College Students Are Ridiculously Infuriating Safe-Space/Mega-thread

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm sure this comes up a lot in real life (because while an online personal will not be entirely accurate, it will be at least partially reflective) and as such you will be bored of even hearing the question, but why are you such an utter cock, Dead0man? Why so nasty? I don't refer to your views here, but the manner in which you put them across: as a general rule your posts typically display such a staggering meanness of spirit as to come across as almost psychotically callous. Please understand that this is not something to be proud of.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

meh, I'm a dick.  Doesn't come up much in real life, but I certainly can be a dick there too.  I'm not unique.  Especially not here.

Again, you seem almost proud of this. Why?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

For the fairly obvious reason that these silly stories about students being very silly (and I observe that there has been little suggestion that the students in question are being anything other than very, very silly) pretty much only concern the Professional Student Activist 1% of the student body. And such people have always been utterly ridiculous (and habitually sell out within seconds of graduating...)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Have you not seen the age breakdown on polling about whether "offensive" political speech should be prohibited?

No. But absolute freedom of speech is rarely popular, although exactly what is deemed to be beyond the pale (and how that is described) will change over time. There are more serious concerns wrt universities (mostly involving the root of all evil, naturally) than online petitions against statues of the long dead or whether this guest speaker or that guest speaker to a pointless post six pm 'debate' should be allowed to turn up or not.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Or rather: ridicule is fine and frankly well deserved (WE DEMAND that our pianos are tuned as regularly as we're pretty sure those of the OTHER students are!!!!). But the pearl clutching - and there are way worse places for that than here - is absurd.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Our generational cohort is much more likely than previous generational cohorts to deem political speech unacceptable, and support it being illegal, on the grounds it is "offensive."

I dispute that this is true. I can believe that when phrased like that younger people right now are more likely than older people to support such a proposition, but I don't think that means a lot (particularly as what is implicitly meant is racist/homophobic speech etc, a matter on which there is quite a lot of generation difference). During the Cold War most Americans supported restrictions on the political rights of Communists, I believe. I suspect that right now there would not be a massive generation difference regarding the rights of someone to preach ISIS propaganda in the middle of NYC.

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I think that the idea of freedom of speech has had foes far more formidable than a handful of drunken students who will likely soon sell out and work in Marketing.

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Well if that's how this is going to be then I'll say that it is also possible that I believe in freedom of association (another important democratic right!). I don't believe that an Assembly refusing to hear a particular person speak is an example of a restriction on freedom of speech, because that Assembly has a right to determine who has the right to speak to it. In the long history of student radicalism there have been incidences of things like attempting to influence what and is not taught in universities on political grounds and often backed up by violence (or the threat of violence). That is an assault on freedom of speech (amongst other things) and if there was much happening in that direction, then, yes; there would be grounds for a degree of concern (though it would have to be prefaced with: why is this happening, exactly?). But if the Students Union at Toad Suck Community College do not wish to hear the controversial figure Bill Dickhead speak at a public meeting because Bill Dickhead has said nasty things about [insert group here], then they are well within their rights to tell him that he is not welcome. Understandably Bill Dickhead would not be very happy about this, but he is not being silenced and his political rights are not being threatened. Now we can have a debate about whether it is a good idea to only hear from people who agree with you (you presume), but if the response is to get outraged about FREEDOM OF SPEECH!!! then this isn't going to happen because the student activists are just going to write you off as a young fogey not worth their time engaging with.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Whoa... #triggered much?

If you dispute that is true, please take a few minutes and look at recent polling on this.  It's true that the biggest age gap is about political speech that is offensive to marginalized people, but the younger cohort is significantly less likely to endorse the abstract concept of political speech too.  So what in my argument are you disputing?  If you don't believe what I'm arguing, I can link you to the polling on it.

But if I dispute that the polling is particularly meaningful then there's no point in showing me to the polling.

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That's fine and you're totally entitled to that that stance, but most people who have grumbled on this matter have done so from the classic 'everything is going to the dogs' point of view. I think it is useful to point out that this is nonsense.

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I don't think I'm being disrespectful - or if I am then it certainly isn't intentional and neither is the rest of the reply - merely expressing a view that this problem, to the extent that it is a problem, is not a serious problem. I would suggest (for instance) that my country's libel laws are a greater threat to free speech (or whatever) than #triggered students, and that there are issues with universities across the world that are considerably more serious and which receive no attention (mostly involving money). Etc.

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If you don't think that most students maybe drink a little bit too much then I don't think you can have spent much time around a university environment either

As for the selling out thing, such is the inevitable path of the student radical. Doesn't mean their views aren't sincere, but History has shown what will happen. Mind you, there's the alternative route: from student radical to minister of state for paperclip procurement in two decades.

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Whereas you...?

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Most people, though, are barely political (sensible fellows!) and so any views they hold on 'pluralism' will be vague and not matter greatly to them. Certainly won't influence how they vote, for instance.

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But this is how I prefer to argue; we can understand nothing without context, therefore the more the merrier

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Some of the people who have been most critical of the current generation of Radical Students were, and this is very interesting, Radical Students themselves back in the 60s and 70s (and were generally far more radical than the current lot, I have to note). I suspect that their views were quite sincerely held at the time as well, but I very much doubt that they hold them now.

Actually what has been hilarious has been the sight of people who have spent decades supporting this protest or that boycott or called for this person to be barred from addressing that meeting or whatever suddenly turn around and howl in entitled outrage when their methods are used against them. I am not sympathetic.

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Ah the famous free marketplace of ideas etc.

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That's one view. Another is that it is a rights matter (i.e. primarily about self-expression and perhaps even the sovereignty of the individual). Not that these positions are contradictory, automatically.

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Yes it does. But this is not automatically problematic in itself and is not a threat to free speech

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But it is acceptable, isn't it? Again, an Assembly clearly has the right to choose who gets to address it. I very much doubt that I would be allowed to address a meeting of my local Conservative Association, and if I did I think it certain that I would be shouted down. Again, you might suggest that it would be better if hostile speakers were heard out more frequently, but...

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It is a belief held by about 99.9% of the population, however. Anyway, what of the heckler? Is the heckler expressing his/her right to Freedom of Speech or is he/she a nuisance interrupting the Free Marketplace of Ideas? Or perhaps both?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm not mad.  Your first post rebutted arguments I'm not making, narrowed down the scope of arguments I was making to the point where it ignored the broader import of my argument, and did a lot of vague hand-waving.  I think you know you were doing all three.  I also think you understand that this wastes my time and fails to directly address my argument.

Perhaps I was putting forward an argument of my own, rather than merely responding to yours?

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I've already explained how. Answers to surveys often depend to an alarming extent on how questions are worded, which is why I'm generally pretty dubious about survey-based quantitative research in general fwiw but that's getting all very tangential.

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Pretty much all the - now quite extensive - discourse about this whole thing here has been about universities.

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But that's what this thread is about?

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I should point out that I'm not exactly fifty either.

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Its more that I don't believe that the views of the 1% shape particularly those of the 99%. Its hard to think of anything less important or relevant to most people's lives - students and former students included - than student politics.

Perhaps it goes the other way: after all we can say that the social condemnation of racism, homophobia etc has become firmer amongst young people in recent years, perhaps this influences the agenda of this generation of student radicals rather than the other way round?

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A respectable viewpoint. I just don't believe that things have deteriorated recently.

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I'm not much of a drinker, but I do like tweed.

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Not particularly.

But fine, an elaboration: one can believe that freedom of speech is primarily important as a right in of itself, rather than as a right that leads to something else (i.e. pluralism or whatever). This might lead you to different conclusions in certain cases if you thought of it mostly as a right-that-leads-elsewhere. Clearer?

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Of course. But I wanted to emphasis the point about free speech.

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That would just mean that I would type out the same words again. I can alter the combination of words, however: I think its fine to deny someone the chance to speak to a particular audience if that audience does not wish to hear them speak.

I understand, of course, that you don't think this, and that's fine: we have a disagreement.

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Yes?

The number itself is purely rhetorical, of course, and not a real number.

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Perhaps as an experiment you could try handing out pro-ISIS leaflets in the middle of a shopping centre tomorrow?

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But who defines whether I have addressed what you have written or not? I might be satisfied that I have done, while you might disagree

[Filuwaúrdjan]

An address at a public meeting is by definition political and therefore arguing that it should be non-political is craven and stupid.* You're basically looking for an excuse to whine, not that anyone here will be surprised at that given that that's like the whole point of young fogeyism.

_{*Mind you who even turns up to these things? Ordinary students don't, and neither do the doomed-to-postgradland types like what I was...}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I could go into detail, but this is all fundamentally a waste of time unless we can establish agreement on whether distrust of pluralism is a norm among the broader group, beyond the student activists.  What sort of evidence would you accept for this claim, if not polls?  I understand the reluctance to extrapolate a core group of student activists to everyone.  I would reject that too.  But you seem to have excluded every available form of mass-observation, and yet you're not asserting you're agnostic on my claim; you're rejecting it.  Clearly you have some firmer evidence--share it?

Mostly I would want to see clear evidence of the supposed different actually happening in the public sphere.

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I'm not sure, but then I'm not sure if either of us are exactly engaging directly which may account for the oddness of this discussion.

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Its a bugger isn't it, but that's the way it is. Though if that's the route you wan to go down you can try more detailed/less crude methods of surveying, perhaps. Or try to be clever about how you read other survey data, etc.

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Then what are you arguing for/against? Or is it that you are more concerned with the climate that leads to 'fyck off' being said more often than with the fact that someone responded to a request to speak with 'fyck off'? I suspect that's so, right? But not easy to spot from your tone earlier, you see.

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Ultimately most people are more interested in the results of a particular process than the process itself and would not regard the fact that political speech is massively infringed on in Russia as a reason for banning what they regard as hate speech in the United States. Whereas for you the process is a moral question in of itself, yes?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

My claim is about troubling, broad philosophical beliefs about pluralism among university students and their broader cohort.  I offer to show you a poll on that.  You're arguing we should instead look at...anecdotal evidence of...something?

Well in order to comment on a social phenomenon we probably need to be sure that it is real, don't we?

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You've misunderstood me. That was not a criticism or an attack. I'm observing that we are going round in circles here and am speculating as to why this might be because I don't think either of us is engaging in deliberate obfuscation.

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Well you wrote 'poll' and I so I made some assumptions.

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Have there been many cases of this happening? Though normally speakers are booked for an event before it is clear if there is an audience.

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I'm arguing that thats the position that most people seem to take, to one extent or other, no matter how they phrase it. That the process is just process to them; technicalities. And that even when it is claimed that this is not so, actually, it pretty much always is (like a lot of the people crying foul about a lot of this studenty nonsense are quite happy to have State crackdowns on speech in other contexts. Which... er... many of those students are not happy with. Lawd). Whereas your concern is with the process, which (again) I observe that you see in essentially moral terms.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Like, I don't know, with a random, representative poll that directly asks people about their attitudes toward pluralism and free speech?

This will probably strike you as deranged rambling, but...

What I'm getting at is that it isn't certain how much this would actually tell us. While, granted, it hangs onto much of its postwar prestige in North America (and amongst journalists everywhere of course), elsewhere the intellectual credibility of positivist quantitative social research has crumbled somewhat over the past third of a century for very good reason (although there were always sceptics; the famous 'rule' about statistics in British India etc).

Basically the issue is this: I might ask a hundred people for their views on a particular social question, but I cannot be sure that they will all interpret the question in the same manner. This is a problem because if they don't then I cannot be sure that the data collected is objective or even exactly accurate. Depending on the circumstances it might even be misleading and through no technical fault on my part. At its worst you get situations where, like, an awful lot of 1960s social surveys are useless as historic documents except as examples of 1960s social surveys. Apparently sending round some well-spoken Oxbridge undergrads to ask workers in a car factory what they think about about class or a bunch of farmers what they thought about the relationship between the country and the city was not the greatest of ideas.

Let's say the question is about unacceptable speech. It is obvious that I'm asking about the acceptability of speech deemed by some to be racist, homophobic etc. Someone older being polled might well give a more 'liberal' answer to the question than if they assumed it was related to the security of the state. The inverse might well be true of someone younger.

Does this render any such survey as useless or inherently unreliable? No. But it does mean that the data is not pure, that the findings should not be regarded as an objective social fact, even if they could be used as an example of something indicative.

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If it feels as if we're arguing across three separate rooms and over the noise of a washing machine about to give up the ghost then I think its fair to conclude that there must be an element of mutual misunderstanding going on.

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An issue in American public discourse - as in something that people with letters after their name are prepared to defend - since the early 1990s, not a new development. I agree that it is absurd and distasteful. And generally counterproductive.

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Depends on the circumstances; i.e. whose event is it, who takes decisions over speaker invites etc. ?

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It isn't as your position is quite consistent and entirely constant. Does pretty clearly place you in a minority position, but then that's the life of the civil liberties advocate isn't it?

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I mean the process of political rights rather than the (or 'a' or 'an') end result. It appalls you to see even a theoretical abuse, and if such a reaction is possible then morality is not far behind. You are in this respect an extremely ardent old fashioned liberal, way more so than a lot of people who use that sort of label. This is not an insult.

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Curiosity, probably.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I love how sensitive people are in a thread about taking apart peoples 'sensitivity'.

The curious part is the assumption that there is something wrong in being sensitive. Ah, destructive cultural norms etc.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Dude the student radicals of the late 1960s were infinitely more violent than those of today. As you'd know if you'd actually read those history books rather than just looked at the pictures.