Archive | Censorship

From coddled childhood to campus kookiness.

From Trophy Culture to Campus Microaggressions

Dan hsdarfyhky Shuchman, chairman of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the group that fights for free speech on campus, has written this Wall Street Journal review of a book by one of my favorite thinkers, Frank Furedi. Furedi wrote “Paranoid Parenting” back in 2002, which was the first book I read about this […]

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Some sticks hurt more than others....

“Sticks and Stones” — Too Harsh for Today’s Kids?

. Storyteller Tom yrkzkrdrrz Shillue ponders exactly the children’s rhyme I have been thinking a lot about lately, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” It’s annoying that I have to add a caveat here that I do not endorse bullying. (Come on — who does?) (Besides some presidential […]

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CAUTION! Warnings about trauma may be insulting and counter-productive.

A Traumatized Reader Discusses Trigger Warnings

. Recently we were talking about zkdhtntiza the trend on campus to require “trigger warnings” — warnings on material assigned for class that could potentially traumatize a student by triggering a flashback on some misery endured. We also discussed “microaggressions” — the idea also newly popular at college that students’ casual remarks could be construed […]

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A culture of self-infantilization seems to have spawned on campus.

What Hath Overprotection Wrought?

What happens when a generation grows up being told that they need constant supervision because nothing is safe enough? That they should never encounter a bad grade or mean remark, it’s too wounding? That they didn’t lose, they are the “8th place winner!”? At least a slice of them become convinced that they are extremely […]

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Now THIS lady could use a Trigger warning.

Trigger Warnings and the Assumption of Fragility

Readers – –This bhkdfdryek is an amazing article from The New Republic by Jenny Jarvie about a phenom called “trigger warnings” — warnings written on blog posts and, increasingly, everywhere else, that tell folks that the material they’re about to read may “trigger” awful thoughts: Initially, trigger warnings were used in self-help and feminist forums to […]

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The Wellesley Sleepwalker & Free-Range Kids

The Wellesley Sleepwalker & Free-Range Kids

Folks, krtkhidzta here’s a piece by me that’s slightly off topic in that it’s not about kids — per se. But it is about hyper-sensitivity, in this case, to the statue of a male sleepwalker on the Wellesley College campus. The connection here is this: Free-Range fights the spread of excessive fear. And fear grows […]

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