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Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses

#61

Post by minitel »

evanlivingston wrote: post #49
shams93 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how we did things in the 90s we used to debate these speakers and knock down their ideas with rational discourse it's not that hard to deflate the arguments of the far right they're mostly based on a series of bad assumptions like assuming everyone has a deep fear of anyone who looks different than them. It's better to let them speak and then deflate their arguments to the bone in debate.

That's what we did back in the 1860's too. There were all these people who wanted to build an economy based around the idea that some humans didn't really have rights and so we deflated their arguments with rational discourse. Obviously I'm not comparing teachers of Western history to slave owners. But i am trying to point out that rational discourse alone doesn't yield a more egalitarian world.

> Implying that a more egalitarian world is always a better world.

Any idea can become evil when taken to an extreme.

Re: Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses

#63

Post by [deleted] »

Top19 wrote: post #28

Tim Wu, who coined the term “network neutrality”, wrote an excellent op-ed in the N.Y. Times yesterday. He said that now speech,l is a form of control and censorship, whereas 100 years ago limiting speech was a form of control / censorship. Interesting to see how the pendulum shifts...

[deleted]

Re: Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses

#64

Post by IslaDeEncanta »

dang wrote: post #53
IslaDeEncanta wrote: post #2

>Oh dear, these left wing protestors taking a microphone sure is comparable to fascists actually killing people. Give me a break.

Would you please stop using HN for political/ideological battle? You've done it quite a bit and it's not what this site is for. Similarly, would you please not post unsubstantive comments here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Every comment in this thread is ideologically driven. It seems that if you don't want people commenting with political opinions, there shouldn't be political submissions.

As far as substance goes, how is my comment less substantive than the top comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575704) on the thread? I said that it was foolish to consider protesting fascism to be worse than fascism, and that commenter said that protesters should be expelled. They're equally substantive comments that express opposing views on the issue in from the article.

Re: Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses

#66

Post by erdojo »

jostmey wrote: post #5

I worry about an increasing movement toward radicalization on all ends of the political spectrum. I think Trump represented a shift to the far -right. Now I worry liberals might shift to the far -left. The middle ground seems to be disappearing

The shift has been taking hold for about a decade. Educators have been teaching these students these tactics. No surprise they're being used against them.

Re: Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses

#67

Post by oceanghost »

13years wrote: post #33
jostmey wrote: post #5

I worry about an increasing movement toward radicalization on all ends of the political spectrum. I think Trump represented a shift to the far -right. Now I worry liberals might shift to the far -left. The middle ground seems to be disappearing

> Now I worry liberals might shift to the far-left Yet Trump's election was in part about a reaction to far left movement from the viewpoint of supporters. You may not agree, but the reality is that real or not the perception is what drives outcomes. The left no longer are strong supporters of free speech, no longer oppose imperialism and foreign interventions and are just as hawkish as the right only the rhetoric di…

The 2016 election was a comedy of errors (I agree with you fully) in essence:

Hillary Clinton = The (corrupt) system is fine. Bernie Sanders = Let's fix the (corrupt) system. Donald Trump = Let's burn the (corrupt) system down.

Trump winning broke down the propaganda model in the US, which has degenerated from Manufactured Consent to some sort of continual moral panic ala "The True Believer." The harder the media pressed on Trump-- the more popular he became.

Perhaps calling your potential voters "deplorable" while accusing them of being sexists and racists, while undermining democracy itself (Bernie Sanders), was not a recipe for success. The Clinton's corruption is well known to the world.

I hate to say this, but Bill and Hillary's proven TREASON pales in comparison to the garden-variety sexism Trump was acused of.

The hysteria over Trump is just that-- hysteria. The fact is the Democratic party offered an objectively worse candidate. Both were "shit sandwiches."

Re: Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses

#68

Post by candiodari »

evanlivingston wrote: post #49
shams93 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how we did things in the 90s we used to debate these speakers and knock down their ideas with rational discourse it's not that hard to deflate the arguments of the far right they're mostly based on a series of bad assumptions like assuming everyone has a deep fear of anyone who looks different than them. It's better to let them speak and then deflate their arguments to the bone in debate.

That's what we did back in the 1860's too. There were all these people who wanted to build an economy based around the idea that some humans didn't really have rights and so we deflated their arguments with rational discourse. Obviously I'm not comparing teachers of Western history to slave owners. But i am trying to point out that rational discourse alone doesn't yield a more egalitarian world.

You hit the nail on the head: the use of rational discourse and the use of logical arguments to plead a case, demanding those arguments follow the ideas of logic. That idea BY ITSELF is one of the core ideas that very much are "Western Civilization" and were hard-fought ideas even inside the West (even in ancient Greece, just read the circle arguments in ancient Greece). Even the idea of a university itself is very much a Western tradition that is not exactly common.

But this rational discourse is quite a unique property of Western Christian civilization, and it's Greek philosophy heritage.

So when those students say that Plato, rational argument itself (and frankly the existence of the university concept itself in the first place) are against their religion/ideology ... they're probably right.

But let's also move one piece of total shite out of this world : there has never been any large scale human society that was egalitarian, and frankly most societies were FAR worse than the West has ever been. Especially islamic civilization is bad in that regard.

Re: Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses

#69

Post by dang »

IslaDeEncanta wrote: post #64
dang wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you please stop using HN for political/ideological battle? You've done it quite a bit and it's not what this site is for. Similarly, would you please not post unsubstantive comments here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Every comment in this thread is ideologically driven. It seems that if you don't want people commenting with political opinions, there shouldn't be political submissions. As far as substance goes, how is my comment less substantive than the top comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15575704 ) on the thread? I said that it was foolish to consider protesting fascism to be worse than fascism, and that commenter…

A certain amount of politics is inevitable, but more than that turns HN into a war zone, which destroys the things the site exists for: intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. So it's a tricky problem. We do two things to address it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

1. Accounts that use HN primarily for political/ideological battle are obviously not using the site as intended, so we ban them.

2. Commenters are asked to avoid the inflammatory style of political argument. Comments need to get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Unfortunately it looks like you've been running afoul of both of these. You need to fix that if you want to keep commenting here.

The "what about that other comment" argument, a.k.a. "the other person started it", a.k.a. "they did worse", doesn't really count as a defense because we can't possibly see everything that gets posted here. Not every driver who is speeding gets pulled over for a ticket. I agree with you that that comment was a bad one, but it doesn't mean yours were ok.

Re: Professors can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses

#70

Post by baud147258 »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #13

Is this academic extremism something confined to the USA so far? I don't remember hearing about riots at European universities yet.

The universities and high schools students in France frequently participates in protest organized by left-wing orgs, like against all the last reforms to the work code.
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