’ll refresh the page before posting.
Ah, Monty Python will be banned soon. What with all that talk about the Spanish Inquisition. Anyone wanna rake bets on the first protest of a Python film or member appearing on a campus? Or has it already happened and I missed it?
Wildgoose, excellent link, thank you. I suspect that chap will run into some hard choices if his ventures scale up into the mainstream, but he’s clearly working his butt of trying to make something better. Which is awesome.
I’m struggling to enumerate the number of fucks I give about Imo Wilson’s predicament as it would be egregiously problematic for a cis-gendered male of pallor to culturally appropriate the relevant Indian paradigm.
she was later threatened with another complaint after shaking her head while someone was speaking.
No down twinkles allowed either?
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2011/10/remember-kids-socialism-is-the-opposite-of-greed.html
You know, I don’t think I can top this one today.
Try this on for size – Student “Activists” Overrun Portland State University Board of Trustees Meeting.
It has everything – loony tunes “feminist of color” with obligatory wackjob haircut, some oriental dude (I think) rocking a Kim Jun Un like haircut, tats, and a keffiyeh, mohammedan lady thinking she is going to be gunned down at her 90% Person of Pallor campus, Vietnamese transgender whose mom was a prisoner in Vietnam then a boat person complaining about how bad it is for xer (or xim – not sure) here, people with tape over their mouths, mic checks – the whole nine yards and then some.
Did the circus come to town?
Looks llke Imogen was hoist with her own petard.
Do any these students take time out of protesting and being offended to, you know, *study* anything?
‘only gestures that indicate agreement are “permissible”.’
A one sentence definition of Fascism.
…she was later threatened with another complaint after shaking her head while someone was speaking.
This makes me feel unsafe as a person of Bulgarian extraction. In our culture a head shake means “agreement” and a head nod means “no.”
While I was working on my Ph. D., I thought it would be great to be a professor. I got my degree but no university was interested in what I had to offer.
I’m now semi-retired and on my own. Whenever I read about what’s happening on campuses nowadays, I’m glad I was never hired.
I live comfortably off my own resources. Imagine having a tenured position with all that nonsense going on. It would be mighty tempting to quit but who’d want to leave the academic hog trough, even under those conditions?
Echoing in parallel . . . .
—From http://www.gocomics.com/tankmcnamara/ which tends to be about the extent of paying attention to sports that I bother with . . . .
When it comes time to build the “B” Ark, I’m sure space can be found for these students along side all those telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, and marketing executives.
Crazed Scots gits ahoy!
Well, thank god they’re not racists, like that awful Trump buffoon.
Who needs a wall?
RY,
Do any these students take time out of protesting and being offended to, you know, *study* anything?
I think it’s a safe bet that they’re all Grievance Studies majors, so I’d wager they get class credit for their protesting/disrupting/beclowning.
“Burn the witch” – LOL
@mojo
US voters: “Aren’t people coming through Mexico a problem if we’re giving out DACA exemptions for them and not Mexicans?”
The US government: “Right. Mexico, we’ll pay you to allegedly kick out illegal South and Central Americans.”
Mexico: “Funding? Ah yes. One issuing of visas to make Central Americans passing through legal until they get to your border for me, with a side of torture and ethnic cleansing of those pesky natives also for me. Gosh, it’s like you really know what I like!”
*torturing intensifies*
The Groan: “THE US IS RACIST”
You know, I don’t think I can top this one today.
The hits keep on coming – Academic Farce of the Week.
From a PhD dissertation in Geography:
Smart Cookies: The Gendered Spaces of Labor, Citizenship, and Nationalism in the Girl Scout Cookie Sale
You can read the whole thing here and you too can expand your, “…knowledge of children’s geographies, emotional geographies, and citizenship studies.”
@ Spiny Norman
I fear you are right.
In fact, if they just renamed most of the courses ” Grievance Studies,” it would be much more honest.
Turns out Imogen Wilson is just as much of an intersectional halfwit as the rest of them.
Yes, hoist, petard and all that. But maybe the thing to take away from this is the fact that someone involved in leftwing student politics was sufficiently keen to exercise power over others that they made a formal complaint about a woman quietly shaking her head in disagreement and then called for a vote on whether said woman should be banished to the outer darkness. An expulsion that 17 other students saw fit to endorse. As if this were something that sane people do.
“Based on a two-year study on the Girl Scout cookie sale, using qualitative methods and rooted in feminist methodologies ….
Translation: none of us knew anything about statistics so we decided to lie, make stuff up and whinge a lot
Translation: none of us knew anything about statistics so we decided to lie, make stuff up and whinge a lot
The incontinent pluralisation of abstract nouns rarely signals a superior intellect at work.
David:
Did the circus come to town?
Not the whole circus: Only the side show came to town.
You Can Either Concur Or Agree
I’m reminded of a Mad Magazine presentation from some bit back . . .
You know, they didn’t go far enough. It’s not enough to ban disagreeing, they should eject anyone who brings up facts that would tend to undermine arguments made by earlier speakers. Actually, they should probably ban anyone who brings up facts that would tend to undermine later speakers too. That way, we could have a truly free, safe discussion.
This
I used to not judge people by appearances and quite enjoy seeing people with weird hair and crazy tattoos but all these videos are making me prejudiced!
“When it comes time to build the ‘B’ Ark, I’m sure space can be found for these students along side all those telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, and marketing executives.”
It can’t happen too soon.
“Later on in the meeting, someone threatened me with a second complaint because I was shaking my head – but when I was addressing the room about my worries about Jewish students, there were plenty of people shaking their heads and nothing happened.”
These are not tender-hearted fools intent on banning all speech that might upset someone. They are Stalinists using “sensitivity” as an excuse to silence all dissent.
These creatures should be treated with all the respect and tolerance that you would show to a Nazi.
Here’s my proposal: As I’ve gotten older and crankier, I care less and less about the feelings of whinging malcontents. How about any of you?
So: Let’s go back to college, as cranky adults, and mock these morons to their faces and NOT CARE about their subsequent crying and bitching. For at least a semester, it might be fun.
“Let’s go back to college, as cranky adults, and mock these morons to their faces and NOT CARE about their subsequent crying and bitching. For at least a semester, it might be fun.”
Two years ago, I offered my services to a group of university students who were working on a cubesat project. I figured that since I worked in the business at one time plus, as an amateur radio operator, I had experience in working with satellites, they might benefit from my advice.
I had some meetings with various people and then dead silence. Nothing. Zippo. Rein. Nichts.
Maybe I scared them by calling a spade a spade and not giving a rat’s patootie about their feelings or their “needs and expectations”. When I was their age, and a young punk with a brand-new engineering degree, I would have welcomed the advice of a silver-backed greybeard like me, even though I might not have liked what I would have heard.
So, I have no idea what’s going on with that project nor do I care. If they think they know everything better, let them figure it all out as, obviously, they didn’t need my help.
These are not tender-hearted fools… They are Stalinists using “sensitivity” as an excuse to silence all dissent.
The pretence of concern is used as leverage, to excuse the imposition of absurd restrictions on what may be said – restrictions that can then be weaponised and used selectively, as in the case above. And as in most cases where such pieties prevail.
As leftism is premised on presumed, often ludicrous categories of ‘victim’ and ‘oppressor’, this kind of incoherence and opportunism is pretty much inevitable. And yet Ms Wilson, who piously signals her disdain for “white men” as some supposedly malign and oppressive group, is somehow surprised when the same mindset of implausible delicacy and question-begged categories – the same glib piety – is applied to her for being insufficiently conformist.
Whatever one thinks about Imogen’s own feeding of the intersectionality beast, it seems that her speaking out against anti-Semitism and the BDS movement marked her as someone who needed to be “criminalized” and “shunned”. She was then put firmly in her place. Just so she knows what is and isn’t acceptable.
She won’t be doing that again.
Which, one assumes, is the point.
I don’t think this one can be topped all year.
the fact that someone involved in leftwing student politics was sufficiently keen to exercise power over others that they made a formal complaint about a woman quietly shaking her head in disagreement and then called for a vote on whether said woman should be banished to the outer darkness. An expulsion that 17 other students saw fit to endorse. As if this were something that sane people do.
That.
That.
Not too long ago some working-class students were intimidated by the prospect of attending a university full of people posher than them. Now, it seems likely that alienation may be caused by the prevalence of institutionalised derangement. A derangement demanded and propagated by people of such feigned mental fragility that even small head movements are something to be punished.
“A complaint was made against Ms Wilson, who was then subjected to a vote on whether she should be removed from the room.”
Note than you can’t raise an arm in disagreement, but you can be physically removed from a room.
Safe!
“The pretence of concern is used as leverage”
It’s also useful for fraudulently determining ‘Who’s the Evil One’ and then unleashing the dimwitted (or professional) shriekers and wailers against him/her/them.
How did the aggrieved students vote? Did they raise their hands? Perhaps they nodded or shook their heads. Oh dear, an empty room as they were all barred. Now I know where all the clowns went after the circuses had to close down.
Has Scotland become ground zero for leftist totalitarian idiocy in the UK or are they still the JV team? Jeez, my late grandmother would roll over in her grave if she saw Scotland coming to this.
How did the aggrieved students vote? Did they raise their hands? Perhaps they nodded or shook their heads.
I assume nodding one’s head in agreement is still acceptable.
“Well, thank god they’re not racists, like that awful Trump buffoon.”
There’s a curious subset of the virtue-signalling phenomenon going on here: you can be as intolerant and hateful as you like provided you use the right words. Maybe (and this is by no means an endorsment of the man) Trump would be more acceptable if he started talking about Mexicans’ appropriation of American culture.
“’only gestures that indicate agreement are “permissible”.’
A one sentence definition of Fascism.”
More true than any of that lot would dare admit. Ultimately, that, not racism or genocide or goose-stepping in black shirts, is the absolute essence of fascism. Agree, and you’re left alone – no, more than that: you’re helped, welcomed, made to feel “special” and “valued” – but disagreement is not tolerated.
“Has Scotland become ground zero for leftist totalitarian idiocy in the UK … ?”
Has been for years, mate. I live in the West End of Glasgow, or as I call it, “the political fashion-victim capital of Europe”. For years, the Scottish Green Party was a bloke who lived just down the road from me. (Seemed to be, anyway. Presumably he got his nomination signatures from somewhere.) Roy Jenkins, the first elected SDP MP: Glasgow Hillhead. Current trends: “Refugees Welcome” posters, Left-Anarchist stickers on lamp-posts, and still with the “Yes” badges.
The only thing that surprises me about Ms. Wilson is that she’s at Edinburgh, not Glasgow.
Turns out Imogen Wilson is just as much of an intersectional halfwit as the rest of them.
I gathered as much from the glasses, nosering and hairdo.
Descending order of reactions from the child-minds of the rabid progressives:
If you…
Enthusiastically agree=”You’re OK, but not as good as me.”
Agree=”Try harder.”
Ambivalent=”If you know what’s good for you…”
Disagree=”Exterminate!”
Well, well, well: “Further on this appalling case from the great David Thompson,” quoth Tim Blair.
Kyoo-dos!
Sigh. I suppose “great” will do.
Just out of curiosity, how do they vote? What with the lack of disagreement and all. Maybe by number of nods (one vigorous nod is no, two vigorous nods is yes)? Or by ballot, where there’s a check box for YES and another check box DEFINITELY (or, “TOTES”)?
I’m studying law by distance and there was one SJW writing 1000-word tants on every discussion topic challenging the whole basis of our legal system. He was ignored and dropped out of the course after one last massive post and making several formal complaints to the authorities. So it doesn’t happen everywhere although we are mostly mature people. I was so disappointed when he left. It was like a David Column every single day.
Has been for years, mate. I live in the West End of Glasgow, or as I call it, “the political fashion-victim capital of Europe”.<\i>
@Sam Duncan
Sir James MacMillan (pbuh) calls the West End “The Peoples’ Republic of Byres Road”
Oops! Italics
I wonder if that will work…
Yay, it worked! If anyone’s wondering just *what* worked, I put an italic end-tag in my post before my comment, though it doesn’t show up.
And for those who thought we had reached peak silly for this year, allow me to introduce, via Tim Blair, the lady who is raising her cats to be gender neutral.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/sooner_or_later_we_must_all_make_this_call/
I’m pretty sure my neutered male cat is gender-neutral already.
Huh. For once I’m fashionable.
And for those who thought we had reached peak silly for this year, . . .
Not. one. chance.
A) It’s only the beginning of April, B) this year includes a U.S. presidential election.
Yay, it worked!
Fetch cake for that man.
Scrub my last comment – we now have The Case of the Racist Bananas at Warwick University. A first year medical student is being ‘comforted by friends’ and the student union is on the warpath.
Whoops! That was a bit of cultural appropriation there. Hope no-one noticed.
@JuliaM
What were the ‘racist terms’ written on the bananas. Is racism now like the the name of YHWH or Voldemort that the terms cannot be said out loud.
btw we presumably just have the student’s word that racist terms were written on the bananas. It’s not like people would fake these things to get attention on social media. Wait…what?
The Indy has a picture of the bananas – strangely, one of the terms written on it isn’t written as you would expect from a racist, but rather from a fellow black person…
Curiouser and curiouser. Whiteys don’t tend to use the spelling ‘NIGGA!’. The writing is very much like street tagging.
You judge
https://m.facebook.com/warsoc/
It’s not like people would fake these things to get attention on social media. Wait…what?
Have any of these “racist incidents” of recent years turned out to be genuine?
If her flatmates did it, then she’s cast a slur on them *all*. This could get rather messy.
Wildgoose, I did like the link, but I’m a bit concerned by the leftwing enviroconscious boilerplate in Mr. Bren Smith’s discussion of vertical underwater farming.
“The old economy is built on the arrogance of growth at all costs, profiting from pollution, and the refusal to share economic gains with 99 percent of Americans.” Really? Mr. Smith might want to ask himself why there are no famines in the capitalist, industrial countries that he likes to deride as “the old economy,” while they are still going on in parts of the world that subscribe to a, shall we say, different mode of economic organization.
And then there’s this: “But out of the ashes of the old economy, together we are building something new based on new-economy principles of collaboration, community-driven innovation, shared profits, and meeting social needs.” Yeah, I bet Lenin and Mao and Pol Pot and Che Guevara all thought the same, too. Shared profits – great business model if you’re the one deciding on who gets what share. Otherwise, not so much.
. . . we now have The Case of the . . . .
Fetch cake for that man.
WooHoo! Cake!:-D
He didn’t tell you it’s a urinal cake. 😉
He didn’t tell you it’s a urinal cake. 😉
So what you’re saying is that the cake is a lie? Certainly puts a whole new spin on the “cake or death” thing…
Don’t badmouth the cake. Trust in the cake.
I find it funny that she was a member of this group and they turned on her. SJWs eat their own.
My main interest though was how were they going to remove her if they had voted to do so. That would have been fun to watch because they only real way is actually illegal as well as being the same as murder in SJW illegal.