3 ms·

> "Once a year, Evergreen State University (located just outside of Seattle), allows the students of colour to take a day of absence, so that their importance a

> "Once a year, Evergreen State University (located just outside of Seattle), allows the students of colour to take a day of absence, so that their importance and contribution is felt at the University. Bret Weinstein, as a progressive, was and has been on board for this for a long time. There is a jarring and confusing change in character between the paragraph above and below this comment. You went from a "this is optional" clause to a "you should stay away." Your narration injected this, and did so clumsily. Is this because you're citing two sources? > A year ago, they flipped the logic. Rather than telling people of colour to stay away for the day, they told white people that they are not welcome on campus for a day. Absence wasn’t compulsory, but highly recommended." Firstly: nothing about this practice was compulsory and nothing about this practice was universal. Professors knew about the original walkout tradition and scheduled around it, but that was the extent of it. Not all students who were people of color participated. They were not "told to stay away." Nor were white students told to "stay away." What actually happened was some white people asked how they could participate, and so a group of students set up a separate group of workshops. This was very small scale, but the folks involved liked it. So the next year, it was proposed that there was a possible track for this to be supported by the school. It was not a "not welcome" declaration, it was a proposal to change a tradition. Brett Weinstein took exception to it. What followed subsequently was a series of predictable escalations by the usual extremist subjects, with non-students from alt-right groups showing up in "support" and antifa showing up to "counter" them. Because Evergreen is essentially a small non-traditional state university, they were just not prepared for this scale of action and national attention. Even with this, these were nothing like the Berkeley demonstrations. Injuries were limited, property damage was low, and actually all groups were moderated by the student body. The attempt to tie this to "suppression" of Weinstein's academic work is absurd, because nothing about any of this relates to that body of work. He took a political and ethical position completely unrelated to his work and then got involved in a controversy about it. Being a scientist with political opinions doesn't mean your political opinions are necessarily right or immune to scrutiny. If he wants to stick to science, he should have (and could have) done that. He didn't like an optional white walkout day that was done in solidarity with PoC, and he said so, and that had consequences.

stcredzero 8y ago
There is a jarring and confusing change in character between the paragraph above and below this comment. You went from a "this is optional" clause to a "you should stay away." Your narration injected this, and did so clumsily. Is this because you're citing two sources? No. The character of the protest did explicitly change in this way. What followed subsequently was a series of predictable escalations by the usual extremist subjects, with non-students from alt-right groups showing up in "support" and antifa showing up to "counter" them. Because Evergreen is essentially a small non-traditional state university, they were just not prepared for this scale of action and national attention. It's easy to find the videos of the students holding the administration captive. Especially telling are the idiotic things they're yelling. It's easy to find the videos of the students confronting Bret Weinstein. Especially telling are the idiotic things those students are yelling. The attempt to tie this to "suppression" of Weinstein's academic work is absurd You're being needlessly specific, or not reading carefully. I mentioned "communicating with the public." In Weinstein's case, he started out communicating with colleagues. Effectively, he was "un-personed" with the protesting students used as muscle to make him and his wife feel unsafe. In Weinstein's case, there isn't suppression of academic work. In this case, it's the suppression of an academic. There's one kind of person in history who goes around intimidating academics for holding reasonable opinions. (Or even correct ones, as in this case.) Those are the villains.
belorn 8y ago
There is clearly a difference of opinion in the different reporting about what the school actually did. You did ask me to look up multiple independent sources. The whole thing however looks like a terrible idea from the start and the "change" even worse. A school should not give day of absence to people based on gender, race or skin color, nor should a school support the idea to encourage people to stay away if that was what the "group of students" suggested. A school should do everything they can do in order to make students feel like they want to be at school, and doing social experiments where they encourage/permit students to not go to school (if that was what the original concept behind the walkout tradition) is a terrible idea. This is, as I mentioned earlier, why board of ethics exist. The thing Evergreen State University should have done is do a public statement that all students regardless of race is welcome and wanted every single day, every week of the year. End of story, end of controversy, just a plain explicit message. No walk out, no white students opting to not go to school, just plain school where everyone is welcome. Then they would not have different political media platforms giving different narratives of what did or did not happen.

stcredzero 8y ago

There is a jarring and confusing change in character between the paragraph above and below this comment. You went from a "this is optional" clause to a "you should stay away." Your narration injected this, and did so clumsily. Is this because you're citing two sources? No. The character of the protest did explicitly change in this way. What followed subsequently was a series of predictable escalations by the usual extremist subjects, with non-students from alt-right groups showing up in "support" and antifa showing up to "counter" them. Because Evergreen is essentially a small non-traditional state university, they were just not prepared for this scale of action and national attention. It's easy to find the videos of the students holding the administration captive. Especially telling are the idiotic things they're yelling. It's easy to find the videos of the students confronting Bret Weinstein. Especially telling are the idiotic things those students are yelling. The attempt to tie this to "suppression" of Weinstein's academic work is absurd You're being needlessly specific, or not reading carefully. I mentioned "communicating with the public." In Weinstein's case, he started out communicating with colleagues. Effectively, he was "un-personed" with the protesting students used as muscle to make him and his wife feel unsafe. In Weinstein's case, there isn't suppression of academic work. In this case, it's the suppression of an academic. There's one kind of person in history who goes around intimidating academics for holding reasonable opinions. (Or even correct ones, as in this case.) Those are the villains.

belorn 8y ago

There is clearly a difference of opinion in the different reporting about what the school actually did. You did ask me to look up multiple independent sources. The whole thing however looks like a terrible idea from the start and the "change" even worse. A school should not give day of absence to people based on gender, race or skin color, nor should a school support the idea to encourage people to stay away if that was what the "group of students" suggested. A school should do everything they can do in order to make students feel like they want to be at school, and doing social experiments where they encourage/permit students to not go to school (if that was what the original concept behind the walkout tradition) is a terrible idea. This is, as I mentioned earlier, why board of ethics exist. The thing Evergreen State University should have done is do a public statement that all students regardless of race is welcome and wanted every single day, every week of the year. End of story, end of controversy, just a plain explicit message. No walk out, no white students opting to not go to school, just plain school where everyone is welcome. Then they would not have different political media platforms giving different narratives of what did or did not happen.