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A little research will produce a vast number of examples of political correctness with real consequences and not just "straw-manning". Here is a recent example
by SeanDav 11y ago
A little research will produce a vast number of examples of political correctness with real consequences and not just "straw-manning".
Here is a recent example: A Canadian university cancels a yoga class because yoga comes "from a culture that “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy,”
In a world that can do that, I don't find it surprising that a student could express the view in the original article and actually mean it.
- jbob2000 11y agoJust to add some more info; it was the student union that was running the yoga class and cancelled it, the university administration had no part in its cancellation. This was wholly done by students.
- zwily 11y agoThat doesn't seem to change how ridiculous it sounds, does it?
- 300zxkyle 11y agoNot in the least.
- jbob2000 11y agoNope, it's more ridiculous, I think. I'm used to misguided administrations; that's par for the course. But students policing themselves, and it's worse than any misguided administration could do? Unbelievable.
- hobs 11y agoFor some reason I am strongly reminded of the book "Interesting Times" “The Empire's got something worse than whips all right. It's got obedience. Whips in the soul. They obey anyone who tells them what to do. Freedom just means being told what to do by someone different.” ― Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- wpietri 11y agoAnd honestly, I'm fine with that. Universities are for learning, and real learning comes from doing. The questions the students were grappling with are real ones. I expect they misapplied them here, as the yoga traditions I'm familiar with are mostly conscious Indian exports, their effort to share something with the world. But students should frequently get things wrong, because that's how real learning happens.
- merpnderp 11y agoLearning only happens when there are consequences for being wrong. Aside from being ridiculed by people they disagree with and thus don't care about being ridiculed by, they have faced no consequences.
- tankenmate 11y agoRidicule is a consequence, bring back the stocks I say! (only half joking...)
- wstrange 11y agoI think the modern equivalent is called Twitter
- intortus 11y agoYou're trying overly hard to rationalize something here.
- afarrell 11y ago> Learning only happens when there are consequences for being wrong If I'm writing a toy project to teach myself WebGL, what are the consequences for doing something incorrectly and later having to debug it?
- merpnderp 11y agoAren't the bugs the consequence? Or it not working correctly? The framerate being to low? I taught myself WebGL by making planet sized spherical terrains. There were consequences just about every single moment I was doing this.
- mfoy_ 11y agoFurthermore, I don't believe they outright cancelled it, but they suspended it temporarily to look into whether or not they should cancel it. Still ridiculous, but less so than it's being represented as.
- asift 11y agoAnyone who has worked in student organizations should be able to attest that students don't have full autonomy from administration/faculty/university governance. I have no idea what role, if any, that any of these influences played on this situation, but I think it's a bit simplistic to assume students made this decision solely on their own.
- tobr 11y agoYou should post a source for the quote.
- dahart 11y agoWhat is the "real" consequence here? And is it still straw manning, in a sense, to make judgements based on an incomplete story, and jump to conclusions about someone else being wrong, without the whole story? I don't know about the yoga class incident, but I don't automatically see the ridiculousness the rest in this sub thread appear to -- it seems pretty reasonable to me for a group of students to check their assumptions about what they're doing when they learn about something related in history. Yes yoga is now a trendy healthy way to stretch and exercise, and how could history have anything to say about stretching, but it does not seem silly to me to wonder out loud if yoga may have originated as a symbol of oppression or death, or of submission to it.
- woah 11y agoIt was invented by Indian fitness gurus to market to the west.
- mcguire 11y agohttp://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/ottawa/university-ottawa-yoga-cultural-sensitivity-1.3330441 http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/ottawa/university-ottawa-... Make of it what you will.
- notahacker 11y agoFor every example of absurd political correctness - of which there are many, particularly in universities - there's an equal and opposite example of absurd bleating about political correctness from somebody upset that a private website barred them for sending out racist memes. I would throw it out there that Evangelical Christian university with rigorous behavioural standards are on average considerably less likely than average to attract rent-a-cause campaigning/complaining types and considerably more likely than average to deliver a "sermon on love" full of dire warnings and animosity towards people that don't love in the correct university-prescribed manner...
- ant6n 11y agoI'd even say that for every example of absurd political correctness, there are many examples of the absurd bleating about political correctness.
- analyst74 11y agoAccording to the article, it was canceled because "they couldn't get a French name and nobody wants to do it" I think this has more to do with Francophone people feeling marginalized as opposed to colonialism or caring for Indian people's feelings.
- randallsquared 11y agoI think you misread sago's point: > Because 'political correctness' isn't the cancer at the heart of social politics, it is straw-manning. On both sides of every issue. I don't think they were saying that political correctness was straw-manning, but that it was straw-manning that was the cancer at the heart of social politics.