{"id":42694,"date":"2018-03-15T03:00:48","date_gmt":"2018-03-15T07:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42694"},"modified":"2018-03-14T16:10:18","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T20:10:18","slug":"tip-toe-around-topics-so-as-to-avoid-triggering-someone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/03\/15\/tip-toe-around-topics-so-as-to-avoid-triggering-someone\/","title":{"rendered":"Tip-toe around topics so as to avoid “triggering” someone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew Blackwell<\/a> isn’t alone in finding it necessary to avoid certain topics of conversation when talking with his friends on the left:<\/p>\n

Outbursts of emotional hostility from progressive activists \u2013 now described as Social Justice Warriors or SJWs \u2013 have come to be known as getting \u2018triggered.\u2019 This term originally applied to sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but activists have adopted it to describe the anxiety and discomfort they experience when they are exposed to views with which they disagree. \u201cFuck free speech!\u201d one group of social justice advocates recently told<\/a> Vice Media<\/em>, as if this justified the growing belief among university students that conservatives should be prevented from speaking on college campuses. It\u2019s no secret that, with the rise of the triggered progressive, university professors are increasingly intimidated<\/a> by their own students. An illustrative example of this alarming trend was provided by the hordes of screaming students who surrounded the distinguished Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis and demanded his head (which they duly received<\/a>). Christakis had made the mistake of defending an email his wife had written gently criticizing Yale\u2019s attempts to regulate students\u2019 Halloween costumes. \u201cWho the fuck hired you?!\u201d screamed one irate student in response. \u201cYou should step down!\u201d<\/p>\n

This sort of my-way-or-the-highway mentality is now spreading well beyond the urban university and into even remote communities. In the small Outback Australian town of Alice Springs where I once lived, agitators have attacked and attempted to silence<\/a> the local aboriginal town councillor Jacinta Price for her principled efforts to improve the lives of her people. When Price tried to sound the alarm about skyrocketing sexually transmitted diseases, or the adult rape of children in aboriginal communities, she was shouted down as a \u2018traitor\u2019 and a \u2018coconut\u2019 (a term of disparagement used to describe a person deemed to be black on the outside and white on the inside). These criticisms do not come from the majority of aboriginal people in Alice Springs, but from a minority of furiously offended activists who, in their own little circles, plot to have Price undemocratically removed from the town council. Censorship is now the instrument of choice, and a reactionary authoritarianism increasingly defines what the liberal Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz has termed the \u2018Regressive Left<\/a>.\u2019<\/p>\n

So how and why have these activists become so intolerant and horrible to deal with? Part of this hostility can be explained by a wilful ignorance and incuriosity about ideas with which they disagree. Every so often, a progressive friend will peruse my bookshelf in a thought-police sort of fashion. What happens next is fairly predictable. Once they realize that Malinowski\u2019s Melanesian epic The Sexual Life of Savages<\/em> doesn\u2019t include any erotic pictures, they will turn their attention to the Ayn Rand collection. \u201cWhy do you have these?\u201d they ask with an air of indignation, holding up a copy of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal<\/em><\/a>. \u201cHave you ever read her?\u201d I will ask. \u201cNo,\u201d they reliably respond.<\/p>\n

The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill once explained that, \u201cThe greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary\u2019s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own.\u201d Mill held that unless we carefully study the views of those with whom we disagree, we will never really know what they\u2019re right or wrong about. \u201cHe who knows only his own side of the case,\u201d Mill wrote in his 1859 book On Liberty<\/em><\/a>, \u201cknows little of that.\u201d Our opponents could be right for all we know or care, because they may know a fact or offer an argument we\u2019ve never thought to consider. And even if they aren\u2019t right, Mill points out that specks of truth may exist among their falsehoods which can guide our minds in new directions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matthew Blackwell isn’t alone in finding it necessary to avoid certain topics of conversation when talking with his friends on the left: Outbursts of emotional hostility from progressive activists \u2013 now described as Social Justice Warriors or SJWs \u2013 have come to be known as getting \u2018triggered.\u2019 This term originally applied to sufferers of Post-Traumatic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"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":[67,238,1020,997],"class_list":["post-42694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-usa","tag-aynrand","tag-offensensitivity","tag-progressives","tag-socialjustice"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-b6C","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42694","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=42694"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42695,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42694\/revisions\/42695"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}