Chicago Tech Academy student Tyvion Campbell, 18, performed a split as she walked across the state to get her diploma during her graduation ceremony last month the Harold Washington Cultural Center in Chicago. The exuberant display got cheers from the crowd, but the young woman, a gymnast, was refused her diploma as a result, and subsequently reprimanded by school officials.
“The principal [Zataya Shackelford] told me that ‘I need to think of a way to make up for what I’ve done. This was supposed to be a celebratory moment and I made it about myself,’” Campbell told reporters. She was escorted out of the ceremony and still hasn’t received her diploma. “It was disappointing,” Tylon added. “It really hurt my feelings. I cried and I couldn’t even continue the graduation.” Apparently the school has no specific policy prohibiting celebratory gymnastics.
I’m amazed that any school would do this. All of the graduations I participated in were handled with restraint and decorum by the graduates (think of the ceremony in “An Officer and a Gentleman”) and any student performing even mild “Hooray for me!” gestures would have looked like a buffoon. However, students parading across the stage like they had just won an Olympic gold or a “Best in Show” ribbon has been standard graduation practice for decades now. In fact, the amount of grandstanding seen in high school ceremonies has increased in inverse proportion to how much a diploma means. The excessively proud high school grad with the screaming family in the audience probably can’t read. Tylon graduated with a 3.5 GPA and plans to study Business Administration at Georgia State University, we are told by the news media, meaning that she at least thought she had something to split about. Sadly, everybody on the stage probably had that high a grade point average or higher.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Was it fair for the school principal to punish the student for her split?
Now, other cases where students were punished for crossing metaphorical lines during their graduation ceremonies are easy calls. For example, Leen Hijaz, a senior at North Carolina’s Clayton High School, had her mic cut off during her commencement speech when she stated to rant against I.C.E. Good! She had no right to hijack the proceedings. In my fantasy world, her diploma would have been revoked and and she would be sent back to the fifth grade to learn about the rule of law and civics.
Ethics Alarms 
This is a tough one. Making it about the ceremony itself and not whether or not she or her fellow graduates did or did not deserve a high school diploma, I would say the school has an obligation to enforce standards at high attendance events.
She did the splits. Next time, someone else does cartwheels. Someone else blares out “We are the Champions” by Queen from a hidden cell phone. Before you know it, the endless ceremonies become performance art demonstrations. At some point, slowing down the ceremony and taking attention away from other graduates has to be discouraged.
I don’t understand why any of that would be bad? What’s the point of the ceremony if not to celebrate the students? I get that there are a lot of them, so they can’t all have 5 minutes to dance and preen, but doing something that doesn’t slow down the production doesn’t seem beyond the pale.
The problem is, as John Paul puts it below, the slippery slope (not a fallacy in this case). Do you know teens? Give them an inch they take a mile. “Doesn’t slow down the ceremony” quickly becomes a 5 minute performance times the 800 graduates walking across the stage.
Then there’s public decorum – watch the video – calling it just a “split” is disingenuous at best. That doesn’t look like anything Simone Biles has done in a gymnastics routine. It was an intentionally sexually provocative move.
Just watched the video(thought it was a still image when I commented).
That was “just a split” as much as having casual sexual intercourse is “just a handshake”.
Knowing my regional demographics and cultures, after seeing the administration’s demographic in the video, I would predict that there is a less than zero chance that behavior standards were not clearly communicated because someone doing a “split” like that is not merely pulling a stunt that is apparently what her culture thinks is appropriate for the moment.
Next question beyond the diploma fairness, is this video now her first job interview?
Oh no, an intentionally sexy dance move? I think you need a little more Kevin Bacon and a little less John Lithgow in your life.
I reject the idea that there’s a slippery slope here, and the slippery slope is almost always a fallacy. What makes a slippery slope argument fallacious is an articulable way to stop the slide: you can’t argue there’s no way to stop the slide if someone can lay out the way to stop the slide.
I can do that here: What kids are good at doing is testing boundaries, and when there is no boundary, or when the fence is weak, or when the warden is asleep, they push. She said all the words out loud: There was no rule against this. Like Jack said earlier: This isn’t a new phenomenon. Not having a rule against this signals permissiveness. They could, and probably will, articulate a rule. That would either stop the behavior or enable the recourse.
I’m not sure that there *should* be a rule against this, but people can have opinions about that, and I can at least see where they’re coming from. But we don’t need to control against things like this if we want to head off worse acts, we can control against those worse acts. We can control against this, if we want to….. But at least own that you want to.
I think there might be one more high school diploma too many.
“You can’t say a slide is unstoppable if someone can tell you how to stop it.” This is a tautology.
Using “articulable way to stop the slide” is clunky. In the context of a graduation ceremony, the “way to stop the slide” is incredibly simple: school rules.
Writing “reject the idea that there’s a slippery slope here, and the slippery slope is almost always a fallacy” is redundant.
“Humble Talent” got caught up trying to sound like a philosophy textbook – not so humbly – and ended up sounding like another high school diploma conundrum. PS: Erosion of precedent, escalation, and “rule creep” are real.
“You can’t say a slide is unstoppable if someone can tell you how to stop it.” This is a tautology.
What’s your point? Apparently someone needed someone to say the obvious. I can do that as well as anyone.
“Using “articulable way to stop the slide” is clunky. In the context of a graduation ceremony, the “way to stop the slide” is incredibly simple: school rules.”
I disagree with the former, you’d be surprised how many people think things without being able to explain why. Going through the exercise of articulation is important. And as to the latter…. I literally said that: “They could, and probably will, articulate a rule.”
“Writing “reject the idea that there’s a slippery slope here, and the slippery slope is almost always a fallacy” is redundant.”
No… There are in fact two very different things being communicated there. Not recognizing that, I think, says more about you than my writing style.
““Humble Talent” got caught up trying to sound like a philosophy textbook – not so humbly – and ended up sounding like another high school diploma conundrum. PS: Erosion of precedent, escalation, and “rule creep” are real. “
First off… My brother in Christ, your username is “kawaii65c843be72”.
More importantly… Why is that bad? Rules change on the daily, and in the grand scheme of human history, those changes aggregate to us being in a much better place than we were previously. The point of the exercise is to identify what materially matters, and to try to guide towards that, not merely point at something vaguely and say that more of it could happen.
“Rules change on the daily… those changes aggregate to us being in a much better place… The point of the exercise is to identify what materially matters…”
Dear Ethics Alarms readers, he completely undermines his own original argument. Originally, he argued that the slippery slope is a fallacy because we can easily stop the slide by articulating a rule (e.g., “Splits are okay, cartwheels are not”). But now, he is arguing that sliding is actually good. He claims that rule erosion and “creeping” boundaries are just natural evolution that makes society “a much better place.” He has just admitted that the slippery slope is real in practice.He says his redundant sentence communicated “two very different things,” but notice he didn’t actually bother to explain what those two things were. He just insulted my capability to see it.
When I raised the concrete issues of erosion of precedent, escalation, and rule creep, he dismissed them by waving his hand and calling them “pointing at something vaguely.” Notwithstanding, precedent is not “vague.” It’s the foundation of governance and ethics. If the school permits a split this year, on what explicit ethical or administrative criteria can they justify suspending a student for a cartwheel next year without being guilty of arbitrary enforcement? Speak to your obvious truth about that, “Humble Talent!” Let er rip!
“Humble Talent” (yes, the scare quotes are necessary) says that because the slippery slope is categorized as a logical fallacy in textbooks, it cannot exist in human behavior. This is a classic “fallacy fallacy” (assuming a claim is false just because an argument for it can be parsed as a fallacy).
I was never a high principle, but if I could go back in time and be one on one particular occasion, I might be tempted…
Doesn’t “teenagers are going to test boundaries” undercut the argument that the slippery slope is illusory and a logical fallacy?
jvb
Yes indeed, teens are biologically compelled in that direction. Criminals test “law and order” boundaries too. Grade inflation is another class of slippery slope on which, if memory serves correctly, our illustrious host, Mr. Marshall, has written something interesting. My main point, however, was to use a small pin of concrete reality to deflate a particular bag of abstract gas.
Not unless you’re a retard. Sorry, but the slope is only as slippery as you let it be. The fallacy is the assertion that there is no way to stop the descent.
If your kid asks to stay up until 10 instead of their normal bedtime at 9, you can say no. If you say yes, and then they ask for 11, you still have the ability to say no. Nothing about the expansion to 10 requires you to say yes at 11, it doesn’t even make it harder.
This isn’t complicated. This isn’t parenting voodoo. It’s an exercise in negotiation, boundaries and responsibility. You’ve probably done variations of these conversations your entire life, I’m sure some rules slackened, and neither you or your kid died in a ditch.
It is always fascinating to watch someone so completely devoid of intellectual steam that they have to resort to middle-school slurs to try to stay afloat. For one, my username might be a system-generated default, but yours, ‘Humble Talent,’ highlights your absolute self-reflection bankruptcy.
If you let a child stay up until 10:00 PM once, you haven’t physically locked the door to 11:00 PM, but you have weakened your leverage. You established a brand-new baseline. Anyone who has actually parented—or managed human beings—knows that rolling back an encroaching baseline requires vastly more energy and creates far more friction than maintaining the original boundary.
In any case, a household is a private negotiation; a graduation ceremony is an institutional event with hundreds of stakeholders. When an institution permits one highly public, highly inappropriate boundary-push without consequence, it doesn’t just ‘negotiate’ with the next person—it signals institutional capitulation.I don’t want to use the “r” word you directed at someone else. So have a nice day.
POW! BIFF! WHAP!
Humble Talent was meant to be ironic, but I think the irony might be lost.
Regardless… I think you’re too stupid to have this conversation.
Over the course of a child’s development… Things like bedtimes *should* change. You can’t be afraid of making those changes because of the slippery slope monster hiding behind every corner. And you shouldn’t roll that back unless you have a reason to, because it’s important to aspire to consistency, but if you have a reason to roll back, you should be able to act on it without mealy-mouthing your way around leverage. You sound insufferably weak.
And sure, a graduation ceremony, or a job environment, is orders of magnitude more complicated than a parent-child relationship. I was hoping I could explain to you the simpler scenario and scale up. I’m just going to put it out there though: People work their way through these dynamics daily. HR is one of the fields where the rules are tightening, not loosening… It’s obviously possible to do that when people think it actually matters.
“I was hoping I could explain to you the simpler scenario and scale up.” — LOL! This guy’s actually getting very funny! He insults everybody as inferior swimmers, then jumps in a lake and proceeds to drown.
If no one thinks that but you, did it really happen?
Humble Talent wrote, “I think you’re too stupid to have this conversation.”
There you go again with that pattern of losing your mind because someone has the audacity to challenge you. Seriously HT, sometimes you act like a snowflake that’s snowflaking hard.
Steve… This asshole came out hot, straight out of the gates, and he’s saying things that are legitimately stupid, personal, and inconsistent. He obviously doesn’t understand some of the concepts being talked about, not limited to what a fallacy even is.
But I understand why me pointing that out might annoy you, because you do the same damn thing.
Again… I’ve said this to you in the past: There are all kinds of people in this forum who disagree with me, and I don’t end up calling stupid, or getting rude to them, and it’s because they aren’t stupid, and they aren’t rude to me first.
Humble Talent wrote, “There are all kinds of people in this forum who disagree with me, and I don’t end up calling stupid, or getting rude to them, and it’s because they aren’t stupid, and they aren’t rude to me first.”
So you’re basically stating “They had it coming“.
2 A. Sicilian Ethics, or “They had it coming“
I get it but you made that one far too easy HT.
Catcha later.
What you’ve never understood, Steve, is that the rationalizations are only rationalizations if they’re used to rationalize. I’m not saying what I’m doing is right, I’m explaining what I do. You want to call that unethical? Sure. I can bear that cross. It’s not like I’m going to burst into flames.
The problem is that that still makes you an idiot that doesn’t understand what he’s talking about, and from my perspective, that’s worse.
Whatever helps you sleep at night HT.
Drop it.
Steve Witherspoon, you correctly know you’re in a losing battle at this point. When a person who’s old enough to be called a man is exposed as an intellectual poseur online, in his “home away from home,” after certainly it’s been done to him in his personal life more than once, it’s an affront that he’s not going to allow. He’ll continue to spew out nonsense, using sentences that are mostly revealing as examples of mental disorder rather than effective thinking – and are quite funny as I have pointed out – and of course they’ll be lashing out, tantrums, name calling, spitting, crude hand gestures, etc. He’s not the first and will not be the last. Let’s just hope the next example has more talent that this one.
kawaii65c843be72,
Humble Talent and I have a very long history and he just can’t seem to get beyond his bias and drop his BS personal attacks. It’s possible there may be some PTSD causing him to be a little pricky. I blow most of his absurd insults off as the same kind of BS rhetoric that was thrown around infantry barracks back in my Army days, it just bounces off.
I learned long ago that people have to learn how to get beyond their hate filled bias or it eats them up, it appears to me that Humble Talent just hasn’t learned that yet.
Given your long history, I leave him entirely to you and will no longer comment in this thread. Nice of you to be understanding and to maintain a long term relationship with him. You’re a good man, Steve Witherspoon. Don’t be doing any splits onstage if you get a good citizen medal. On second thought…
I have never, and will never, listen to you. The way to end the conversation is for you to stop replying.
Humble Talent wrote, “The way to end the conversation is for you to stop replying.”
No kidding Einstein.
It seems that you’ve haven’t learned from your own advice.
I didn’t start this conversation, Zoltar Speaks, you replied to me.
And low key, I think there’s a non-zero chance that you’re also kawaii, your style (being very generous with the term) is so similar. I suppose it could be coincidence. I wonder if our host can see the IP address of posters?
Humble Talent wrote, “I think there’s a non-zero chance that you’re also kawaii”
Now you’re making up stuff? Seriously HT, give it a rest you’re going to rupture a blood vessel. 😉
I mean… You’ve changed your name before, you’ve had conversations with yourself before. I just have an inkling. I could be wrong. I just did the exercise of looking and apparently Word Press does in fact log IP addresses of commentors, so it isn’t impossible to disprove.
But more than that, Steve, I just looked at your blog… Your constant whining of “I’ve been blocked”, “all my posts have been deleted”, “everyone else is a snowflake”… Has it ever occurred to you that you’re simply insufferable, and no one wants to put up with you? That the problem isn’t necessarily your point of view, but how you express it? That the linear feet of continuous, logic-proof diatribes are annoying? I say this feel cognizant that I do something similar, but have managed to go my entire life with only being blocked once, and I don’t particularly blame the guy that did.
Humble Talent wrote, “…you’ve had conversations with yourself before…”
Is it fair to assume you’re talking about Steve Witherspoon having a conversation with my old blogging handle Zoltar Speaks?
I’ve tried to honestly own up to all my bad choices, I’ve had a few, and apologize to fellow commenters around here when I think it’s necessary, but I don’t remember doing what you claimed. I’ve fully acknowledge that I didn’t publicize that my old Zoltar Speaks blogging handle and Steve Witherspoon were the same person during my transition from being anonymous, but I searched my extensive database of all my comments that goes all the way back to 2015 to find any time where I did what you claimed and I honestly can’t find it. I found a couple of comments where I referenced something that I wrote as Zoltar without acknowledging that I was Zoltar, but having a conversation with myself, I can’t find anything like that.
Please support the claim you made above with actual facts, provide a link, not just your recollection or nonsensical spin. I’ll own it if you can prove your claim. If you cannot properly produce evidence, a man of integrity would publicly retract the claim.
As for the rest of your comment, you’re welcome to your opinion no matter how nonsensical it happens to be.
P.S. Yes, WordPress has always had the ability to find the I.P. Address of every commenter. You’re dead wrong about me being the person behind the commenter kawaii and Jack can verify that.
I unlike you, do not have a murder board with red string, or extensive copies of my own posts, let alone yours…. Do you have one of mine? I also hate the way the search function works in WordPress… It’s functionally useless. But I tried.
I did recall a conversation I had with Mark Draughn where I told him that you were both names and was mocking you for speaking about yourself in the third person and was able to find comments from that 2020 conversation where Steve came valiantly to the defense of Zoltar Speaks when someone called him “beyond dumb”. Because of course you did, you’ve never been able to help yourself:
“Interesting that you think Zoltar is “beyond dumb” which is actually an improper use of the word dumb but I think we get your point even though it was Zoltar in the comment that Windypundit referenced above that accurately stated and predicted that. […] I get that you might disagree with Zoltar but “beyond dumb” doesn’t quite ring true in fact it appears to be a bigoted statement..”
I also found comments on this site from 2019, over the course of a couple posts, centering around an open forum where you were talking about how a Madison Metropolitan School Board member blocked you on Facebook and you wanted to sue her so you could continue to harass her online. Someone pointed out that you were both accounts, and you asked them never to mention it again:
“Alizia, JutGory, & Benjamin,
Please don’t bring this up again.
Thanks
Steve”
(which, by the way, is exactly the post that led me to do so at every opportunity, Streisand FTW)
And I thought the comments were somewhere around there, but obviously before then. I couldn’t find comments where you directly talked to yourself, but I do remember requests from you to delete your own comments, and some that referenced your alter. And I believe that Jack did it for you, because the nesting in some of those threads are fucked up, as an example Alizia quoted someone as saying:
“…..In addition to Steve, originally known here as “Zoltar Speaks.”
But there was no comment where someone said that. I think you had it nuked.
So you cannot support your claim and you’re not going to retract it?
I learned long before starting my participation on Ethics Alarms to keep a copy and a link to all my comments so I have actual proof when internet trolls and dishonest commenters make false claims about what I write.
As far as I can tell, your claim that I had conversations with myself are a complete fabrication created by a brain suffering from Witherspoon Derangement Syndrome; prove me wrong or shut up.
That’s correct. I’m not going to sink hours into finding some seven year old proof that you did what I know you to have done, particularly when what I can prove is bad enough. You can take some kind of pyrrhic lap on that if you want… But I just don’t think going to your own defense via sock puppet is all that much better than actually talking to yourself. And if you do end up being kawaii, you talked to yourself in this thread.
Steve…. Do you never take a step back and just imagine what you must look like to other people?
Humble Talent asked, “Do you never take a step back and just imagine what you must look like to other people?”
Yup I do; but some of our fellow Ethics Alarms friends would like to know is, does a person like you, that intentionally doubles down on an accusation they cannot support with evidence and refuses to show integrity in this regard, ever step back and imagine what you must look like to other people?
As I’ve done many times before, you get the last word, do try to use it wisely.
Steve, you’re a troll. You harass people on the internet, and you collect online blocks and bans like some people collect bumper stickers. You have at least one sock puppet account that I can prove. You have used your sock puppets to come to your own defense. You are an idiot. You are everything wrong with the internet, and the saddest part of this is that you are old and doing all of this.
Thank you for the last word, fuck off.
pt109,
Challenge Humble Talent a few more times and he’ll launch into regular insults thrown at you like “you’re an arrested-development manchild who’s too stupid to type and breathe at the same time”.
This is getting narrow, I’ll respond below.
Totally lazy response for an intellectual. For you, it must have taken a while. Nothing worthy of a response. I concur: have a nice day.
“Intellectual”?!?! Now there’s fighting words.
Not referring to you. Referring to a hypothetical intelligent person against whose lazy efforts I was comparing your best effort. Nonetheless, even if I called you an intellectual, you have referred to several people in derogatory terms implying their intelligence is subpar — when you haven’t shown any yourself, even with what is presumably your best effort. But please go back to being funny rather than boring. Your self-defenses reveal an involuntary and unwitting “humor” that I hope is delighting visitors to this comment section. (Folks, there’s really some funny stuff in there — kinda like when a dog farts, is surprised by the noise, and then gets all defensive…)
….
There was this thing that happened a couple years back, there was a lawsuit…
You know what, no.
IYKYK
So if a high school student decides she wants to twerk for just a couple of seconds without splits, that’s okay? I don’t know where your line is.
I commented without watching the video because I assumed it was just splits. She made it sexual, on purpose. It looked very practiced.
Maybe? I don’t think the sexiness of the dance really matters. There’s probably some limit to that, but I’m not sure even twerking gets there. These are young adults, not grade school kids, it’s not your job to shield them from dirty dance moves.
I think my line would be against something that disrupts the proceeding, or something that is overtly intended to offend… Otherwise, my opinion is that this say is supposed to be about them, you should probably let them have their ten seconds as they cross the stage, and it’s really not about what you want.
But if you really wanted to class the ceremony up, then you should probably organize it in a way that gets that job done. There should be rules, you should be able to outline expectations…. you still haven’t done that, by the way. Where’s your line? What rules would you make?
Don’t shake your butt in front of thousands of people is a good start, right? I mean, we are talking basics here. This wasn’t controversial until today.
Since people are so ill-behaved anymore, it may be a good idea to sketch out some rules. At least that way, no one can cry foul.
No foul language. No political rants. I personally don’t really love the yelling from the crowd. Have you ever been behind someone and 3-4 bust out as loud as they can? It’s kind of painful, but we don’t have to keep that rule necessarily. People also used to bring those party horns. Those were extremely rude.
If someone wants to do a short dance as they walk, there’s no issue for me. You could do an older style or a more neutral dance.
Waving to your family, blowing a kiss at the crowd, etc. are also fine for me. The event should be a celebration.
Just try to act dignified. Avoid sexual poses, Respect the time and process of others.
Rules?
Walk in a reasonable fashion to straight to the speaker
Smile
Shake their hand
Receive your diploma
Walk in a reasonable fashion straight to the exit stairs and back to your seat.
Don’t do anything else.
That was easy.
And it sounds stupid to write down basic things parents used to teach children but I guess that’s how it has to be.
People really aren’t taught some of these things. I recently went to a high school graduation, and I was really surprised at the number of people who talked through the national anthem.
This is the argument that people always bush boundaries a little bit, so the standards need to stay strict for the “pushing.” So, if you don’t allow any kind of celebration, then someone pushing that would be much less than if you allow “some” celebration.
Sports often have excessive celebration penalties kind of in this area.
I’m mixed on this. It seems benign, even if stupid, but our society is increasingly losing respect for everything. We need decorum again, and it needs to be enforced. I am okay with consequences, though I don’t know what those should be.
On what she did… The news had to play it five times because it took less than five seconds from start to finish. You could literally sneeze and have missed it. Was it tasteless? Sure. Was it disruptive? No. The witholding of the diploma probably slowed the production down more than the split.
I’m not sure what exactly happened here though… I think this might be an Americanism… She still graduated, right? If this is actually going to hold up post-secondary enrollment, I think the school is so far out over their skis that I’d sue. If the diploma is just a piece of paper, I’m less outraged, but still annoyed.
Does the actual split matter? Not really. The school is worried about the slippery slope. I don’t know if they can legally keep the diploma from here, but again, I don’t know what recourse they have to enforce things like the slip from getting out of control.
I’m sure it was explained to them prior to the events starting. This is pure selfishness on the girl’s part. For that reason, it was wrong. If more and more students push the boundaries, I suspect graduation will be canceled or… as I once saw in China, student-led and full of chaos.
Withholding is cruel and petty unless the graduates were advised on permitted behavior before hand. Was the behavior tacky, yes. Was the behavior prohibited, hmmm?
I want to agree that tacky celebrations increase inversely with the substance of the graduation. We also had some of that but from the audience at a child’s promotion ceremony to 9th grade. The audience was informed to withhold applause until the end. There was a predictable demographic that never heeds this instruction, but they also have the most to celebrate that their children are getting an education.
I just had a child graduate. Granted that it was from a christian private school with shared values, respect being one of them, but what they allowed was a personally recorded message for each student to share which would be played as their names were called and walked across the stage. This allowed for customized and approved self expression while maintaining formality of the ceremony.
The school should have given the diploma and planned for the next year to clearly communicate that diplomas would be withheld for such behavior or any behavior that is not boring and frozen.
My family ALWAYS waited until the end . . . . 🙂
–Dwayne
They withheld her diploma because she grandstanded a little bit, that’s rediculous. Students have been doing some kind of grandstanding as they cross the graduation stage since the dawn of time. No that doesn’t make it ethical but it does show an unstated standard as to where they draw the line defining what kind of grandstanding is unacceptable.
“Was it fair for the school principal to punish the student for her split?”
No, not unless virtually all other students that displayed any kind of grandstanding also got punished. What they did was show a double standard in their selective punishment, this borders on intentional unwarranted public ridicule. She should sue the school.
Yeah, withholding the diploma seems disproportionate. It sounds like they didn’t set expectations for the ceremony or hold any sort of rehearsal. Even if they had specifically prohibited grandstanding during the ceremony, they’d need to make it a disciplinary infraction to have any justification for academic consequences, since she’s still earned the diploma according to their academic standards.
(On a separate note, just wanted to make sure you saw this announcement about a local event on June 20th you might be interested in: https://ethicsalarms.com/2026/06/01/an-unanticipated-consequence-of-a-i-fake-girlfriends-now-what/#comment-904588.)
the rules of decorum should be presented before hand. violations of those rules ought to be punished.
Perhaps the school was so strict because the school is a black run school for black kids that is making an extra effort to give the kids a disciplined environment so they can learn while in school. Maybe we should give the administrators a little latitude.
Wouldn’t Kant suggest that if EVERY student did something the overall ceremony would be degraded both by unnecessary duration and by degrading spectacle? So, if not every student can do something, then no student should be permitted.
I saw it said somewhere that “Kids need this rule articulated or else they’ll do it”. I don’t know. How many graduations have we had since mass public school became a thing? Like 130+ or so. And kids have really only been increasing the disruptive hijinks the past 20-30 years?
So there’s like 100 some odd years of kids that somehow had been taught how to behave with solemnity….so I guess kids back then didn’t need the rule articulated… what changed?
Here is an anecdotal evidence that what the student did was not appropriate and the school denying the diploma at graduation (I don’t think they revoked or rescinded her graduation from what I read):
When our son graduated from high school in 2022, we asked him if he wanted a party. He simply said he did not want anything. When asked, he said, “Why should I get a reward for something that I was expected to do? I mean, my mom is a dentist, you are a lawyer, all of my aunts and uncles have college degrees if not advanced degrees. So, graduation from high school is not a huge milestone from my perspective.” Then, the school sent out its expectation of student behavior during the ceremony – which included directions to parents, as well.
jvb
I think you’d call that a twerking split. Inappropriate for the occasion. A joyous act is one thing …. in-your-face vulgarity is another.
Her diploma won’t be withheld forever, but some sort of reprisal is in order.
I like it. “Twerlit.”
jvb
You walk, accept your diploma, then leave the stage. I’m sure they were given instructions on what to do. If she couldn’t follow simple instructions, perhaps she’s not ready to graduate.
Even if it had just been the splits and not bouncing up and down, it would still be inappropriate. Why should she get extra time for her performance? Was this the only graduation scheduled at the Cultural Center that day? How big is the graduating class and how much longer will the event run if everyone takes a couple of extra minutes? If you run over the allotted time, do you just tell the graduates with names that fall towards the end of the alphabet that you don’t have time for them?
Selfishness shouldn’t be rewarded. The principal was right.
I don’t know where the hostility is coming from, I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with you before… But sure… We can do this.
“[H]e completely undermines his own original argument. Originally, he argued that the slippery slope is a fallacy because we can easily stop the slide by articulating a rule. But now, he is arguing that sliding is actually good.”
Not only did I not say that, but even your poor approximation of a straw man doesn’t undercut itself: Let’s say I did say that “sliding is actually good”… Why does that preclude being able to stop it? Even if I was going to argue that every instance of creeping boundaries was unambiguously good (Which I didn’t, the word “aggregate” did some work there), that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t control against it. Of course you could. We can control against most things, and failure to is usually a problem with leadership, not some kind of inevitability. But just because we can stop something doesn’t necessarily mean that we should.
“He claims that rule erosion and “creeping” boundaries are just natural evolution that makes society “a much better place.” He has just admitted that the slippery slope is real in practice.”
Your problem is that you’re approaching this like a child, dealing in strict absolutes. Let me demonstrate: By your logic, rule erosion and creeping boundaries are unambiguously bad, so we should go back to the rules as they were set back in 1791. All the amendments past the 10th? Moral decline. The 13th Amendment? Emancipation? A horrible slippery slope that would end with former slaves owning property, being able to vote, and being able to marry white people.
Could someone devise a system that would control against that? Probably. Should they have?
“He says his redundant sentence communicated “two very different things,” but notice he didn’t actually bother to explain what those two things were. He just insulted my capability to see it.”
Jesus… What I’d said was “I reject the idea that there’s a slippery slope here, and the slippery slope is almost always a fallacy”. You called that redundant, but the two things I was saying was that 1) This isn’t a slippery slope and 2) Most things people call slippery slopes aren’t actually. These are different ideas, they responded to different things the person I was responding to said. You not only not getting that, but doubling down, is insane to me.
“When I raised the concrete issues of erosion of precedent, escalation, and rule creep, he dismissed them by waving his hand and calling them “pointing at something vaguely.””
No… You said that those things were real. Sure. They’re real. Now what? This is what I meant by “gesture vaguely” – You’re assuming that we agree on all kinds of definitions and prescriptions when we obviously don’t. It’s lazy.
“Notwithstanding, precedent is not “vague.” It’s the foundation of governance and ethics. If the school permits a split this year, on what explicit ethical or administrative criteria can they justify suspending a student for a cartwheel next year without being guilty of arbitrary enforcement? Speak to your obvious truth about that, “Humble Talent!” Let er rip!”
This is pure barn door fallacy. And it’s particularly stupid because we’ve already agreed on how they could do exactly that: They could make a rule, publish the rule, and then enforce the rule. There is a question on whether it should be a rule… But I don’t think anyone is actually arguing that the school is incapable of making such a rule.
““Humble Talent” says that because the slippery slope is categorized as a logical fallacy in textbooks, it cannot exist in human behavior. This is a classic “fallacy fallacy” (assuming a claim is false just because an argument for it can be parsed as a fallacy).
I was never a high principle, but if I could go back in time and be one on one particular occasion, I might be tempted…”
Well…. You might not have been a principle, but you must be high, because I unambiguously did not say any of that. I suppose that I could argue the reason that the slippery slope is literally the name of a fallacy is because a lot of people use slippery slope arguments fallaciously…. That seems tautological, but you seem stupid enough to need it.
It’s not that there is no such thing as a slippery slope, there’s that toddler logic rearing it’s ugly absolutist head again, it’s that most slippery slopes could be controlled against if someone had the will to do it, which includes the one we’re talking about.
I find the best way to get people to stop complaining about slippery slopes is to break down what they’re actually concerned about, so we can figure out where to draw the boundaries. We don’t have to argue about whether or not stopping the slide is possible if we take the initiative and stop it ourselves.
Costs: We want to make sure people aren’t taking up too much time during a long ceremony.
Risks: We don’t want people to injure themselves during the ceremony.
Habits: At least to some extent, we might want people to be able to express themselves during their big triumphs. We also might want people to display discipline, dignity, and respect.
Trust: We want to be able to trust that people will know and care what dignity looks like.
Seeing someone do something tame might prompt someone else to be more daring, if they don’t have a good sense of where the line of what’s appropriately dignified is. That’s probably where the perception of the slippery slope comes in. It would help to set expectations by defining the line clearly, at least at the college level. That’s tricky, though, because the boundary around what’s dignified becomes subjective, especially where people motivated by boldness (flouting limitations) are concerned. Different audience members would disagree on how serious to take a performance.
It’s difficult to define dignity legally or in terms of mechanical actions, so we might want to define it in terms of its purpose. What effect is it intended to have on people and their habits? Is it meant to show that we can take things seriously not because we have to, but because we choose to? Can we designate a separate time or place where people are encouraged to be a bit more transgressive?
Does that help?
“It’s not that there is no such thing as a slippery slope, there’s that toddler logic rearing it’s ugly absolutist head again, it’s that most slippery slopes could be controlled against if someone…” Funny I can’t even finish one of your sentences without laughing. Have the last word. I won’t be able to get through it, but have the last word for the sake of your intellectual admirers here. I mean, you must have one, even if it’s only you.