Shut up and listen

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The following passage (borrowed from a twitter feed) is very suggestive:

 

We can all get a good chuckle about how these precious snowflakes need a safe space.

I imagine there’s some value in people being able to say things without having to worry about being evaluated (which is what “racist” is). This is what rough drafts are for.

But rough drafts also serve another purpose: to elicit cheap criticism in a low-stakes environment. You can’t forget that part.

If you do, then you’re just talking and making other people listen. What’s the point of that?

 

3 thoughts on “Shut up and listen”

  1. If you refer to the full memo, I’m sure you will find fodder for a great many posts about logical fallacies:

    http://www.democracycorps.com/attachments/article/1063/Dcor_Macomb_FG%20Memo_3.10.2017_FINAL.pdf

    Steve: Five years ago, five, six years ago I had a really great job, was working at Coca-Cola, making really good money and blew out my back. My wife’s a nurse, I lost my job and they de- nied me unemployment. We’re struggling. We tried to apply for a BRIDGE card, we get denied because she’s a nurse. Her income. And it just – at the time, it just irritated me because we’d be at the grocery store, just looking at each other. How are we going to pay for all this and I’ll see somebody with a basket full of stuff, loaded with – just overloaded, use a BRIDGE card wearing top of the line stuff, $500 purse and then they walk to an Escalade. What is wrong with this system, we get denied –

    Matt: The Escalade’s usually parked in the handicapped spot.

    Steve: Exactly.

    Tom: Pull the card out, they got wad of cash –

    William: It was funny, the backlash that we got over the EBT cards, people could use them at gas station to buy dog food –

    Chris: Cash withdrawals.

    William: Cash withdrawals, and here I’m struggling to get my kid hot dogs and you’re buying a porterhouse and I’m being told that I’m wrong or I’m racist or I’m not the – I’m privileged and that’s what’s wrong.

    Chris: It’s almost like you wonder how are they working the system that you’re not. There’s some way they’re working the system I sometimes think that to qualify for something like you said, how’d they qualify when you didn’t and you – and you put side by side, you would think that you would qualify.

    William: And I’ve paid so much into it.

    Matt: It’s kind of off color, [but] I think we’re checking the wrong box when we’re filling out paperwork.
    I wonder what box he’s talking about. (Not really.)

    .

    Interesting, how this supposedly reachable population is reciting Reagan-era tropes, almost verbatim — Cadillac-driving welfare queens, young bucks buying… Porterhouse steaks instead of entire T-bones.

    This whole line of argument takes me back to when my wife and I were foster parents, and my wife would go grocery shopping with mixed-race children who were in our care, make purchases in part with their EBT/Bridge card, and then take them to our SUV. I hope we didn’t turn too many people like the Macomb crowd into Trump voters, but I can say that people like these gave my wife a lot of dirty looks.

  2. I fixed the comment, Aaron.

    Interesting story (just confirmed by my wife who worked once as an attorney for foster kids).

    In the present case, of course, no one is allowed to correct their (likely mistaken) impression–because, well, safe spaces.

    Such precious snowflakes.

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