I Fear for Our Young
Posted on January 22nd, 2015 in Uncategorized | 41 Comments »
What does one say about a comment like this one, from my post, “Rolling Stone Hedges Its Bets“?
My name is Nicole and I am currently a senior double majoring in Criminology and Political Science. This semester I decided to take a course by the name of Confronting Gender-based Violence in the United States. We have been challenged with the task to confront a journalist in which we believe is using passive voice when reporting on gender-based violence. I happened to be reading your article and I realized that you were doing just that, by tearing apart the victim’s story. In your statement you mentioned Rolling Stone “found her to be “entirely credible”—a word which is subtly different than, say, “Truthful.” I wanted you to realize that your choice of words can cause readers to refer to the victim as an alleged victim, rather than a victim, ultimately creating doubt which inculcates distrust. I hope the next time you write an article on sensitive issues, please consider my recommendations before you insult, re-traumatize, and or deeply hurt someone.
Well, to start, you say that no one should ever, ever use the word [sic] “re-traumatize.”
Then you wonder about a course in which students are assigned to “confront a journalist in which [sic] we believe is using passive voice when reporting on gender-based violence.”
What does that even mean?
Then you acknowledge that, yes indeed, your words can cause readers to refer to the “victim” as an “alleged victim”—which, in the case of an anonymous, single-sourced, fantastical story, seems more than appropriate.
And then, before the next time you write an article on “sensitive issues,” you completely ignore the recommendations of this poor, silly, hapless writer.
41 Responses
1/22/2015 11:31 am
No to be a pedant* but crucially:
Rolling Stone “found her to be “entirely credible”
isn’t in the passive voice. It seems her class have been sent on this cockamamie errand and not told what the passive voice is.
* also, totally willing to admit that I am wrong here - I’m an ok reader but a bad writer.
1/22/2015 11:42 am
Oh, looking at your original article I realise my mistake (the inverted commas confused me and I wasn’t sure where the quotation ended). The bit she has taken issue with is where you say ‘a word which is subtly different than, say, “Truthful.”’
It makes no difference though. There is no passive voice there either!
(*Waits for English major to correct me*)
1/22/2015 11:43 am
What are the career options for a college graduate “double majoring in Criminology and Political Science”?
1/22/2015 11:47 am
These are the Sabrina Rubin Erdelys of the future.. I just feel bad that this ” senior double majoring in Criminology and Political Science” will present herself as a serious and reasonable professional around 2025 and will probably be giving interviews about many different topics to lots of magazines and papers..
So yeah.. the future isn’t that bright..
1/22/2015 11:58 am
Although the commenter is an idiot for other reasons, her use of the phrase “passive voice” was a mere misappropriation of the concept she was actually trying to explain.
Passive voice uses passive verbs to hide the subject of the action in a sentence. “John kicked the ball” is active voice. “The ball was kicked” is passive voice.
What the commenter was saying is that Mr. Bradley’s language minimized the assumption of truthfulness. She apparently became confused about what passive voice really means, but I understood what she was trying to say.
1/22/2015 11:58 am
I think your author is using “passive voice” as an antonym for social justice advocacy. In other words, I think that in her world “passive voice” means “neutral voice”, which of course is a misuse of the term.
Kind of hard to believe that college seniors would write so poorly. But, then again …..
1/22/2015 12:05 pm
You’re being far too kind.
The first problem with Nicole’s comment is that its dated yesterday. Although she is a college senior studying gender-based violence, and finds herself compelled to criticize your commentary, she doesn’t know that the UVa story was found to be a complete fabrication weeks ago.
And what kind of class assigns, as homework, to go attack a working journalist for not espousing opinions that are politically correct enough?
1/22/2015 12:25 pm
I took a political theory class taught by a feminist who made me write poetry. That was bad enough. This is just ridiculous. I’ve never heard of a class that requires students to email people to tell them they’re wrong. I would be more comfortable with the students writing a fake letter for the teacher to evaluate.
1/22/2015 1:23 pm
Nicole has just made up her own creative definition of what “passive voice” is and no-one is cooing about what a very special little sneauxflake she is? Stop micro-aggressing her you guys!!!
1/22/2015 1:37 pm
Institutions of ‘higher’ education are our version of communist reeducation camps. The only difference is that unlike places such as North Korea, you don’t have to have actually offended the regime to be sent there to be subject to the brain-washing and other forms of punishment… the American left likes to be proactive and discourage disapproved thought before it gets a chance to be spoken.
The syllabus is this: Anything that a woman, a homosexual/lesbian/trans-something, a member of a racial or ethnic group other than white or Asiatic, or a Muslim says is to be taken as the Gospel, while anything a male, a white or Asiatic, a Catholic/Jew/Southern Baptist, etc. says is to be taken as a deliberate lie.
Witness Marquette University (a Catholic school) disciplining John McAdams, a tenured professor, for criticizing a teaching assistant (Cheryl Abbate) for not allowing opponents of gay ‘marriage’ to voice their opinions, and for pointing out that the TA is going against the teachings of the church. In American academia, the First Amendment doesn’t exist… or at least not for people they disagree with.
1/22/2015 1:48 pm
“We have been challenged with the task to confront a journalist in which we believe is using passive voice…”
I can’t even.
I just give up.
1/22/2015 2:27 pm
@Cath: “special sneauxflake”…I admit it…I lol’d. Well played.
1/22/2015 2:47 pm
Is “Nicole” really SRE?
1/22/2015 2:58 pm
What’s even better is that this class is probably in a small liberal arts college that costs $60,000 a year.
Can’t wait to see you ‘occupying’ something after you graduate Nicole!
1/22/2015 2:58 pm
What kind of a teacher thinks it is a good idea to sic wet behind the ears don’t know jack college kids on veteran journalists on a language usage issue? Is she insane? That is the height of insolence. That is asking to get your student intellectually pummeled. As a blogger who is not a trained journalist, in my experience if there is one thing journalists do know it is proper word usage, and I would always defer to them. That’s like a dojo operator telling his white belt student to go find some MMA competitor and teach him how to fight.
I doubt the assignment was actually to find “passive voice.” It was more likely to find language such as “alleged,” but isn’t alleged routinely used before a conviction? Does rape get some special dispensation that robbery or fraud or whatever don’t?
1/22/2015 3:12 pm
Here is a column from Thomas Sowell from 1998 about teachers giving students letter-writing assignments in school that’s relevant:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell081798.html
“Few things are more dangerous than articulate superficiality. Glib demagogues have been the curse of the 20th century and tens of millions of human beings have paid with their lives for the heady visions and clever talk of political egotists. Yet the danger is not that a particular child will follow in the footsteps of Lenin, Hitler or Mao. The danger is that great numbers of people will never know what it is to know, as distinguished from sounding off.”
1/22/2015 3:56 pm
What a terrible shame…
Here we are in MLK week itself and Miss Future AG is slagging RB because of the color of his skin rather than the content of his character. He is, after all, WHITE!… and MALE!… two strikes against him right off the bat. I’m loath to go here (and I don’t really care aside from wanting to make a point here), but any chance you are of the Jewish faith RB?… that would be a trifecta… win, place and show in the list of the left’s favorite bogeymen.
Everyone knows that if you are a Jewish white male, you are privileged just for who you are, and an oppressor of the 1%.
1/22/2015 4:12 pm
This double major in Criminology and Political Science illustrates how social justice warriors prioritize political correctness over basic competence and truth.
1/22/2015 4:14 pm
Just this comment is enough to explain how this stuff happens. Journalism is no long about Truth, and it looks like Criminology is going that way as well.
The new McCarthyism.
1/22/2015 4:21 pm
Please comment on Juliet Lapidos’ NYTimes editorial.
“frats … are hubs for binge drinking and hooking up, sometimes consensual and sometimes not … music loud enough to mask … cries of protest … punch spiked with date-rape drugs.”
1/22/2015 6:02 pm
I’d be more impressed if Nicole came back and defended her claims against the blogger’s response and these comments. As it stands, she did the minimal amount for her class, and no more.
1/22/2015 6:26 pm
@Gunnar Grey
Nah, she’s already chalked this up as another victory for social justice.
1/23/2015 2:25 am
I fear for our country BECAUSE of “youth” like Nicole who consider all self-described victims to be noble standard-bearers for all manner of rape activist causes. The guy removed his condom during a session of consensual sex? Congratulations - you’re now one of the 1 in 4 women entitled to call yourself a rape victim, with all rights and privileges thereunto appertaining.
1/23/2015 2:52 am
Richard,
Keep being you and never change.
1/23/2015 6:11 am
“I wanted you to realize that your choice of words can cause readers to refer to the victim as an alleged victim, rather than a victim, ultimately creating doubt which inculcates distrust.”
Well, that’s the criminology part of the course failed then. For of course Jackie was and is an “alleged victim”. We have here an accusation of a serious criminal offence. Gang rape. And for someone to be a “victim” we must have a perpetrator, ie a criminal.
This is the sort of thing that gets sorted out in the “criminal justice system” to offer our student a small clue.
So, just as no one is a rapist until the verdict’s in then it’s “alleged victim” until it is too.
1/23/2015 10:19 am
Exactly, Tim. Excellent point.
1/23/2015 10:31 am
I started looking around for a course called “Confronting Gender-based Violence in the United States,” but gave up. Try it. I stopped at “Hip Hop Culture, Race, and Gender,” “analyze and deconstruct music lyrics, music videos, and movies.”
1/23/2015 1:24 pm
I’m going to throw out another hypothesis: This is a very well constructed troll.
Mr. Bradley wrote in one of his first posts on the entire Rolling Stone/UVA fiasco that we need to be especially careful of stories that play into our existing biases. Here we have a semi-anonymous student who is taking a course with a title that screams “this is about activism and an agenda not education.” Our student is not the best writer and doesn’t understand concepts like what it means to write in the passive voice. “Nicole” essentially argues that we should automatically believe anyone who holds themselves out as a rape victim without qualification. She doesn’t even seem to have followed this story closely enough to realize that calling Jackie an “alleged victim” wound up being entirely appropriate.
In short, “Nicole” is basically a parody of everything wrong with a large swath of academia and journalism today. She is also more or less perfectly crafted to provoke outrage and ridicule from exactly the kind of people who have been following this blog for the last couple of months as she feeds directly into everyone’s preexisting ideas on what went wrong with Rolling Stone, UVA, etc.
Throw in the fact that there is basically no real identifying information that could trace the comment back to a real person and well…I wonder if someone is trying to show that everyone here can fall into the same trap that Rolling Stone did.
On the other hand, maybe I am just indulging my own biases here. After all I would MUCH rather believe that this is an exceedingly clever prank than that someone actually thinks like that.
1/23/2015 2:00 pm
At U-Va:
WGS 4800
Examining Gender-Based Violence
Lisa Speidel, Instructor
I bet this is the class our Nicole is referring to.
The most shocking thing about her comment was her inability to create proper English sentences. I doubt this is an English as a second language issue as the mistakes seemed more to do with her trying too hard to sound intelligent. It kind of reminded me of the speech by Miss Teen South Carolina back in 2007.
1/23/2015 2:33 pm
There’s a great book whose passive voice title is a remarkably spot-on match up to the positions expressed by RS and SRE:
“Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.” (Carol Tarvis & Elliot Aronson).
1/23/2015 2:50 pm
I fear for our young, too. Please see article titled “Former Vanderbilt Teammates Testify in Rape Case”. (Fox Sports, Jan. 20, 2015)
Not a hoax this time, and very disturbing.
1/23/2015 5:09 pm
Shouldn’t Nicole be interviewing Erdely?
But speaking of her, has she really fallen off the planet? No word of her whatsoever by any colleague or friends? I guess media let other media off easily . . . ?
1/24/2015 4:43 am
Richard, have you seen this: http://knowyourix.org/writing-about-gender-based-violence-and-title-ix-a-guide-for-journalists-and-editors/
This is the background for all kinds of advocate reporters in this matter and I think this way of perverting journalistic integrity has already found its way into all kinds of other professions, including criminal investigations (or at least the way they teach it at some colleges)
1/24/2015 5:41 am
@Skeptic
Very clever. In my opinion a successfull troll presents the following characteristics:
(1) Be like a red flag waved in front of a bull.
(2) Cue the outrage, sit back and enjoy.
(3) The reveal. Ideally, this should be done by the trollees themselves, when it dawns on them that the dial went up past “10” to an impossible “11” on the scale. But that’s difficult to do when parodying feminist grievance hucksters: you cannot be “over-the-topper” than “cosmically over-the-top”.
(3a) Plant a clue. A course titled “Confronting Gender-based Violence in the United States” that search engines cannot find in any course catalog might serve.
(3b) If the trollees are still too dense to catch on… post a helpful skeptical comment.
1/24/2015 5:42 am
Whoops, forgot to sign preceding comment.
1/24/2015 1:03 pm
Student would be wise to read the Washington Post reporting. It’s clear that’s not true - the facts are (for the most part) in.
1/24/2015 1:06 pm
Can’t major in Criminology at UVa either. Sociology fine, not criminology.
1/25/2015 7:19 am
In an effort to train professionals to confront this major health issue, the School of Medicine’s Center for Clinical Global Health Education, in conjunction with the School of Nursing’s Center for Global Nursing, will offer Confronting Gender-Based Violence, a distance-education course that began enrollment on Dec. 1.
http://archive.gazette.jhu.edu/2011/12/19/confronting-gender-based-violence/
1/26/2015 12:51 pm
http://archive.gazette.jhu.edu/2011/12/19/confronting-gender-based-violence/
1/26/2015 6:48 pm
Nice find, Anonymous, but that online distance learning course in 2011 was not for undergraduates: “The program targets health care providers—physicians, nurses, psychologists, social workers and lay caregivers—in low-resource settings in Africa, Asia, Latin America and beyond.”
Moreover, that course offered by Johns Hopkins sounds like it fills a pressing need, too. Probably money well spent. A ditz like “Nicole” (if she is real) wouldn’t last two weeks as a caregiver in an environment where rapes occur frequently.
Note, I am not claiming that Nicole/Skeptic are the same person and that they are a troll. Just voicing my suspicions is all.
1/27/2015 4:14 pm
@ I-Roller:
While I like the way you think, I’m afraid I am going to have to disappoint. For whatever an anonymous disclaimer on the web is worth, Nicole isn’t me.
I’ve simply seen too much in the way of trolls/false flags/whatever to accept truly absurd comments at face value.