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Horrible, Bad, Insensitive Joke Requires Justice to Be Meted Out
A tweet from student Jaden McNeil last week said, “Congratulations to George Floyd on being drug free for an entire month!” This prompted a decision for Kansas State football players to boycott.
Frankly, I am surprised this joke wasn’t posted on our “Funny Political Memes” page. But in today’s world, who here would dare have the courage or stupidity to do so…
If this joke were told by a late-night comedic host, would he be canceled? Is free speech no longer one of our constitutional rights? Will Kansas State officially cancel this student? I think the odds are high that they will. Intolerance is ironically the highest honorable badge of the so-called, self-declared tolerant.
I am simply exhausted by the totality of the insanity.
Published in General
So what exactly is the threat to this jerks constitutional rights? Is he facing jail? Loss of property? Is the State coming after him in some way? No?
Kid has no right to attend a University that will not have him and he can plead and apologize to the community that will now seek to ostracize him for his remarks, or not. People can face the consequence of their action and hopefully grow wiser from it.
Wrong again. This is a state university. If he gets the boot, the state is “coming after him.”
Looks like K-State won’t be playing football this year. That, or the players that do take the field will get creamed.
Of course not, as long as the victim of the joke is about a dead white guy . . .
One could argue that any school that accepts taxpayer funding is prohibited from infringing on students’ freedom of speech, not just state universities.
This event has been burning at me all weekend, since it showed up in my Twitter feed by a person I follow taking the university President to task. I’m from Kansas and chose K-State in the great KU/KSU division the state has so I’m following it a little closer. I know that St. George is untouchable now and that’s why they call the tweet racist, but how can the university seriously say it’s a racist tweet? Ted Kennedy is coming up on eleven years of sobriety and I’ve used this joke framework two or three times to wish him X years being sober. Should I be condemned too?
Peering into the Twitter thread, the student also recently commented that Bubba Wallace’s claim sounded fishy, so “it’s not just this one tweet”. Apparently he’s founded an America First group, which is also putting him on the destroy list. The school should tell the football players to suck it up and focus on their task. If they don’t want to play, pull their scholarships.
I think that we know the answer. Even preceding the many absurdities in recent memory, we’d long ago lost perspective on what is truly racist and what is not. I’m good calling it “insensitive,” which used to be the all purpose catch-all for remarks the hyper-sensitive did not like. But Floyd is black, the “joke” is about him, ergo racist.
And that’s almost all of them.
That lost perspective might have some basis in the thought that blacks can’t be racist because they don’t have any power. I think Jesse Jackson might have gotten that ball rolling thirty-some years ago. Changing the definition from thinking one race is superior to thinking one race is superior and has the power to do something about it weakens the definition and the discourse.
I have mixed thoughts about this. The “joke” was terrible and displays rank stupidity on the part of the student who made it. And I grant that the boycott is way way over the top. On the other hand, I can imagine speech that everyone here would agree should get someone thrown out of school for indecency. Where do we draw the line? How close does the joke come to that line?
There’s a difference between opposing “wokeness” and defending disgusting behavior.
It’s a college kid. The line should be tempered by 1) content and 2) the level of maturity expected.
I hope I’m not capable of thinking about what type of remarks might justifiably get someone thrown out of a state school, but it’s really about time that some learned the meaning of freedom of speech. We are fast forgetting it.
That does seem to be how atheists played the “Freedom from religion” schtick.
Well, again, what is the line? As Jonah Goldberg likes to point out, we all believe in censorship. Few people would agree, for example, to a “pedophile hour” show airing on Saturday morning TV, or a TV documentary on how to torture pets. There’s got to be some level of decorum that schools can demand from students. That line used to be very strict: Students will wear the proscribed uniform. Shoes will be shined. Professors will be addressed as “Sir.” We’ve move away from such rules but have we thrown away all expectations of self-restraint?
Schools demand various levels of decorum from students, and, fortunately, these usually are directed at conduct. To get to your direct question, as far as speech goes, the courts have spent plenty of time drawing lines–focusing on calls to violence, etc.
I’m rather sure that there is more than enough “speech” on college campuses that would be offensive to me and many others, but I’m not calling for the speakers to be kicked out of school for words because I recognize that the line is a long way off.
Let me try out a half-baked idea on you (push-back desired). There’s a concept in economics called the “tragedy of the commons” that you’re probably familiar with. If not, here’s a quick definition: The tendency for unowned or communally-owned resources to be overused or abused. Often, market “externality” problems are caused because property rights are poorly defined or poorly enforced. So, if my factory pollutes the water that runs through your property, in a society in which property rights are upheld, you would be able to sue me in order to make me either stop polluting your water or to reimburse you for the damage I’m doing to your property. In the 19th Century, however, judges decided, on the basis of then popular utilitarian thought, that my factory was a greater public benefit than your farm, so I won in court. That led to a lot more environmental damage than was necessary.
It seems to me that universities used to “own” the campus culture. That is, they could demand a specified level of decorum of students. Their contracts with students included the rules. If a student broke the rules – that is, breached their contract – they could be expelled. The federal government overrode the universities’ and students’ rights of contract, by threatening to pull public funding from the universities. The campus culture then became a “commons” that no one owned. What we see now is a fight over control of that commons. Students aren’t mature enough to exercise that sort of control, so we’re seeing dysfunction.
I’m not familiar enough with the concept to have an informed opinion on the analogy. However, I do remember Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in ’64-’65, which was a major assuault on a university’s ability to “own” a culture. The point, I think, was that the spirit of a university–and certainly a state run university–is inconsistent with ownership insofar as that ownership efffects a repression of speech. Of course, this brings us back to line-drawing, but, in most instances, it strikes me that the negative fallout is from speech accompanied by conduct, not merely speech.
One of the points that stuns me about this situation is the the football team’s belief that they are so important that the threat of them boycotting practice can force the admin into action against another student. This is the equivalent of a toddler refusing to move in the grocery store unless they get the piece of candy. I am sure there are radical left comments daily made on campus (ie kill all cops) that clearly do not receive similar protests. This is the mainstream adoption of Antifa tactics against anything
conservative. they disagree with or take offense to. (edited appropriately)I think that I disagree, but I can be convinced that I’m wrong. I do want universities to be able to restrict free speech. I don’t want students to have the “right” to shout down speakers, professors, and other students merely for disagreeing with them. I don’t want students to have the “right” to shout obscenities in class or in on-campus demonstrations.
Are you sure you want to label that joke as “conservative”? I really don’t want to claim it for our side.
And Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead . . .
Like Barack Obama was powerless . . .
OK, and I would share those concerns. At the risk of hair-splitting, the worst examples have an element of conduct to them and are location specific. Shouting obscenities in class is disruptive as conduct, and I would argue that shouting down speakers is, by definition, anti-speech. So that would assist in line-drawing. The tweet at the center of this thread really does nothing but offend, as would, for example, someone who set up a stand on a campus green and expounded on topics of choice. Bottom line for me is the line should not be drawn based on the content of the speech, but on the means and location of the speech.
I can live with that. If I shout that joke in the school cafeteria, people have no choice but to hear. If I post it on my Facebook page, no one is obliged to read it.
I disagree. Speech can be allusional. This is a response to the deification of Floyd. Floyd was drugged up at the time he resisted arrest, and that may have contributed to the need to retrain him (no matter how unrestrained the restraining was).
You’ve taken my comment somewhat out of the context of a comparison to disruptive speech/ behavior. It was not directed at whether one might not be offended, but rather at the fact that it only does that at worst.
Same here. Though perhaps I should have chosen KU cause I flunked out of KSU. Several times.
I did get a degree….eventually. Just not from there. :)
But having this happen at KSU is just depressing.
Am I wrong, or do we not have many present-day Kansans here?
I ended up at Wichita State because I liked planes and space and wasn’t going to go to KU for an aero engineering degree.
The Cosmosphere in Hutchinson is a lot of fun–at least for a lay person.
Yeah, I ended up at K-State to do a mechanical engineering degree. That didn’t work out. Wichita State contributed several transfer hours to my eventual degree from Friends University.
Both universities have had wokeness in the news lately.
Sadly all universities seem to be suffering from wokeness.
Good ol’ Friends University of Central Kansas. Obviously not their real name but I don’t know how many times we used that line in high school, being edgy high school students.