As a side note, one of the most cogent things I've seen written about trigger warnings comes to us by way of the commenter "AcademicLurker" over at crooked timber. The upshot is that (s)he takes the debate to have devolved into clickbait with no real there there.
My impression is that the whole trigger warning phenomenon has passed into the realm of pure clickbait at this time.
Most instructors who’s courses include things like explicit discussions of sexual assault or graphic depictions of violence use some sort of content notice to indicate this and have done so since forever.
All efforts to date to mandate trigger warnings through the administration have failed, and this was the primary concern of professors in the first place: the specter of some associate vice dean for trigger warnings mucking around with people’s syllabi based his or her non-knowledge of the subject matter.
The subject continues to be discussed online simply because it’s now a known troll-magnet. Hence the fact that Salon and the Atlantic have taken to running a “So, how about those trigger warnings?” article once a month like clockwork. I think the subject has become one of those traffic boosting standbys, along with semiannual “Feminism is totally passe these days, amiright?” piece by Phyllis Schlafly.
and
There seem to be 3 distinct issues that are getting mixed up.
1) People with actual PTSD. All of the discussions of this topic unfold as though people have never heard of an office of student services and are unaware that ADA compliance is a thing that exists. There is a standard procedure in place in which the student contacts the person(s) at student services who are responsible for ADA compliance. The student explains what their condition is and what factors might interfere with their ability to participate in class. This information is communicated to the instructor, who works to make some reasonable accommodation for said student.
Precisely because people with real PTSD (as opposed to people appropriating the language of PTSD for whatever purpose) may be triggered by completely idiosyncratic things that are not readily predictable, proactively consulting with the instructor and informing them about your triggers to the extent that you know them is exactly how things should be done.
In the entire 1+ year’s worth of discussion on this topic I have yet to hear anyone explain why it makes sense to replace the system described above with one in which instructors make ill-informed wild guesses about which students might or might not be suffering from PTSD and what things might or might not be triggering for them.
2. Topics that are widely agreed to be upsetting enough that material dealing with might reasonably be expected to be difficult for at least some portion of any given class. Sexual assault and graphic depictions of violence are the real entries in this category, and as I mentioned above, most instructors already use content notices of some sort for these. If there’s an epidemic of instructors holding surprise mandatory screenings of The Accused in class, a) I’ve never heard of it and b) if it’s happening I fully agree, professors should stop doing that. I suspect that this sort if thing is not nearly as large a problem as the sheer volume of trigger warning talk would suggest.
If the subject had been raised as “Content notices about material dealing with sexual assault or graphic depictions of violence can be a big help for students coming to grips with the material. Instructors should be more aware of that.” then the entire subsequent public discussion would have gone differently.
3. Any subject that anyone might conceivably find unpleasant for any reason (the chucklehead in the original article who claimed that The Great Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway should have trigger warnings, for example).
The reason that trigger warning discussions are such a playground for trolls (of both the pro and anti TW variety) is that they all muddle 1, 2 and 3 together in a totally unhelpful way. Although it is ideal for baiting people in comment sections.
I think this is more or less the point of view I'm coming around to. The fact that this debate has consumed such attention is best explained by the fact that it stirs people up, and the fact that it stirs people up is best explained not by the substance of the disputes--which, even for people in the thick of it, can sometimes be quite hard to make out--but rather but the fact that it serves as an extremely effective form of social signalling. The minute someone opens their mouth about trigger warnings, it is often very easy to get a strong sense of their overall social sensibility. That, of course, and the fact that it provides ready occasion for a moral panic over the young elites, something that is never unpopular (what's wrong with the kids at Harvard today? is a genre of editorial that will never die).
So, for instance, riddle me this: the AAUP is one of the "anti-TW" standard-bearers. But they have always and always will defend the right of a professor to insert trigger warnings into their syllabus; they are a professorial union! What they have categorically opposed is any mechanism whatsoever by which a professor could be punished or censured for refusing to include a trigger warning when they deem it pedagogically inappropriate.
But then: in terms of the actual treatment of trigger warnings, their position is indistinguishable from the mainstream of "pro-TW" authors. Only the fringe of TW proponents have ever asked for failure to include trigger warnings to be an actionable offense that could lead to e.g. firing. If I'm right in my understanding, then, actually almost everyone agrees on what the rules should be: namely, it should be up to the professor on the basis of what they deem the best pedagogical approach to their material. What they disagree on is something like 'best pedagogical practice.' That's pretty inside baseball though. It's hard to see how a debate on best pedagogical practice could arise quite this level of passionate intensity except by way of being a proxy for more general cultural affiliations to play out.
That isn't to say that there isn't anything behind the debate--the culture war aspect can be pretty compelling to the people in the thick of it. In particular, I suspect that a lot of the academics who come out swinging against trigger warnings are not so much motivated by the things themselves (not when construed just as 'a non-binding recommendation for good pedagogy'; as academiclurker notes, people who teach disturbing content have been using those since approximately forever), but rather by the suspicion that this is the thin end of a wedge that is going to end with the sort of people who really like trigger warnings being in charge of their universities; and then, they think, those people are going to do their best to badger, harass, and generally side against them whenever possible, because fuck you you're out-group that's why. This is, I think, not actually a completely unreasonable fear. But it's also not really a fear about trigger warnings. It's a fear about getting outmaneuver in a broader cultural context that's latched onto trigger warnings as its convenient flashpoint.
Some remarks (numbering not related to previous numbering):
1. I think the diversion to PTSD is misleading and confuses the online history of the concept. Its genesis is tied to anti-rape-culture activismspecifically (note the 2010 date) and are tied to certain other coincident concepts, like safe spaces. Later evolution has amended the qualification of being limited to contexts with known rape survivors (with PTSD or otherwise), or as a response to organized trolling, and instead picked up Title IXian hostile environments and microaggression theory; hence the metastasis to academia.
That's not the only direction this same activism has taken, of course (there are others, e.g., campus rape reform). Attempts to hitchhike onto professional-gender-bias-as-due-to-alleged-harassment have also happened, with varying results (the campaign against Leiter, the #teamharpy case). This is not a monolithic movement and so there's naturally experimentation with diverse kinds of political action, not all of which will be entirely consistent with the genesis of the concept.
2. Activists don't speak for each other, and conceptual contradictions behind similar demands is not necessarily a flaw (but rather a sign of effective coalition building). But by the same token, thin wedges, vae victis. That's the nature of mass politics: there's nothing that can be offered in negotiations, because nobody binds each other to concessions.
3. Regardless of the past, now that Title IX and microaggressions are being bandied about, the implied threat of actionability comes bundled. It is no longer a non-binding recommendation.
3b. The Accused is pretty lurid stuff, but most stuff is not The Accused. The demand that a bright line be drawn before we endorse collective censure of violators is a valid one, especially given #2.
3c. promises that censure will not extend to, e.g., career penalties are equally incredible.
3d. the specific way in which the corporatized workplace and campus construct IX enforcement is of note: they farm out consultation over these policies to activist NGOs, and adherence to issued recommendations (best practices) that have notified them to discriminatory practices plays a significant role in liability. Therefore: proxy battles over what NGOs should or should not recommend. It may not actually be necessary to postulate a grand narrative of the thin wedge.
4. You'd think that video game journalism is pretty darned inside baseball, too, and yet here we are.
5. I'm not sure why Schlafly of actually-destroyed-the-ERA-and-destroyed-a-bipartisan-consensus infamy is now a demonstration of the harmlessness of political organization. Clickbait is there. It's the "there" that is there. There doesn't need to be a deeper reason.
6. the confusions intrinsic to rights-as-trumps discourse is on unusually stark display in this topic
Would this be an accurate way to represent our respective points of view? Me: there's not much interesting to the debate over trigger warnings, everyone reasonable has converged on policy and what's left at the margin is either crazies or tribal politics. You: tribal politics are really important and what's crazy today won't be tomorrow!
That's the sense that I'm getting, and, if so, I don't think we really disagree--we're just addressing different senses of 'interesting,' i.e., whether the debate is interesting because it contains compelling arguments or whether it's interesting because a lot potentially hangs on the resolution.
(I would not merge trigger warnings with Title IX stuff; Title IX, by contrast to trigger warnings, strikes me as inciting debates with a whole lot of there there.)
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
The Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), also called the Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Crisis, Oxygen Holocaust, Oxygen Revolution, or Great Oxidation, was the biologically induced appearance of dioxygen (O2) in Earth's atmosphere.
The names for this imply that it may have been an important event
Did it occur during a short period of time, or was it something that happened gradually? Relatively speaking, of course.
I cannot find an answer, but the question is also sort of ambiguous. Oxygen may have been produced for (according to Wiki) 900 million years before it built up in the atmosphere. It looks like if we had today's photosynthesis it'd take 2000 years to get this much O2, and we have way more photosynthesis now. It may have begun to appear in the atmosphere 50 million years before what is referred to as the event itself.
Extinctions tend to be a lot slower than people realize, but that is particularly slow.
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Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
So today I was in my metalworking course learning about how to put rivets in things and that there is a machine called a jump press that lets you cut metal and it's called that because you actually jump on it that's how it works
and
I noticed there was a dude at a table in the shop (not in our class just in the shop at the same time as us) who was p nice looking but MORE IMPORTANTLY he was surrounded by books on norse and celtic art and also scabbards. He was carving something into one of the scabbards.
So after class I was like HELLO HUMAN TELL ME ABOUT SWORDS (except like, slightly less awkwardly) and he was very excited to talk about swords and also has a nice voice. But I really really had to catch a bus so I was like
"I have to catch a bus but let me know when you're here again" and I wrote my number in his sketchbook
and he was like "I'm here a lot"
and I was like "Good!" and left
I INTERACTED WITH A PERSON??
however it's been pointed out to me by other people I've talked to about this that.... at no point did we exchange names.
I.. I tried so hard..
Names are just descriptors with no inherent meaning
They share this quality with all of language, as well as life
Heh. My sister is fiddling with this one puzzle game on her phone that she seems to be pretty dedicated to 100%ing. It looks like she's made quite a bit of headway towards that goal, looked like she was maybe 79% of the way through and some of the puzzles I saw got very complex. So I was just kinda sitting there with her watching her play and talking about the game and occasionally going "hmm maybe [thing] would work?" and then I realize oh my god I'm finally having a conversation with my big sis about video games and so that was pretty great
+1
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Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
So today I was in my metalworking course learning about how to put rivets in things and that there is a machine called a jump press that lets you cut metal and it's called that because you actually jump on it that's how it works
and
I noticed there was a dude at a table in the shop (not in our class just in the shop at the same time as us) who was p nice looking but MORE IMPORTANTLY he was surrounded by books on norse and celtic art and also scabbards. He was carving something into one of the scabbards.
So after class I was like HELLO HUMAN TELL ME ABOUT SWORDS (except like, slightly less awkwardly) and he was very excited to talk about swords and also has a nice voice. But I really really had to catch a bus so I was like
"I have to catch a bus but let me know when you're here again" and I wrote my number in his sketchbook
and he was like "I'm here a lot"
and I was like "Good!" and left
I INTERACTED WITH A PERSON??
however it's been pointed out to me by other people I've talked to about this that.... at no point did we exchange names.
I.. I tried so hard..
Names are just descriptors with no inherent meaning
They share this quality with all of language, as well as life
Shivahn eating dinner alone
People like me : (
But do you like them! I was calling back to avatar tea leaves pls forgive...
Heh. My sister is fiddling with this one puzzle game on her phone that she seems to be pretty dedicated to 100%ing. It looks like she's made quite a bit of headway towards that goal, looked like she was maybe 79% of the way through and some of the puzzles I saw got very complex. So I was just kinda sitting there with her watching her play and talking about the game and occasionally going "hmm maybe [thing] would work?" and then I realize oh my god I'm finally having a conversation with my big sis about video games and so that was pretty great
Casual phone games today, high-level Halo tournaments tomorrow.
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Orphanerivers of redthat run to seaRegistered Userregular
Heh. My sister is fiddling with this one puzzle game on her phone that she seems to be pretty dedicated to 100%ing. It looks like she's made quite a bit of headway towards that goal, looked like she was maybe 79% of the way through and some of the puzzles I saw got very complex. So I was just kinda sitting there with her watching her play and talking about the game and occasionally going "hmm maybe [thing] would work?" and then I realize oh my god I'm finally having a conversation with my big sis about video games and so that was pretty great
So today I was in my metalworking course learning about how to put rivets in things and that there is a machine called a jump press that lets you cut metal and it's called that because you actually jump on it that's how it works
and
I noticed there was a dude at a table in the shop (not in our class just in the shop at the same time as us) who was p nice looking but MORE IMPORTANTLY he was surrounded by books on norse and celtic art and also scabbards. He was carving something into one of the scabbards.
So after class I was like HELLO HUMAN TELL ME ABOUT SWORDS (except like, slightly less awkwardly) and he was very excited to talk about swords and also has a nice voice. But I really really had to catch a bus so I was like
"I have to catch a bus but let me know when you're here again" and I wrote my number in his sketchbook
and he was like "I'm here a lot"
and I was like "Good!" and left
I INTERACTED WITH A PERSON??
however it's been pointed out to me by other people I've talked to about this that.... at no point did we exchange names.
I.. I tried so hard..
Names are just descriptors with no inherent meaning
They share this quality with all of language, as well as life
Shivahn eating dinner alone
People like me : (
But do you like them! I was calling back to avatar tea leaves pls forgive...
Oh! Sometimes! I just misinterpreted your tea leave interpretation as though people did not want to eat with me rather than the reverse. The reverse is more accurate honestly.
Incidentally I am nearing unconsciousness and it is taking an amazing amount of effort to be coherent. If Geth picks me, please someone else do it. I am incapable.
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simonwolfi can feel a differencetoday, a differenceRegistered Userregular
The Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), also called the Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Crisis, Oxygen Holocaust, Oxygen Revolution, or Great Oxidation, was the biologically induced appearance of dioxygen (O2) in Earth's atmosphere.
The names for this imply that it may have been an important event
Did it occur during a short period of time, or was it something that happened gradually? Relatively speaking, of course.
I cannot find an answer, but the question is also sort of ambiguous. Oxygen may have been produced for (according to Wiki) 900 million years before it built up in the atmosphere. It looks like if we had today's photosynthesis it'd take 2000 years to get this much O2, and we have way more photosynthesis now. It may have begun to appear in the atmosphere 50 million years before what is referred to as the event itself.
Extinctions tend to be a lot slower than people realize, but that is particularly slow.
I like the theory that it was a late sudden appearance of oxygen producers that appeared right before the event
"and the morning stars I have seen
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Posts
@ronya
Would this be an accurate way to represent our respective points of view? Me: there's not much interesting to the debate over trigger warnings, everyone reasonable has converged on policy and what's left at the margin is either crazies or tribal politics. You: tribal politics are really important and what's crazy today won't be tomorrow!
That's the sense that I'm getting, and, if so, I don't think we really disagree--we're just addressing different senses of 'interesting,' i.e., whether the debate is interesting because it contains compelling arguments or whether it's interesting because a lot potentially hangs on the resolution.
(I would not merge trigger warnings with Title IX stuff; Title IX, by contrast to trigger warnings, strikes me as inciting debates with a whole lot of there there.)
I cannot find an answer, but the question is also sort of ambiguous. Oxygen may have been produced for (according to Wiki) 900 million years before it built up in the atmosphere. It looks like if we had today's photosynthesis it'd take 2000 years to get this much O2, and we have way more photosynthesis now. It may have begun to appear in the atmosphere 50 million years before what is referred to as the event itself.
Extinctions tend to be a lot slower than people realize, but that is particularly slow.
Hit me with your best shot!
People like me : (
But do you like them! I was calling back to avatar tea leaves pls forgive...
Casual phone games today, high-level Halo tournaments tomorrow.
*shoves cB into a locker*
I loved the Strike Series.
What was that Japanese one with the super moves? It was 3D and anime pilots.
Oh! Sometimes! I just misinterpreted your tea leave interpretation as though people did not want to eat with me rather than the reverse. The reverse is more accurate honestly.
Incidentally I am nearing unconsciousness and it is taking an amazing amount of effort to be coherent. If Geth picks me, please someone else do it. I am incapable.
I had things I needed to do today!
tiiiiiiiiiime
I have no idea what you are talking about but I want to know more.
I like the theory that it was a late sudden appearance of oxygen producers that appeared right before the event
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
On average, this thread was blasting along at warp 3.3
@Shazkar Shadowstorm will create the new thread
@emnmnme is backup