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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> Are they also going to go through all kinds of expressions of art and looking for unacceptable views in their libraries?

Good grief. It's not a library, it's a mural. This isn't an archive of historically important but plausibly controversial artwork being purged for thought crimes, it's a fucking school wall. Kids and staff have to walk by this thing every day. And there's a dead indian on it front and center, and a bunch of slaves working in a field. It's... it's just not appropriate artwork for a public space.

And all this hand wringing is completely insincere anyway. If some random school in Arkansas had decided to repaint a mural with similar content, no one would care. But this is San Francisco, so of course Bari Weiss gets to write about it int The Times and pretend it's some kind of liberal disease.

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School kids have to walk by a mural depecting the sometimes ugly history of their country? So what?

So... maybe their school district should feel free replace the ugly history with some more acceptable public artwork without a bunch of internet conservatives freaking out about it?

I mean, it's not like they don't teach the history of slavery or indigenous peoples in California schools. They don't need to celebrate it on the corridor walls if they don't want to, do they?

The artist was a communist. Do you really think he was celebrating slavery?

Does it matter? Do you really argue that no one could possibly be offended by this 40 foot long painting of a literally larger than life dead native american?

Let. Them. Decorate. Their. School. Why must everything be a moral lesson with you people? You don't apply that level of finger wagging to anyone else, but Good God if liberals do something then it must be evil.

How could you say it doesn't matter if the artist opposes or supports slavery?

Because the question isn't what the art means! It's whether or not the San Francisco school district and its community should be free to choose what kind of artwork to decorate their school with without knee-jerk conservatives like Bari Weiss and "darkpuma" freaking out about it as it it were censorship.

It's their school, not yours. Why do you think you should get veto power over what they are allowed to change and what they must keep? And why on earth, of all things, do you think they should be required to keep this thing?

We know it is censorship because they're spending $600k to ensure they totally destroy it forever.

If it were merely about choosing what kind of art to show on the wall, they could simply paint over it for $1k.

That's $599,000 that could be used to pay teachers instead being spent to ensure this mural is never seen again.

> "Because the question isn't what the art means!"

Of course it is. You've got a bunch of hysterical people saying the mural is in support of slavery and genocide. How can you say that the meaning of the art isn't relevant? The beliefs the mob have about the meaning of the mural are central to the story, you cannot abstract them away.

Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? and violating the site guidelines? For example, the guidelines include: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." The comment I'm replying to here broke that, as have others you posted, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20299823 from yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough, I'll delete the responses here. To be fair, though, we both know that the linked editorial is a deliberate exercise in insincere outrage. Demanding that one side assume good faith while the other is allowed to feign as much outrage as it wants because their media feeds the narrative isn't a good path to clean discussion either.

With no one to challenge the framing (which, yes, includes accusing people of being conservatives) topics like this become echo chambers. I don't want that, and am willing to tolerate some flamage as the price.

But yeah, it's not my forum. Like I said I'll delete the responses here.

Thanks for the reply. It's quite possible to express your points thoughtfully rather than flamingly, and then there wouldn't be any problem at all.

It's not my forum either! We're just trying to preserve it.

We're do our best to demand good faith equally from everyone, or rather to cajole them into it. Outrage—feigned or otherwise—seems pretty evenly distributed as far as I can tell.

It's not just any artwork, it's a piece of WPA art by an independently-notable artist. Yes, it's ugly (if only in the way it freely uses stereotypes that are considered at least somewhat offensive today). But so what. The school district can cover it in a non-destructive way if they don't want the schoolkids exposed to it, but destroying the work altogether would be out of question in a sane world.

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