Misogyny v. Autonomy: Women in Combat

 February 5, 2013

“Don’t send our daughters into combat,” proclaimed Kathleen Parker in last Monday’s Seattle Times, describing the decision to allow women to work in combat roles within the military as an “abandon[ment] of all reason.”

Her obnoxious tone turned to a two-faced tirade of tiresome inanity after she attempted to defend her stance as a “feminist” view. Apparently words don’t mean anything anymore, or else she would have taken a pragmatic approach instead of defending her unequal treatment of the sexes in the name of equal treatment. Her reasons were essentially that women are physically inferior to men in combat, that including women poses a threat to unit cohesion and that women are more at-risk in prisoner situations. On the same line of thinking, she makes a rather teary emotional appeal, asking the reader to “hold the image of your 18-year old daughter, neighbor, sister or girlfriend” in mind when discussing combat. I’ll save that one for last.

For starters, it is true that on average, women don’t have the same upper-body strength that men do. Conceded. Fine. What you must say, however, isn’t that women in general don’t have the same physical strength—you must say ALL women lack the constitution to be good soldiers. We have physical standards to weed out unfit soldiers, male and female, so why add superfluous gender restrictions? This attitude of generalization isn’t just the very definition of stereotyping and gender discrimination; it’s patently untrue as well. If you care to disagree, I’m sure you could settle that score in a parking lot somewhere with Ronda Rousey; the number one female MMA fighter and judo gold-medalist would handily take down most military men in a heartbeat. Limiting the ability of minimally and equally qualified, let alone exceptional, individuals from participating in combat roles because of sweeping gender generalizations is morally indefensible. Saying so under the banner of feminism merely adds irony.

On to the issue of unit cohesion.

What’s wrong with saying we shouldn’t integrate blacks and whites in uniform? Is there something intrinsically bad about segregating platoons and brigades by ethnic and national origin, as was done in early 20th century combat? What’s so terrible about keeping gays out of the military? After all, a change to any of these standards might cause strife and disunity within the respective group.
The fear of damage to morale and unit cohesion is such a definitively destroyed argument that I can’t help but speculate on the motives of those who offer it in a serious manner. As for women, they’re already integrated in the rest of the military, including the many groups like the Naval construction battalions (SeaBees) that carry weapons, suffer mortar fire and enemy attacks and are working under combat-like conditions. Shockingly, damage to unit cohesion doesn’t seem to be threatening our borderline-overpowered military’s combat readiness in any way. To say, “oh, but it’s different this time,” would require a much higher burden of proof than the sexist hunch of a misogynistic military tradition.

As for the claim of increased vulnerability to exploitation in prisoner situations, everything that’s wrong with the argument is summed up by Parker in an appended parenthetical in the paragraph. On the heels of a snide comment deriding the “adult” designation of 18-year-old girls, she says “parents know better.”

This is paternalism if there ever was such thing. As if these women weren’t adults! As if women couldn’t make decisions for themselves! If you were to meet a woman who was physically fit, who was mentally steeled, and knew the implications of combat, to tell her “you can’t go because I feel uncomfortable” is undermining her right to self-determination in defense of a personal view on defined gender roles. Without seeing it, I wouldn’t have imagined a writer for a publication like The Seattle Times could seriously take such a condescending and disrespectful position.
Are there dangers in combat for women? Absolutely. Hygiene challenges, boredom, psychological damage, injury, rape, torture and death are possible problems for both sexes, and the burden is not shared equally. Women know this better than men. This is precisely why a willing and qualified female soldier who desires a role in combat should be granted their request with all of the expediency and support afforded to their male counterparts. If Parker and like-minded people, men or women, don’t have the guts themselves to serve their country on the front line, that’s fine. I’m sure no one will hold that against them, particularly those they’d be serving alongside. But they should keep their worries about other people’s welfare to themselves, at least where legislation is concerned. Let adults (yes, they are adults) make their own decisions without other people’s confusion over what “equality” actually means infringing on their right to do so.

Don't Embrace "Multiculturalism" Under the Guise of "Diversity"

February 4, 2013

“We have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong[…]We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values.”

These were the words of British Prime Minister David Cameron, in Feb. 2011, speaking on the failures of the British state’s support of “multiculturalism.”  Recently, Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkel of Germany uttered similar public confessions, all speeches delivered after decades of support for the inclusive policy. What is “multiculturalism,” and what’s wrong with it?
Multiculturalism is more than a mere tolerance of cultural differences; it is a positive and proactive accommodation of differences, accomplished through Will Kymlicka’s “group-differentiated rights.” It’s the application of exemptions and exceptions for certain groups from the normal social and legal expectations of society, such as allowing certain religious groups to be exempt from the no-hats rule in drivers license photos.

What’s so harmful about that? Doesn’t this promote tolerance and a pluralistic society and the beautiful mosaic of human diversity?

The short answer is simply ‘no.’ The long answer would take a full volume, like “The Closing of the American Mind,” to fully answer, so I’ll stick with the short.
As with all flawed theories, the fundamental issues are worth pointing out first.  Multiculturalism arose as an idea in the wake of a generation characterized by ethnic and racial strife, both at home and abroad, and the philosophy grew from within the political movement doing most of the ideological combat, those whom we would today call “liberals.” Against discrimination in spirit, multiculturalism is, at its essence, the proposition that we should treat people differently based on their racial or ethnic background.

Notice a problem?

A deeper issue lies in the movement’s proclivity towards what is known as moral relativism, the idea that moral truths are subjective and that no one is really in a position to praise some action as “good,” or to decry another action as “bad,” in any kind of binding fashion. Sam Harris gave an example of just such a mindset in his TED talk, describing how many modern intellectuals couldn’t bring themselves to say there was anything objectively wrong with throwing battery acid in the faces of women suspected of less-than-perfect chastity.

“Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this?”

It’s a distinction of Western academia in recent years to be unable to distinguish, in the words of Winston Churchill, the firefighter from the fire. Such is the case with such outspoken dissidents as Noam Chomsky, who to this day proudly claims that 9/11 was not the result of radical religious extremism, but rather defends the actions of Al-Qaeda as justified acts of retribution against American terrorism in the Middle East in prior years.

For decades now, American and British journalists, philosophers and social critics have warned of the dangers of multiculturalism, and the threat it poses not merely to the national identity, but to the very soul of the nations’ people. Such is the case in much of Europe, where anti-semitism is back on the rise, where different cultural groups are treated differently and where hate speech laws are becoming increasingly broad in scope and rigorous in application. If an 18-year old white girl vanished for a week to have her genitals sawed off, for example, there would be a national outcry and harsh justice rained down on the perpetrators of such a heinous crime. Not so if said 18-year-old girl happened instead to be Pakistani. The tragedy isn’t that this is happening—it’s that the intelligent, educated citizens have been robbed of the ability to see the evil lurking in their midst, and worse, have been convinced that those who notice these problems are themselves the evil ones. Usually, this manifests in accusations of racism or intolerance.

The harbingers of such a mindset have been in place in the American intellectual culture for a while now, and the natural outcome is slowly beginning to come to fruition, albeit slightly behind Western Europe. A brow-beating attitude towards “tolerance” and “diversity” is one such sign. We should support diversity, given the value of different perspectives and experiences to our shared future, but we should be extremely wary and suspicious of the newfound obsession with diversity that is creeping into universities and colleges more forcefully, both at Bellevue College and elsewhere around the country. The difference in mindset is subtle but important, not merely for ourselves, but for the future of our nation.

The Merits of Rigorous Coursework

January 28, 2013

Nothing demonstrates the spiritual gutting of the purpose of education as thoroughly as the proliferation of online accreditation “courses.”  If we look at a brief history of education, it becomes apparent that we’re living through a remarkable paradigm-shift in the perceived purpose of education, where the end goal is no longer education at all but merely the paperwork claiming to have received one.

Academic circles are replete with commentators who complain about the passive role students are taking in education today.  Ken Robinson’s TED talk from 2006 describes how our current education model kills creativity.  The social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, well known for his Stanford Prison experiment, has done recent research showing a continuing trend of disengagement in school, particularly in boys.  And it’s hard, of course, to imagine the protests and cultural challenges that framed the academic culture of the 60’s and 70’s taking place in today’s generation. Grades take precedence over learning.

This isn’t, of course, something intrinsically “good” or “bad,” but it does have consequences on how our society works.  More importantly, it has a dramatic effect on how classes are run because students’ incentives have changed.  Instead of striving to learn, they’re striving to attain acknowledgement of learning.  Learning, as it turns out, that didn’t happen in the first place.
Lack of economic incentives might not be a problem we as a society can solve at all, since industries are becoming more specialized by the day.  The lack of education, however, is something we can change.  Cultural shifts have happened in the past, and societal values are often as arbitrary as one small group’s preference.  America’s fascination with football, for example, isn’t any more or less “rational” than the rest of the world’s equally rabid obsession with soccer, and it would be a tall order to deny the impact of these arbitrary cultural phenomena.

Why not make this decision with education?

Taking an active part in the educational process doesn’t only make students better citizens by making them more informed about important issues; it makes them fundamentally better professionals in their respective job field by transferring habits of reasoned skepticism, attention to detail and proactive learning to the world of private industry.

There are two major ways students can make this happen: class selection and active dialogue.  Choosing classes that challenge preconceived notions of how the world works opens up students to new perspectives.  From my own experience, Dr. Chace Stiehl’s class on the economic history of the United States and Michael Korolenko’s class on the techniques and technology of propaganda have been exceptional examples of just this variety of class, and I’ve heard (almost) nothing but good things about BC’s sociology department.  The number of students talking about how their minds were blown certainly exceeds the number of students claiming the same thing out of 100-level English and math courses, as important as those are.The second part—taking an active part in the process by asking difficult questions—makes the knowledge more thorough and memorable.   Why do we think evolution is true?  How sure are we that the holocaust really happened?  How would you beat a Flat Earth Society member in a debate?  These are arguably the questions that generate the most genuine understanding of the material.

While the temptation to take easy, straightforward classes and to passively swallow and regurgitate the course curriculum is strong, especially due to parental expectations and college competition, it seems that people are losing more than they gain in this trade-off intrinsically.  However, with colleges and hiring businesses increasingly looking more at portfolios and activities and less at perfect grades, the loss in intellectual rigor and the actual education students are paying for outweighs the ease and security of vanilla classes occupied by vanilla students by leaps and bounds.  Don’t be afraid to grab your learning by the horns and demand your money’s worth.  After all, it is your money.

Killing Diversity with Diversity

January 22, 2013

“I sat in my chair, stated my opinion and then I shut up,” said Aaron Malec from his office chair in the Veteran Office in Student Programs last December.  “I can pull up the email right now, she kicked me out of the class for basically exactly what I was saying earlier, telling someone that if you come to this country, and you become a citizen…this is your country, because nobody’s from here…Now this is your country.”

Apparently, such conversation is fast becoming off-limits territory in the classroom environment, where diversity of opinion is viewed as antithetical to the diversity universities and colleges nation-wide are promoting so vigorously. The email read: “If you act as disrespectfully again in class as you did today when you questioned a student’s contribution based on her ethnicity, I will ask you to leave.”  Regardless, whether the professor misinterpreted what Malec was saying, or if he had, in fact said, something that intimidated a student, what is clear is that he was forced to drop the class and switch to an independent study based on something that he said.

In a different scenario from two weeks ago, a video was uploaded onto YouTube entitled “Testimony,” which caught a verbal altercation between several people. According to Carlondo Dudley, an eyewitness from the video, the unidentified white male in his 40s walked in front of a black student who was looking down.  After bumping into each other, the man said something along the lines of “I’m an American, I walk on the right side of the road.” This speech, as it turns out, is also off-limits.

“Here’s my situation,” says Dudley to the man in the video. “This is an international environment. You can’t say things like ‘are you an American?’ because not everyone can say that.”  If that had been all, it might have simply been a gruff exchange of perspectives prompting no need for an opinion article, but many students felt that this speech was aggressive enough to justify seeking administrative help in punishing the man for his comments.  Given that a bias incident is “conduct, speech or behavior motivated by prejudice or bias towards another person that does not rise to the level of a crime,” a description which itself is determined by the victim’s perception, punitive action seems to be likely.

It’s difficult to imagine that great American whose life we celebrated yesterday would have been thought of as sensitive and respectful by the standards of his time, or, for that matter, by the standards of our time within campus boundaries. But historical speculation aside, the idea that certain speech is “off-limits” defeats the very purpose of protecting individual rights on campus.  In fact, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) gave Bellevue College a “red-light” rating, as a campus with policies that are in the words of its president Greg Lukianoff, “laughably unconstitutional.”

It’s worth pointing out that the reason FIRE became involved in BC in the first place was over the suspension of a math teacher in 2006 for putting a question on an exam that asked students to do some calculations based on Condoleezza Rice dropping a watermelon off of a building. While FIRE proudly announced victory for free speech at BC in February of 2007 (finally overturning the suspension more than five months after the event itself occurred), the voices that vilified the math professor haven't become weaker; they've become enshrined in actual school policy.

This is not how a free-society works, and certainly now how students can experience the marketplace of ideas. If BC students and staff value diversity as much as they say they do, they must be willing to value diversity of opinion, especially, in fact, of opinions they disagree with or find offensive. True diversity of ideas is being killed on campus in the name of multiculturalism, and not only does it defeat the very purpose for which it was designed - to make students feel safe to be themselves - but also defeats the principles of education and our country's constitution. You simply do not have a right to not be offended.

This idea is fast losing support on campuses however, where the price of having a thin skin can include your own ideas and convictions. Think "hate-speech" codes will protect your political views from criticism? Ask a college Republican how easy it is to get support for speakers and events, whose views are often inaccurately called "fascist" and "idiotic" by their own teachers and very often don't receive as large budgets as their liberal counterparts. Confident school policy will keep others from insulting your faith, or at least your race? Tufts University has banned the recitation of several verses of the Quran for inciting hatred and the same push for diversity has spawned Palestinian "apartheid wall" demonstrations on campuses across the country, often blatantly anti-semitic.

If we value diversity, we have to stand up for our ability to be who we are on campus, no matter our race, gender, ethnicity, religion, politics or opinions. No idea, no conversation and no words can be "off-limits" in an institution designed to teach its students not only how to interact with other people coming from different worlds, but how to function as informed citizens in a democratic society.

“Dangers of Reality and Imagination”

January 14, 2013

The casual phrase “it’s that time of year again,” betrays something of a cultural dismissal of the seriousness of the flu virus in the United States; ‘oh, it’s just the flu.’  No big deal.

While gun violence steals our headlines and late-night TV news time, less visceral but equally dangerous problems like the flu remain largely ignored.  Last Tuesday’s USA Today, for example, ran front page stories about both Gabriel Gifford’s new anti gun-lobby lobby group and the Newton School shooting, with just a side-bar story about the flu hitting with “deadly force,” having already killed 18 children this early in the season. The following day, the Seattle Times had not one, not two, but three front-page stories about gun control.  The entire paper didn’t mention this year’s particularly early and lethal flu season at all.

It should be pointed out that according to the Center for Disease Control, gun violence resulted in just over 12,600 deaths in 2007, while the 2009 flu pandemic, also known as the “swine flu” has resulted in the deaths of over 18,000 people.  It’s also worth noting that gun violence, though severe, has proven to be very, very difficult to mitigate without causing even more significant problems.  Preventing deaths from the flu, by contrast, is not only very easy in logistics, but politically and financially easy as well.  We simply need to walk over to the local drug-store and pick up a vaccine, often for just a few bucks.

So why aren’t we doing it?

It doesn’t take a PhD in social psychology to understand that we don’t make our decisions as rationally as we like to think – a problem that has vexed economists as well as health-care providers for as long as we’ve been managing our money and our bodies.  We make a lot of our decisions based on our fears, which are very often poor reflections of the actual dangers that we face. Based on the number of guns, number of swimming pools, and number of children annually killed by both, Economics Professor Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago calculated that “on average, if you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”  And yet, we very rarely hear of worried citizens fighting for more restrictive laws on swimming pools.

While there is a small fringe group of people who don’t understand medical technology perpetuating some bad science (like the claim that vaccinations cause autism, or hurt your immune system), the main problem with the flu, as with swimming pools, seems to be that it lacks agency – it’s not a person doing something to you, it’s simply a hazard.  The more primitive parts of our brain are programmed to fear predatory animals and, more importantly, other people.  It’s only natural, biologically speaking, that something like a gun-wielding person inspires more fear and political action than something even more dangerous and more preventable like influenza.

However, as educated people (you’re reading the newspaper, after all), we have a responsibility to set the bar higher, to do our best to match our fears with reality, and to match our preventative action to the threats that actually endanger people the most.  It would also pay huge dividends in safety for us to try to deal with the easy problems first.  So if we really want to make society safer, let’s try to ensure as many people as we can get vaccinated this year.  When we finally send the flu the way of smallpox, we will be in a more rational position from which to worry about the more sensational dangers like firearms.

Constitutional Controversies on Campus

January 7, 2013

Coming to school after a long and hopefully relaxing Christmas Break, talking about politics, law and freedom may seem to be kind of an agonizing prospect; perhaps not unlike being asked to do something unpleasant just after waking up without even the decency of a shower and a hot cup of coffee.

Oh, I meant to say “holiday” break.  There is, sadly, no escape from issues of free speech by hiding our heads in the sand during whatever ethnically, religiously and culturally neutral festive holiday you may or may not celebrate.  I actually tried it with snow, and while my ugly little igloo was sound-proof for the duration of the camping trip, it was hardly what you might call a sustainable practice for peace of mind.  And returning to school, we are once more confronted with these stubborn issues – the only difference is that we’re forced to be a bit more aware of them.  Ignorance is only bliss in the unenlightened short-term where such matters are concerned.

If you are lucky enough to be enrolled in a political science class, these problems may even affect you in the more visceral, offensive way it affected Bill Neel in early September, 2002.  President Bush was touring through Pittsburgh on Labor Day, where Neel was planning on greeting him with a sign that read, “The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us.”  The local police created an ad-hoc “free speech zone” on a baseball field more than a quarter of a mile away, and ordered Neel and other wavers of critical signs to move (though supportive signs were, of course, perfectly acceptable outside this free-speech zone).  Neel was arrested for disorderly conduct when he refused to move.

Such was the case for students Marco Valdez, George Miller, Jon-Mycal Panattoni, Ally Mcgill and Kayla Jeppeson last quarter for their class Indecision 2012.  For their political action assignment, they chose to stage a protest of Bellevue College’s own free speech zone; outside of said free speech zone, of course.  Unfortunately, the students chose to start the protest by camping out overnight by the R-building, which violates a more mundane and perhaps more reasonable rule about the schools hours of operation.  When they talked to security about the possibility of future protests with better times however, things didn’t look any better – even during normal school hours, such activities must be confined to the so-called free-speech zone.

Do we lose our constitutional rights outside of the fountain plaza?

School is, and generally always has been, centered around the classroom.  Let’s face it: no one really cares that much about whatever group happens to be tabling or petitioning in front of the fountain around lunch time on any given day.  The threat is not that the administration won’t let you hold a sign saying you dislike Bush’s policies regarding poor people, but that they won’t let you hold that sign where it actually matters, and where you should be allowed to by the First and Fourth Amendments – that means in the classroom.  It’s condescending and evasive lip-service given to free speech, allowing people to say that they support free speech without actually having to.  You know you’re talking to one of these people when they say ‘I support free speech, except when…’

Valdez and his classmates started their protest primarily as a school project, but started to care more about the issue when they realized that they actually were, essentially, being censored, and that other students who wanted to make similar use of their intellectual freedom could be similarly silenced.  The problem isn’t that most students like the idea of these sorts of impositions on their rights: in a recent project for one of my own courses from last quarter called Techniques and Technology of Propaganda, all but a couple of the dozen or so students we interviewed supported absolute freedom of speech on campus, and said they would be extremely upset if they were limited in what they could hear or read, since when you silence one person, you simultaneously cut off everyone else’s ability to hear their ideas.  Two even said they’d rebel (violently!), if such censorship were revealed to be happening.

As Valdez and his group demonstrated, the problem isn’t attitude, but awareness of the state of things, and our present status quo’s adverse affect on not just student freedom, but the very education these rules were designed to protect.  When students can’t express themselves – when we’re so limited by unnecessarily stringent rules of conduct and Orwellian rules of political correctness that we can’t even ask difficult questions, education is adversely affected indeed.

In short, students need to follow the advice of Dr. Bernard Franklin – perhaps not to the extreme of overflowing the college sewer-system in protest, or yelling at the dean of the school from atop their own desk, but at least standing up for ourselves and demanding more for our money.  College, for most people, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for growth, education and intellectual stimulation, and it would be a personal and national tragedy for us to throw it away out of apathy or blissful ignorance.

For more information about the student protests against BC’s Free Speech zone, see “Students Protest Free Speech Zone” by Erin Hoffman on page 1.  To get involved, contact Marco Valdez at mrc.vldz@gmail.com.

Fascism’s New Spartan Face

November 26, 2012

In Germany, it was the mysterious visage of imagined ancient Nordic supremacy, a chiseled face both beautiful and determined, intricate and hard.  In Japan, it was the compelling vision of the Samurai tradition; unwavering courage in the face of death, romantic and inspiring and undefeatable in will and resolution.  In Bosnia, it was the false-memory of a Golden Age of dominance from years past, a time or kings and knights when Serbs were the greatest and most respected people in the region.

Fascism has always needed an ideal to look for, a perfect model, accompanied by a scapegoat.  In Greece right now, a fast-growing political party, the “Golden Dawn,” has risen to power under the powerful nationalistic image of Leonidas and the indomitable Spartans.  Their selected scapegoats are immigrants, and they aren’t afraid to show it.

“If an employer wants to blackmail you, he threatens to call Golden Dawn,” said Javet Aslam in a documentary of the movement posted by The Guardian in late October.  A Pakistani community leader, Aslam says that the Golden Dawn thugs aren’t afraid to use violence.  “He gets them to beat you up.  Gangs of fascists often beat up workers who demand their rights.”

For Abu Zeid Mubarak, an Egyptian fisherman, this sort of beating nearly turned deadly.  “There were around 20 of them, all dressed in black.  They kicked my face.  I had to have metal plates implanted.  I spent 27 days in hospital.  Even now, I can only drink liquids and eat yogurt…They blame us for the crisis in this country.  We haven’t created this crisis. We work hard; we earn our money just like the 55,000 Greeks that live in Egypt.  They should find those who kill and steal.  We work to earn our money like anyone else.”

Nikolaos Michaloliakos’ party bears symbolic and visual resemblance to the Nazi Party of Germany in addition to their behavioral similarities to the brown-shirts and black-shirts.  Their flag looks remarkably like a swastika, their shaved heads and black shirts strongly suggesting inspiration from the SS, and their flare-wielding salutes are a spitting image of the gesture we all now associate with the phrase, “Hail Hitler!”

It’s worth noting that this new party isn’t the first to look to their Greek ancestors for inspiration – Hitler was another fan of Spartan government.  Among the first practitioners of eugenics, the Spartans only made up about 10% of the population of Sparta – the rest was a slave class whose members were called “helots,” who were kept in bondage by their ferociously militaristic captors.  The coming-of-age ceremony for young Spartan warriors was to kill a Helot without being caught.

With the backing of the Greek Orthodox Church and the police, the increasingly popular Golden Dawn seems poised to take political control of the entire nation, by election or by force.  While there are plenty of national and international issues to contend with – Syria and Palestine come to mind – it would be a mistake to ignore Greece in our international efforts to restore the economy and work towards a more peaceful global community.

The old saying, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing” could not be more necessary and true than it is today.

Speech Codes on Campus

I've been very passionate about protecting free speech for quite a while.  Probably as far back as late August, I've wanted to take an active part in reversing some policies that I see as a threat to a full and complete education.  I was kind of on the fence about it though – school was busy, I was at that time trying to run a club, and generally had other things on my mind, so taking the time to make something happen stayed with me, but wasn't really a priority.

That changed when one of the editors for the school paper that I work for, the Watchdog, approached me and told me that they had decided not to run a story I had written about the violent global reaction to the “Innocence of Muslims” film.  I wasn't terribly surprised, given the nature of the topic, but it still angered me.  I wasn't angry at the editor though. I was angry at the situation in general, because even though this was probably the most important news story of the whole month of October, the reactions the editor was worried about had a precedent in recent history that was compelling enough to keep that story from being heard on campus.

In 2007, for example, the editor-in-chief of another school newspaper, the Daily Illini, was suspended from school and fired from their job for reprinting four of the twelve Danish cartoons that had been circulating around the world and causing an enormous political uproar.  This would be, by any account, a very important news story for any student with even a vague interest in foreign politics and global affairs, but even talking about it quickly became controversial because people were getting offended.

The problem with the whole situation is essentially this: as a culture, we've been programmed to think that we more or less have a right not to be offended, and that if someone is offended, it’s the fault of the person who is doing the offending and not the fault of the person claiming offence.  What is offence, really?  I don’t really need to explain why this mindset is bad if you've read Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” but in case you haven’t it’s because different people are offended by different things, and the sensitivity level varies as much as the number of triggers.  If you try to avoid anything and everything that might offend people, you will inevitably end up with nothing – which costs people the very education they've paid money for.   Regardless, you’ll fail anyhow, because this coddling treatment offends me!

The problem we’re facing here at BC is the institutionalization of this way of thinking through what are called “bias incidents.”

What is a bias incident? As they’re described in the “Don’t Let the Haters Win” pamphlets, which you can pick up in the President’s office, a bias incident is “conduct, speech, or behavior motivated by prejudice or bias toward another person that does not rise to the level of crime.”

For obvious reasons, punishing the unfair treatment of students isn't intrinsically a bad idea.  It’s actually a very good idea, but the way bias incidents are defined unfortunately has a fundamental flaw, which is that they’re subjective.  What do I mean by that?  I mean that whether an action is deemed to be punishable as a bias incident or not is determined by the perception of the victim.  The pamphlet actually lists three factors on what is implied to be a larger list of possible aspects used in determining whether an action is a bias incident, but of the remaining two factors given, one is un-provable (evidence of motive), and the other is plausibly deniable (evidence of connections to known hate groups).  Perhaps it could be argued that connections to hate groups might provide a good foundation for an indictment of discriminatory conduct. In any case, if you look at other instances of censorship on the grounds of bias in other schools, you’ll notice that motives and ties to hate groups almost never play any kind of role in making that determination.  It almost always comes down just to the subjective experience of offended.

Let me explain the connection between bias incidents aimed at student action towards other students, and the censorship of books, videos, speech, etc.  Besides the obvious fact that a book, video, or speech could qualify as a bias incident, maintaining these kinds of rules further cultivates the mentality of entitlement to an unperturbed, unchallenged mind.  The society we live in today is in many ways more sensitive than is healthy for the open dialogue necessary for a functioning democracy to happen.  You can see this in the increased polarization of political parties and religious ideologies.  People have become close-minded because being open-minded means sometimes having to admit that you’re wrong, and that hurts.  We’d rather not do that.

On a related side-note, the culture of entitlement also breeds fear.  Sometimes fear of retribution, but more importantly fear of breaking the increasingly narrow bubble of social norms.  By seeing these kinds of rules, and BC’s dribbling affirmation of inclusiveness plastered in every room and on every club charter and on every syllabus, students become attuned to the language of non-confrontation, and become uncomfortable, even scared, of speaking their mind because it might lead to conflict.  I can’t tell you how many potentially wonderful debates I've almost gotten into with students, only to have them back off because they “don’t want to start a fight.”  A debate isn't a fight – it’s the pinnacle of intellectual and academic stimulation!  It’s the pinnacle of learning, and it's being lost.

To return to the previous point, bias incidents affect the entire student culture, notably student attitudes towards learning materials, even if the language is aimed at interpersonal interaction.  This brings us to one of the biggest specters that looms up whenever subjective standards become objective rules: censorship, and it’s more evil twin, self-censorship.

Do you know what the most banned book in the United States is?  It’s probably not what you think it is… I would have guessed something like “Mein Kampf” or “The Turner Diaries,” but it’s actually J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series.  The most painful book to see banned, and another of the most commonly censored, is Mark Twain’s classic “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”  Under these subjective rules designed to protect students from having their feelings hurt, students are being deprived of what is arguably the most eloquent, beautiful, and powerful counter to racism ever written on the grounds of itself being racist.

Another example: just last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled, “How Free Speech Died on Campus,” which described how Yale students aren't allowed to wear T-shirts with F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes on them, and certain passages from the Quran aren't allowed to be quoted at Tufts.  In one particularly Orwellian instance from a mere two weeks ago, the Fordham University administration condemned a political club for inviting a controversial speaker, and ambiguously called the invitation a “test” of the school’s speech codes.  After the club caved in and disinvited the speaker, the administration praised itself for its valiant defense of free speech.

Taking a step back from the specifics, you might be asking “How did this whole phenomenon come about?”  The judicial branch is more or less solely responsible in this case.  There are a number of court cases have slowly constricted freedoms of speech over the last century; certainly not just for students, but for students more than anyone else.   In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled in Hosty v. Carter that for University environments “Hazelwood provides our starting point,” which is a reference to the 1973 Supreme Court case over free speech in high schools, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier.  In that 1973 case, the court ruled that the school administration had the right to limit student speech that was “school-sponsored,” and gave among its examples of things that could be censored, material that was “poorly written,” material that “would associate the school with anything other than neutrality on matters of political controversy,” and most insultingly, material that was “unsuitable for immature audiences.”  But even these cases are built on a frame of reference that goes all the way back to 1919, a case that was so influential that you’ll probably recognize the ruling even if you don’t know the case, since it has a habit of coming up quite a lot.

Case in point: at the student open forum for the presidential candidate Dr. David Rule, (who I’m very happy to say will almost certainly be our new president this coming winter quarter), I asked him where he saw the line between first amendment protections and protections for students against bullying, since that was something of a hot topic at those question and answer sessions.  His response was that in his view, first amendment protections aren't absolute, and he gave by way of explanation, the example of how someone can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater because it would endanger other people’s safety.

What he was referencing with that comment was that 1919 Supreme Court case, Schenck v. United States, in which the famous Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” By his reasoning, such a use of words would pose a “clear and present danger” that the government has not only the constitutional ability, but the duty to limit.

While the ruling sounds reasonable enough at first glance and standing alone, the background might portray the court’s decision in a slightly different light. Charles Schenck, the secretary of the Socialist Party of America at the time, had been distributing pamphlets to young men of military age urging them to oppose the draft and the American involvement in the First World War.  He was arrested and convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which, among other things, made “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States ... or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy,” a criminal act.  It was arguably one of the worst pieces of American legislation ever passed into law, in terms of undermining the values of free society and diversity of opinion and expression protected and celebrated by our great Constitution.  Schenck appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that his 1^st amendment rights protected his opposition to the American involvement in the war, which the Supreme Court under Holmes shot down, labeling his speech as allegorically equivalent to shouting fire in a crowded theater.

What’s painfully ironic in hindsight is that there really was a fire… there was an enormous fire on the Western Front, where the United states eventually lost over 115,000 soldiers, and nearly doubled that in wounded.  In casualties, it was the greatest loss of life the Western world had experienced in history, not to be outdone until World War II a few decades later.  Schenck was in this case the real firefighter, and Oliver Wendell Holmes threw him in prison for attempting to alert people to the danger.

So who is to decide what speech is harmful and what speech is good?  Clearly the US Supreme Court shouldn't be the one deciding.  So maybe we should allow Community College administrators to make that decision instead?  Deciding for us adults what we ought to be allowed to write and say?  And by extension to read and hear?

Well, as a paying student and customer of the college, this is my opinion – my judgment if you will, that I think is equally if not more important than the Hazelwood ruling: the bias incident code in its current form is “poorly written.”  It “associates me with a position of neutrality on matters of political controversy,” which is wrong because I actually care about these controversies and have an opinion about them that I have a right to say.  Most importantly, I think that subjective restrictions are “unsuitable for mature audiences.” Particularly educated mature audiences, and especially if they’re paying for the right to read, write, listen, and speak.

As a mere Community College, it isn't really realistic to hope to overturn fatuous Supreme Court rulings, but if those higher up insist on taking full advantage of the censorial power allowed to them by the courts, I would hope we can redirect them to the 2001 case of Kincaid v. Gibson, in which it was ruled that the learning environment of the University is the “quintessential marketplace of ideas, which merits full, or indeed heightened first amendment protections.”  We cannot attain a complete education without coming out from under the sheltering rock and exposing ourselves to different ideas and opinions, even if they might offend the more thin-skinned among us.

If my editor is afraid to publish my writings for fear of retribution, something is wrong.  If my communications teacher can’t show us historical examples of propaganda due to rules best described as puerile, something is wrong.  If our free speech is given lip-service where it matters least – in a so-called free speech zone, (as if one needed a zone in which to maintain their protection under the 1^st amendment) – but taken away in the only place where it truly matters, the classroom, something is dreadfully wrong.  And yet, all of these things are true, and we as students are suffering for it, often without even knowing what we've lost and what we’re continuing to lose.

These things aren’t the fault of Bellevue College’s administration or faculty, as far as I can tell. Our vice-president of Diversity is as vocal in her support of free speech as she is in defending students from discrimination, even going so far as to defend a racist message on campus (so long as it’s kept within the “free-speech zone”), and speech code policies have been standard practice across the landscape of our nation’s educational institutions for a while now.  This, however, doesn't make these policies acceptable.  We should get rid of bias incidents.  We should get rid of them completely, or if nothing else, reword them and all of the other rules like them with concrete, objective language that offers protection for students against harassment, assault, and other manifestly and objectively harmful acts.  Removing subjective standards of discrimination won’t somehow increase the amount of bias and hatred on campus, but it will increase student and faculty freedoms to more efficiently and effectively pursue what they came to college to do: get an education.

Remember, bias incidents don’t make colleges safer; they only sterilize the classroom of the very diversity of thought and perspective they were designed to protect.  When you really boil it down, all education is is exposure to new ideas and perspectives, which is precisely what these rules are taking away.  Don’t let the censors win: lets get rid of bias incidents.

Eye on Syria

November 6, 2012

On Nov. 4, 1979, a group of college students and rioters overran the U.S. embassy in Iran and held 52 of its American inhabitants hostage all the way through January of 1981.  The incident shocked Americans at the time – it seemed to come completely out of nowhere, with no motive or provocation.

Over the years, the American public has become more educated about our history of involvement in the region.  We’ve learned that Iran elected its very first leader democratically in 1951, a man named Mohammad Mosaddegh.  We’ve learned that the U.S. and U.K. didn’t like Mosaddegh, since his desire to nationalize the oil business in Iran would take away some of the lucrative economic exploitation of the region by western companies.  We’ve learned that in 1953, the CIA and MI6 manufactured a coup d’etat that successfully ousted Mosaddegh and reinstated the hated Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.  We’ve learned that Ayatollah Khomeini, who overthrew the Shah in a wave of theocratic Puritanism, gained a large part of his following by channeling the anti-western and anti-American sentiments that had been burning for decades; sentiments that were a direct result of the years of undermining and degrading foreign policy from nations abroad.

Suddenly, the embassy takeover seems less mysterious.  In many ways, it mirrors in its complaints and reactions the backlash against another western super-power by an upstart nation just over 238 years ago.  Our own ‘grand revolution,’ called “the American War of Independence” in other parts of the world, was the natural result of the same meddling and exploitive governmental policy we’ve seen in the past century in the Middle East.

Fast forward to the present – the Arab Spring is well under way.  Demonstrations and protests have resulted in governmental overthrows in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen, and protests in many others.  Violence has, fortunately, not taken a primary role in much of this revolutionary movement, with two notable exceptions: Libya and Syria.  While Libya’s violence was relatively short and painless, as far as violent conflicts go, the battle in Syria has raged on for over 19 months now.  In the battles between the despotic Ba’ath government (the same party headed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq prior to Desert Storm II) and the anti-totalitarian revolutionaries, more than 34,000 Syrians have died.

Given the way things have been going in the region, the Syrian rebels’ victory is inevitable.  More will die, and it will certainly be a bitter struggle, but the citizens of that old and proud nation have had enough, and the international support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Kurdistan will only increase as the human rights violations committed by Bashar al-Assad mount over the coming months.  His regime is in its death-throws.

This poses its own problem, however – the thing about democracy is that the people choose what the government looks like.  When Egypt overthrew its own monarch and exchanged a kingship for democracy, it elected for its government a political party the U.S. doesn’t like very much: the Muslim Brotherhood.  It hasn’t even been two years since the conflict began, and already conservative politicians are publicly voicing their fears and concerns about the Brotherhood, who were only recently removed from a list of terrorist organizations.

Have we learned nothing from Iran?

Among the military organizations fighting for the liberation of Syria is the infamous al-Qaeda.  The extreme variants of Islam are very appealing and inspiring to many people at this point of time, and it is very possible that the Ba’ath party will be replaced with a democratically elected party even less favorable to the U.S. than the current dictatorship, in which case we can all be prepared for the political jargon of imperialism spouting from the lips of our politicians.

Regardless of whether we intervene on the part of the rebels or sit back in silence as the body count rises, we as Americans must remember what true democracy really stands for and respect the hard-won electoral decision of the upcoming Syrian democracy, whatever it may be.  It would be an understatement to say they’ll have earned it, and it would be an insult to all involved parties to relive the self-righteous and arrogant mistakes of the last century.

Waste of a Vote?

October 29, 2012

We can all probably agree that the winner of this year’s presidential election is going to be either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, so what’s the purpose of voting for someone else?  Aren’t you throwing away your vote?  Isn’t voting for a third-party candidate a waste?

Voting for a third-party candidate is not only not a waste, but it’s a very powerful vote – one could say it’s more powerful than a vote for one of the two mainstream candidates.  Serious votes (no, Elmo doesn’t count) for non-partisan candidates are courageous and optimistic, and the most important votes, in my opinion, for three main reasons.

First of all, a vote for a third-party candidate sends a message to our government that is supposed to represent us: you’re not representing me.  Neither party is representing me, and I want something different.  If, for example, you are opposed to the Patriot Act, neither Obama nor Romney will truly represent your informed opinion on the issue.  If you are opposed to an unprovoked invasion of Iran, neither mainstream candidate shares your view.  A vote for someone else tells our policy makers that they don’t have the support they think they have.  If you substantially disagree with both of the main candidates but vote for one of them anyways, you can’t seriously expect a change in policy to match your views anytime in the near future.

Second of all, saying that a non-mainstream vote is a waste – and voting for a Democrat or Republican as a result – is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The claim that voting for the Green Party, the Communist Party or the Libertarian Party is a waste of a vote is not just cynical; it negatively impacts the movement to take these serious political movements seriously.  If people do this knowingly, it’s not even cynicism anymore – it’s ideologically subversive.  Ideas and theories should be argued on merit, free from the browbeating of public opinion and pessimism.

Finally and most importantly, voting against your personal convictions is dishonest.  A vote is a statement of preference that happens to be the foundation of democracy.  It’s sacred, and I don’t use that word lightly.  Not everyone feels this way, and I understand the perspective of someone who votes for one politician over their favorite on the grounds that their favorite won’t win, and the voter really doesn’t want some dreaded other competitive candidate in office.  I can’t bring myself to lie to myself and the government like that (is that not what is happening?), but I can understand and empathize with those who do.  However, when they turn around and say that my vote is a waste, it rubs me the wrong way.  My vote is a waste?  I vote for the candidate that most accurately and honestly represents my values and reflects the methods of governing that I think will best benefit the nation.  If that’s a wasted vote, I don’t know what a real vote looks like.

A vote for Jill Stein is not “basically” a vote for Romney, nor is a vote for Gary Johnson “basically” a vote for Obama.   A vote for Obama is a vote for Obama, and a vote for Romney is a vote for Romney.  With Stein, Johnson, Goode and Anderson, it’s the same story.  Before calling a vote for one of these lesser-known presidential candidates “wasted,” it’s worth considering whether the candidate in question might be better qualified or more in line with your own convictions than whoever it is you intend to vote for, and what your own motivations are for calling their vote inferior or less valuable than your own.

No honest and informed vote is wasted, and our great democracy is richer when represented by a multitude of views and political opinions, not poorer.  What makes it poor is when the variety of voices is diluted and condensed from that pluralistic symphony to a dissonant duet.  A third opinion offered with sincerity is never a waste.