This trigger warning may cause irritation

Prior warnings about content are OK in principle but they are often now greatly overdone. All sorts of content are unreasonably stigmatized

These days even trigger warnings are triggering. A university is discovered to be chaperoning a text with a warning to students that it may “trigger” the memory of past trauma. This triggers the socially conservative, who anxiously conclude that another institution has surrendered to the iron whim of a generation of snowflakes.

Even those of us who try to respect the ebb and flow of cultural mores surely winced when it transpired that the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland had alerted its charges to the news that Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea contained “graphic fishing scenes”.

Scotland lands more than 300,000 tonnes of fish every year. In the novel, after 84 days without a bite, the old man catches one marlin and knocks off a few sharks.

In recent months universities have issued trigger warnings (or, as most prefer, “content notes”) for Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Nineteen Eighty-Four and, predictably, the entire oeuvre of the suddenly problematic JK Rowling.

It is not even an especially new phenomenon. Eight years ago students at the University of California in Santa Barbara demanded the sirens sound for F Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf and, obviously, Shakespeare.

Booktriggerwarnings.com announces cautions for 6701 books, these being listed alphabetically from A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy by Alex White (“cults, death, gore, murder, smoking, violence”) to Zone One by Colson Whitehead (“death, gore, gun violence, violence”).

Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winner has so far failed to make the site’s generous cut; much work clearly lies ahead for its compilers.

As it happens, trigger warnings may be counter-productive. The academic journal Clinical Psychological Science published a study in 2020 suggesting that trigger warnings “have little or no benefit in cushioning the blow of potentially disturbing content”, and sometimes make things worse by “increasing the extent to which people see trauma as central to their identity”. I have more fundamental queries, however. How commonly does a set text “trigger” anything in a student worse than sadness, disquiet, anger or whatever emotion its author intended? Could trigger warnings be a solution for a problem that barely exists?

Robert T. Muller is a therapist and academic at York University in Toronto, and the author of two books on trauma. He explains that the idea of “triggers” came out of 1990s trauma theory, which acknowledged that therapists had underestimated the amount of trauma in the population. Many who presented with, say, eating disorders or depression had, in fact, childhood histories of physical or sexual abuse, and were in reality suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Just as flashbacks could be triggered in Vietnam veterans by Fourth of July fireworks, “a word, an image, a smell, a sensation of some sort, a sound” could plunge abuse survivors into a “heightened awareness of the original trauma”. Sufferers experienced disassociation from their circumstances, or were rendered speechless. Some had the classic panic attack symptoms, such as sweating, hyperventilation and palpitations.

Triggering, Muller says, is a terribly important concept.

So how often, during a lecture, at a seminar or in a library, do students find their PTSD ignited? No one seems to know, and despite our appeals through social media and mental health charities, it is hard to find examples. Perhaps people keep quiet because there is shame attached, or because they fear reliving their attacks by reciting them. Maybe they distrust journalists. Students who have campaigned for trigger warnings at their universities have failed to get back to me. A young woman said she would be happy to talk but didn’t.

Carole Carter did. Now a practising therapist, she studied psychology at the University of Hull. She had been abused by men in her teens, and one was still manipulating her when she arrived in Hull. A lecture on sexual offenders proved particularly hard for her – although she forced herself to sit through it, refusing, as she says, to be defined by her abuse.

“When I get triggered, it’s not outwardly as dramatic as a panic attack. I get my heart racing. My ability to think clearly goes,” she says. The lecture in question was preceded by a warning. Her only complaint, 12 years on, is that the university’s counselling provision was inadequate.

Much more here:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/do-classic-works-of-literature-need-trigger-warnings/news-story/9c21b8e33b1f5c20173663544439c23d

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Petty Thieves Plague San Francisco. ‘These Last Two Years Have Been Insane.’

When you hobble the police, you should know what to expect

Terry Asten Bennett’s family has been running Cliff’s Variety Store since 1936. In all that time, they’ve never experienced the amount of burglaries and property damage that they have recently, Ms. Bennett said.

Thieves smashed a display window and broke down a door to steal items as small as spray paint, and people shattered glass doors on two occasions for no apparent reason.
“These last two years have been insane,” she said. “It used to be a rare occurrence.”

Although violent crime in San Francisco is lower than in many other major U.S. cities, business owners, residents and visitors here are dealing with a rash of thefts, burglaries and car break-ins.

Among the 25 largest U.S. cities, San Francisco has had the highest property-crime rate in four of the most recent six years for which data is available, bucking the long-term national decline in such crimes that began in the 1990s.

Property crimes declined in San Francisco during the first year of the pandemic, but rose 13% in 2021. Burglaries in the city are at their highest levels since the mid-1990s. There were 20,663 thefts from vehicles last year—almost 57 a day—a 39% increase from the prior year, although still below the record of 31,398 in 2017, according to the police.

Smashed storefronts are so common that the city launched a program to fix them with public money. Car owners leave notes declaring there is nothing of value in their vehicles, or leave their windows open to save themselves from broken glass.

Videos of shoplifters hauling goods out of drugstores such as Walgreens have gone viral, and a smash-and-grab robbery by 20 to 40 people at a Louis Vuitton store last November made the national news.

Owners of small businesses say the costs of security and repairs are eating into profits already diminished by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the Castro, the neighborhood where Cliff’s is located, shops have recorded nearly 100 instances of smashed windows and doors that cost $170,000 to repair since the beginning of 2020, according to the neighborhood’s merchant association.

Criminologists say San Francisco’s high density of retail stores and its mix of tourists, commuters and wealthy residents have made it an inviting target for thieves. Locals point to a host of other factors that may be exacerbating the problem, including the tactics of the police and prosecutors, statewide changes intended to reduce the number of people behind bars, and the city’s dual crises of drug use and homelessness. There has been no end of finger-pointing.
Despite the city’s long history of progressive politics, some business owners and residents are demanding that political leaders shift to a more law-and-order approach.

San Francisco’s mix of retail stores, tourists, commuters and wealthy residents have made it an inviting target. The Union Square retail district, top, and the Chinatown neighborhood.
District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who took office in 2020 as part of the national “progressive prosecutor” movement and has de-emphasized the prosecution of low-level offenses, will face a recall election in June.

“Nothing is more important than to make sure that people who live in this city, people who work in the city, people who visit San Francisco, feel safe,” Democratic Mayor London Breed said at a news conference last month. “The fact is, that does require police officers.”

Some former police officials and business owners blame Mr. Boudin’s focus on keeping people who commit small-scale crimes out of prison. His office, for example, discourages filing charges in cases where suspects are pulled over for traffic infractions and officers find small amounts of drugs. Others point the finger at the police, who cleared just 6% of the city’s property crimes in 2020, more than 8 percentage points lower than the national average. A case is considered cleared if a suspect is arrested, charged and turned over to a court for prosecution, or is identified with sufficient evidence for a charge but can’t be taken into custody for circumstances beyond police control.

Some business owners say the city’s large population of people living on the streets and using drugs such as fentanyl is a big factor in the small-scale thefts. Law-enforcement officials, though, say they suspect organized crews of petty criminals are carrying out a large portion of them.
Police Chief

Bill Scott has deployed more officers to tourist spots such as Fisherman’s Wharf to stop car break ins, and to retail shopping districts to stop thefts and burglaries. He has beefed up his retail theft investigations unit.

Businesses have been affected in every corner of San Francisco, even traditionally low-crime areas such as the Sunset District, where commercial and residential burglaries rose 80% in between 2019 and 2021.

Michael Hsu’s Footprint shoe store got broken into for the first time in February 2021. The thief used a blowtorch to crack the glass door without setting off the alarm and took tens of thousands of dollars worth of high-end North Face jackets. More people arrived soon after, taking whatever they could grab before they set off the alarm.

Mr. Hsu, who grew up in the Sunset, said he recalled thinking: “Oh, they finally got me.”

Mr. Hsu was the first recipient in the new grant program for small businesses to fix their storefronts. Three weeks later, his store was hit again, this time by a thief who climbed up scaffolding, broke in through a second-story window and made off with several boxes of shoes.

He now equips his employees with pepper spray and a key fob that calls the police directly. He upgraded his security system and is putting money aside for other antitheft measures.

The grant program has distributed more than $500,000 to nearly 400 businesses to fix their storefronts.

Sharky Laguana, who is president of the city’s small business commission and runs the van-rental company Bandago, said thieves frequently smash his vehicles’ windows and steal his customers’ belongings. “It gives customers a bad experience, it costs them a lot of money and it costs us a lot of money,” he said.

Police and prosecutors say the majority of car break-ins are committed by organized crews. Mr. Laguana grew so frustrated he launched a reward program for information that leads to busts of big fencing operations that buy merchandise from such thieves. He thought he would be able to raise tens of thousands of dollars at best; he got $250,000 in pledges from rental-car companies and other businesses.

The day after the Louis Vuitton smash-and-grab robbery, San Francisco police deployed a mobile command center that still sits across the street from the luxury-goods store. The department sent more foot patrols to the Union Square retail district, pulling officers from all over the city, said Captain Julian Ng who oversees the area.

“It’s a resource drain, but if I had my way, we’d do this forever because it’s such an important area for the city,” said Capt. Ng.

Five people were arrested in connection with the Louis Vuitton incident. Captain Ng said there are many reasons for the city’s overall low rate of clearing property-crime cases, including the department’s no-chase policy for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, which aims to reduce unnecessary accidents. Car break-in crews can easily zip away in their own vehicles without police cars chasing them, he said.

https://archive.ph/CzNat

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Raymond Ibrahim on Academic Myths About Islam

Raymond Ibrahim, the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum, Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, spoke to a February 11 Middle East Forum Webinar (video) hosted by Winfield Myers, director of the Middle East Forum's Campus Watch project, about the reasons for the academic myths that "proliferate in university life about Islam and the Middle East."

Ibrahim began with an overview of "the history of Islam, vis a vis the West" which was one of "continuous warfare from the seventh century on." According to Ibrahim, most people are unaware that "basically, three quarters of what was originally Christian territory was conquered and absorbed by Islam." Ibrahim focused on today's cultural atmosphere "where history isn't considered too important" in influencing the historical revisionism seen among academics. In an environment of "fake news," much of the media manipulates historical facts to suit their own agendas. Similarly, in academia, graduate students feel pressured to present Islam's history of warfare with the West in a "new interpretation ... that [goes] hand in hand with political culture since the sixties."

Ibrahim discussed the Palestinian Arab academic, Edward Said – a literary critic and "not a historian," – whose 1978 book Orientalism criticized "European academics who studied the Orient." Said claimed that Western scholars presented the "East as barbaric and ... primitive, especially Islam," and were therefore "not objective." At the time, the culture was ripe for Said's politicization of historical fact, including tarring the term "Orientalist" as a pejorative. Today, this trend has reached a zenith in the current climate among leftist academics and their fellow apologists. Western history is reframed largely as "racist ... imperialistic ... [and] xenophobic," while Islam's wars of conquest, which consisted of "nonstop violence," are minimized or justified. The culmination of the mythmaking has produced the "new" version of history in which Islam was "peaceful [and] progressive," while Western Europe was the "violent" aggressor.

Islamic conquests that began with "the Battle of Yarmuk in the year 636," and were halted temporarily in the Siege of Vienna in 1683, resumed their advance that included attacks by Barbary pirates against the "infidels" on American ships in 1785. It then hit a pause that was an "aberration," according to Ibrahim. "The Islamic world wane[d]" after Napoleon's entry into Egypt in 1799, an event marked "the [beginning of the] golden age for the Christian minorities of the colonial era." Ibrahim said that jihadists like ISIS bolster their anti-Western rhetoric with quotes hearkening back to Islamic leaders of the distant past who fought against the "Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire" only a few years after the death of Muhammad, Islam's prophet and military leader. Ibrahim said, "So yes, to me, it's definitely a continuum ... even if [Islam] took one or two centuries" off.

Ibrahim experienced firsthand the consequences of questioning academia's mythmaking orthodoxy. After lecturing about his book on Islamic warfare at the U.S. Army War College, Ibrahim was attacked for disagreeing with those who charge that Islamic wars were entirely the fault of the West. Ibrahim said the excuse academics assign to "Western machinations" is used as a rationalization "other than radical Islam to explain ... what we're seeing today [that] is an identical duplication of ... [what] Islam was doing ... for over a millennium." Myers referred to the plethora of centers devoted to the "propaganda of Islamophobia ... tied to intersectionality ... [as] part of the ... leftist push to silence critics." Ibrahim noted how the opposition, unwilling and unable to debate, is silenced when they are challenged with "objective truth."

Mythmaking academics resort to "anything and everything but Islam," instead blaming the victim for the continuation of Islamic warfare against the West, charging that it is either "colonialism ... [or] Israel and Zionism" that is at fault. To shore up their position, academics in many Middle East Studies departments are "obsessed" with Israel, Palestine, and the boycott, sanction, and divestment (BDS) movement targeting Israel. Ibrahim questioned the preoccupation of "non-Muslim, non-Arab, regular academics" who handily avoid discussing the "pandemic of Christian persecution by Muslim nations." He said, a reported "380 million Christians around the world are being persecuted ... eighty percent of [them] ... in the Islamic world."

Middle Eastern Christians, already a "second class minority ... ostracized and disenfranchised," are loathe to express any support for Israel because of their own fears of being "on a thin line" in Muslim host nations where Israel is considered "the arch enemy." Ibrahim found that the paucity of Western Christians advocating for their oppressed co-religionists in the Middle East is a result of the "ignorance of the media," which avoids reporting on the plight of Christians so as not to portray Islam in a "negative light."

Despite the "ecumenical talk" of interfaith efforts between religions, Ibrahim said that the Quran "appropriate[s]" the biblical figures of the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament by "recast[ing]" them to "[give] credibility to Islam [while] denigrat[ing] Christianity and Judaism." Ultimately, the Quranic text "creates obstacles" and divisions with its narrative of Islamic superiority. Ibrahim also cited the "Red-Green Alliance" where "hardcore leftists ... [are] embedded with Islamist types" because of both groups' animosity and hatred for "the West's background [of] Judeo-Christian tradition [and] ethical system." By applying the adage "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," the alliance between leftists and Islamists is "ironic because the left is antithetical to Islam in many social mores." Leftists who advocate for homosexual rights ally with radical Muslims "who would behead them in a heartbeat." Ibrahim believes the "linchpin" uniting these diverse groups is "hatred for ... Western tradition."

Ibrahim remarked on the glaring irony that academics are "supposed to be the ones who believe in free thought [and] inquiry," but now act as self-appointed guardians of censorship. He bemoaned the mythmaking "spirit ... in the academic world ... shutting down critics of Islamism." Far from being an isolated case in academia, Ibrahim said, "you're seeing it in so many different ways ... in American culture today."

https://mailchi.mp/meforum.org/ak5tp9zezu?e=40cc1655ef

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Free Speech Throat-Punched by Leftists

Free speech prevents violence. Unfortunately, that is one reason that leftists hate it.
A currently used college textbook on media law lists the core values of free speech that US courts have historically considered while ruling on free speech related issues. One of these core values is free speech as a Safety Valve. Free speech allows people to express problems and grievances before they escalate into violence. Also, free speech is a mechanism for ‘letting off steam” and helping to balance “social stability and change, compromise and conflict, tolerance and hate” (Trager et al 61).

Further, free speech is a right that we are all supposed to have under the Constitution. Leftists accuse anyone who criticizes what they say as being against free speech (Flynn 8). Yet, they have shown over and over that leftists will go to any extremes to silence ideas that they don’t want you to hear. These are up to and including terrorism.

Leftists know that most reasonable people abhor violence.
Yet leftists need violence to enforce their preferred policies. You generally can’t get people to adopt actions that are against their own interests by using reason. Instead, you must use tactics like trickery or coercion. If that doesn’t work, leftists escalate to intimidation, backed by actual incidents of violence for reinforcement. That’s how the Democratic KKK operated in the Jim Crow era. In fact, it’s a strategy they have used effectively for a long time. If you live in a city where there have been riots, you know what I’m talking about. You or your friends and relatives have lived in an atmosphere of terrorism, subjected to being firebombed while eating out. Meanwhile, your historic landmarks are vandalized as your stores are burned or boarded up. People have been gunned down in the street for the crime of merely existing.

To further deceive, leftists then label counteractions that are peaceful as violent or potentially violent to justify suppressing them. This raises the level of frustration in people who would prefer to act reasonably. If leftists can provoke a few vulnerable individuals who are already stressed to the limit into committing actual violence, those individuals can be made examples. This helps sell the chosen narrative to the rest of the public.

Alternate Reality

The advantage of double standards to an abuser is that they get to live in a world created just for them. They can do anything they want while they place restrictions on you (Bancroft 157). Some people call this “liberal privilege”. Even though leftists talk a lot about equality, it really doesn’t work for them. Clearly, they only want you to have the impression that it’s one of their values. When the left gives something a label, it’s a smart idea to check and make sure that it really doesn’t mean the opposite of what they claim.

As an example of liberal privilege, pro-American displays and sentiments trigger violent thoughts and actions in many leftists. After 9/11, one college professor spoke out in favor of blowing up the Pentagon (Flynn 3). If you search for “Liberals advocating for violence” or something like that on a search engine that doesn’t censor, you will find numerous examples. It’s acceptable at many institutions of learning for teachers and professors to preach politically motivated violence. For example, recently the University Of North Carolina Wilmington retained a professor who advocated for terrorist bomb attacks against Republicans (Edgar).

Yet leftists are quick to advertise their moral superiority and accuse anyone who stands up for America or Freedom as being inherently violent. This is what domestic and other abusers do when they taunt a victim until they act out so they can accuse them of being “crazy” and therefore deserving of harsh treatment.

https://theblacksphere.net/2022/03/free-speech-throat-punched-by-leftists/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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