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Comment by fredfoobar42 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. I'm 30, and I'm heartened by the idea of the next generation coming up with a culture that's more compassionate towards people who are different from them in various ways. For people in the HN demographic, behaving with compassion is clearly an inconvenience.

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That's a mighty broad brush you have there. I, for one, do not know the many people on HN nor do I claim to know their thoughts and feelings on different matters. I guess I'll refer to you when a question like that comes up in the future.

Anyway, I too like the idea of younger generations growing up with more compassion towards people that are different. I raise my children with that in mind, believe it or not. But what much of what we're seeing coming out of college campuses in the US is not something I want my children to learn. I won't raise them as perpetual victims offended at anything and everything and I sure won't raise them to be unable to deal with an opposing viewpoint without falling back on a shut down the discussion mentality. Which is what the author is actually complaining about in the article.

Some opinions aren't worth having a discussion about. If someone says that "all fags should be rounded up and shot" there's nothing discussion worthy there. A rape survivor is under no obligation to have a discussion with someone who says "all rape victims deserve it, or are liars, or both."

These are extreme examples to be sure, but the principle remains.

And nobody is saying "you can't say 'all fags should be shot.'" They're saying 'You can't say it _here_." Freedom of speech is not freedom to be heard.

Using extreme examples does not prove a point. Especially when one of them advocates criminal violence.

Saying I don't want to hear what you have to say and actively preventing speech are two completely different things. If a group of students don't want to hear a speaker, they have the right to not show up. They don't have the right to prevent the speech from happening. I don't know if you intended it, but your response is an effort to change the context of what I stated.

"Freedom of speech is not freedom to be heard" is what people actively preventing free speech fall back on to justify their actions against the speaker. Not that I'm lumping you in with that way of thinking, just pointing it out.

> If someone says that "all fags should be rounded up and shot" there's nothing discussion worthy there.

Actually, I believe that by discussing the statement you're much more likely to change the person's opinion or open up their empathic capabilities than by being an intolerant asshole and attacking them verbally.

I don't believe you can really know whats coming out of college campuses in the US, other than some opinions viewed through the lens of these few professors who are pointing out outliers. You're getting the same grossly unbalanced viewpoint that would tell you that murders and rapes and child molestations are rampant if you viewed it through the lens of local or national news. Colleges are much more diverse than that, and people learn all sorts of opinions. The "over-victimhood" issue is something they'll encounter but don't think for a second that its the majority viewpoint. People are simply more sensitive now towards other people's struggles, and a natural overextension of that is the protectionism of perceived victims by shutting out perceived perpetrators, which simply does not have legs long term.

Those few professors, the media, and the groups themselves say different. Thankfully colleges are very diverse. But like I said, this appears to be a growing trend that has affected real people beyond their feelings in college. I'm talking real long-term lasting effects that can ruin a person's life. I would say that this thing has been growing long enough that so far it seems to have quite strong legs in the long term since we've been dealing with political correctness since the early nineties at least.

I honestly disagree - to me it fits too cleanly into the narrative that millennials are all coddled children who whine about everything which has been pushed for the past 15 years. The problem is of course, that depending on where you stand in relation to the issue and the people involved you can get completely different perspectives than someone else and both be correct from a particular point of view.

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