It happened, it was halted, it's happening again. As long as lower education is so disparate between mostly white and mostly black schools, it's proper. Revamp the education system so all high school graduates have the same educational opportunities, I would support removing it again, but we are moving the opposite direction. No link required, I explained....but from the link you provided....
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html

Did you read the link you provided about the one place supporting a day of absence? Evergreen? Their "day of absence" was 100% voluntary, not enforceable and not enforced, contrary to your claim.

The reporter chased out wasn't chased out, he was confronted, and he had left the media area to interrupt the event by "interviewing" people who didn't want to be interviewed in the middle of the event. Trump's campaign has adopted this tactic and added violence, and often physically assaulted reporters even when they comply and stay in the media area. This particular event was akin to a reporter jumping on stage and insisting the speaker let him interview him then and there, disrupting the sanctioned event.

Um....this was a discussion of why people would vote for Trump, not what's happening in Canada. That said, you can't expect a university to give a platform to a person who would use it to degrade and denigrate the university and it's policies. I wouldn't expect a religious school to host atheistic pro-life lectures, and I wouldn't expect publicly funded universities to host anti inclusion lectures.

Duh...your alleged "whiteness" class was not defining whiteness as inherently negative, it was this....
CSRE 136: White Identity Politics (AFRICAAM 136B, ANTHRO 136B)
Pundits proclaim that the 2016 Presidential election marks the rise of white identity politics in the United States. Drawing from the field of whiteness studies and from contemporary writings that push whiteness studies in new directions, this upper-level seminar asks, does white identity politics exist? How is a concept like white identity to be understood in relation to white nationalism, white supremacy, white privilege, and whiteness? We will survey the field of whiteness studies, scholarship on the intersection of race, class, and geography, and writings on whiteness in the United States by contemporary public thinkers, to critically interrogate the terms used to describe whiteness and white identities. Students will consider the perils and possibilities of different political practices, including abolishing whiteness or coming to terms with white identity. What is the future of whiteness? n*Enrolled students will be contacted regarding the location of the course. And it was cancelled in 2016-17. Don't be dishonest, it will change my responses.

Not sure why you made up this falsely alleged definition of racism that appears nowhere in the definitions or class descriptions you linked, but you did. Calling bullshit....Again.

Critical Race Theory (7016): This course will consider one of the newest intellectual currents within American Legal Theory -- Critical Race Theory. Emerging during the 1980s, critical race scholars made many controversial claims about law and legal education -- among them that race and racial inequality suffused American law and society, that structural racial subordination remained endemic, and that both liberal and critical legal theories marginalized the voices of racial minorities. Course readings will be taken from both classic works of Critical Race Theory and newer interventions in the field, as well as scholarship criticizing or otherwise engaging with Critical Race Theory from outside or at the margins of the field. Meeting dates: The class will meet 7:15PM to 9:15PM on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (January 7, 8, and 9), and the following Monday and Tuesday (January 13 and 14). Elements used in grading: Class Participation, Written Assignments.

Not anti white/pro minority/white=evil....but an examination of how laws as written and enforced may (or may not) be an example of racial injustice codified in law, whether by accident or intent. Again, you misrepresent the facts to pretend a class that examines the roll of race in law is a racist class teaching whites are bad and blacks are good.

If everyone BUT Asains do poorly because they aren't offered the same opportunities to excell, then yes, we need to step in to UPGRADE the opportunities of everyone else, that doesn't translate into downgrading the opportunities Asains are offered. Derp. This bullshit is the same racist trope the anti equality side has used for years, it's just bullshit. Asians aren't penalized for being competent at math nor for being Asian....neither were whites, which was V 1.0 of that same argument.

Identity politics are on both sides, played hard by the right too, to the detriment of society.

Affirmative action got national pushback from the racist right the day it was described as a plan, and constantly since.

It seems you may be confused by morons who would tell you racism is dead, reverse racism is out of control. When white women start being lynched by black mobs and blacks get a free pass for breaking the law, come back and try again. Until then, you sound like a bully whining about getting a time out for punching a smaller kid because they're a different race and proclaiming the whole system is unfair to white kids because you had a minor consequence forced on you.

Just to be clear, the officer who made the remark (Carri Weber) was not the one giving the seminar.

The presenter (in the red shirt) gives the statistic.
Angry White Dude questions it.
Weber remarks about privilege.
Angry White Dude gets annoyed.

Good info there....thanks.

What I read there is he was ignorantly incredulous about a statistic because, not knowing any transgender people, he hasn't heard any complain about their mistreatment.
As an official who was giving a training seminar on how to professionally and respectfully deal with people who are different from you, her response was disastrous.
If they intend to continue having her lead these seminars, I hope they retrain her to be professional and respectful when dealing with people who are different from her, even if they are an ignoramus.

Didn't call for censorship. I just find little benefit in singling out an individual with a very tiny platform for saying something dumb. The idea that her being singled out online to be inundated with death threats and vitriol for her and her family (her and her family were doxxed over this) seems to far outweigh the benefit of "stopping this woman going around the country"... seeing as how she's one woman with basically no following and little influence. I doubt she's done many of these talks at all or will do more. (Looked it up. This talk was the only one she'd given all year. Only one on a different subject the year before. Both locally in her area.)

Spreading videos like this after someone has already been doxxed and threatened only seem to help compound the injury. And it's not ideological to me. Justine Sacco said something stupid online and got a crazy amount of blowback and lost her job for it- I don't agree with that either.

If you want to call out what you view as racism, going after the little guys for saying something a little off isn't the way. Go after people with influence. Hell, a police chief in Oklahoma was just caught running a white supremacist website and record label. That guy has direct impact on the rest of people's lives and even if they get to keep their lives in some situations.

Ashleigh is an unemployed recent college grad. The most influence she has are the 15 or 20 people who were all adults that signed up for this particular seminar. I imagine they either agreed with or are old enough to make up their own mind on what was said.

@PlayhousePals & @oritteropo
Nope, that's my own creation. I attended a Photoshop seminar last year (as part of an advanced vocational education course), but me and one of my classmates already knew how to use Photoshop, so we kept challenging each other to create strange and funny images throughout the seminar. You can admire our creations here: https://imgur.com/a/NFavi (but please don't share them, they probably violate a ton of copyrights ).
My profile pic is part of the first image. Our homework was to photoshop a small group of meerkats into a desert. I added a few more - and five pop culture easter eggs.

Is not the "immorality" of homosexuality derived from Leviticus, in the Old Testament? (and as I read it, it only speaks about bi-sexuality, laying with a man as you lay with a woman is not the same thing as homosexuality, homosexuality is a man laying with a man as a different, straight man lays with a woman)

If, as research suggests, that's the case, are not those who advocate against homosexuality non-Christians? Didn't Jesus teach that love and acceptance for others supplants all the Old Testament rules?
If not, why do Christians not picket Red Lobster for serving shellfish and Banana Republic for selling blended fabrics, and hold re-education seminars for shrimp and spandex lovers?

Most of this shit could be learned at a 45 minute Home Depot "seminar"...

Yeah when she was telling him about what the results meant I found myself thinking "What is this some kind of religious self help seminar? How much did he pay for this lady?"

Yes, money cant buy happiness, but can it buy a seminar "How to avoid vert video recording"?

Um, you’re still overthinking it. I don’t think comedy and jokes are worth dissecting, like we’re at some seminar with Powerpoint slides showing intersecting circles and flowcharts and phylogenetic trees showing comedy lineage, trying to extract the "why".

I don’t think men are “threatened” by her comedy (as someone here wrote) any more than I’m threatened by seeing a video of Miley Cyrus shouting “eat my pu**y” into the mic and then gyrating against a blow up doll. I’m sure somebody out there must find that very shocking and sexy.

Didn’t mean to hit Pause on the laugh track, I just don’t find her funny for no other reason than she doesn't make me laugh. To each his own.

Believe it or not, I think I was already wondering about those type of topics at that age (as I had always been a HUGE space and science fan, I knew by age "3" essentially that I wanted to be an Astronaut; which I'm sure my parents got a kick out of).

However, here is the problem with asking that/those type of questions (as I believe many people have more than likely been down this road). The community and the adults around you shape parts of your reality AND how you decide to continue to ask or answer that question(s). In my case, the problem was: religion. The answer to ALL my questions back then were: religion...

It wasn't until I was around 16 that I became highly suspicious and then began to bring up ALL of these questions I had "thought" WERE answered...but, they weren't at all. Finally by the age of 18 (into 19) I had shaken off the chains of religion that had held me down and to this day I have to wonder what would have become of me, what COULD have become of me, if I had an educated answer to my questions and not merely the answer that is given by those that don't know (a.k.a., I hate to say it, but it IS true: the stupid or ignorant people).

Religion DID, however, give me answers to some things I couldn't have gotten anywhere else. But, in the long run I must admit that--while a small amount of good came from it--it truly didn't out-weigh the tremendous amount of damage that had been done to me (as I bet others can attest to this being true for them as well). I was forced to go backwards through my entire life and then question myself on everything I believed and stood for, including "facts" and other such things that science uses as foundational elements--but, religion uses belief in the same manner as "facts" (as we were taught in some cases to say that we "knew" or "know" that something is true, rather than using "believe", "thought", or had "faith"...pretty shady right?!). This took a very long time, years on end, to finally "un-clutter" my mind.

Now I'm left wondering how well I would have done without all that nonsense pored into my mind DAILY (as I attended seminar...).

So I appreciate Neil's answer here in many ways. He is telling this kid to explore the world around him and to some degree, don't obey everything you are told (so long as it isn't dangerous). He is absolutely right. I merely wish I had people that told me the same things. As I didn't get "this idea" until FAR later in life (since my mind becomes "infatuated" with questions and ideas, getting the religious answer to my questions prompted me to literally think of everything possible within the religion to make things work "logically", and I was very much "zealot" like...because as I said, these questions consume me, so I cannot help but BE a "zealot")...

But, eventually I had a Physics class and that re-opened everything. I started to ask those questions again and NOW I found a new answer to what I had previously been told. The huge difference this time was: facts and proof; and also that it is all derived from logic. Physics was essentially undeniable. You could not refute it, because this was how we made things work around the world--via engineering--the math within it is used to control, make, and imagine anything you wish to engineer (or if you wish to do an experiment). I already had major issues with religion, but I was making logical "excuses" to make it work. But, with this huge influx of knowledge everything changed (how I wish we would have had Physics in Junior High; why do we not...don't we want engineers?).

I hate to add religion into this topic, but I thought it good to point out that this kid may be heavily influenced by Neil. This conversation that Neil directs towards him may end up being one of the most important events in his life. Just as mine was when I asked certain questions, I received religious based answers...practically deciding the path I would take...at least while I was a child/kid. But, had I been a slightly more stupid or just ignorant person, then I would still, right now, believe fully in religion.

So, when a child asks you ANY question like this do not joke around about it--while it is cute, you must remember that YOU are shaping their future and their destiny...

/lengthy

Oh, the technique worked perfectly. It removed money from the pockets of idiots, exactly as intended.

And sorry @Stormsinger, but I think there is no chance that this dude actually believes in what he is selling. Not only that, he likely has enough experience with running this or similar scams that he knows that being debunked and maybe going viral like this will probably be a net positive to his bottom line -- more people will show up to see for themselves than will be discouraged away. Hell, I bet a higher-than-average percentage of the people attending Day 1 (excluding the group that was there as skeptics from the outset) came back for Day 2 just to see how he would respond.

There's a sucker born every minute. Some people believe in Ouija boards, pyramid power, homeopathy, etc. And some people apparently believe in "EFO". However, I feel confident that the guys putting on the "seminar" and doing the "demonstrations" (I use those terms in the loosest way possible) AREN'T among the believers.

I saw a demo of this material at a NASA seminar once. The guy held a tile of it in his hand, toasted the other side to near-glowing with a blow torch, and 5 seconds later flipped it onto his other hand. The whole room flinched.

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

Nice @critical_d. An even more layman explanation:

When your computer tries to load a domain name like "videosift.com" it asks your local Domain Name Servers (usually provided by your ISP) a question like "What is the numeric address of videosift.com?"

The name servers check whatever their records state and that's what they return. In this case, they were returning an old address that is no longer functional, so your computer says, "Okay, I got the address. Let's connect to it," but it fails and your browser goes kaput with "Can't connect!"

When we make a change to our DNS records, it's at a single place: the authority who has control over our domain (e.g., GoDaddy [though, that's intentionally not who we're with]). Once we've made a change, all the DNS servers around the entire planet need to get updated with the new domain-name-to-IP-address translation. Some get updated quickly while others take a very long time (depending on factors we won't cover in this seminar).

For those whose DNS servers take a very long time, there are two loopholes:

1) Before asking a DNS server to translate a domain name, your computer looks at its "hosts" file. If you've specified the address for a domain there, that's the address it will use. (You could really screw with someone by changing the address of google.com, for example, to some other address.)

2) You can change your computer's DNS servers to something like Google's, which are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. They tend to get updated pretty quickly in many cases, so when your computer asks for the IP address of videosift.com, it will get the right answer.

Clear as mud?