171–180 of 370 posts
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So then you support removing all government funding from the college, yes?
Why would I want that? The government funds private institutions all the time. Doesn't make them less private. If the government wants to run Harvard, then it can tell Harvard who it can and can't admit.
Yes, it does actually.
People worried about free speech rights should realize that Harvard is a private university. If I held a party at my house and didn't want to invite you because you called my dog a 'mutt', you'd get laughed out of court if you tried to sue me over it. People should be allowed to organize under whatever principles they want to organize under. Disallowing Harvard to use whatever criteria they want to use to admit stude…
Folks always make this argument which this kind of thing comes up. Just because you as a private entity can limit free speech, doesn't mean you should . Censorship is generally a bad idea, and I as a private entity can be upset at Harvard for doing it.
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'Ironic' racism is still racism.
See my comment above. It's not any more racism than joking about dead babies means you actually want to kill babies. It's not any more racism than playing cards against humanity makes you an unforgivable monster. Black humor is extremely common and as old as time.
Someone at a state school would have the same thing happen to them if they pulled stuff like this. No reason why they should be treated with kid gloves because they got into Harvard.
I think the concern here is that it was private.
> The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group.
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Harvard could admit only valedictorians. It could admit only those with perfect scores on the SAT. It doesn't do either of those things. Rather it spends a lot of time and energy putting together a class that it thinks will be greater than the sum of its parts. As a private organization it is perfectly entitled to pick and choose what matters to it. In that light, why not consider the character of the people it decid…
This is an aside, but I don't entirely agree. The tax exemption Harvard receives on its massive endowment is, per undergraduate, worth much more than the direct government subsidy public universities receive per student. UC Berkeley alone enrolls more low income students than the entire Ivy League combined (this is true of several UCs). Harvard also gets a monumental amount of funding directly from the federal govern…
There are two ways to fix this problem--assuming one thinks it's a problem.
One would be to leverage the myriad benefits we provide to do more to ensure that these organizations are acting in the public interest. That's a pretty tall order though. We'd be looking at a ton of new laws/regulations/bureaucracies to make tens of thousands of determinations. In this particular case, it's not clear to me that Harvard isn't at least not acting against the public interest.
The other way would be to eliminate the tax advantages and let the chips fall where they may. Again, assuming one thinks there is a problem, that seems the preferable solution to me.
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Private organizations going "nah, we don't want you here, get out" isn't oppression . Your right to free speech doesn't supersede my right to free association.
Yours is the argument posed by employers who posted "Blacks need not apply" adverts. Are you sure that's the hill you want to die on? Anyway, by "oppression", I was referring to the OPs implicit suggestion that were prohibit unpopular speech, which is oppression.
So, yes, I'm quite comfortable with this hill. It has a nice shining city on it. Shame its originators abandoned it. (They never really liked it anyway.)
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I am perfectly fine with private organizations banning whoever they like for posting racist shit. Racist shit is "wrong speech". If I have friends who start uttering racist shit, and I can't talk them out of it, they are no longer my friends. (This has happened precisely once, no regrets. Thanks, Fox News, for poisoning an old man's mind.) Posting racist memes is wrong, saying racist things is wrong, thinking racist…
It's not easy to draw line. What about some light racist jokes? Or jokes demeaning wives(fairly common in India) or blonde women? Most seems fine with it but what happens when this line move a bit more further? In Hollywood movies, I have seen comedies doing all this and people applauding it. I believe we need a firm policy of no jokes with a hint of racism or sexism. Or have absolute free speech. You can't be cherry…
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Why would I want that? The government funds private institutions all the time. Doesn't make them less private. If the government wants to run Harvard, then it can tell Harvard who it can and can't admit.
>Doesn't make them less private. Yes, it does actually.
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People protecting the right of racists to spread racism, support racism. It cannot be any other way. You cannot claim that you dislike racism, and and also want to preserve it. Also, "Free speech" refers to the fact that the government cannot bust in to your house with a SWAT team and arrest you for speaking something that they don't like. Private companies can enforce whatever speech rules they like, and that doesn'…
As I said in another comment - I don't disagree with Harvard's decision, or any decision made by a private institution or person. I disagree with the notion that certain types of speech or thought are universally wrong. Personally - I believe racism is wrong - but I disagree with the notion that it's "wrong think". It's simply a different world view. To re-iterate: I don't agree with what the students said or did. I…
One that states that people with more melatonin are fundamentally inferior and should be subservient to people with less melatonin. It is a point of view that is objectively and morally wrong.
I wonder whether you would support the right of people to state that PoC should be sterilized, or the rights of people to call people to attack PoCs. Because that is what more and more people have been calling for in America. That is what Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the alt-right, advocates.
The problem with these 'different world views' is that even without directly stating that people should attack minorities, these statements lead to people beating up black people on the streets. The more these ideas and 'world views' are accepted, the more acceptable it will become to think and state such things, leading to a resurgence of people who think that PoCs should be murdered. That will then directly impact the probability of someone acting upon those beliefs.
The reason why the rest of the world does have as bad a racism problem as America, is because they took steps to alienate people who had such views.