/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4738374]

>Worse, the Oberlin guidelines go on to advise professors to remove "triggering material" from their courses entirely if it is not directly related to the course's learning goals. Such instructions come dangerously close to censorship.

>Chinua Achebe's novel "Things Fall Apart" is listed by Oberlin as one possible "trigger" book because of its themes of colonialism, racism, religious prejudice and more. At Rutgers, an op-ed in the student paper suggested that study of "The Great Gatsby" should require trigger warnings about violence and gore. And then what happens? Should students be excused from reading a work of great literature, or be allowed to read a sanitized version?

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-trigger-warnings-20140331,0,6700908.story#ixzz2xyaq01bz

Discuss

[Anonymous No.4738406]

Trigger warnings are fucking retarded.

"Waah I don't want my feelings to be hurt by a book"

I actually enjoy being saddened or disturbed or surprised by a book, because that way I know it's had an effect on me and it's actually fucking good.

[Anonymous No.4738414]

Trigger warnings being a thing is probably the point at which I finally felt completely detached from what was going on in my society. The last vestige snapped at that point.

At first I thought it was people who claim to be champions of liberal constitutionalism and free speech trying to ban controversial ideas like Holocaust revisionism. That really shook me for a bit, but then I realised everyone's just a retard. But trigger warnings, that shit is, like, beyond-parody levels of Orwellian crazytown.

[Anonymous No.4738417]

prolly for grills that got raped

[Anonymous No.4738428]

what violence and gore in The Great Gatsby? is it just on the surface level of some hoes getting slapped and gatsby getting shot?
or is there a more analytical level of violence and gore? if thats the case, shouldn't they be bitching about the novel because of classism and racism? am I missing something?

[Anonymous No.4738430]

What's a "trigger warning"?

[Anonymous No.4738433]

"Brave" New World.

[Anonymous No.4738435]

>>4738430
I assume something related to "PTSD triggers" like someone's going to read something and get reminded of a past traumatic event...?

[Anonymous No.4738441]

this makes me extremely mad. sticking your head in the sand wont change shit. i am at a loss for words.

[Anonymous No.4738442]

whenever something potentially offensive is going to come up in a book/film the professor usually makes note of it anyway. they never use the words "trigger warning," but they always mention that something graphic is about to occur.

[Anonymous No.4738444]

>>4738430
Its when you get so offended by something that the only course of action left for you is to pull the trigger.

[Anonymous No.4738449]

>>4738430

It's usually used to describe something that can cause a flashback or anxious reaction in people who were traumatized by something, like PTSD as >>4738435 said.

Tumblr warriors have co-opted the term to now describe anything that makes someone butthurt, for whatever reason.

[Anonymous No.4738451]

>>4738435
Seems fishy. I have PTSD and I had no idea I could have "triggers". PTSD in my experience was a lot of nightmares and screaming in my sleep. Also impulsive behavior. But never triggers or any of that Hollywood bullshit PTSD.

[Anonymous No.4738453]

>>4738449
butthurt is homophobic

[Anonymous No.4738457]

Is there a trigger warning for dealing with people who are too easily offended by everything?

[Anonymous No.4738456]

>>4738433

[Anonymous No.4738470]

It's a conspiracy.

Leftism is insanity. Perhaps even more insane than extreme rightism. Suffering is an integral part of the human condition, not something that automatically turns people into subhuman poor babies. Of course we should feel bad for people who actually are incapacitated by suffering or actual victims of circumstance but you have to draw a line somewhere. If you draw leftist thinking to its logical conclusion, all viewpoints and all suffering is equal, even the viewpoints and suffering of "oppressors" should be minimized, and the criticism of racists/sexists is wrong because it hurts their feelings.

If you draw rightist thinking to its logical conclusion, everyone is responsible for their own condition. A perhaps offensive position if you're considered the incapacitated and the oppressed, but there is really much more we can do in shitty situations than we think we can do. Not to add that compassion is a virtue as well that can be cultivated, and deeply contemplating and increasing your own compassion for humanity, and doing things in real life for helping the suffering and helping the suffering help themselves, is far better than the animalistic and irrational pity of leftism, where the suffering are helped by allowing them a comfortable state of self-pity as other people help them.

But the funny thing is that leftism and rightism are just labels, labels that can be easily manipulated. If you want to go by their actual definitions, then the leftism I'm talking about is really rightism: the goal of this leftism is a reversal of the current social hierarchy, where the people currently oppressed oppress the oppressors: not an abolition of social hierarchy, but an extremely blatant attempt at seeking pleasure and power for the self, and avoiding all pain. The rightism I'm talking about is an actual equalizer: all people can help themselves, and people have the ability, even the responsibility to make themselves more virtuous, help their companions tangibly, and sympathize with all of humanity, even forgiving the murderers, oppressors, tyrants, and dictators.

TL;DR Huxley was right and we're going into a brave new world where everyone's afraid of pain and uncomfortableness.

[Anonymous No.4738474]

>>4738470
Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.
'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth...
One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink...
One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.
'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink."

>For matters stand like this: the diminution and levelling of European man conceal our greatest danger, for at the sight of him we grow tired . . . We see nothing today which wants to be greater. We suspect that things are constantly still going down, down into something thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian—humanity, there is no doubt, is becoming constantly “better.” . . . Europe’s fate lies right here—with the fear of man we also have lost the love for him, the reverence for him, the hope for him, indeed, our will to him. A glimpse at man nowadays makes us tired—what is contemporary nihilism, if it is not that? . . .We are weary of man. . . .

[Anonymous No.4738472]

>>4738470
>Leftism is insanity.
>Still confusing liberal rightism with the Left

American, please.

[Anonymous No.4738480]

>>4738472
Thanks Einstein, good thing I noted that two paragraphs later.

[Anonymous No.4738491]

>>4738480
No, dingus, no.

[Anonymous No.4738501]

>>4738474
I can't help but get the itching feeling that Nietzsche was justifying his own existential angst, failure to find any answers to the questions of the meaning of life, and self-hatred/probable depression. Of course it's a valid reaction: he's this smart, thinking about this stuff, and it just makes him depressed, and everyone else is complacent and happy, not getting depressed and not failing (since they haven't even tried anything hard enough to warrant failure). So what does ol' Nietzsche do? He glorifies the leap itself, the fact that he asked the Questions, got depressed over his inability to answer them, and imagines a bona fide human being able to answer the Questions whom he (Nietzsche) and similar humans are helping humanity progress towards by asking certain Questions, and destroying or changing the answers to certain other ones.

I also point you to the ultimate ending of his life: his mental breakdown. The thing about Nietzsche is that everything he was saying about others, he was ultimately saying about himself.

[Anonymous No.4738502]

>>4738449
The supreme irony here is that tumblr SJWs are always crying about appropriation and ableism.

>>4738451
It's most definitely a real and common PTSD symptom. Not everyone's going to have the same symptoms though.

[Anonymous No.4738504]

>>4738502
>The supreme irony here is that tumblr SJWs are always crying about appropriation and ableism.

Well yea, they're the least self-aware people out there.

[Anonymous No.4738509]

>>4738501

>people still talking about Nietzsche's mental breakdown like it was some natural continuation of his philosophy

he had a brain tumor or syphilis, get over it

[Anonymous No.4738512]

>>4738509
What about that infamous letter where he tells his friends not to be sad if he dies, and to disregard his philosophy as the ramblings of a diseased mind?

[Anonymous No.4738517]

>>4738512

He didn't know he had third stage syphilis (or a rapid onset brain-tumor, same effect in this case).

My guess would be that he's going batshit crazy, and would use that as a reason to believe his works were just crazy too, and only now was he realizing it.

Considering the kind of man Nietzsche was, I wouldn't be surprised if having his brain suddenly stop functioning correctly (even if it wasn't his doing) would cast some doubt over his life's work.

[Anonymous No.4738520]

>>4738517
What do you think about the horse anecdote?

The way I see it, poor ol' Nietzsche wanted to be nice and loving of all of humanity, but he didn't want to be identified with the pussy leftists we're talking about.

[Anonymous No.4738535]

>>4738520

I don't really see the point to reading into his breakdown. I mean, he got sick, and that shouldn't be used to judge his work off of.

Also, one thing to note is that Nietzsche always evaluated the philosophy through the life of the philosopher. Since he himself went insane, it would only be logical to view his own philosophy in the way he judged everyone else's.

[Anonymous No.4738538]

>>4738535

Er, it would be logical to him, that is. I'm not saying we should analyze him in the same way.

Basically, if you want to understand Nietzsche, ignore the insanity. It was, more or less, an anomaly that distracts from his real work.

[Anonymous No.4738555]

>>4738538
I'm saying that at the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy is weakness vs. strength. While I do credit him for realizing a lot of so-called morality is just an attempt to gain strength/justify one's own weakness, Nietzsche himself seemed to be an isolated, angry, probably manic-depressive individual, and a lot of his work is self-glorification (justifying his unhappiness). Of course, you can argue by saying he himself acknowledged this by realizing everything is the will to power, but it just seems a terribly lonely way to live.

[Anonymous No.4738562]

>>4738555

I agree to some extent, but to be fair, a lot of his philosophy is very life affirming. I feel like when people hear "Nietzsche was influenced by Schopenhauer" they take that to mean "Nietzsche was a pessimist like Schopenhauer", when in reality Nietzsche is a pretty optimistic guy in some ways.

And considering his, like you said, very lonely life, it's rather incredible he was able to embrace such a life-loving philosophy.

[Anonymous No.4738576]

>>4738562
Yeah, but in his life he was himself a very sickly person. I feel the ultimate confession he could've made was one of his incurable imperfection, or dare I say, weakness. An admission that perhaps everyone shouldn't be exactly like him, and should only take from his philosophy what they need. His own version of a "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Without that, Nietzsche just seems so... depressingly self-absorbed. But once you get into that, you get to the ultimate tragedy of life: lack of true possible communication with something else besides yourself. Sensuality or maybe drugs can take away this illusion temporarily, but...

[Anonymous No.4738575]

The worst part about this is how it treats victims as children that we must protect.

Leftists have this attitude a lot. It's fucking ruined every GSA I've ever been to.

People treat me like I'm 4 because hard shit happens to me. It's honestly better than the people who flat-out hate me.

[Anonymous No.4738581]

>>4738576

Isn't Zarathustra supposed to be the surrogate "person you should listen to", while not just being Nietzsche himself?

I could be wrong, but I don't recall him making the claim that everyone should be like him.

[Anonymous No.4738582]

I fucking hate this PC pussy BULLshit. How great that this the current generations "counterculture"? Out babyboomer parents were atleast against things like war and consumer culture. Our generation is against accepting the hardships of the human experience and shaming whiteys and non-gays. Like fuck man

[Anonymous No.4738583]

>>4738576
I guess what I'm really trying to say is that humans are social animals, like it or not.

[Anonymous No.4738585]

>>4738575
We- honesty worse.

[Anonymous No.4738590]

>>4738581
Nietzsche himself said all philosophy is just the philosopher's own personal views. Nietzsche glorified the people who disregarded conventional morality, asked big questions, brought humanity closer to the "Ubermensch". A common side effect of these is the blues, something Nietzsche probably had himself since he could never really answer these questions beyond a doubt.

[Anonymous No.4738597]

>>4738590

I'll agree with you there. Full and complete living of the Nietzsche philosophy is probably not the best, but there are definitely things to learn from it

[Anonymous No.4738600]

>SJWs trivializing a real mental disability

[Anonymous No.4738622]

>>4738470
>being this retarded

[Anonymous No.4738623]

>>4738480

You're still wrong though. The people advocating for this ARE leftists in a social sense, but terribly rightist in an economic and political sense. For maximum accuracy go ahead and just replace your statement with "I'm a big gay baby, someone take me seriously."

[Anonymous No.4738629]

SJWs are extremely destructive people. I consider myself quite socially leftist. I will call you by your preferred pronoun (if it's like Xir or Xhe though I'm just not going to speak to you probably), I will support you in your gay rights campaigns, I will certainly stand with women when it comes to their issues.

I refuse to take SJWs seriously, though. The entire "movement" is just piggybacking off of the relative acceptance that social liberalism has been experiencing, trying to indulge themselves in it. You know how the whole "activism" thing they do is really just relentlessly shaming other people who say insensitive things? You ever notice how most of the people they shame aren't actual racists or sexists or whatever, but rather "allies" of the social justice movement? That's because it's easier to nitpick Stephen Colbert's jokes in a word-by-word tumblr take-down than it is to broadly address Shaun Hannity or Bill O'Reilly's entire ideology. Colbert is more likely to back down and apologize for his mistake—which is what it is. You can actually *shame* a liberal into assenting to your criticism. You can't shame people who actually believe what you claim they believe. You can yell at a white supremacist, but you can't shame them like you can someone who slips up and uses the wrong term for a person of color. And that's why SJWs are literal human garbage.

[Anonymous No.4738656]

Guys this is Oberlin College. It's liberal.

[Anonymous No.4738663]

>"Things Fall Apart"
Trigger warning: violence against bicycles

[Anonymous No.4738672]

>>4738374
I really hope those colleges suffer a steep decline in student attendance for promoting the "bury your head in the sand" education system.

In actuality, employers will just begin to equate those sorts of trigger universities alongside Full Sail, Arizona State, and Devry-- and its graduates will just continue to wonder super-hard why they can't find employment, after all: they did spend $60k to attend and graduate from a clown college.

[Anonymous No.4738682]

That's pretty depressing. Oberlin has been a good school.

[Anonymous No.4738854]

There is nothing funnier than seeing SJWs arguing whether 'Die Cis Scum' needs a trigger warning because telling people to die might trigger them.

[Anonymous No.4738861]

Historically, identitarian ideology is a product of the failure of the Left. The various forms of identity politics associated with the “new social movements” coming out of the New Left during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s (feminism, black nationalism, gay pride) were themselves a reaction, perhaps understandable, to the miserable failure of working-class identity politics associated with Stalinism coming out of the Old Left during the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s (socialist and mainstream labor movements). Working-class identity politics was based on a crude, reductionist understanding of politics that urged socialists and union organizers to stay vigilant and keep on the lookout for “alien class elements.” Any and every form of ideological deviation was thought to be traceable to a bourgeois or petit-bourgeois upbringing. One’s political position was thought to flow automatically and mechanically from one’s social position, i.e. from one’s background as a member of a given class within capitalist society.

Anyone whose working-class credentials were not considered impeccable were expected to go through rituals of self-criticism or “autocritique” [from самокритика, a crucial shibboleth in the Stalinist vocabulary] confessing one’s incorrigible bourgeois intellectual habits in order to purify himself. Maoism radicalized this with application Third World and minority contexts. Indeed, much of the tedious discourse of “privilege-checking” derives from this, as one commenter pointed out in response to a post on Kathy Miriam’s blog:

"I see [identity politics'] origins in confrontational New Left styles of the late ’60s through the early ’70s (when lots of feminists were reading Mao’s little red book, believe it or not). These consisted in an accusatory calling-out of any person whose individual acts were thought to be based in structures of systemic oppression, even if only potentially. There was no sense of proportion — it was all or nothing, totally Manichaean, polarized into either “good” or “bad.” Breast-beating was required. Confession, as well (Maoism again). Lots of guilt and fear behind the attacks, too."

When identity politics emerged as part of the constellation of the “post-political” Left in the 1990s and 2000s, however, it did so in a more academic and institutionalized form. The “new social movements” had more or less ground to a halt, and so the center of political gravity shifted from the streets into the classroom (where it was even less effective). There was more jargon; the word “privilege” was on everyone’s lips. Of course, this is unsurprising: the New Left had entered the very institutions it once protested, as either professional academics or full-time activists.

[Anonymous No.4738870]

>>4738428
I guess the hit and run

[Anonymous No.4738888]

Isn't this what you faggots begged for? Well, I hope you're happy.

[Anonymous No.4738895]

Same fucking thing happens to every leftist. Let's just kill the ones we don't like! Wooo, revolution! Oh shit, now the revolution is eating its children, and there's a Stalin telling me I have to lick his balls or I'm bourgeois. I only liked shooting bourgeois things when the shifting definition of bourgeois included people other than me!

Exact same thing. Now the white male leftists - the ones who actually do things - are being ousted, and increasingly stringent and ad hoc ideological self-policing described in >>4738861 is going on. Left has neutered itself.

People will say it's just online, but I've seen committed Marxist activist professors obsessing over identity politics shit and adhering to its gay little rules for correctthink. It's depressing.

[Anonymous No.4738922]

"Trigger Warning" sounds like the special attack of some Japanese fighting game character.

"TRIGGA WARNINGU!!!! ----- ATATATATATATATATATATATATATTATAT-HAYYYYUAH!"

[Anonymous No.4738954]

>>4738470
Thing is that national socialism is the original SJW ideology.

[Anonymous No.4738956]

>>4738374
Censorship

[Anonymous No.4738968]

>>4738374
Let's cripple the abled so the weak and victims don't have to suffer

Lel only ameriburgers

[Anonymous No.4738992]

>>4738470
Trying to solve the social justice menace with your version of social justice is embarrassing. You are just exchanging one set of political correctness for another. If you really have a problem with SJWs, stop being a carefag/moralfag.

[Anonymous No.4738997]

>>4738922
I'll admit that I laughed.

[Anonymous No.4739135]

>>4738474
Good old Friedrich, spot on.

[Anonymous No.4739158]

>>4738861
>tfw i know the guy who wrote this

r-ross?

[Anonymous No.4739357]

Does anyone else think that horseshoe theory perfectly applies to the relationship between SJWs and stormfags?

>once SJWs run out of straight cis white men to bully, they'll start turning on each other because they don't know anything except how to lambast people for being "too privileged"
>once stormfags run out of racial minorities to whine about, they'll start turning on each other because they don't know anything except how to lambast people for being "not white enough"

>"please don't use the term 'gay', I take offense to that, the correct term is 'LGBTQGSWTFBBQTGIFURAQTOFWGKTA'"
>"please don't use the term 'racist', I take offense to that, the correct term is 'racial realist'"

>SJWs believe in an imaginary patriarchy that they have no proof of, but they're too narcissistic to admit that they're being mildly inconvenienced by anything but an organized worldwide conspiracy with the sole purpose of keeping them down because they're special little snowflakes
>stormfags, well, same thing except replace "patriarchy" with "jewish cabal"

>SJWs get mad when the academic community doesn't take pseudoscience like homeopathy seriously
>stormfags get mad when the academic community doesn't take pseudoscience like eugenics seriously

>bell hooks is a hack writer
>so is william pierce

>both can be found in abundant supply on reddit

[Anonymous No.4739370]

>>4738374
AHAHAH AMERICA DOES IT AGAIN

>Tfw not living in America and actually live in the rest fo the world

[Anonymous No.4739384]

>>4738474
>>4738474
Does anyoen know that quote from one of Neitzsches works about leveling the top or bottomg to their equal level and not going higher

Something like that
It can be compared to Liberalism

[Anonymous No.4739397]

>>4738374

I don't see a problem with this. The opressed and less privileged need to be protected and this is a great way of preventing traumatic experiences.

[Anonymous No.4739410]

>>4739357
Horseshoe theory isn't quite the right idea. It's the kind of fanaticism people get without any kind of humility to hold them back. It's the same thing as religious fundamentalism, Stalinism, fascism, and all that jazz.

The thing that unifies SJW and stormfags is hate and bullying. And I *love* it. The same techniques that I use to shrug of stormfag criticism I use to shrug off SJW criticism, because they don't care about reality, which means their words aren't evidence of anything.