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bogus comments on Irrationalism on Campus? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (43)
The fact that you even refer to things that occurred "in the past few years" is enough to conclude that what follows is seriously cherry-picked evidence. Any incident may obviously be concerning as far as it goes, but is there any real evidence that racial prejudice and animus are getting out of control? The point is, any situation where multiple cultures and social groups interact (and yes, races in the U.S. are social groups too, as we all know) is going to involve some amount of friction and conflict - particularly in a youthful environment, such as college. It's not something unrealistic or out of the ordinary. One can hope that such things will improve over time, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that.
I'm 62 and have seen a lot, but what falenas108 describes sounds kind of horrific to me. Also I don't see "cherry picking" in part because he/she's just giving a couple of points of data, not using a couple of points of data to draw broad conclusions. If you haven't looked at the link http://assets.feministing.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Screen-Shot-2014-11-19-at-10.26.55-AM.png I suggest you do. It seems to me many people's fears and rages are being played on, and many people find themselves agreeable "echo chambers" where they goad each other into ever more extreme views. I remember in the 1970s working (as a nurses aid in a state mental hospital) with a guy who was as sure as he was of anything that the Moon Landing was a hoax (note - a fellow employee, not a patient) and that seemed pretty remarkable back then, but it seems pretty ordinary now.
This is entirely bog-standard garden-variety plain-vanilla 4chan fare.
No contradiction there, in my opinion.
No contradiction, but some implications. Implications mostly having to do with meaning behind the words and word inflation.
That was impressively opaque.
By the way, is it really "bog-standard"? I thought it was "hog-standard".
I'll unroll. "Word inflation" means that with time the intensity signaled by words decreases. Used to be you felt good on occasion, you felt excellent rarely, and you felt awesome maybe a few times in your life. Nowadays if you say "good" it means "pretty much sucks", if you say "excellent" it means "OK", and if you say "awesome" it means "I"m fine".
4chan has pretty extreme word inflation. "I'm gonna rape you bitches" generally means "I will attempt to do something unpleasant to you" and the actual intent behind it might be something like kicking someone out of an IRC channel.
So all that vocabulary in the quote upthread doesn't actually mean what it literally means. In reality it means "I want to make some status noises and that's the only way I know how".
Evidently in your area the hogs are standard, and in my -- bogs :-/
Thanks for a good humored response.
Yeah, awesome is one that gets me.
Don't get me wrong, I also think the incidents are horrific, and I'm far from condoning those responsible. I'm just saying that expecting an environment that's completely pristine and free of any kind of tension is entirely unrealistic, and we should not be assuming that as a sensible short-term goal. If there's anything that can be done to help this situation, it's expanding our notion of "cross-cultural competency and communication" to include personal strategies for being more resilient and assertive in the face of perceived slights to one's status (what "microaggressions" seems to unpack to, AIUI). Because I don't think you can have one without the other.
I totally agree that we need that.