Posted on 11/07/2015 7:11:42 PM PST by sparklite2
One last word about the art of taking offense. Nowhere has this art been more assiduously cultivated than on American campuses, where an entirely new culture of trepidation has set out to capture the adolescent psyche. When discussing any of the matters in which the secular dogmas have staked a claim - race, sex, orientation, sexual politics - the professor may now be required to issue "trigger warnings", lest he stray into areas that might trigger the memory of some traumatic event in the life of the student. Visiting speakers with heretical views about feminism or homosexuality are also preceded by trigger warnings. Some campuses even provide safe rooms where the trembling students can retire for consolation should they have been exposed to the contamination of an unorthodox point of view.
Amusing though this is, you have to be careful not to laugh at it, at least if you are a professor who has not got tenure. Those who wish to maintain the student mind in a condition of coddled vulnerability, unhardened by opposition and unpracticed in argument, now police the campus, with the result that these places which should have been the last bastion of reason in a muddled world, are instead the places where all the muddles come home for nourishment. The example vividly illustrates the way in which the attacks on free speech can go so far as to close off the route to knowledge. And in the end that is why we should value this freedom, and why John Stuart Mill was so right to defend it - as fundamental to a free society - without it we will never really know what we think.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Did you see the video where students at Yale gang up on a professor because he sent an email telling them to ignore Halloween costumes that offend them?
Talk about insanity. Next thing we’re gonna hear about is students assaulting professors physically over crazy stuff like this.
There is a lot of good stuff here...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3357552/posts
Muslims perpetually claim victimhood and the right to be offended at ever encountering contrary views - and use the rage and perceived perpetual offense as a basis to behead people.
Liberals have simply adopted the same perpetual outrage at everything but strict orthodoxy. And haven’t yet picked up the habit of killing people.
It won’t be long before students march on libraries, confiscate “offensive” books and make a big bonfire of burning books. They will also probably say that anyone who is against burning books is a Nazi.
Is this Gai related to the Korean airline co pilot Sum Ting Wong?
I hadn’t noticed that, but, yes, he could be!
A person does not have a right to not be offended. In a sane world.
We do not live in a sane world.
This? Coming from the BBC?
Isn’t the UK the place where saying ANYTHING bad about muslims will land you in jail? Or uttering any sort of non-PC speech is considered a hate crime, and worthy of imprisonment?
No wonder the leftists in the US want to embrace Ingsoc and make it the law of the land.
Anyone who reads a small bit of history will recognize this offended mentality, this mentality of seeing every normal thing said and thought as a dire threat.
It is USSR commissars in the 1920s. It is Pol Pots revolutionaries. It is Mao’s red guards in the cultural revolution. It is brownshirts.
If they ever get ANY political power, they will do more than scream at us. Never accept them and appease them. And NEVER give up your firearms.
The article was written by the philosopher and novelist Roger Scruton.
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