Weeds
Oxford students shun the Oxford Union because eeeeeeeeeeek a transphobe.
In its 200-year history as a prestigious debating chamber the Oxford Union has hosted world-famous speakers including Mother Theresa, Albert Einstein and Desmond Tutu. But now it is being ostracised by the University of Oxford’s student union, which has accused it of fostering a toxic environment that has led to bullying and sexual harassment.
The student union voted to sever fiscal ties with the OU, banning it from its freshers’ fair, which could put a strain on the debating organisation’s finances. It is the first time such action has been taken.
It comes as a number of Oxford university colleges voted to oppose the OU’s speaking invitation this month to Professor Kathleen Stock, despite the union defending its commitment to free speech and even offering welfare support to those attending.
“Welfare support”? Couldn’t they just stay away if they’re that fragile? In fact shouldn’t they go home altogether if they’re that fragile?
The student union has voted to review its relationship with the OU and to cease any commercial and financial relationships between the two organisations. The motion resolved to add the OU to the student union’s list of “prohibited external organisations”.
The OU’s latest accounts show it had an income of £1.53 million last year but an expenditure of almost £1.5 million.
Funny thing: the OU has even invited me to speak – more than once in fact. I think they thought I was in the UK; when I replied to tell them how far away (and thus expensive) I am, silence ensued.
A spokesman for the OU said: “The university’s compliance policy indicates that free speech is the lifeblood of a university, a principle that is upheld by the Oxford Union. It is unfortunate that many of the claims made on the motion are not factually accurate, and merely represent the views of a minority of the student body.”
And a very feeble tiresome Fotherington-Thomas sort of student body at that.
Indeed.
It always surprises me when university students behave like such fragile specimens. How are they going to survive adulthood and the fierce competition of academic research if they require “welfare support” when a lesbian mildly states that she prefers women rather than be-penised beard-people as partners? One imagines that they might fall to the ground, quivering, if someone said that the sky is azure instead of blue.
I mean, come on. Real life in the fields that these children might eventually find themselves is aggressive, and often cruel. I’ve been at many conferences in my field where people lined up behind the aisle microphones in the room to each tell the presenter that he (or she) was manifestly uninformed and stupid, one after the other, and they used exactly those kinds of words.
Buck up, buttercups. Clutch your blankie if you must, but stop this pitiful whining already.
Do they or anyone else ever make such a fuss about any other speakers? Do they offer cookies and milk and hugs for anyone who accidentally attended a lecture from a controversial politician or economist? Are they at all concerned about the people who might be traumatized by seeing gender ideologues preaching, in the event that the Union does invite one to speak?
I don’t think they’re fragile at all. It’s an exercise in power to control the ability of women to have a voice in the matter. They are probably getting pissed off their asses and laughing about how easy this is.
Yeah. Fragile like a machete, they are.
Sackbut, unfortunately yes.
https://reason.com/2023/02/09/after-muslim-students-complained-that-an-art-exhibit-was-harmful-macalester-college-shut-it-down/
I guess I’m fortunate that my current healthcare people are all younger than me, so I will outlive them and won’t have to put up with a Doctor who believes my diabetes is a white colonialist construct, a nurse who insists I’m a woman because I have a penis, or a podiatrist who faints at the sight of an ingrown toenail.
@6: They’re younger and therefore you will outlive them? How does that work?
I think he meant “outdie them”
Eava @ 5
Point taken. Of course I knew about such things. I was thinking more narrowly, about how a speaker might be seen as traumatic enough to warrant offering solace to the people who freely chose to attend the event, and wondering whether this particular set of complainers would offer solace to those who were offended by a speaker they liked. But I should have made that clear.
And I suppose I wondered if the solace might involve cookies and milk and hugs.
But yes, there are a lot of “heckler’s veto” incidents.
I recall during my own biology education, my university permitted a young Earth creationist to book a hall to hold forth for an hour, followed by a lengthy QA session afterwards. Our own prac demonstrators even encouraged us leave our experiments running to attend, as it happened to fall in the middle of a fairly lengthy experiment that did not need constant attendance. Obviously the YEC guy spewed a whole load of anti-science nonsense, yet the advice we had was to hear it out and politely probe it with our nascent biology knowhow during the QA section. No wilting flowers, no declarations of wrongthink which must be forbidden.
___
#6 GW
I think the good reverend means his doctors are young enough that he will not! outlive them, meaning he will not live to see them retire and be replaced with woke numpties.
Your reverence @#6:
Could be the way things are headed all the same. My advice would not be to jump off life’s tram asap, but nonetheless to move to a seat close to an exit: in case all of the above, or a member of the crew goes berserk, a passenger starts shooting at random with a bazooka, or someone’s luggage starts ticking and smoking.
Above all, be ready for anything. Strange times we have to live in.
“Fragile like a machete”
I’m definitely going to use that.
Diabetes is a white colonialist construct? I wish I known about that. I spent the last 15 years uncomfortably numb with undiagnosed diabetes and all I had to do was embrace post-modernist thought. BTW for those Australians here, be in no doubt that the Australian health care system is deeply broken and is failing the genuinely most vulnerable people (and I don’t even include myself in that because I still have a few middle-class friends who I could turn to for help).
My own experience of cancelling, from around 15 years ago, is depressing, as it involves people that I respect(ed). A well known AIDS denialist that I know (I won’t name him, as I don’t name living people I know; I’ll just say it wasn’t Peter Duesberg) was on holiday with his wife in the south of France, and I invited him to give a research seminar in our institute. His seminar was not about AIDS or HIV, and no obstacles were put in our way for inviting him. However, I thought it would interesting for many people if he also gave an informal talk about AIDS, with ample time for discussion. Unwisely, I gave the opposition plenty of time to organize a protest by advertising it about three weeks in advance. The week before he was due to come I was visited by two people from another campus who said that he should not be allowed to speak. As they were technicians with no authority to stop a researcher from inviting another researcher to visit the institute, I decided to go ahead anyway. A couple of days later I was visited by the Director of the institute — bad enough, but in order to intimidate me she came with the administrator of the building, a large man with no qualification to forbid or permit a research seminar. She said that the lecture could not be allowed as it might cause a disturbance from snowflakes who couldn’t bear to hear things they didn’t agree with. I had no option but to cancel the lecture, at least officially; but I still invited some people that I knew to come to a private session. I was disappointed that very few did.
A few years earlier I edited a paper [Duesberg et al. The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: Recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition. J Biosci 28, 383–412 (2003)] about AIDS and HIV, and needed to get referees’ reports. I tried to find people both friendly and hostile to Duesberg. Finding a friendly referee was easy, but finding a hostile one proved to be impossible. Not a single person that I approached would touch it with a barge pole, preferring to pretend Duesberg’s views did not exist rather than to argue against them.
I expect that at least some, maybe most, of the people who follow Butterflies and Wheels think that AIDS denialism is wicked, but do they agree that wrong-think should be suppressed and never analysed?
OK, speaking purely for myself, I don’t think aids denialism HIV denialism is wicked (too theological for me) but I think it’s foolish probably self-delusional and definitely dangerous. There’s a wonderful poem I wish I could find about someone trying to cure their AIDS with cucumbers, I think. It doesn’t end well. (Full disclosure: I don’t know much about biology. My background is in physics and the philosophy of science. My Catholic school avoided talking about evolution bythe simple expedient of not teaching any biology so I never knew how interesting it is. This despite one of my great heroes being Howard Florey since about the age of 12.) But I’m very interested in how people’s thinking can go wrong. That’s what led me here many years ago when Ophelia had less immediately pressing battles to fight. And so I have absolutely no time for the idea that wrongthink must be suppressed rather than discussed and analysed to the death (hopefully literally). It’s just puzzles me why you think that the claims rather than ideas behind them are what need to be discussed. Don’t get me wrong. I can’t support those managers who tried to shut you down. But your colleagues who refused to be part of debate I agree with entirely. You don’t debate creationists, flat earthers and especially not Holocaust deniers. I think the same goes for AIDS deniers. If their ideas were any good they wouldn’t need our help. I believe there’s a Dawkins quote relevant to this.
Francis Boyle:
I know there is a line of thought to that effect, and I know Dawkins supports it. He feels that debating them gives them legitimacy, and refuses to share the stage with creationists. I don’t really blame him; they don’t debate honestly, they use the Gish Gallop, and they make shit up.
But:
One thing we learned in evolution (I AM a biologist, so I DID study evolution and understand the basics of the theory) is that when you DON’T debate them, two things come out of it.
(1) They claim you are afraid to debate them. People will believe that. (Look at all the discussion we’ve had here around the NO DEBATE! of the trans lobby.)
(2) They may – and often do – organize and become stronger. The creationist crowd took a lot of territory before biologists even understood what they were doing. We weren’t interested in debating evolution because it isn’t anything, to us, worth spending our time on. We prefer to be doing the research that gives us something new, not constantly quibbling over what is already established science.
Because of creationists, I learned very little biology in my high school biology class. When the time came for human reproduction, the instructor took us out to fly kites – physics, she said, which was important to biology (it is, but flying kites isn’t what we needed to learn). When time came to talk about evolution, the kites returned.
They gained a lot of power because nobody was paying attention to what they were doing. Nobody was taking them seriously. Nobody was answering their claims, and to a lot of people, it looked like nobody could. I know a lot of people who aren’t anti-biology per se, and who are not Christian, but who have drunk the Kool-Aid because they have heard the creationists, and they haven’t heard us.
tl;dr – the issue is quite complicated, and there isn’t any one right answer.
@Athel,
Well, “our” opinion about one specific example of one specific view being presented in one specific context doesn’t extrapolate to whether “we” agree that all “wrongthink” should be suppressed and “never” analysed.
For example, most people agree that Holocaust denialism no longer merits the legitimacy of a platform at a respectable academic institution. This isn’t at all because Holocaust denialism is supposedly “wicked” and should be suppressed: it’s because such views have already been aired plenty, and analyzed to death, and there’s by now such broad, overwhelming evidence against them that the subject is done and buried. There’s nothing left to argue, and it’s reasonable to assume that anyone arguing so is not presenting a reasonable viewpoint in good faith. This is why, famously, the tobacco lobby deliberately kept offering up speakers to deny that cigarettes cause cancer, long after they knew otherwise. They were cynically exploiting what superficially looked like a principle of free speech to suppress years of medical research consensus, to the detriment of society’s public health, and the probable death of countless thousands.
I can see how some people might fancy themselves offering up a neat exercise in showing off their open-mindedness and evenhandedness by, say, inviting a Holocaust denier to speak on campus, but I think it could much better be argued that doing so just undermines the values that any respectable academic institution would presumably uphold.
How this overlays onto your AIDS denialist example depends on a few factors:
– how broad is the consensus that AIDS denialist theories have already received broad, thorough review and been properly rejected by overwhelming evidence, which has received overwhelming consensus in the field?
– what kind of institute was this person speaking at, and would him airing his views in that environment be seen to be undermining the insitute’s credibility and/or giving undue credibility to the speaker’s views?
To sum it up briefly: not all views are appropriate for all forums. I by no means believe that Holocaust denialism or flat-earthism or AIDS denialism should be suppressed on, say, the entire Internet. Because free speech, etc. But there’s plenty of room to evaluate the appropriateness of platforming certain topics within certain environments.
However, that threshold — the threshold where a topic should no longer merit being treated as an ongoing, open question, and therefore should not merit some platforms that would grant it that legitimacy — must be taken very seriously. We’ve seen students slip into believing that any views they find “wicked” should “be suppressed and never analysed,” to use your words. I obviously think that needs to be rolled way back.
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Fotherington-Thomas is wet, as any fule kno!
I didn’t know Molesworth made it across the pond, I’m impressed:)
I say “as any fule kno” a lot too. Molesworth is part of my idenniny.
How bout that, I had always wondered if Deep Purple spelled it that way as a reference to something older and suddenly along comes the answer these years later.
@iknklast
Sorry for the late response. Notifications are broken, at least for me.
I suppose I just think that there are other ways of taking them seriously than actually formally debating them which always give them the upper hand. I follow several flat Earth debunkers on Youtube. I find that flat Earth is a nice toy example of stupidity and outright denial of the facts. These debunkers don’t all refuse to debate the flat earthers but if they do they make sure it’s on a reasonably level playing field. But mainly they just mock them relentlessly. And the thing is, it’s working. Flat Earth is no mostly a spent force to the extend that there are a lot of debunkers who have had to find something else to do. I suspect that, mutatis mutandis, the same can work for other forms of denialism.