Coddling the American Mind: The Rise of Microagression & Emotional Terrorism...

[cclaxton]

Unless things have changed significantly since I graduated in 2013, yes we are. Pretty much every social science class ran us through the basics of that, and we're generally required to take a public speaking course which includes some sort of argumentation component.

It's not that we weren't taught that. It's that certain ideologies teach us that it's acceptable to disregard all of those things depending on the issue. That's entirely the fault of the professors who are effectively indoctrinating kids with this modern social justice mindset.

This may vary widely on jurisdiction. My daughter attended Fairfax County schools, and their fundamentals in math and science and writing were top notch. But zero public speaking or debate, and watered-down history, no class in analytics or logic. She did get some of that in college, but where it really matters while their minds are forming is High School.
Cody

[LOKNLOD]

Related podcast, with two guys who wrote a paper about the victimhood culture. Basically they're taking the direct response to perceived insults (honor culture) and combining it with remaining unaffected and letting the authorities address it (dignity culture), by playing the victim and forcing a response from third parties to address it. That may be actual authorities (police, administrators, etc) or public pressure (the media, internet mobs). Interesting stuff, and completely mind-boggling to me.

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/1...mhood-culture/

This was good -- I listened to it the other day and was going to mention it as well.

[ssb]

This may vary widely on jurisdiction. My daughter attended Fairfax County schools, and their fundamentals in math and science and writing were top notch. But zero public speaking or debate, and watered-down history, no class in analytics or logic. She did get some of that in college, but where it really matters while their minds are forming is High School.
Cody

In college you'll certainly get it. It's pretty much impossible not to. Even the hard sciences will teach you how to write academic literature, which necessitates some fundamental understanding of argumentation (claim-data-warrant).

In HS, I recall most of my writing and arguing development coming from English classes, and I consider that to be good education. I was definitely ahead of the curve when I got to college when it came to writing stupid papers and making a point. However, I took honors and then AP stuff so I can't speak much to what the standard classes taught. The quality of that education almost certainly varies by jurisdiction.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Unless things have changed significantly since I graduated in 2013, yes we are. Pretty much every social science class ran us through the basics of that, and we're generally required to take a public speaking course which includes some sort of argumentation component.

It's not that we weren't taught that. It's that certain ideologies teach us that it's acceptable to disregard all of those things depending on the issue. That's entirely the fault of the professors who are effectively indoctrinating kids with this modern social justice mindset.

I think that's a good description of what's happening. I went to university ten years ago and in Canada, so conceivably it was a little different, but no, we were taught all of the usual logical argument stuff.

It's just that a lot of people refused to apply it evenly, and there was a lot of social pressure to suspend it during discussions of some topics. For example, when discussing some of the original testimony at Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings - this is the "Canada apologizes to its indigenous peoples for residential schools and the effects of colonization in general" bureaucracy, I ran across a bunch of testimony that was factually impossible.

Essentially, there were a bunch of survivors who claimed that the school they were taken to had staff who murdered a bunch of the students, and buried the bodies on the grounds, but come back later and removed them in an incident a bunch of them remembered.

At the time I was running an excavations crew and I immediately realized that the amount of earth they were talking about moving in the amount of time they were describing would have taken an excavator and dump trucks, so I pointed it out and did the math on what would have been involved, and how since the school was in an area accessible only by boat, they'd have had to use a barge to get the equipment up to the school, and nobody remembered equipment, or a barge, or a bunch of priests hiring an excavation crew to dig up a mass grave, or a priest who was also a skilled excavator operator who owned a barge. So the entire incident was clearly the product of faulty childhood memory, bitterness, and time.

And there was a bunch of stuff similar to that that had clearly been wildly exaggerated and never challenged, and a bunch of students who thought that everyone should be charged with murder, and so on.


Anyway this is the equivalent, in Canada, of pointing out that someone's tale of family slavery is wildly exaggerated and coming up with evidence that while they may have been owned, they weren't living in poor conditions, but pretty average ones for the time. Some people got upset.


What did NOT happen was that I was told by the SCHOOL to stop making rational arguments about things. I was just a pariah with the students, which didn't bother me at all since I was about five years older, and making eighty grand a year running the pile driving team and I used to throw our 300 pound torch cutter in the back of my truck every morning by hand. That is not a recipe for someone who gives a shit what a 22 year old English Lit student thinks about him.


But the students who heard me critique the whole thing were appalled. And I don't really think this has to do with a lack of rational analysis per se, because I had other classes with some of the same people and heard them do plenty of that.

No, it was a case of willful suspension of rational analysis, because of the immense social pressure against challenging the accepted "progressive" narrative.

I think this is particularly seductive for young people for reasons I don't entirely know, but to my way of thinking, it's exactly the same phenomenon that defined the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It's the same reason that you meet a zillion strident vegetarians in their early twenties, but only a few in their forties. It's the origin of the term "LUG" (lesbian until graduation) and in my case, the reason for my now inexplicable (to me especially) fanatical allegiance to hardcore music when I was younger. It's the same thing that makes radical Islam recruit young people more often than old ones.

Young people are just easily taken by morally overzealous ideologies.

It's just that now, we also have a ton of support for certain SPECIFIC ideologies, and it's coming from mass media. Racial outrage in particular is stoked and aggravated by certain influential people, and so the level of support this kind of idiocy has is much greater.

I think it's also probably not coincidental that young people dominate social media, and this has shifted the balance of power further into the hands of the demographic that really gets off on ideology.

Anyway those are my scrambled, still-waiting-for-the-first-cup-of-coffee-to-cool thoughts.

[LOKNLOD]

Young people are just easily taken by morally overzealous ideologies.

.

In general, young people today enter into this barrage with very little solid grounding, ideologically.

Why? That's a big topic in and of itself, but generally speaking I think a lot of it is trickle down piss poor parenting.

[Dagga Boy]

When I was in Middle School and High School I was involved in the debate club. One of the topics was very emotional and controversial: Should the US be engaged in the war in Southeast Asia? (The Vietnam War). I had to learn to effectively debate both sides of the issue, and I had to learn to control my emotions so that I could be a better debater. The issue with many college students these days is they are not taught the fundamentals of analytics, logic, making an effective argument, providing supporting documentation and facts, and being impartial. I still think this problem goes back to High School, where those subjects are not required or taught. High Schools need to be more like boot camps than luxury resorts away from parents.
Cody

That is funny. I wrote a paper in history class (already thrown out of AP History for debating with the teacher, so I was in a regular class) justifying our involvement in Vietnam. Our teacher was a full boat dove anti-war protestor during Vietnam. I got a "D". I wrote almost the exact same paper, just arguing the opposite with all the same events and laid out the same way for one of my best friends in class who was a little academically challenged. He got an A+. Kind of funny and showed how well some people in academia do at having an unbiased view. Debate is a great means of learning to look through the other side of the lens. It teaches you to be convinced rather than just believe and even informal debate is a lost cause these days.

Now as far as micro aggression and not coddling emotions.....I may end up on a terrorist watch list.

[Robinson]

I can only imagine what my dad would have said if I had started spouting off that kind of crap while I was in college.

They may claim to be all sensitive and traumatized and shit, but I'd bet they really just feel powerful when they get away with bringing other people down in the name of emotional justice. Or something. I really don't understand the whole mindset. It's un-American.

[Robinson]

*** double posted somehow ***

[cclaxton]

Debate is a great means of learning to look through the other side of the lens. It teaches you to be convinced rather than just believe and even informal debate is a lost cause these days.

Having to argue both sides also forces us to look at the integrity of our own position and helps to shore it up...or even reconsider it.
Cody

[NEPAKevin]

I could give a rat's ass about heteronormative, social justice, ecobullshit. Schools need to teach the little bastards to read and count. Parents need to teach the little bastards to put their damn phones down and pay attention to what is outside of their palms.
Examples: I went to pay for an order which was $5.31 and handed the kid a ten, a quarter, a nickle and a penny. Someone owes me five minutes of my life back because I found no entertainment value in watching the little punk's mind shut down. At a different restaurant, my order came to $18.21 and I handed the kid a twenty, two dimes and a penny. First he took the money and gave me the receipt. I reminded him that he owed me change. He could not figure out what to do and had to call the manager who opened the drawer with his key at which time the kid handed my one dollar and looked at me plaintively. I politely explained to him that the change was two dollars and that he might want to try counting the change back. His response "oh, I know that." Thank's Common Core Math. Enough about counting, the last two employees we tried to train had no attention span, did not know how to address an envelope much less calculate postage, and resisted learning basic office procedures such as using the telephone hold button and prioritizing customers over text messaging. One got canned and the other went to lunch and never came back.