Tag: trigger warning

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard

May Trigger Eye Rolling

microaggressions, trigger warning, free speech, First Amendment, freedom,

The fashionable campus notion of “microaggressions” blurs the distinction between peaceful speech (offensive or not) and bashing somebody over the head with a club. 

If courts, police and/​or university officials can rationalize regarding the perpetrator of a so-​called “microaggression” as initiating force against an offended listener, they can also rationalize using actual physical force in retaliation. Which, to the extent implemented, would mean the end of freedom of speech. 

After all, nobody needs a First Amendment in order to utter banal pronouncements about the weather.

The allied campaign urging or requiring professors to issue “trigger warnings” before discussing anything that might provoke discomfort also dampens discourse. 

Who can object to letting viewers of TV news know that they are about to see a corpse? Or sending little kids out of the room when certain subjects are discussed? But is such common sense the point of “trigger warnings”?

At best, “trigger warnings” are a silly name for referring to what nobody seeks to keep secret. At worst, they help trigger distress themselves — or impede frank discussion of controversial subjects. The latter treats adults as if they were not adults; the former makes adults less adult. 

If and when “trigger warnings” are imposed by force, with penalties for omitting them, they also endanger freedom of speech.

Advocates of open discourse seem to be in an endless war with champions of a repressive political correctitude. The jabberwocky used to justify that repression keep evolving. The response must be constant: intellectual clarity and eternal vigilance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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education and schooling folly ideological culture responsibility

Anti-​Lynch Lynch Mob

racism, political correctness, progressivism illustration, common sense, trigger warning, micro-aggression,

America’s worst racial and sexual injustices were institutionally addressed years ago, in the Sixties and soon after — by folks in the Civil Rights movement, everyday citizens, and their representatives.

So what do today’s earnest, Johnny-​and-​Jilly Come Lately “Social Justice Warriors” have left to complain about?

Why, building names, of course!

The local college in Annville, Pennsylvania, has been embroiled in a bizarre civil rights complaint about their Lynch Memorial Hall. Named after one Dr. Clyde A. Lynch, a Depression Era benefactor, some SJW students are demanding that it be changed, because of, get this, “associated racial connotations.”

“Lynch,” you see. It triggers them.

I kid you not.

Colin Deppen, writing last week on pennlive​.com, explained how Dr. Lynch had nothing to do with the lynching of African-​Americans in Jim Crow days. The extra-​legal hanging tradition began much earlier, in the Revolutionary War, “with a Captain William Lynch of Pittsville, Virginia.” This fellow “headed a self-​constituted court with no legal authority that persecuted suspected British loyalists.”

Lynching’s origins? White-​on-​white violence, not white-on-black.

SJW students, mostly ignorant and incurious, prefer coming off as whiners or moral scolds than learn something.

Or let a coincidence go.

The problem is this: the closer some people get to reaching their goals, they have less and less to do. Yet many “late adopters” covet the moral authority of their predecessors. So they pack all their frustration and passion into making more and more unreasonable demands.

But this may be self-​correcting. They look like idiots. And they have obtained our attention. This Lynch Mob nonsense could be the sign of their end times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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racism, political correctness, progressivism illustration, common sense, trigger warning, micro-aggression,