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Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

>We introduced ourselves and took our seats. But as we were about to begin, the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture.

I'm not sure who gave these people the idea the heckler's veto is a legitimate tactic on a college campus or why the administration puts up with it. Those students should be summarily expelled.

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I agree with you, but... Apparently, this argument (against mandatory Western Civ) has been going on for years, and a few (3?) students went wild this year and disrupted class. There have been previous complaints and protests that did not disturb class. http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/march2017/articles/feature...

However, to use their own language against them (because I get to hear this stuff on Turkey-Day)... it reeks of privilege.

I question whether the protest leaders even know what discrimination is. Have they been alone where they were truly a minority (by skin color or politics) or outside of their parents cocoon? It seems not, because they don't know how to get along even with people who largely agree with them... privilege. That they were allowed by the appropriately outraged staff/faculty to continue says it again.

Still, based on my recent experiences, these are not the majority of students at any college. Even the hotbed schools of such pop-protest need something else to get a larger group of their undergrad students out... that's why it takes an actual march of Nazi's on campus (or take back the night, TA unionization, etc) to get student protests in Berkeley... the city is more activist than the students.

I agree, they should be expelled for deliberately disrupting a class like that (or at least be forced to drop it with an F on their transcript). I think the lack of an appropriate response like that is what "gave these people the idea the heckler's veto is a legitimate tactic on a college campus." They tried it, it worked, so they do it again but bigger.

This is not how we did things in the 90s we used to debate these speakers and knock down their ideas with rational discourse it's not that hard to deflate the arguments of the far right they're mostly based on a series of bad assumptions like assuming everyone has a deep fear of anyone who looks different than them. It's better to let them speak and then deflate their arguments to the bone in debate.

However when it comes to speakers advocating racism, race is not even real, there is only one human race with ethnic variations we don't allow people to come to medical schools to advocate using voodoo doll to cure cancer why should racists be speaking on college campuses?

Race is real. It's obvious when you look around. The major continental races show up on any k-clustered human genomic analysis. And any competent forensic anthropologist can identity race from skeletal remains.

We should treat people with equal dignity. Race should not be a factor in individual decisions. Left doesn't stop there, though. They go further, insisting that race is not only irrelevant, but unreal. They step beyond fairness and into propaganda and lies. It's why the left is now on the retreat in every institution of power.

I'm not the only one who's sick of having to parrot lies. By alienating people like me, people who would ordinarily be sympathetic to the left's causes, the left is guaranteeing a conservative backlash of biblical scope.

The vast majority of the people accused of being racists aren't actually racists. But even if they were, it's not your place to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't.

Perhaps, but then you run into the problem of defining racism. It can be obvious, but you can also have situations like the one in yale where the english curriculum was "Colonized"[1] by the fact it had too many white male writers. Would someone who advocates for teaching the traditionally accepted cannon of english literature be racist. According to some definitions, yes. Further, some are willing to call the fundamentals of math racist[2]. Racism can be subtle as well as obvious, and to define the parameters of acceptable speech based on subjective understanding of that subtlety seems that it would likely lead to abuse.

[1]http://college.usatoday.com/2016/06/10/yale-undergraduates-a...

[2]www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5018223/Professor-says-math-perpetuates-white-privilege.html

[1] is fake news. [2] is a single professor from a low-tier university with the article intended to incite outrage and divide through inducing fear in the reader, which is what you felt.

Please be more careful where you are sourcing your brain food.

My view on the freedom of expression is well known, so I'll try to avoid being verbose.

Does the institution receive funding from the government?

If so, can it legally prohibit lawful speech?

SCOTUS has pretty much decided that it can not. In time, this will be a more settled matter. America is still young, comparatively speaking. We will be okay so long as we remember it's a constant effort and not a final state.

That's what we did back in the 1860's too. There were all these people who wanted to build an economy based around the idea that some humans didn't really have rights and so we deflated their arguments with rational discourse.

Obviously I'm not comparing teachers of Western history to slave owners. But i am trying to point out that rational discourse alone doesn't yield a more egalitarian world.

You hit the nail on the head: the use of rational discourse and the use of logical arguments to plead a case, demanding those arguments follow the ideas of logic. That idea BY ITSELF is one of the core ideas that very much are "Western Civilization" and were hard-fought ideas even inside the West (even in ancient Greece, just read the circle arguments in ancient Greece). Even the idea of a university itself is very much a Western tradition that is not exactly common.

But this rational discourse is quite a unique property of Western Christian civilization, and it's Greek philosophy heritage.

So when those students say that Plato, rational argument itself (and frankly the existence of the university concept itself in the first place) are against their religion/ideology ... they're probably right.

But let's also move one piece of total shite out of this world : there has never been any large scale human society that was egalitarian, and frankly most societies were FAR worse than the West has ever been. Especially islamic civilization is bad in that regard.

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