In my experience, the kids who grew into adults who weren’t very good at adulting tended to be the most sheltered kids, who never had a chance to have consequences for their actions.
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You’re not just denying human behavior with this unworkable suggestion to ban sex at uni, you’re assuming all uni students are fresh out of high school. The real world doesn’t look like that. Your proposal is also classist in that it ignores shitty behavior occurring in low-wage jobs that less connected or less academically inclined young people often end up in. The problem isn’t rooted in academic achievement levels, the problem is men believing they’re entitled to sexual gratification, regardless of the willingness of their targets.
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I can’t describe everyone, and I am a poor point of reference, but I generally agree. It doesn’t mean I believe there should be more stringent actions, I don’t believe in more core corporal actions, and I really don’t believe in a more regimented society.
My belief is founded in fairness, opacity, empathy, sympathy, and equity. Some here use equity as a weird weapon. I don’t. All the concepts that involve fairness and equity require history–which I know you know–so here is the conundrum.
How do we teach history?
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We teach it with all the ideas you mention here, with empathy, fairness, and equity. Understanding the people who made history (not just the elites, but everyone) and shaped events. Modern history is more or less a story of setting up a ideal world to strive for, humanity consistently and often failing to reach their own professed standards, but people continuing to push for those ideals.
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I owe you an enormous hug. We need to set up a Meetup for cheese fries, a few glasses of wine, and a nice history conversation.
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I informally follow the Stoics in my own life, too. Using draconian or unenforceable or ineffective rules and legal mechanisms to eliminate moral corruption and enforce temperance in others is not the path toward peace and clarity that they suggest. If anything they’d consider that a path toward eternal frustration.
He didn’t say that. He said it is not a virtue, a position the Stoics would agree with (abstinence is not the same thing as the cardinal virtue of Temperance). He also said that abstinence-based policies are delusional, and anyone starting with the assumption that most people around him are unethical or immoral (i.e. any Stoic) would agree with that as well.
With respect, I’d suggest you re-visit some of the works of philosophy you’re (wisely) attempting to structure your own life around.
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I wish I could still read Dilbert without hearing all of the characters speaking in Trump’s voice, but it’s a weird world we live in.
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I’ve worked in a state where sexual harassment training is mandatory. And adjuncting at 4 schools at once meant I got to do it 4 times as much as somebody with one job.
After all of that I learn that it is, at best, ineffective?
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I heard an interview with a workplace trainer who started with the proposition that most of the people in the room were not potential sexual harrassers but that most of them were potential witnesses and bystanders to sexual harrassment. The training followed from there. That strikes me as a more effective and productive approach to creating workplaces and campuses where most stakeholders consider sexual harrassment to be unacceptable.
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Where i work it’s one of those old school type institutions. Go back 5-10 years and the workplace culture was the good ol’ boys club. The company has changed a lot, most of the people in director/manager/supervisor positions are held by no-nonsense intelligent women. There’s also a good drive for high standards of safety and protocol, and also charity work. Only been with the company for 3 years but people take maintaining a healthy workplace very seriously.
I’m sure harassment probably has happened here, no place is perfect, but management has no patience for that kind of shit. I’ve seen people sacked pretty quickly because of personality conflicts, i could imagine harassment wouldn’t last long here.
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Like I said, it was just a conversation starter. But things have to change and it’s not going to change itself. People are going to have to learn a higher ethical behavior and practice it. It’s difficult but it must happen. I look forward to making sacrifices and doing the work. I hope you are too.
It stopped being that when you based it inaccurately in Stoicism.
With prescriptive and demanding language like that Plato might be more your philosopher.
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The problem with just not believing for some one like me (and nobody apologize please for my life) is that it’s so easy for it to be true. No one in my life is famous. But I was forced into a violent choking relationship by a bf in college who also pointed guns at me. No, I didn’t get help. No, I didn’t tell anyone. No I didn’t do anything you’re supposed to do and I live with that. Given my upbringing I was basically a robotic non-human with no sense of self until my mid-thirties. As a result stories like this come off as very believable. Now it’s easy to say either I’m lying or crazy (what actually the university did say which caused me to drop out, then years later living a different life and bearing all the guilt and shame being disowned by your family because no one believed you can garner… I naturally refused to partake in a later lawsuit that didn’t directly involve my case but that did probably include it indirectly… i wanted to live my life). So, honestly, even if some people are lying I’d like more people like my former self to have some sense of hope that they don’t just have to put up with it and keep putting up with it or kill themselves. I struggled with those two options meaning honestly… I started living my own life about two or three years ago. I’d like other people, random regular people no one is going to hear about, to have that chance. If keeping the heat on celebrities might help that… I’m for it. Basically it’s the same way I feel about racist, crooked, and downright violent police. Can it hurt… yeah sure it can make problems, are the problems so big that a certain amount of human sacrifice is justified to protect more valued people? Maybe … but I can’t stand to live in that world and I don’t want to die. So my options are clear because they’re motivated by life experience. I assume that experience is rare enough to seem jarring odd and not relevant. But is it really irrelevant?
In truth people lie about crimes of all types at about the same rate. I’m not very special or unique, so I’m probably not the only one at my own school let alone in the country.
Whose life are you more comfortable being destroyed? A famous person or people you don’t even know exist. It’s easy, the famous person.
Yet… is it worth it? Idon’t know. I deal with life by avoiding people. I plan to live and die this way because it’s the only way I have found safety and peace. Alone… the few people who have gained my trust are few and… I’ll be honest, I will ALWAYS have plans for escape because I don’t know how else to get through a day.
Do I want more people like me? No, no I don’t… and I’m willing to make problems for others even if we have to think of NEW solutions.
Now I’ll go because i know I’m not going to be a popular person here and I’m not even going to pretend to be sane, but then again I didn’t get here all by my lonesome and the things that were said about me were eerily similar to the things said about this person. That I just caused problems. That I made it all up (even when the person in question later got fired for assault but not of a girl… so that mattered). And looking back and forward I have almost NIL hope because people will always care about one or two people more than any hundreds that may never matter to them.
Do I have hope? No, not really. Do I think the turning tides of social media are unfair… no more unfair than it already is and has been.
Really… no more unfair unless you care about some people and don’t care about others. That’s a personal choice.
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Read Marcus Aurelius. He’s much more dire. Memento Mori.
I have. Aurelius says nothing about accepting death with dignity necessitating the imposition of authoritarian measures on others to force them to be ethical. And he was an emperor who could have made a decent attempt at it.
It’s clear you need to go back and read the Stoics more carefully. I think it will be worthwhile for you to do so. Until you do, though, there’s no point in our continuing this discussion.
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(Languidly strolls into the room, decked in a mini hounds tooth, turn of the century suit with one button buttoned, a small canine in a large bag, and a Cuban Missile Crisis in a copper mug.)
So, we still chatting about stoicism? (Takes a long draw from the Crisis, which brims with mint and ginger.)
How’s that workin’ out?
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Not so well, given that only one of us turns about to be chatting about Stoicism while the other is discussing Plato’s republic.
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Well, at least it ain’t Nietzsche. That guy’s a bummer.
On topic, I hope TJ is innocent, I have no way of knowing, and us men have to be… What’s the phrase?.. Less asswads.
(Prances away with said puppy, jumps into a hot air balloon, and sales away to the French Laundry.)
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