{"id":33535,"date":"2015-11-10T03:00:44","date_gmt":"2015-11-10T08:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33535"},"modified":"2015-11-09T12:58:11","modified_gmt":"2015-11-09T17:58:11","slug":"the-culture-of-you-cant-say-that-in-all-its-swirling-borderline-violent-ugliness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/10\/the-culture-of-you-cant-say-that-in-all-its-swirling-borderline-violent-ugliness\/","title":{"rendered":"The “culture of ‘You can\u2019t say that!’ in all its swirling, borderline violent ugliness”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill<\/a> in sp!ked<\/em> on the Halloween derangement syndrome at Yale:<\/p>\n

Video footage of Yale students losing the plot over a faculty head who said everyone should calm down about Halloween has caused much head-shaking in liberal circles. And it isn\u2019t hard to see why. The head\u2019s crime was that his wife sent an email suggesting academics and students should chill out about \u2018culturally insensitive\u2019 Halloween costumes. It\u2019s okay, he said, to be a \u2018little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive\u2019 on this one day. For his wife issuing this mildest of rebukes to over-sensitive over-18s, he was accosted by a mob of students insisting the email made them feel unsafe. When he told the crowd that he thinks university is about providing education, not a \u2018safe home\u2019, they screamed at him to \u2018step down!\u2019. \u2018Who the fuck hired you?!\u2019, the most unhinged of the students cries.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unnerving, odd, a terrifying snapshot of the new intolerance. We could see the culture of \u2018You can\u2019t say that!\u2019 in all its swirling, borderline violent ugliness. It wasn\u2019t a whispered or implied \u2018You can\u2019t say that!\u2019, of the kind we see all the time in 21st-century public life, in response to people who criticise gay marriage, say, or doubt climate change. No, this was an explicitly stated \u2018You can\u2019t fucking say that, and if you do we\u2019ll demand that you be sacked!\u2019 That it was stated at Yale, and in response to a bloody email about Halloween, has added to the hand-wringing among liberals, who want to know what\u2019s gone wrong with the new generation.<\/p>\n

Okay, fine. It is indeed interesting, and worrying, that students are so sensitive and censorious today. But I have a question for the hand-wringers, the media people, academics and liberal thinkers who are so disturbed by what they\u2019re calling the \u2018Yale snowflakes\u2019: what did you think would happen? When you watched, or even presided over, the creation over the past 40 years of a vast system of laws and speech codes to punish insulting or damaging words, and the construction of a vast machine of therapeutic intervention into everyday life, what did you think the end result would be? A generation that was liberal and tough? Come off it. It\u2019s those trends, those longstanding trends of censorship and therapy, that created today\u2019s creepy campus intolerance; it\u2019s you who made these monsters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill in sp!ked on the Halloween derangement syndrome at Yale: Video footage of Yale students losing the plot over a faculty head who said everyone should calm down about Halloween has caused much head-shaking in liberal circles. And it isn\u2019t hard to see why. The head\u2019s crime was that his wife sent an email […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,13],"tags":[1043,238,351,764],"class_list":["post-33535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-usa","tag-halloween","tag-offensensitivity","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8IT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33535"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33536,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33535\/revisions\/33536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}