I don't read the OP as calling for military intervention to prevent the carrying out of the sentence or corporal punishment in Saudi Arabia more generally. I think it's more of a question about when criticism of a foreign country or culture is appropriate.

It's reasonable to believe caning is wrong and to criticize governments that do it. It's also reasonable to call out the hypocrisy of those who selectively criticize brutal criminal justice systems (i.e. focusing on the middle east while ignoring America's own morally dubious policies). I would argue that our harshest scrutiny should always be of our own government.

Nevertheless neither cultural sensitivity nor even a broader understanding that different cultures will always perceive justice differently should prevent us from calling a spade a spade.

I don't disagree with this post but I think it might be worth distinguishing "the internet" from "how discourse is conducted on the internet." I don't think online discourse was ever or will ever be the same as discourse in person. We're evolved to communicate through physical cues and all manner of non-verbal signals that can't translate into text (at least with current technology). However, what I believe has made discourse on the internet even worse than it otherwise might be, is the incentives set up by social media. The psychological satisfaction of getting a like or a re-tweet is small but real. In an environment of strangers or loosely connected people the speech that ends up getting the most likes (or whatever) isn't the speech that's most thoughtful or nuanced, it's the speech that affirms biases in the most aggressive language possible. This isn't to say you couldn't see some out there stuff on Web 1.0 but now we've found a way to reward people for bad or stupid speech.
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I think that probably nails it. If not for those other issues I have a feeling it would never be discussed outside of some dull college faculty meetings that half the attendees couldn't even recall if asked. I suspect your prediction is correct.

I think I answered these points above (but if there's a point I missed I'm happy to look again). My opinion is that it shouldn't be the professor's responsibility for the reasons stated in the previous comment.

It isn't a tool, it's a burdensome responsibility placed on someone else. It requires a third party to have intimate knowledge of a complete stranger's psychological condition in a manner that will never be possible. This is why it must be the sufferer's own responsibility to be wary based on their own diagnosis and where they are in their treatment, something that that no professor is ever going to be able to know for certain. Contra your point about a history professor, I don't think it's at all reasonable to expect professors to have expertise outside of their own discipline.

Take an individual with a certain type of learning disability. Our response to that isn't to, say, eliminate timed tests for everyone just in case someone in the class has a disability. It's to require the individual with the disability to provide documentation evidencing its existence and to work with the institution to make an accommodation, to the extent possible and/or legally required.

I think a similar approach is much more reasonable than requiring professors to divine what might set off any given adult student at any given time. That means if you've got severe ptsd from a few tours in Iraq it's probably a good idea to avoid a class called war in modern cinema. If it's ptsd from being a victim of a crime then it's probably a good idea to avoid courses in the criminology department.

This is where I might get a bit harsh (and back to Thucidides). If a person's ptsd is such that a translation of an ancient text causes such a severe emotional reaction then I submit that college just isn't right for that person at that point in time. It doesn't mean it never will be, but that individual clearly has some things to work through first, and it isn't the faculty or anyone else's responsibility to navigate that for them.

I dont see how basic cost analysis and treating this like every other mental health diagnosis is 'concern trolling.' Let's assume your facts are accurate and 1-2% of the student population has a ptsd diagnosis. The cost effective way to handle that is for that 1-2% of the population to work with their therapist and be wary about what they expose themselves to. It isn't to have every professor reviewing Thucidides or the 2010 anthology of literary classics for passages that could cause a reaction, especially when it might be unique to every individual.

This is how we handle all non-incapacitating mental health diagnosis. There's some responsibility on the part of the sufferer. More often it sounds to me like it's advocates who want this issue treated by the pyblic as having the gravity of medical diagnosis but don't want any of the reasonable responsibilities that go along with that. This is why skeptics sense a political agenda.

We can say with some medical certainty that peanuts plus people with a certain diagnosed sensitivity equals measurable medical distress. I'm not sure we can say that about psychological discomfort arising out of an external stimulus which causes an individual to recall a painful past experience. There are far more variables.

To the extent this is something that can be diagnosed I'm not even sure we should be trying to shield people from exposure so much as getting them into therapy. Isn't the goal of treating people with ptsd to get them to a point where the individual is no longer afflicted? I'm not of the sky is falling persuasion on this issue but I do think the advocates have a long hill to climb when it comes to proving that marking everything in this manner is even in the interest of the folks for whom they claim to speak.

From a pure cost perspective are we even sure that there are enough people in college with a ptsd diagnosis to justify major reviews of curriculum that people seemed to have handled just fine in the past?

Sounds like it might be exciting to have around the office though, re: the weasel.

I think we can worry about hypocritical isolationism when we stop involving ourselves in every conflict we can get away with. The pendulum has a long way to swing for that.

Maybe this is a reactionary view but I don't understand the challenge with people taking a bit of responsibility for their own mental health. We don't seem to be talking about individuals with profound disabilities who aren't able to function on their own. It's people who have a diagnosed psychological problem with at least some awareness of what stimuli could cause a reaction. Given the innumerable potential causes of a ptsd related episode it can't be the responsibility of everyone else. If you have a known food allergy and go to a pot luck dinner then eat things without asking questions whose fault is it if you have a reaction?

I think those things are probably true about some opponents of those policies. I just think it's impossible to read that into a bunch of rants and insults on social media, many of which don't seem to even talk about particular policy preferences. As Saul noted some of the posts imply that people think Trump was criticized by NR for not showing sufficient fealty to Israel (and that lack of fealty to Israel is a good thing). However a quick Google search shows Trump to have only spoken positively about Israel during the campaign and has said Obama is abandoning Israel by making a deal with Iran. I just don't see how anyone can be so sure in any assumptions about the views of people who are relatively anonymous and, assuming they're being serious, have such a poor grasp of the facts.

I think there is probably some truth to that, at least in certain demographics in the Trump zone of appeal. I just prefer not to speculate given that what we're talking about is a bunch of racist and obscene comments on social media where it's hard to know much about the posters and why they're saying what they are.

I think you're assuming far too much deep/theoretical thought on the part of the commenters discussed in the op than is likely to actually be occurring. They're coming from the part of the political spectrum that compares the Obama administration to Mao or Stalin, seemingly without any concept of history or political philosophy. Suffice to say I don't think they're thinking hard about something like gender roles and how the state does or does not validate them through different policies. More likely these messages are a statement about tribal and cultural loyalties.

I agree with @oscar-gordon. It's a nice thought but I don't see how making legislators full time does anything to change the incentives that lead to lousy oversight of the executive branch and lack of expertise. I won't say that legislators have no incentive to oversee executive agencies or fix problematic policies but that incentive is complicated by political calculations and various partisan and other loyalties. A full time legislator will be as beholden to those things as a part time legislator. Further you can probably never explain an issue to someone who has a strong interest in not understanding that issue.

Think arguing sentencing reform to a person representing a district where the main employer is a prison, or the problems with fossil fuels to someone representing a district full of coal mines.

I see the phenomenon Saul describes as the natural result of mass/pop culture in a globalized economy. Super-hero movies, for example, are conceptually simple, translate easily into other languages, and do not challenge the audience politically or socially. The same can be said about most pop music. If you're in the entertainment business, why limit yourself to millions of dollars in the American (or even Western) market when you can make billions globally? Combine that with a post-modern American culture that sees itself less and less tied to religion/culture/community and you get people who treat the entertainment they consume as a deeply rooted part of their identity. To criticize the entertainment is to criticize the person. In such an environment, when the pop culture gets particularly insipid, the people who love it follow suit.

I do see it as part and parcel with an infantile streak in American culture that I think will be destructive in the long term, but that might be beyond the scope of this post/discussion. Of course I will cop to my own potential hypocrisy on this issue as a huge fan of cult horror movies and underground metal. Not pop culture, but certainly not high culture either.

I think you could make that argument about a lot of countries that for purposes of this conversation we would call prosperous and stable. Though as I said to Lee above it may be that this discussion isn't possible until some definitions are agreed upon.

Fair enough but isn't that moving this kind of far away from the original discussion about whether or not there's a pragmatic justification for civil liberties (or general liberalism) that isn't ultimately value based?

Granted as I'm typing this I think part of the problem with the discussion may be a lack of defined terms..

I'm a bit confused by your response. We both agree that a society could be stable/prosperous without civil liberties (or being socially liberal). If that's true then what's the pragmatic case you referenced for, say, freedom of speech or freedom of the press? By pragmatic I mean something we can't do without in order to make a society function, as opposed to just something we value.

I don't think the comparison of a political philosophy to religions, which are at least to some degree based on the supernatural, is apples to apples. There's also more to this than the pragmatic (your comment itself includes the value that bloodshed and chaos are bad).

Look at the example of China which has been able to develop at a rapid pace economically but remains repressive politically. This isn't to say they don't have plenty of problems and of course they're not fully industrialized but based on their example I think it's feasible that a society could be stable, economically prosperous, and still illiberal politically.

The universality you menton is very important. Corruption of power isn't a cultural problem, its a human problem. I think the discussion is conflating two separate questions. The first question is whether or not there are certain universal values or truths (or in the language of the enlightenment human rights). The second is whether or not one society has the moral authority (without getting into questions of competency) to impose those values on another.

I'd defer to Burt on that question and I do not have any familiarity with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act so can't really opine.

I do think there might be some parallels to the debate over whether or not the state should recognize more positive rights (as oposed to negative rights).

This piece was an excellent read on a number of levels. Maybe it's a part of my own Catholic baggage but I can relate to the difficulties of navigating that weird terrain where you recognize the inherently supernatural (i.e. hard for rational people to believe) aspects of the religion and try to square it with the passionate teaching of secular subjects by clergy and nuns.

All that aside, I do agree with concerns about overly catering to students. I try not to believe reports I hear about things as extreme as not teaching rape in a crim class in law school. It caters too much to my own biases about political correctness run amok. If it's really happening then the answer to any complaining student I think should be if you can't handle this you aren't fit to be a lawyer full stop. I only did crim very briefly at the beginning of my career but even outside of that as an attorney you have to deal with challenging subjects and even more challenging personalities in virtually all areas of practice. A lawyer can't be trusted to appropriately serve a client if a tough subject in the class room flusters him.

I'd say the same thing about people who think they should be exempt from undergrad assignments due to content. If you can find a way to pass without getting the credit then so be it, but again, I think the response is that college isn't for everyone.

All that being said, I do wonder how prevalent these attitudes are outside of certain groups on campus. Of those that do exist I tend to think that their views rarely survive first contact with the outside world.

The normal 7th inning stretch song at Camden Yards is Thank God I'm a Country Boy (preceded by take me out to the ball game for most games). Since 9/11 it has been preceded by God Bless America for Sunday games.

Personally I could do without the God Bless America stuff. I struggle to see it as anything but a weird self-imposed propaganda. It reminds me of the episode in Catch-22 where everyone has to sign loyalty oaths to get their meals at the mess hall.

Gotcha, makes sense to me.

@james-k I agree. Unfortunately I think the heavy handed approach has become a sign that a problem is being taken seriously. Bureaucracies of course also love the ability to enforce their will in a manner that inherently increases their power.

@oscar-gordon I'd actually take it a step further and say there should be a demonstrated threat to person or property. I do think there's a harm to abandoned vehicles being left for other people to deal with, just not a severe enough harm that it should immediately result in criminal charges.