Idiots.

Oregon schools to remove "Lynch" family name from schools because "trigger."

Trigger Warnings and Cognitive Dissonance

Jonah Goldberg writes:

And what a strange madness it is. We live in a culture in which it is considered bigotry to question whether women should join combat units — but it is also apparently outrageous to subject women of the same age to realistic books and films about war without a warning? Even questioning the ubiquity of degrading porn, never mind labeling music or video games, is denounced as Comstockery, but labeling "The Iliad" makes sense?

I do wish these people would make up their mind. Alas, that's hard to do when you've lost it.//

Orwell Call Your Office.

Warnings for children bad; warnings for college students good.

We live in Crazy-land.

But trigger warnings have come in for criticism and mockery even on the left. Jarvie concludes her piece with this sensible observation: "Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them." She reports that the feminist website Jezebel, "which does not issue trigger warnings, raised hackles in August by using the term as a headline joke: 'It's Time To Talk About Bug Infestations [TRIGGER WARNING].' " And Susannah Breslin provoked outrage in 2010 when she "wrote in True/Slant that feminists were applying the term 'like a Southern cook applies Pam cooking spray to an overused nonstick frying pan.' "

The Times reports that targets of campus trigger-warning demands include F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (for "a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence"), Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" (anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway" (suicide).

Here's what this reminds us of: "Rated R for strong sexual content, language, nudity, drug use and violence throughout." That's the Motion Picture Association of America's warning for the 2012 film "Spring Breakers." Or how about this: "Rating Category: M. Content Descriptors: Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Mature Humor, Nudity, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Violence." That's the Entertainment Software Rating Board's evaluation of "South Park: The Stick of Truth," which the ESRB helpfully explains "is a role-playing adventure game based on the animated South Park TV show."

There are similar rating systems for television programs (the TV Parental Guidelines) and popular music (the Recording Industry Association of America's Parental Advisory Label, or 'Pal,' program). (This column, published as it is by a family newspaper, will occasionally include a warning when linking to an external website that contains family-unfriendly content.)

The MPAA, ESRB, TV Parental Guidelines and RIAA warnings are all designed to strike a balance between freedom of expression and parents' interest in shielding their children from the fouler aspects of popular culture. For the most part free expression wins out, especially in the Internet age, as it generally requires enormous effort to prevent a determined adolescent from gaining access to "adult" material. And the law isn't of much help: In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a California law restricting the sale or rental of "violent video games" to minors.

Still, efforts at establishing such warning systems have occasioned free-speech controversies, most notably in 1985 when the Parents Music Resource Center, led by Tipper Gore, called for warning labels on record albums with explicit lyrics. It was a bipartisan effort--Gore, a Democrat, was joined by Susan Baker, wife of then-Secretary of State James Baker--but it drew wide derision from pop musicians and the left. In 1992, the Associated Press reported, vice presidential candidate Al Gore "fielded questions from an MTV audience" of college students about his wife's efforts and was put on the defensive: "He said neither he nor she supported censorship."

In those days, "mature" content held a certain allure for teenagers and young adults. By contrast, it would seem that today's young adults are anxious to be infantilized.

Trigger Warnings and Literature.

Isn't there something weird - something that speaks to cognitive dissonance - that restrictions on what can be shown on television, which is accessible to children, have been removed, while college students are seeking to censor the literature that generations of students have read?

Are we creating a generation who are out of touch with reality and can't distinguish between fiction and their own life?

Or is it just another tool in the Fascist-Left's toolkit of repression?

The term “trigger warning” has its genesis on the Internet. Feminist blogs and forums have used the term for more than a decade to signal that readers, particularly victims of sexual abuse, might want to avoid certain articles or pictures online.

On college campuses, proponents say similar language should be used in class syllabuses or before lectures. The issue arose at Wellesley College this year after the school installed a lifelike statue of a man in his underwear, and hundreds of students signed a petition to have it removed. Writing in The Huffington Post, one Wellesley student called it a “potentially triggering sculpture,” and petition signers cited “concerns that it has triggered memories of sexual assault amongst some students.”

Here at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in March there was a confrontation when a group of anti-abortion protesters held up graphic pictures of aborted fetuses and a pregnant professor of feminist studies tried to destroy the posters, saying they triggered a sense of fear in her. After she was arrested on vandalism, battery and robbery charges, more than 1,000 students signed a petition of support for her, saying the university should impose greater restrictions on potentially trigger-inducing content. (So far, the faculty senate has promised to address the concerns raised by the petition and the student government but has not made any policy changes.)

At Oberlin College in Ohio, a draft guide was circulated that would have asked professors to put trigger warnings in their syllabuses. The guide said they should flag anything that might “disrupt a student’s learning” and “cause trauma,” including anything that would suggest the inferiority of anyone who is transgender (a form of discrimination known as cissexism) or who uses a wheelchair (or ableism).

“Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” the guide said. “Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” For example, it said, while “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe — a novel set in colonial-era Nigeria — is a “triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read,” it could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”//