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You're hardly alone, and when I voice this concern to my vocally liberal friends, the vast majority don't give any reply at all and pretend that my message neve
by hkmurakami 11y ago
You're hardly alone, and when I voice this concern to my vocally liberal friends, the vast majority don't give any reply at all and pretend that my message never reached them or wasn't worth responding to. I find this brand of (what is essentially) censorship to be quite disappointing.
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It’s November 2008, after President Barack Obama’s first election, and one of professor Ruth R. Wisse’s undergraduate students comes in to speak with her.
“I really did want to tell you that I’ve been feeling very guilty,” says the student, a freshman.
“About what?” asks Wisse, an outspoken conservative faculty member and prominent Yiddish scholar.
“Well, I worked on the Obama campaign,” the student says.
Wisse laughs, and replies, “You and everyone else—why would that necessarily make you feel guilty?”
“You see, I’m for McCain, and I voted for McCain.”
Wisse was now puzzled—and intrigued. “Well, why did you work on the Obama campaign?”
“Because I so wanted to be with my roommates and with everyone else.”
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/10/1/conservatives-scrutiny-oct-2015/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/10/1/conservatives-sc...
- adrianratnapala 11y agoI'd say if they are ignoring messages they don't like, then you are doing well. After all, we have the right to say what we like -- not the right to be taken seriously. I am not saying it means your friends are being wise or balanced, it's just that what they are doing is not censorship.
- hkmurakami 11y agoOh yes sorry I shouldn't have conflated the two. I, like the parent poster, have taken care to not voice not-commonly held opinions that would be met with scorn or disbelief since I want to avoid that sort of misery. I suppose my own experiences are a disappointment that my peers often do not open themselves up to understanding the logic and reasoning behind someone's beliefs that do not match their world view. I guess the Brendan Eich situation would be a decent example of the kind of censorship I am referring to, where we now seemingly cannot respect the right of others to have opinions and beliefs that are vastly different from our own.
- argonaut 11y agoHow does that anecdote support your point? It's quite natural to want to work with your friends. Also, there's no indication that person's friends actually pressured / shamed the person into working for Obama.
- hkmurakami 11y agoIt is a demonstration of the strong social pressure to conform to one's environment, even if that means going against their actual preferences. >Also, there's no indication that person's friends actually pressured / shamed the person into working for Obama. If only overt and direct kinds of social pressures mattered, then we wouldn't be having similar discussions about structural and subtle forms of racial bias, gender bias, etc. It's not the intent of the giver of (unintended) pressure that matters, it's how the receiver interprets and responds to it.
- argonaut 11y agoYes, but that is not an exclusive political/politcal-correctness phenomenon, so it's not particularly interesting. This is a universal phenomenon in all walks of life. This is a phenomenon experienced by liberals in deeply conservative areas. This is a phenomenon experienced by atheists in deeply religious areas.