Entitlement, sensitivity & world gone mad, indeed.

I'm of the seemingly increasingly unpopular opinion that no one can make you feel badly about yourself.  Only your own emotional reaction to stimulus determines how you feel.  "Sensitivity" to "offensive" comments removes all of your own power and places it in the hands of others - which I never understood, why you'd want to give your power to those you ostensibly disagree with - and how they "make" you feel.  But only you can make you feel things.  You can't control the world or others, all you can control is your own response.

Plus in terms of free speech and expression, things like this just piss me off.

It's a Mad, Mad World - Reason Magazine:

"...In short, in response to a single, isolated act of vicarious offence-taking, where a woman who had not witnessed the dance routine decided on behalf of mentally ill people everywhere that a photograph of the dance routine was offensive, a university has banned said routine, censored the dancers, apologized, changed its rules on dance costumes, and stepped up its efforts to cleanse its students’ minds of allegedly insensitive, inappropriate thoughts about mentally ill people. I told you that the only word that could accurately describe these bizarre events is “mad.”

Why did a university so quickly and willingly genuflect to the complaints of one blogger? And why have media outlets across Chicago and elsewhere treated this weird episode as if it were perfectly normal? Chrisa Hickey, the blogger in question, gets all defensive when I ask her what she thinks about the impact of her complaint. “I surmise that you intend to write an article about how I am a soul-crushing busy-body,” she says (well, if the hat fits). But, she continues, “I never requested that the school censor or in any other way stop the team from dancing in whatever costumes they see fit.”

...Hickey does have a point: she didn’t explicitly demand censorship of the dancers and possible censorship of future routines. Instead, those things were offered up to her as a kind of sacrifice by RMU, with school officials desperately hoping they might appease the gods of sensitivity and media fury.

What Straitjacketgate really shows is the power of sensitivity today, its extraordinary influence over public life and freedom of expression. But this is a two-way process. It is not enough simply for someone to feel offended; there also must be spineless institutions willing to bow and scrape and promise never to do it again..."