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Chris
04-22-2017, 10:22 AM
Heather Mac Donald warns about Those ‘Snowflakes’ Have Chilling Effects Even Beyond the Campus (https://www.wsj.com/articles/those-snowflakes-have-chilling-effects-even-beyond-the-campus-1492800913)


Student thuggery against non-leftist viewpoints is in the news again. Agitators at Claremont McKenna College, Middlebury College, and the University of California’s Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses have used threats, brute force and sometimes criminal violence over the past two months in efforts to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and me from speaking. As commencement season approaches, expect “traumatized” students to try to disinvite any remotely conservative speaker, an effort already under way at Notre Dame with regard to Vice President Mike Pence.

This soft totalitarianism is routinely misdiagnosed as primarily a psychological disorder. Young “snowflakes,” the thinking goes, have been overprotected by helicopter parents, and now are unprepared for the trivial conflicts of ordinary life.

...Campus intolerance is at root not a psychological phenomenon but an ideological one. At its center is a worldview that sees Western culture as endemically racist and sexist. The overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people within the ever-growing list of official victim classifications to view themselves as existentially oppressed. One outcome of that teaching is the forceful silencing of contrarian speech.

At UC Berkeley, the Division of Equity and Inclusion has hung banners throughout campus reminding students of their place within the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood. One depicts a black woman and a Hispanic man urging fellow students to “create an environment where people other than yourself can exist.” That’s not meant as hyperbole. Students have been led to believe they are at personal risk from circumambient bigotry. After the February riots at Berkeley against Mr. Yiannopoulos, a columnist in the student newspaper justified his participation in the anarchy: “I can only fight tooth and nail for the right to exist.” Another opined that physical attacks against supporters of Mr. Yiannopoulos and President Trump were “not acts of violence. They were acts of self-defense.”

...Many observers dismiss such ignorant tantrums as a phase that will end once the “snowflakes” encounter the real world. But the graduates of the academic victimology complex are remaking the world in their image. The assumption of inevitable discrimination against women and minorities plagues every nonacademic institution today, resulting in hiring and promotion based on sex and race at the expense of merit.

...

Standing Wolf
04-22-2017, 10:29 AM
"Circumambient bigotry"?

DGUtley
04-22-2017, 10:54 AM
It is the most offensive of speech that is the most deserving of protection.

AeonPax
04-22-2017, 10:59 AM
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You might want to chose a source that doesn't require you to join.

Chris
04-22-2017, 12:21 PM
"Circumambient bigotry"?

Bigotry from all sides, bigotry everywhere they look. I'm reminded of Bob Dylan's "Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues" where in the end he sings "So now I’m sittin’ home investigatin’ myself! Hope I don’t find out anything . . . hmm, great God!"

Chris
04-22-2017, 12:22 PM
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you might want to chose a source that doesn't require you to join.

:( wsj.