Senate Has Cancel Culture Gone Too Far?

So we are talking about a complete nonissue, both in the principles and in the substance ?

 

But you see, this could have been easily handled by those students contacting him after class and explaining what they felt about his use of the term. But that's not what they did. Instead they wrote a letter to the dean with hyperbolic language about how they took 3d8 mental damage from it which then forced the issue to become public. This was entirely unnecessary. They either wanted attention or they disliked this professor from something prior and saw this as an opportunity to get at him. It's so transparently obvious that this is the case.

 

How did it "force the issue to become public?" It was in fact never public at all until right wing/libertarian publications started shrieking about how free speech was being oppressed. I'd agree that not going to him doesn't reflect a great deal of confidence in him. But there are plenty of ways that can happen, and very few of them involve some nefarious plot to get someone fired. It's wild of you to attribute some malicious plot to them.

Esmir's summary above is correct. In that this was ever "about" anything, it was some outsider to the university wanting to convince everyone that "Something something liberal snowflakes Things aren't as good as they used to be." Apparently, they were successful in persuading Vivec.

 

Honestly, once in a while I'd like some honesty from you. This because public because the Dean wrote an email to students explaining why the professor wasn't going to be teaching the class. Do you not see how the students making a formal complaint to the dean against the professor and then the dean writing an email to all the students in class widened the scope of who was involved? Because that email was what was shared to news agencies, including mainstream news agencies.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/09...ion-students-allege-sounds-like-english-slur/

I don't know why you're like this. I've mentioned twice now that I believe the students were unnecessarily hyperbolic in describing the "damage" they suffered from hearing a Chinese word that sounds similar to the n-word. I've mentioned that they could have handled it by 1) the students not making a formal complaint and instead taking to the professor outside of class 2) the dean not sending a email falsely claiming that the professor mispronounced the word to make it sound more like the n-word. Various groups of faculty and students, including a group called the Black China Caucus have all said that this was mishandled. But no, wocky knows better than all of them! There's no defense here. The black students were wrong. The way the school handled it was wrong. You have no case.

 

"Pauvre ***" can be both used as an insult and as an endearment in French.

 

What does it mean in America?

 

A couple point worth nothing here.

How does that equate to what you proposed? You said they "wanted attention" or "wanted to get rid of the professor." What you highlighted supports neither. They could have started with an open letter posted to everyone on campus. They could have e-mailed sympathetic media outlets themselves. They could have staged some sort of public protest, or marshaled other negative stories about the professor in question to justify their move.

They did none of the above. They sent a private e-mail to a leadership official within their own program. You can't say why they didn't. You don't actually know, but chose regardless to use the most disparaging possible interpretative frame. That the administrator chose to write a public e-mail rather than send a private reply, meet with them in-person, or use some other approach is not their responsibility. Only in your telling does this become somehow a part of their master plan.

This concern itself seems quite selective. It's not the language that I would use either. But the reality is that vncredleader was just saying yesterday that Barack Obama "slit democracy's throat" by encouraging someone who couldn't win to drop out sooner than later. Slit democracy's throat. Literally destroyed forever the entire concept of a system of government. Really? Younger people express themselves differently.

Regardless, let me repeat what I find most objectionable. Not that you thought their wording was too strong. But that you decided to develop a whole fan fiction on the basis of this judgment about how they must be publicity-seekers out to ruin people's career.

This was not a "false" claim. As even the articles you cited--and the professor himself--noted, there is a fair degree of regional variance in how this is pronounced. At best, the one he chose was closer to the n-word than others. And again, native Chinese speakers in the class also confirmed it wasn't how they were used to hearing the word.

 

The same as in the UK, but the difference is that it has been typically used as a slur towards women. So by 'meaning', I was referring to its use to put women down. It causes far greater offence for that reason. Elsewhere it gets used on both sexes of course, though mostly men.

 

The Daily Telegraph (also known in the UK as the Torygraph) gave the cue, and they're a journal who routinely misrepresent what someone they classify as a political opponent say when outright lying would be a bit too much. They're not quite QAnon-misrepresenting, but that's the direction in which they're heading. This one I'd advise taking with a grain of salt until after reading the potentially offending chapters.

 

huh?

 

The evolving position of JK Rowling:

Spoiler

 

Here's what makes me wary: Le Monde, Libération and L'Humanité here would have already picked up on a transphobic book by Rowling. None of them are saying a word about it.

 

I get what you're saying about The Telegraph; for what it's worth, The Guardian also reviewed it and called a certain decision to be "at best, utterly tone-deaf" - won't link or go into the details as there's potentially spoilerish info in that review.
And the book just came out yesterday, so we can wait for more reviews to come out in the next few days.

 

I mean, I sort of get it -- and CNN is carrying it, so I think it's probably legit -- JK Rowling believes her own press, so she likely thought "Huh, The Silence of the Lambs was really good -- I bet I can write something as good as that!" and... yeah.

The Silence of the Lambs (at least the movie) went out of its way to have the actual brilliant serial killer character say that the other crazy serial killer wasn't really transgender / transsexual, and the movie was still problematic on this front. I can't imagine Rowling would get anywhere close to that level of nuance...

 

This seems relevant, and FB keeps showing me ads about it about how colleges are creating terrorists now.
There's a debate currently ongoing about a planned discussion at SFSU: "Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance"

What's gotten attention is that one participant would be Lelia Khalid is one of the participants, and she's a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and was involved in plane hijackings around 1970, and it seems letting her talk violates the expectations some have of the administration: “We look to them to ensure the safety and inclusion of all students, including Jews and Zionists.”

The president of the university has also put out a response as well.

 

Speaking of Zionist Cancel Culture, the CBC had to apologize for using the word Palestine because it offended Zionists.

https://mondoweiss.net/2020/09/cbc-owes-the-people-of-palestine-an-apology/

 

Palestine is both the name of the political state and the name of the geographical area, so even conceptually it doesn't make much sense to me.

But what they are doing is clear, @Lord Vivec , and it's actually similar to what they do to Cuba and communist countries in general. It's not enough for them to make people just have a bad opinion about certain issues or political realities. They want those issues to become unspeakable. Like Voldemort. They want people to be uncomfortable to even having a discussion about them. We saw that with Cooper's interview of Sanders. "You are praising Castro for something???? ". Same is true for Palestine. They want people to be really afraid when they talk about these issues.

If someone starts praising Hitler, we'd all start being a bit suspicious, for obvious reasons. Well, they want the same to happen in several other circumstances that would be way less controversial. If they start giving up on imposing this fear of discussion, they are afraid that they might lose the war of ideas.

 

If you can't name it, you can't talk about it, and eventually, you can't think about it. Orwell had it right...

 

Absolutely it has gone to far.

 

Thank you for this unsubstantiated one sentence that ignores the last 28 pages of conversation. Very compelling!