Taken Too Far: When Trigger Warnings Attack!

[jimhines]

I guess this is Jim Talks About Triggers and Content Warnings and Censorship and Stuff Week. Here are the previous two blog posts:

• Trigger Warnings as CENSORSHIP, and Other Nonsense
• Trigger Warnings as an Impediment to Mental Health

I want to talk next about the fear that trigger warnings could be abused, or that they could be used as a tactic to

Comments

Re: Here's one thing that popped up in my Facebook feed...

[jimhines]

Okay, the article uses the word "triggering," but I'm not seeing it in the actual complaints.

That said...yeah, the situation feels like potentially going too far with the safety/respect policy.

Pulling up different articles, I see her "offense" described as "raising her hand," "indicating disagreement," and "inappropriate hand gestures." I'm guessing we're not talking about flipping someone off, because if so, that probably would have been spelled out.

It also says she went so far as to "shake her head disapprovingly," which...um...okay, yeah.

Following the link to the Reason article, it sounds like students voted 33 to 18 to *not* kick her out or expel her for this "violation" of policy, and that other students are pushing to rewrite the policy.

Wilson herself says, "I completely understand the importance of our safe space policy, and will defend it to the ground...but I did not think that was fair, and had it gone further I would have either left or argued against it."

My takeaway is that yeah, in this case the policy was abused. I suspect this quote from the Huffington Post write-up gets close to the heart of things:

"So for someone to have abused the very legitimate purpose of safe space rules to get at someone they politically disagreed with was pretty low."

My sense is that the policy probably needs to be rewritten. But that it wasn't so much a case of "coddling" or overprotecting students so much as using a policy that wasn't written well in order to attack a political "enemy." Particularly since this all happened in the context of an Israel/Palestine debate.

Very long-winded response, I know. Hopefully it makes sense?

Re: Here's one thing that popped up in my Facebook feed...

[shiv5468]

The reason she was targeted with the safe space rules is because she was speaking in favour of Israel. other people had done the same thing in the meeting and had not been censured.

It was political silencing, and censorship.