From the Globe and Mail:
The Kingston university has hired student facilitators to step in when they overhear homophobic slurs, remarks bashing women or racially tinged insults, along with an array of other language that could be deemed offensive.
That means tête-à-têtes in the residence hallways may no longer be just between friends.
…
A sampling of some behaviour that could warrant attention from university-appointed student
facilitators, tasked with policing students’ offensive language
at Queen’s:
If a student uses the phrase “That’s so gay” in conversation.
If a student calls someone or something “retarded.”
If a student writes a homophobic, racist or other derogatory remark in a public space, such as on a residence poster or classmate’s door.
If a student avoids a classmate’s birthday party for faith-based reasons.
What… the… hell????? Avoiding a birthday party because your religion happens to be against some aspect of it (could be the booze, could be the mixing of males and females, hell, could be a religious aversion to frosting for all I know) may or may not be a reasonable thing to do. But considering this to be an Officially Actionable action on your part? Unbefriggenlievable. My great hope here is that when these idiot “facilitators” start doing their thing, that those they are pestering turn on them. Not with force and violence, but with mockery.
For all the bitching and whining over the last seven years about how Bush has been a fascist… the *real* threat to free expression, and to basic human liberities as a whole, comes from those who would mandate Niceness in the names of Tolerance and Diversity. This motive is hand-in-hand with the drive to eliminate gun rights, enact socialist “Universal Whatevers” and ensure that all outcomes are equal. These are efforts to control human thought, with the goal of creating some hellish Utopia filled with mind-numbed zombies.
While a university is not the Real World, the fact remains that acceptance of this sort of jackassery at *any* level only inspires more of it at higher levels. Those who get away with this in school, once they get out into the actual job market, expect things to still go their way. Once they have an encounter with reality outside of the coddling of the university, there will be seveal options open to them:
1) Grow the hell up and realize and accept that not everybody thinks the way they do
2) Piss and moan .
Some will choose 1. But enough will choose 2 that they will help society grind to a halt. I’ve seen this several times; the most astonishing occurance was when I worked for United Tech in California. One day the whole plant, nearly a thousand people working on Defense Department programs, froze up. At least two days of productivity were simply flushed as everybody was sent to Sexual Harassment Training, where we were told by a corporate lawyer that:
A) Anything that anybody might decide was offensive, was indeed offensive
2) Offensive speech and behavior were not tolerated.
Me being the pain in the ass that I am, I asked the lawyer to consider the hypothetical of a male Muslim employee who was offended at a female employee who was, say, showing ankles and cavles due to her dress. As the lawyer was a female wearing a dress that showed her ankles and calves, I thought this was relevant. But the lawyer not only didn’t have an answer to that, she deflected it. Didn’t even try to consider it. Also didn’t have much of a response to my claim of being offended at the misuse of corporate resources to deal with such a pathetic issue.
What was the incident that caused United Tech to shut down? Turn out that two male employees were walking from one building to another. One made mention that his girlfriend had a new dress and that she was attractive in it (the terminology used may have been substantially coarser, I don’t know). They were overhead by a female co-worker who complained. The male who was speaking? Fired. The other male? Suspended. The company? Out hundreds of thousands if not millions in productivity. The lesson? If you bitch about being offended, you can wreak all manner of havoc. The Junior Spies were creepy enough in 1984. Hopefully in at least this case, they will turn out to be laughable. But I really don’t have high expectations.
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If this was a story about some nosy busybodies who just want everybody to talk nice and are injecting themselves into other peoples conversations, hey, whatever. But this is a story about a university setting out to specifically hire snitches and thinkpol. To anyone who actually thinks this sort of blatant Big Brotherism is a good idea:
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