Ruminations: Batshit Crazy

Sunday, August 09, 2015

Batshit Crazy

Atlantic Magazine offers the following story:

Today's college students can't seem to take a joke

In it, reporter Caitlin Flanagan describes the sanitized process by which colleges choose guest speakers and comics, hyper-judiciously excluding the slightest controversial or "trigger" statements.

So to you, I offer this:

The term 'trigger warning' should be banned because it contains the word 'trigger', which is a microaggression against those who feel threatened by suggestion that anything resembling a firearm might be mentioned in an academic setting.

Therefore, to warn against offense may be offensive. And it probably makes you a racist or a misogynist because you micro-aggressively caused someone to think for themselves of situations which might trigger their abject terror of racists and misogynist, thus causing them severe emotional uncomfy-ness.

Does this sound absolutely, utterly insane?

News flash: there is nothing too batshit crazy for someone to suggest it seriously in today's academia. Knowing this, after I came up with the above ridiculous example I went looking for it in real life.

JACKPOT.

As opined in Everyday Feminism Magazine, "trigger" is a trigger and should be avoided. They're so adamant about it that they use the word "trigger" 63 times, including in the headline, the summary, and the "content warning" for the article itself. In fact, if the word "trigger" were to trigger you, you'd have been triggered 6 times before you ever got to the article proper. Good job, persons.

It won't take long for them to realize that even a generic "content warning" is enough to "force" a person to dwell on potential content that might trigger them. Don't think so? How much do you want to bet?

This kind of hyper-sensitive silliness is what comics like Jerry Seinfeld are complaining about. They won't do the college circuit. Read this. You'll be glad you did.

Can you imagine how George Carlin would react to this? Bill Maher does:

Maher is right. You don't need an X-ray to know there's a stick up your ass. So I'm calling it quits. the "being indulgent" thing doesn't work.

Not any more, it's not

Jokes are jokes. They are funny, even the politically incorrect ones. And if they're not, that doesn't make them mean. It just makes them jokes that didn't work. If you are so damned maladjusted that you need your nanny, the dean, to take time off from boiling your bottle to sanitize the humor to which you're exposed, then you need to see a psychiatrist today.

To the hyper-sensitive: the problem is yours.

But not yours alone. It seems to me as though American colleges have taken on the mission to take the brightest people they can find and make total and complete idiots of them, churning out rank and file of whining, self-indulgent, narcissistic, infantile jackasses. They are either brilliant at doing this on purpose or they are thoroughly incompetent at preventing it from being done through consistent, repetitious error.

Nevertheless, there remain a fortunate few who are relatively immune to authoritative pressure, proving Isaac Asimov's maxim that, “Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is."

Sadly, they don't even need to be there. But that's a rant for another day.

I will leave you with a gratuitous Semitic [1] joke:

Sadie: Shmuel, I want to get a get... I can't live with you anymore! I want a divorce!
Shmuel: But why? Is there someone else?
Sadie: [hopefully] There must be!