Sexual paranoia on campus: Laura Kipnis, the professor at the eye of the storm
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's understood sexual assault is an issue at campuses --focus on that. Focus on providing guidance to new arrivals, acceptable sexual behavior, etc. But to censor opinion on the subject in institutions of high learning is ridiculous. It's unfortunate that some faculty as well as student bodies have been complicit in the new baseline for what consists of harm --it's no longer bodily harm or physical assault but rather ideas and opinions --this is very sad. I can only think back to my days in Uni. What a strange unrecognizable world it has become.
One of the most effective essays I've read on diagnosing the problem is this:
I mean, the actual cause they claim to fight for or against, doesn't even come up anymore. Its all about testing social nukes. Yes, we can bundle together and silence that guys opinion (we never really read his book, or provided valid counter arguments), yes we can ostracize that woman for taking our claims apart in public. Is that all?
Los Alamos for the social media version of Lord of the Flys? Honestly, the first develop/her who welded a camera to a cellphone, did more against police violence against minorities, then three generations of social justice warriors combined. So why not close the talk-shops and force those hick-up-hikikomorito to actually work for social causes ? Write a Email-Correcter, that takes slang out of a business Email? Fight centralized identities, which put a face to everything on the web. Implement a fake news detector - filter the web for click bait, by replacing links to the original paper/blog post/cause. Your absence has been noted.
This is probably unrealistic, since one person's enjoyable experience is often in direct conflict with another's misery.
Maybe it just needs to to go down so that all the noisiest, most adversarial assholes, likely to compliment each other's misery land in the same place, make the most noise, and it looks like a huge, ridiculous disaster, but through this, 99% of everyone else's time at school goes smoothly, far far away from the well-isolated, planned demolition of losers.
Is this how wars start?
It's predictable to a large degree. Between moral foundations ( Jonatan Haidt, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI1wQswRVaU ) and hormone levels (IIRC Gad Saad, can't locate specific video right now, some example articles below) there is growing body of scientific research relating to how much moral and political alignment is function of our body and brain.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/08/05/politic... http://www.unl.edu/polphyslab/polpsycharticle.pdf