Saturday, November 5, 2016

Pity the anti-Zionist Snowflake

Michael Lumish

{Also published at the Elder of ZiyonJews Down Under, and The Jewish Press.}

 photo clean-your-room.jpg One of the most pathetic and hypocritical aspects of contemporary western campus politics is the Crybully / Snowflake phenomenon.

University administrations throughout the West have brought back en loco parentis in a manner that would have absolutely disgusted - in its treacly infantilization of young adults in "safe spaces" - college students from the 1960s and 1970s.

Young radicals from that period would not have demanded common spaces where they could suck their collective thumbs, while instigating hatred toward white people and Jews who stand with Israel.

Whatever they may have thought about allegedly insidious white-anglos, radical students from the 1960s - who were mainly middle-class white-anglos, themselves - emphatically did not want the university administration's parental embrace. What they wanted, frankly, was for the administrations to get the hell out of their faces and to stop enabling the "war machine."

The late 1960s, and the early 1970s, saw the emergence of a hodge-podge of radical types ranging from the Panthers to the psychedelic-counterculture people to the variety of hard political types, blending criticisms of race and gender with economic class, to those like the Weathermen who wanted to burn the "system" down entirely.

But whether these young people wanted social and economic justice for non-white people or women or Gay people, or whether they wanted to end the Vietnam War or to float away into a haze of smoke and acid, the very last thing on this planet that they wanted was to be treated like small children by parental university help-mates.

What they wanted, more than anything else, actually, was the freedom to be who they are.

And it is this that makes the Crybully / Snowflake phenomenon on today's university campuses pathetic. It is not merely that the university infantalizes these students, but that the students infantalize themselves when they go into such rooms, sometimes containing coloring books and stuffed animals.

At Brown University, or so Judith Shulevitz tells us in the New York Times, the "safe spaces" are:
intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.
When did the university experience become kindergarten?

Why do university administrators insist upon treating young adults, who are old enough to fight and die in war, as 8 year olds? And why are so many students eager to avail themselves of their own dimunition?

But this is just why the Crybully / Snowflake Phenomenon is pathetic.

If it were merely pathetic I would not bother writing about it because, so what? If students who think of themselves as on the cultural cutting-edge wish to be pathetic, who am I to say "no"?

The thing is, of course, they aren't children and many of them carry anti-white and anti-Zionist hatred which they wield with abandon. That is, many of the the same people who require safe spaces are also the same people who spit hatred at whiteness, defame those Jews who refuse to toe their political line, and encourage violence toward cops.

Here, for example, are a bunch of student racists, just days ago, refusing to allow white kids through the main gate of UCAL, Berkeley:



And this is what makes this creepy campus political trend hypocritical and entirely toxic.

A student activist cannot, after all, be racist and anti-racist, both, at the same time.

A student activist cannot call for the blood of random Jews in Jerusalem (in calls for intifada) while simultaneously requiring that the university provide a special place to rest their head from trauma if the mayor of that town drops in for a chit-chat.

If today's crop of college radicals wish to spit fire at white people, and Jewish supporters of Israel, for our decadent and evil ways, that is their right, but one cannot inspire hatred toward others while also demanding child-like coddling from public universities.

And why would any self-respecting young political activist want such coddling, anyway?

Coddling, after all, is not the stuff that young rebels are made from... or is it?

15 comments:

  1. This is an act of violence. Blocking people from accessing a public walk way is what thugs do. The UC police are useless.

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    1. There's a segregationist trend growing within anti-racism as a political movement.

      Thus we see the emergence of non-white dormatories and anti-Zionist "safe spaces."

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    2. I don't see many colors represented in the chorus line. As far as anything to do with alleged "genders" please give me a break. I went to college to learn something, not to become fuzzy. BTW, just when did Asian kids become white and spoiled little middle class white girls become POC? And why don't "white" students get a space after having to put up with all this nonsense. File it under "sick joke" in the Twilight Zone.

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  2. A sociologist or cultural anthropologist will tell you that adolescence, as a concept is only about 120 years old. Before that, you were child until about 14 or 15 and then you were in practical terms, an adult. With the rise of the non agrarian middle class in America there arose an idea that young people were not young big people but something quite different - people who live in a twilight state between childhood and adulthood. As they transition from one to the other they experience and experiment with different things with equal parts freedom and measured paternalist control. Some responsibility coupled with a great deal of micro management. Even more management than small children are subjected to because of the ramifications of their so called free choice. The social contract was altered to accommodate adolescents from the age of 13-18 in the space of such things like juvenile justice, work laws, age of consent, laws limiting privileges and access to driving, alcohol, fighting in wars.

    We're now at the point where that's become a monster in some ways. In some states a 13 year old girl can obtain an abortion without any parental notification or involvement. But she can't buy cigarettes until 19 or 21 in some places or buy alcohol until 21 while driving a car is largely unrestricted after age 16. And there are some people who want 16 year olds to vote but they want to raise the driving age to 18.

    Now you toss a bunch of youngsters who have never been under NO parental control for very long before into an environment where the college assumes a weird kind of partial in loco parentis role that protects these 'children' from their own parents, eg. they don't share grades or transcripts or medical records.

    And if that wasn't confusing enough, biologists now say that neurologically, childhood extends to age 25. Health insurance on your parents' dime extends to 26 (29 in New York), you can't rent a car until age 23, the DREAM act assumes immigrant 'children' up to age 30.

    So if anything, the 120 year old notion of adolescence has expanded to the upper 20's. It used to be 13-18 but now there's a super-adolescence that lasts another 10 years. We tell these 'college students' that they're still not fully formed adults and then we give them 99% of the rights and freedoms of adults and we are astonished that they really don't fully grasp either the reality or the responsibilities of that status. Of course they sound silly.

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  3. Well you know what I will say. Pepper spray and air horns. If they block the bridge, toss them over the side.

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  4. I am curious what a generation of angry entitled functional illiterates will indeed experience once they leave the crèche of college. It can't be that they all find jobs with the government or academia. I can't imagine that marching around outraged will be a paying career. We're running desperately short of middle class people the government can continue to kick like an ATM. We're running out of employed people who live IN cities in the private sector where they productively make something as opposed to financial wizardry.

    I seriously doubt we can keep going much more. It will be one hell of an end of the world party.

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  5. http://www.popecenter.org/2016/10/modern-universitys-greatest-failing/

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    1. Recommend "A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California" from 2012.

      https://www.nas.org/articles/a_crisis_of_competence_the_corrupting_effect_of_political_activism_in_the_u


      For something in great depth, "What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students" from 2013.

      https://www.nas.org/articles/what_does_bowdoin_teach_how_a_contemporary_liberal_arts_college_shapes_stud

      Both are very informative and support what was described in that article.

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  6. Rubio wants to flood this country with H-1B visa holders.






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  7. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/11/07/patrick-caddell-real-election-surprise-uprising-american-people.html

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  8. http://www.steynonline.com/7590/sanctity-and-dispossession

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  9. Would Rubio have withstood the onslaught? He wilted under pressure. The larger matter going forward is globalism and it may not have been joined without Trump.

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  10. No doubt all these fellow travelers helped deliver Trump to the White House.

    http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-leftist-political-corr

    I watched the election on NBC and on the Canadian station CBC. One of the most vocal guests on CBC was a black lesbian American commentator who railed against Trump and all his supporters as dumb racists. She also railed against Hilary and the Dem party who didn't support Black Lives Matter et al as much as they should have:"they only respect us when they want something from us."

    All I could think of as she railed was that stuff must really irk the general American public a lot: no wonder they voted for Trump. Meanwhile my facebook page is full of family and friends predicting Armageddon . Me, I'm more sanguine (my general nature.)

    I was surprised mind you but not shocked. And I am not ever prepared to label almost half of America as stupid and racist. Interesting times.

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    Replies
    1. Political Correctness: Being polite and having good manners? lol
      Pretty good article. Hey, you can have as many genders as you like, but there's still just two sexes, says me.
      On the main point I certainly agree and have agreed with the author's position on being PC for...well, forever. Those involved will have a terrible time seeing this as a backlash against them, and will most likely double-down. And I think Bill Maher's mea culpa about crying wolf is revealing and, I think, in the current case, still largely unsubstantial. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.

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