Academic self-censorship... I read things like this and despair ... until I remember that there are places still in the U.S. – like here in northern Utah – where testosterone is still abundant and normative. One doesn't hear about “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” around here. Any student who couldn't take (say) the sight of a historical photography of Nazi concentration camp victims (as in the linked article) would most likely be laughed right out of a classroom.
The testosterone-depleted “delicate snowflake” world that apparently exists in a large part of our academia is so different than our experience here that it is sometimes difficult to believe it really exists – until I run into it head-on. That first happened to me about two years ago, when I started to get comments on my blog posts from offended people; now these are the majority of all comments posted. I used to answer them, but that was a futile endeavor. Now I simply delete the post and block the author. Much easier. I see the delicate snowflakes on Twitter all the time; so far as I can tell, the tweets aren't satire, they're serious. So they really must exist, despite their non-existence around here.
What happens to the U.S. when the delicate snowflakes are adults, and in the majority? That's really hard for me to fathom. Do we end up with a bifurcated culture, wherein one isolated group of people (possessed of the majority of the testosterone) do all the jobs too rough-and-tumble for the delicate snowflakes?
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