Imagine fearing the consequences of "people are not gay by choice, but because they are each halves of a eight limbed cartwheeling sphere". Young minds cannot handle such dangerous rhetoric
I've heard an uptick in derogatory terms being thrown around recently and while unsurprising, it sure is sad.
Recent events...
- Went to a concert, an underage kid with a fake ID couldn't get a beer, turned to me and goes "Isn't this guy a f----"
Uh... well, he may be making your night less enjoyable, but I don't see why gay people have to catch strays cause of it...
"I don't think I'd call anyone that" was my response, and "it's okay to be gay" was a follow up
- My boss said something was retarded. I'm a bit wishy washy on the r-word myself as, while I'm friends with people with Down Syndrome and other maladies, it never occurred to me to relate the word to them (especially since they're generally really very nice people)
It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association)
But now I've stopped using it entirely, although in this case I did not correct my boss (who I respect as a person and enjoy working for very much)
- One of my other friends called something "gay" recently
"Don't call things gay bro" was my response. As my mom explained to me in sixth grade "even though you don't really even have an idea what it means to be gay, when you say that negative things are gay, you're implying that being gay is negative, but gay people just are themselves and don't deserve that"
I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that and I'm damned proud of it
All these losers trying to turn back the times to put gay people back in the closet give me "peaked in middle school" vibes, and it's sad to see that it's also slowly becoming normalized with people who I don't even think have that inclination or care to say prejudiced shit again too
> I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever
Usually cerebral palsy, I think, or (less commonly) epilepsy. I'm not sure it's still that common in the UK; I don't think I've heard it in the wild since the 80s [1], though some of that may just reflect the people I talk to as I get older.
> It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association)
Language police are extremely uncool; going around telling people which words they are allowed to use mostly just hurts your own cause. It has the exact same effect that an old Christian woman scolding kids not to use swear words has. Eventually people realize that your magic words give them power and it becomes cool and useful to start using them in the exact opposite way you want them to.
The only way for you to achieve the goal of making sure nobody’s feelings are hurt by words is to take away the power of the words. You only give the words MORE power by reacting to them.
I am a former student and graduate of this department at Texas A&M. I just called The Association and informed them that I consider this completely unacceptable and will not consider donations to the university unless this policy is reversed.
I would encourage fellow like-minded Aggies to do the same.
Drs Austin and McDermott are surely spinning in their graves right now.
I would say that the most respectable universities are traditionally institutions of higher learning.
It's always been possible for any of them to decline into lesser institutions of not-as-much-higher-learning as they started out with.
Wouldn't leadership integrity and actual scholarship make the big difference between those that are able to strive higher each generation compared to those who strive lower?
Who is it that wants to aggressively devalue Aggie degrees that have already been earned, especially in the eyes of the world, along with any to be granted in the future anyway?
It's not only "The Eyes of Texas" that are upon this.
> It's not only "The Eyes of Texas" that are upon this.
Referencing the University of Texas (Austin) school song in a reply to an Aggie, them fightin' words
More related, with A&M generally being traditionally conservative* and also being a research university that values higher learning -- yet still a public school -- they are going run up on these issues given the current state of "conservative" (maga) politics. UT is getting the same pressure, but being a traditionally liberal leaning school with a rich history of protest leading to change, they are able to resist a bit more -- which I always respected (except for Thanksgiving rivalry games) -- but even they are slowly caving-in. Texas use to mind its own business, scoff at whatever ideology the federal government was pushing and, for the most part, let people and institutions be. How we became a maga lapdog is truly baffling.
*Has the George H.W. Bush library and a Corps of Cadets (student military organization) that deeply intergraded into school tradition, for starters. Also, oil money.
It really begs the question of, how much is this obsession with controlling others' gender actually going to end up negatively impacting the US's competitive edge in higher education? Between this and firing qualified TAs who did their job, we're well beyond just impacting gender studies majors at Evergreen College. How much longer until it cuts into mathematics, merely because an author was part of the reigning administration's monster of the week?
It’s an issue, but a small part of it. The funding cuts and immigration barriers have already laid foundations for a massive harm to the US’s edge in research and education.
The US got the bomb in large part because the Nazi intelligentsia didn't like Jewish physics. If the person who unifies the four forces is transgender, will the US recognize and teach it?
The US got a lot of things in a lot of fields because the sort of people who were smart enough to make those advances were also smart enough to get far away from the Reich while the getting was still good.
Similarly, I believe the Renaissance was not so much a "rebirth" of culture as it was italian port cities suddenly benefiting from a sudden influx of highly educated people bugging out from Constantinople; more a translation than a reappearance.
I'm a bit peeved at this caricaturization of earlier eras. In fact, significant fields of modern philosophy received great innovation by churchmen, and they were of course constantly attempting to reconcile Christian dogma with Greek and especially Aristotelian thought.
One prominent example was formal logic, which was significantly developed in the middle ages, but received scant attention in the Renaissance.
They developed a great deal of formal logic, but looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroco#:~:text=In%20the%20term... (with the hindsight from Boolean logic, admittedly!) it seems more like they were mostly slathering on the tech debt. How am I mistaken?
Speaking of reconciliation, might I interest you in a reconciliation of Aquinas and Spinoza, by way of Galois Theory?
Not to minimize the significance of this but prohibiting a portion of a reading is like slapping a "parental warning" on a Rap CD in the 90s -- if I was an undergrad, I'd only want to read those excerpts more.
The real barrier to students reading Plato has historically (and correctly) been the dismal quality of translations available. I always hated reading plato because the translations available to me were significantly more concerned with carrying into the modern day the wonky syntax and sentence structure of ancient Greek philosophical writing, and less concerned with translating the underlying ideas into language understandable by a 19 year-old engineering major who can barely spell their own name.
I think that it would be easier to get younger people to study Quenya to be able to read fragments of Tolkien in the "original" than it would be to somehow get them to learn to read classical Greek. But it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek, and then there's a lifetime of really great stuff that opens up for one to enjoy.
I read an excellent parallel Greek and English translation when I was a kid, probably the one in the Loeb Classical Library.
They probably had this attitude, but I didn't find it objectionable at all, and I'm not a native English speaker. If a 19-year old engineering student can't read that, even in his own language, what's the point? The guy's a bore.
I think it's probably better to just read them having picked them off a bookshelf than in a class though.
You act as if there are not companion or derivative works ad-nauseam. The barrier is hermeneutic, not grammatical, which is a fundamental constraint on shared meaning. Thus the "real barrier" is innate and your particular fixation only serves artificial ones. But please do add more than a complaint to our canon of meaning, I do not mean to devalue the act you are advocating, just the notion of neglect in this respect.
The difference is people wanted to listen to Eminem or whatever because it's enjoyable, trendy music that's played on the radio and all their friends were listening to.
Plato is not exactly burning up the airwaves right now. Most likely the only exposure most people will have to this work (or any of the libraries of work that's been banned in this manner) would be at college, assigned to them for a class.
The undergrads won't hear about it. The material will just silently not be on the syllabus and they'll never know. In this case the interference has broken containment, but this won't be the norm.
Similar vein: reading in general is down, overall. Especially among young people. "Banning" a book isn't affecting anyone, it just gets a bunch of people riled up on two political tribes.
Now, if they actually banned a book, like "you will go to jail for having this" I would be concerned.
It's wild how there's so much overlap between the faction that wants to champion "European culture" and "Western civilization" and the faction that will do things like this.
I thought we were broadly against colleges and universities banning politically incorrect speech. Wasn't that a huge talking point 2-3 years ago? Didn't we bring back freedom of speech?
It's really depressing how the popular discourse around these topics so consistently fails to address any kind of bad-faith reasoning on topics like this.
Politicians complaining about free speech almost uniformly are referring to speech they don't like. Just like when they say they want to be "moral" its their morals, and when they say they want safety it's safety for a certain kind of person.
But the media (institutional AND social) ends to just accepting their stated motivations at face value. And at this point it's making us all look like idiots.
Freedom of speech is now defined as the person with the most power or who screams the loudest has the final say.
That is what happens when you elect a dictator.
It has been that way in the US since the supreme court decided that money is equivalent to speech. And the effects have been ramping up ever since. If there is only so much bandwidth in communication, then using money to monopolize airwaves directly reduces the speech of those who cannot afford the excessive cost that results. Monopolize here is used in the sense of dominating the available supply (of bandwidth) and bidding up the price.
Who is "we" here? I can't count how many times I've argued against just an apparently broadly-held view that free speech ends at the first amendment and isn't a general principle that should be practiced at, eg., universities. Looks like when I argued that here, I was told that I should pick a different term for the principle of free speech in order to disambiguate from the first amendment (they recommended calling it 'my personal content preferences').
Likewise uncountable is the number of times I've said normalizing free speech restrictions against the other side will come back to bite you once they're (inevitably, especially given these tactics) in power.
I can see how 'pro-speech' might have appeared to be a right-leaning position when violations were typically against right-leaning expression, but I never got the sense that either side really gave a damn.
For those like me wondering what in this syllabus they should be looking at, the key bit is the required reading in the middle of the second page: "Plato, excerpts from Symposium" instead of just "Plato's Symposium".
Edit: weird. On the app I'm using ("Harmonic") it redirects to a syllabus PDF. But when I open in a browser it opens to an article.
Readit News
A thing you can right now do is read it (1-2 hours): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm#link2...
Or just the two sections in question:
Aristophanes’ myth of split humans (7 minutes): https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/eros/platos-other-half
Diotima’s ladder of love (20 minutes) https://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/103/jowett_symp_A.htm
The issue is only when professor suspect of being liberal changes assigned reading in any way. That is the only possible big issue
/s
Dead Comment
Recent events...
- Went to a concert, an underage kid with a fake ID couldn't get a beer, turned to me and goes "Isn't this guy a f----"
Uh... well, he may be making your night less enjoyable, but I don't see why gay people have to catch strays cause of it...
"I don't think I'd call anyone that" was my response, and "it's okay to be gay" was a follow up
- My boss said something was retarded. I'm a bit wishy washy on the r-word myself as, while I'm friends with people with Down Syndrome and other maladies, it never occurred to me to relate the word to them (especially since they're generally really very nice people)
It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association)
But now I've stopped using it entirely, although in this case I did not correct my boss (who I respect as a person and enjoy working for very much)
- One of my other friends called something "gay" recently
"Don't call things gay bro" was my response. As my mom explained to me in sixth grade "even though you don't really even have an idea what it means to be gay, when you say that negative things are gay, you're implying that being gay is negative, but gay people just are themselves and don't deserve that"
I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that and I'm damned proud of it
All these losers trying to turn back the times to put gay people back in the closet give me "peaked in middle school" vibes, and it's sad to see that it's also slowly becoming normalized with people who I don't even think have that inclination or care to say prejudiced shit again too
Usually cerebral palsy, I think, or (less commonly) epilepsy. I'm not sure it's still that common in the UK; I don't think I've heard it in the wild since the 80s [1], though some of that may just reflect the people I talk to as I get older.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Deacon#Blue_Peter_and_cul...
It is a shortening of spastic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(charity)
Trump's openly crude behavior is normalizing such behavior amongst the impressionable.
And society will be worse for it for a long time to come.
The only way for you to achieve the goal of making sure nobody’s feelings are hurt by words is to take away the power of the words. You only give the words MORE power by reacting to them.
I would encourage fellow like-minded Aggies to do the same.
Drs Austin and McDermott are surely spinning in their graves right now.
It's always been possible for any of them to decline into lesser institutions of not-as-much-higher-learning as they started out with.
Wouldn't leadership integrity and actual scholarship make the big difference between those that are able to strive higher each generation compared to those who strive lower?
Who is it that wants to aggressively devalue Aggie degrees that have already been earned, especially in the eyes of the world, along with any to be granted in the future anyway?
It's not only "The Eyes of Texas" that are upon this.
Referencing the University of Texas (Austin) school song in a reply to an Aggie, them fightin' words
More related, with A&M generally being traditionally conservative* and also being a research university that values higher learning -- yet still a public school -- they are going run up on these issues given the current state of "conservative" (maga) politics. UT is getting the same pressure, but being a traditionally liberal leaning school with a rich history of protest leading to change, they are able to resist a bit more -- which I always respected (except for Thanksgiving rivalry games) -- but even they are slowly caving-in. Texas use to mind its own business, scoff at whatever ideology the federal government was pushing and, for the most part, let people and institutions be. How we became a maga lapdog is truly baffling.
*Has the George H.W. Bush library and a Corps of Cadets (student military organization) that deeply intergraded into school tradition, for starters. Also, oil money.
Similarly, I believe the Renaissance was not so much a "rebirth" of culture as it was italian port cities suddenly benefiting from a sudden influx of highly educated people bugging out from Constantinople; more a translation than a reappearance.
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Dead Comment
One prominent example was formal logic, which was significantly developed in the middle ages, but received scant attention in the Renaissance.
Speaking of reconciliation, might I interest you in a reconciliation of Aquinas and Spinoza, by way of Galois Theory?
They probably had this attitude, but I didn't find it objectionable at all, and I'm not a native English speaker. If a 19-year old engineering student can't read that, even in his own language, what's the point? The guy's a bore.
I think it's probably better to just read them having picked them off a bookshelf than in a class though.
Plato is not exactly burning up the airwaves right now. Most likely the only exposure most people will have to this work (or any of the libraries of work that's been banned in this manner) would be at college, assigned to them for a class.
Now, if they actually banned a book, like "you will go to jail for having this" I would be concerned.
Politicians complaining about free speech almost uniformly are referring to speech they don't like. Just like when they say they want to be "moral" its their morals, and when they say they want safety it's safety for a certain kind of person.
But the media (institutional AND social) ends to just accepting their stated motivations at face value. And at this point it's making us all look like idiots.
Citizens United must be overturned.
Dead Comment
Likewise uncountable is the number of times I've said normalizing free speech restrictions against the other side will come back to bite you once they're (inevitably, especially given these tactics) in power.
I can see how 'pro-speech' might have appeared to be a right-leaning position when violations were typically against right-leaning expression, but I never got the sense that either side really gave a damn.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Edit: weird. On the app I'm using ("Harmonic") it redirects to a syllabus PDF. But when I open in a browser it opens to an article.