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Comment by maverick_iceman | Hacker News Reader

I see this as an outgrowth of left-liberal student bodies clamping down on conservative speech on college campuses. If leftist students can block Ann Coulter from speaking then why can't Chinese students block the Dalai Lama? Every speech is guaranteed to offend someone and that's verboten in today's campuses. As a libertarian, I was always worried about this and it was a main reason why I opposed social justice warriors. Sadly, our fear has come to pass and censorship now reigns in universities. In the future, children's fairytales will be the only safe topic to discuss.

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First off, who would you include in "left-liberal", "leftist", and "social justice warriors"? These terms all mean different things to different people. "Liberal" in the American sense or the traditional sense? Do you group anarchists, communists, and sociaists into "left-liberal"? Do you consider Democrats to be "leftists"? I won't bother addressing the amorphous idea of a "social justice warrior". Your interchangeable use of these terms suggests a general boogeyman whose beliefs don't match your own.

Secondly, I happened to be in university right now, and I can attest that the idea of campuses being overtaken by "censorship" has been blown far out of proportion in the press. Religious fundamentalist groups regularly set up shop on the main thoroughfare to propagandize; one even put up a gigantic wall of very graphic abortion photos. The university isn't coming to kick them out as their expression is protected. Students tend to gather around and heckle/argue with them, and their expression is also protected. In another incident, the Hispanic services center and other areas of campus were chalked with slogans like "Build The Wall" the night before an annual event for prospective students and their families: extremely embarrassing for the school, and widely condemned, but there was no retaliation against those responsible as, again, their expression is protected and no permanent damage was done. I'm aware the plural of anecdote isn't "data", but stories like this remind me of other pumped-up "kids these days" moral crises like the D&D scare of a few decades ago.

When the law department attempted to get a representative of the white house to speak about public service (something they do every year, for obvious reasons), the aula got locked down with chains and students prevented anyone from coming there.

Why ? Well "not my president" was one of the signs.

Needless to say, the students blocking the aula were not law students and since they made it clear they would disrupt any attempt to change the venue, the talk was canceled.

VERY disappointing I must say. You don't like who's gotten elected ? Let's obstruct the futures of your co-students because it might help them.

This seems to be the norm now. And yes, it was rescheduled, the venue was changed to a downtown hotel, and there was a "covert" announcement of the new arrangement. I hear the hotel owner even gave the venue and the drinks for free in support of free expression.

Except the D&D crisis was fake, and Charles Murray really was assaulted, and his escort battered, and Anne Coulter wasn't really able to speak at to speak at Berkeley because of the threat of violence. While these anecdotes don't define the scope of the problem, they prove it exists.

> If leftist students can block Ann Coulter from speaking then why can't Chinese students block the Dalai Lama?

Students actually don't have a right to forcibly block speakers. That's a common misconception of free speech.

If you want to see examples of how real free speech is upheld, check out cases on thefire.org [1]. It's a law firm that specializes in tackling free speech issues on college campuses. However, they can't take a case without a plaintiff.

So, if one group protests and succeeds in blocking some speaker, the burden is still on the victimized group to file a lawsuit.

As they say, freedom isn't free, and you need to fight to keep it.

[1] https://www.thefire.org/category/cases/free-speech/

It isn't a legal right, it is a de facto right.

Generally speaking, only left leaning speakers are allowed on campuses.

Generally speaking, only pro-immigration speech is allowed in polite company.

This story, at least to me, also illustrates Chinese immigrants aren't interested in immigrating to other countries because they like the culture, way of life, etc and are choosing them as a new home to raise their families (well, this is part of it of course), but perhaps even unbeknownst to themselves, they have a strong intention to modify their host cultures into a form more like what they are used to.

> Generally speaking, only left leaning speakers are allowed on campuses.

No. Just no. While American college campuses tend to skew left, they are not fortresses of liberalism where everyone duckspeaks about Bernie Sanders. They all have conservative professors, Young Republicans clubs, and so on.

Hell, part of my large, public university tuition money went to pay a 50k speaking fee to Alberto Gonzales, ffs.

When the riots and shouting over top of conservative speakers so they can't be heard stops, then I will concede that I was wrong, until then, I consider you wrong.

Freedom of speech used to be inalienable as a matter of principle, now the majority of college students vehemently oppose it. That is a fact.

If it's a fact why not cite something then? Nothing indicates a majority of students oppose free speech.

I think many speakers are dumb, so I don't attend them.

> It isn't a legal right, it is a de facto right.

Our legal system allows you to challenge that. If a campus prevented your conservative group's speaker from speaking, you can sue and win.

If you don't do that, you are failing to uphold free speech as we have upheld it for centuries in America. Your civil rights do not enforce themselves.

> This story, at least to me, also illustrates Chinese immigrants aren't interested in immigrating to other countries because they like the culture, way of life, etc and are choosing them as a new home to raise their families (well, this is part of it of course), but perhaps even unbeknownst to themselves, they have a strong intention to modify their host cultures into a form more like what they are used to.

Of course. That's many people's reaction to a new culture. They want the things they like from both. It's still your job as an American to uphold American values.

> Our legal system allows you to challenge that. If a campus prevented your conservative group's speaker from speaking, you can sue and win.

Sure, might as well sue mother nature for the temperature rise. What we're seeing is a force of nature, the legal profession cannot stop it, overall society has to choose to stop it, which means they have to choose to allow conservative voices.

> What we're seeing is a force of nature, the legal profession cannot stop it, overall society has to choose to stop it, which means they have to choose to allow conservative voices.

I find this observation very strange considering the current political climate in the United States. Isn't the conservative voice the dominant voice being expressed in the executive and legislative branches right now?

Political leaders don't define the culture, the culture is defined by activists within the culture itself, and the left is winning.

> Sure, might as well sue mother nature for the temperature rise.

Plenty of court cases have set precedent for how individuals and businesses operate in the future.

When a court makes a ruling, people know they can be held similarly accountable, according to the written law, in the future.

> What we're seeing is a force of nature, the legal profession cannot stop it, overall society has to choose to stop it, which means they have to choose to allow conservative voices.

That's not actionable. "Society must do x" is not something you have any control over. You can sue and convince culture to follow written law that way.

Oh it's not impossible to legislate, but very unlikely. Someone they trust has to tell these kids that listening to ideas is a good thing, but good luck finding someone influential with integrity these days.

Chinese students studying at American universities may not necessarily be looking to set down roots in the US. Most of them return to China after getting their degrees.

As for the question of assimilation, it takes a generation for cultural attitudes to shift. People aren't going to abandon the cultural values of their homeland. But their children will grow up as Americans and adopt more American ways of thinking.

>Generally speaking, only pro-immigration speech is allowed in polite company.

Anti-immigration speech was very far outside of the Overton window until very recently - a development I find incredibly concerning.

Are you saying you're concerned that anti-immigration speech is now more acceptable? If so, why?

Because most of it is wrong?

Most of the speech is around ideas that have been proven wrong over and over again. It's the same as when people come in and talk about a database that "solves" CAP.

Perhaps a better example is climate denial. Why do I have to listen to decades old debunked discussions over and over again?

EDIT: I also disagree with the premise. Loads of polite company will happily discuss immigration restriction and beyond. Though that's not your main point, I suppose.

It's not society's job to have all speech be acceptable. It's speakers' job to actually formulate ideas in a way that society accepts.

If you can't, the simplest explanation is that you're wrong, not that you're innovative.

Practically speaking, it's a two-way street. Speakers also redefine the speech that society accepts.

But I disagree that it's not society's job to have all speech be acceptable. All speech should be allowed, and all counter-speech should be allowed. Only violence is not tolerated (and speech is not violence).

We also shouldn't treat all other cultures as equally valid sources of immigration because some cultures hold values that directly oppose our own.

Ideally, any individual that accepts certain fundamental western liberal values like freedom of speech should have the chance to immigrate. Practically, it's extremely difficult to screen individuals for this.

We have to be able to talk about the effects of mass immigration from places like the Middle East and North Africa. In Europe, many people who arrive from those areas create no-go zones, and their children don't assimilate but instead foster a resentment for the dominant culture. That is not ok and if we can't even talk about the one solution being to stop immigration from those areas then we are done as a culture.

> In Europe, many people who arrive from those areas create no-go zones, and their children don't assimilate but instead foster a resentment for the dominant culture.

To be fair, I think a lot of the fault for non-integration lies with the host country, although if the migrants weren't invited, or weren't actually wanted by the population (fake democracy), then it's pretty tough to solve that. It's a group effort ideally.

Immigration issues aren't climate change.

Why is it a moral imperative to import, abuse, and discard Mexican and Guatemalan workers to pick your fruit and butcher your meat? Why could you drive around to Home Depot in the morning and see construction guys and landscapers hiring mostly immigrant, often illegal day laborers for cash?

My grandparents were able to migrate here legally in the 1940s without a pimp-like corporate sponsor holding them hostage or living illegally and being a second class citizen. Flooding the market with cheap labor that works cheap because they have no agency of their own hurts everyone.

If you want immigration that's fine, but don't advocate for the status quo -- take on immigrants as equals. If we did that, we might find that impoverished classes of US citizens would have an opportunity to enter the workforce.

I am not arguing for the status quo. The hostage-taking of immigrant workers through things like corporate linking in H-1B is a tragedy and shouldn't happen.

I would rather solve the day laborer issue by going after the employers. Some immigrants take these jobs because they have no other choice, but employers are the ones actually exploiting people.

My impression was that the post was referring to the "classical anti-immigration" arguments that have been debunked like "immigrants are stealing our jobs" or "immigrants cost us money".

I'm very much for a humane system of immigration, that is to say being able to come into a country without having to be an indentured servant, and having the same labor protections as citizens.

I think you'd find a lot of pro-immigration people to be for this as well. A lot of corporations lobby for things like H-1B increases because it's much easier to get than "overhaul the immigration system to just let us hire who we want".

> Most of the speech is around ideas that have been proven wrong over and over again

I doubt it, most likely you are thinking of some set of straw man arguments of the left having been disproven.

There's definitely a lot of strawmen being kicked back and forth in image macros ("You will pay for the illegal immigrant to go to school but not for the sick vet" meme was reposted a lot during the VA scandals)

But we do live in a world where a congressman said that nobody dies from a lack of health insurance. There is still a lot of "solved" debate that gets rehashed over and over again (see also things like the autism-vaccine link, based off of the debunked paper).

> we do live in a world where a congressman said that nobody dies from a lack of health insurance

There's straw men, and then there's the idiocy of "far right", or whatever you'd call that. Opposing Obamacare is one thing, comments like that are something else entirely.

> It's not society's job to have all speech be acceptable

In the USA, it is. We call that the First Amendment

Pretty sure it was the university administration, not the student body, that said the Ann Coulter event wouldn't happen.

And I believe this happened because at previous events clashes between protestors on both sides, right and left (or all sides if you prefer) had turned violent. And since then the university has changed its decision.

Also I don't think we know that the protestors were students. Although it's reasonable to think that at least some of them might have been.

To me it's far more interesting to look at the Chinese students associations as a phenomenon with a longer history, predating the recent free speech brouhahas. The groups have been around since at least the early 1980s and are staffed by brainwashed zealots who were raised in a country where the official school curriculum teaches them things that are simply false (edit: as does ours too (US) but in China it is at an entirely different level), and media is tightly controlled to the point that journalists sometimes just disappear.

The liberals in the US are more in line with the thinking: "tolerate everything but intolerance," so you see them react strongly when intolerant people try to spread intolerance. It's hard for some people to wrap their head around the seemingly contradictory idea of not tolerating intolerance... you may be one of those people. But the Chinese folks are an entirely different thing, imho. They are complicated (due to national pride coupled with a huge chip on the shoulder from their history of getting surpassed in the last century) but suffice it to say they have a very rigid line of thinking about things they were force fed from an early age, and this goes way back.

All you talking about really hilarious. The Chinese students' protest has nothing related with Chinese government, all these is assumed by NYT. There are lots of political related protests in US campus, like protesting against Milo Yiannopoulos was supported by Hilary?! In NYT's point, all Chinese students are dumb, and they are brainwashed by Chinese government, and controlled by the gov. So, their protest is remote controlled by the gov. Really?

I'm sure someone will eventually object to the negative portrayals of witches in fairy tales. There's no safe topics once you give in to this direction.

It has nothing really do to with that. Chinese government doesn't care about left wing American students and what they think. It is just doing what it can to promote its message, like it has been doing for decades.

the chinese government may not care what left wing american students have to say, but if those students establish a precedent that speakers deemed 'offensive' can be shut down solely for that reason, then the groundwork is laid for parties who _aren't_ left wing students to abuse that precedent as well. this is why we must defend the principle of free speech even when we disagree with the speakers.

I think gp is saying that the first action legitimizes the second by setting precedent, so it's difficult to call the second action illegitimate.

I think the GP meant that the Chinese government can in fact promote its message because it is free speech.

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