Not disagreeing, I find this whole situation bizarre, but do you mind sharing some of your reasoning?
After WWII, the Czechoslovak communists were faced with the problem of replacing the management of literally the whole country's public sector, as well as the newly nationalized formerly private sector, with people loyal to the new Republic. This meant no Nazi or Western collaborators, this meant purges. A lot of good people were chewed up, some died in prison or were executed. In the universities that had been closed since shortly after the beginning of the war, the students were allowed to take over, and run the administration, and later conduct the purges. This gave tremendous responsibility to people who had no qualification, no training, no life experience; and also tremendous power to people who by bribery or false testimony leveraged the system for personal gain or revenge. These drumhead hearings were not dissimilar to the Title IX hearings that take place on the campuses today. Here also are people with inappropriate training, perjury is rampant, the verdict is swift, but can it really be called just?
Read Kundera's The Joke[1] (also a 1968 movie), for a good illustration of the absurdity of it all.
The protagonist sends a letter to his girlfriend with a joke regarding something or other. She finds the joke offensive, shares her concern with some of her colleagues, a hearing is called, and our protagonist finds himself kicked out of the university, and branded politically unreliable. This means he can barely get the worst of jobs, and will in fact be forced to work in a penal colony for a few years. Never having been convicted of a crime, never having been given the opportunity to defend himself in a court of law. Because of a joke.
Since this is the internet I'll note that I'm being sarcastic, and attempting to demonstrate the intellectual bankruptcy of such a statement, which we hear all the time when these sorts of things happen.
When such restrictions or punishments are in place, you are not, in fact, free to speak.
Now private universities, for example, not being governmental institutions, are not required by the constitution to guarantee free speech rights within their domain. But there are good reasons why that right was encoded in the constitution to limit the power of our national government, and they apply just as well to the governing bodies of universities and other private institutions.
The best system they have is public discourse... the media or internet,
But modern corporate media, much like University administrators, have demonstrated to be extremely unwilling to offend anybody. They rarely take a strong stances towards freedom of speech, preferring to appease via resignations and public apologies.
Additionally if Reddit is any indication the internet is not a great place for thoughtful political discussion.
sarcasm is often lost on our more zealous comrades.
The effectiveness of sarcasm depends on the audience's ability to discern that what you say is obviously ridiculous or otherwise at odds with what you really think. When it is not reasonable to expect that your audience can make that deduction, you have failed at using sarcasm. This is much easier to accomplish in person, where body language and vocal inflection add to your meaning, and thus sarcasm must be used more sparingly and skillfully in written media.
It is also much easier when you have a well-known reputation, especially concerning the topics you wish to satirize. A relatively anonymous text-based forum such as HN is thus one of the most difficult places to effectively deploy sarcasm.
In this case, the poster did not establish his true feelings ahead of time, nor engage in sufficient hyperbole to make the statement clearly ridiculous, nor even employ quotes to distance the words from his own opinion. No, he simply made a statement that is completely plausible to interpret as his genuine opinion, given how common such statements actually are. This does nothing to demonstrate the "intellectual bankruptcy" of such a statement. It's just sloppy rhetoric.
If you know before you post that you're going to have to explain how you didn't really mean that, and we're supposed to take it as sarcasm, then maybe try a different rhetorical tactic, because you have already admitted failure at this one.
To make such an extraordinary stretch; you need to provide some serious evidence or to redefine 'not dissimilar'. ISIL kills innocent people, the US executes innocent people, therefore, by the same definition, the two justice systems are 'not dissimilar'. But they are very dissimilar.
Chilling effects on a huge scale. Things are getting weird.