Campus free speech was in trouble in 2018, and the data shows worsening

> It's the most deadly conflict of the region and it's brushed off because it's the fault of a socialist dictator.

Are you serious? "because it is a socialist dictator"? Iran regime is extremely criticized in academia, the idea it's a deadly horrible regime is a very agreed consensus. And Syria too, by the way.

(edit: and if you say "but it's what I see locally in USA, maybe it's not the case worldwide", you shoot yourself in the foot: you were saying that the whole western academia is left-wing and stand by the same goals of cancelling some opinions. If some opinions are cancelled by the big bad lefties in US but not in Europe, then again, they are not cancelled: their thesis will be largely published in Europe, and the big bad lefties in US will be exposed as fraud)

Also, political game is not as simplistic as "Syrian are socialist, I'm left-wing so I will pretend they are great": tons of left-wing people are very harshly critical of left-wing countries and inversely. Take Russia for example: while historically communist and with still strong roots to it, _some_ left-wing politicians will tend to minimize all their fault, but _some_ right-wing politicians will tend to minimize all their fault because their are politically allied with the nationalist Putin (cf. Trump who said he admires some aspect of Putin and minimises his crime). Because of that, _some_ left-wing politicians recognize in Putin a right-wing ally and are against Russia.

They idea that the "left-wing academia" "brushes under the carpet" crimes of Iran because a blind allegiance to the word "left" when in practice their ideologies are very incompatible is just ridiculous.

> I am not right wing.

What I mean is: if there is a bias, it should be raised by people who are also supporting what this bias support.

Once again, there is someone saying "they are left-wing" and then say "and I don't like the way they are left-wing".

As I've said, if someone is fair, promote 50% left-wing and 50% right-wing, people who don't agree with the right-wing direction will say they are right-wing and people who don't agree with the left-wing direction will say they are left-wing.

> As someone in academia I'm frustrated with so much corruption and harassment and bullshit passing off as science by leftists. This is where I come from.

Ok, so you are extremely biased. I'm sure you may have had very bad experience. But in science, we know that opinion from someone who had bad experience is extremely unreliable, especially if they have to judge the general environment after being confronted to a very small part of it.

No wonder you think all academia is left-wing if you have experienced a small part of it where there was things you've found unjust and that you attributed it to left-wing reasons.

> Their intention is ideological, the goal is to destroy liberal democracy, this is documented. Yes the far right would do the same. I argue they are the same movement.

You realise that this document is not the result of ideology, but that the ideology this document depicts is the fake justification to attack the other country, right? If they are against "western values", it's not because they really are against "western values", it is mainly because they need a justification to depict a concurrent country as "bad".

As you said, if US was more left-wing and China more right-wing, the same document would explain why left-wing politics is bad and they are against it.

Americans are really brainwashed about "the communist threat". Other powerful countries, especially dictatorships, are threats. China is a threat. The stupid idea that China is the enemy "because of the communist ideology" is ridiculous. They are the enemy because they are a concurrent country and that USA is preventing them getting more power. While Russia is becoming more complex because it's both communist and popular amongst right-wing nationalists, Russia is as much as a threat to USA (and there too, there are numerous documents proving their political interference for their profit).

And it is also deforcing your previous arguments: academia is left-wing, so they love China because they are left-wing too, while at the same time, China is planning to kill them all. It's so ridiculously simplist. You seem to think every left-wing person is very very stupid. Even if some left-wing persons are stupid (and they are), your whole reasoning falls apart when you have one non-idiot left-wing person who says "wait, I'm left-wing, I like the left-wing ideology, but what China wants is not at all what I want, because they want to rule over me instead of me being able to do my own socialist adventure. So, wait a minute, I will not protect China, I have absolutely no reason to do so".

From this whole discussion, it just looks like to me that you were in an unfair situation, and that you rationalised the situation with "it's because they are left-wing" (which may be true, or not, people always blame it on the ideology instead of thinking that maybe these people were just dicks, independently of their ideology), and because of that, now, you see proofs everywhere that the big bad academia is both dishonest and left-wing.

https://x.com/XVanFleet/status/1768375317695996395?s=20

> Chinese conservative author Yu Jie @yujie89 offers a profile of anti-Trump Chinese “influencers”, both outside and inside China:

> They are mostly left-wingers and supporters of BLM.

> They are mostly atheists.

> They are mostly favored guests/commentators of Chinese language MSM.

> Among them is the famous dissident Ai Weiwei.

Conflating leftist ideology with BLM when BLM is explicitly a movement against excessive police violence against black people is funny - kinda says the quiet part out loud about what conservatives represent.

Not to mention the religious rage baiting.

Scrolling through her feed, she seems like your typical American right wing talk show political grifter. You can't "win in the marketplace of ideals" against these people with rigorous logic and spirited debate, if you could, they wouldn't exist, because their entire belief system depends on cognitive fallacy.

As someone else put it, modern university students are less naive than that. They understand that people like this woman aren't here to say "can I tell you why I think communism is bad from my time under a communist regime," but instead are asking "can I come rage bait your campus by fear mongering about all leftist ideology, tying it into religious fear mongering and doing a bit of race baiting? I will likely also be fomenting whatever this week's culture war talking points are." And the students, rightly, are engaging this speaker in the way she deserves: protest. Preventing her from speaking isn't really the point, loudly demonstrating her viewpoints aren't welcome is.

This is obvious: we don't allow the state to pass laws that require men to donate kidneys when the donation would provably save another life. We seem to believe bodily autonomy is a human right which can't be trespassed by the state. The next step in the USA is of course to enshrine bodily autonomy specifically in the constitution.

Until then however you can't argue for only women to not be allowed bodily autonomy without basically arguing that they're subhuman and deserve less human rights than men.

The only way around this is to believe the state should indeed be allowed to compel people to donate their organs. Right now we don't even tolerate corpses being compelled to donate organs. This alone could save many lives.

We probably can't, but we can discuss it. I don't believe in universal ethics, however I believe humans are very good at trending towards good ethics when left alone to do so (instead of i.e. being forced to participate in dehumanizing systems).

Though there are some obvious things we should agree on, for a good society, such as slavery being bad, humans deserve equal rights, etc, that many of the speakers argue against. I propose we consider the issue settled and if anyone disagrees they can deal with hippie commie students yelling at them from a crowd I guess, oh well.

> I'm guessing literally zero of the deplatformed speakers were actually calling for violence.

This is the excellent line that the shill alt-right dances in the current culture war. There's this odd belief that so long as nobody says "kill all xyz," then they must have something worth hearing, or don't deserve to be deplatformed. After all, the only person that deserves being disinvited from a university speech is Hitler, I guess?

In the 21st century I think we're smarter than that.

cauch put it well elsewhere in this thread when someone said that smart listeners should be able to listen to the hateful ideas and dismiss them thoughtfully:

> If it was true, then racism, populism, or prejudice would not exist at all, because all of that is based on flawed logic that can be easily demonstrated. The reality is that intelligent debate LOSES in front of convenient fearmongering. Not because people are idiot, but simply mathematically: fearmongering is way easier and way more convincing than rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

> And who decides when these labels apply?

Whoever's better at protesting, of course. What's wrong with that? People like Ben Shapiro will weaponize the inherent conservative nature of most systems (states, universities, capitalism) to give themselves literal megaphones and sound systems with deployed security to ensure their ability to spread their message, so somehow it's bad to weaponize the power of "finding people who agree with you" to organize a protest? Why is one method automatically more valid? IMO probably because you're participating in the banality of evil - it's a part of a system, it's something "normal," therefore it's on at least some level OK.

In reality it's nontrivial to organize a protest. In reality, leftists almost always outnumber fascists and nazis and white supremacists at protests - at least all the ones I've been to. The reality is that protests, and these "campus cancellations," represent the will of the community. So, that's who decides. The system isn't protecting "from the mob," the system is the mob, empowering those who seek to harm humans.

> but then allow individuals to determine where those lines are themselves.

What's wrong with shouting back at a shouter? I really don't understand the opposition to lively discussion. How else do we determine our values? This is an ancient human tradition, arguably the core of our survival mechanism as a social species.

> Socialism / communism killed tens of millions in the 20th century - should they be banned from speaking?

FWIW I know very few leftists that would tolerate a speech by the genocider Stalin. There's a reason Stalin and Mao put leftists, anarchists, and communists against the wall. I believe it's intellectually dishonest to ascribe their actions to the entirety of socialist / communist thought. If that's the case, we can start blaming capitalism for all sorts of diabolical things that have happened throughout history, such as the transalantic slave trade.