Hacker News Reader

Comment by stainforth | Hacker News Reader

The supervisor is a coward and should be known as one.

> She had «no desire to receive emails like this because of one of my doctoral students.»

Is she? I love China and if somebody pulls a stunt like that that may blow up in my face I would take action too.

Think about if you were in CS and a student of your would post some ISIS shit on the internet and you were threatened with a travel ban to the US. I think most people would think twice.

Supporting free Hong Kong and Taiwan isn’t really comparable to supporting ISIS. The “he is an anti Chinese racist” rhetoric seems stretched by the fact that he spent so much time there, his romantic partner is Chinese, he seems to have a friends network there.

Having a Chinese partner is not guaranteed for not racism. This reminds me of the local case. A British Expat married to a local and posting racist comments on social media. His defense was the local failed to understand the British joke.

Ah yes. The old, "I can't be racist. I have black friends" defense.

Somehow im guessing it goes a bit deeper than “I have black friends” in this case. Althoug I haven’t seen the image referred to in the tweet, so maybe it was in very very bad taste and racist.

I am in CS. If a student of mine posted "ISIS shit", I'd want nothing to do with that person for personal reasons, irrespective of professional consequences.

People of other cultures, if told "Entity E will make so that if any student of yours expresses an opinion against E, you shall pay consequences", would make a perfectly consequently legitimate and correct declaration against E (defamating E in light of judgements evident and justifiable in some solid ethical frameworks: confusion in the attribution of responsibility, bullism, even the nowadays overused concept of terrorism, etc.).

Also following what I wrote nearby:

curiously, you mention "ISIS", and a practice like "If you have ties with people we dislike there will be consequences for you" is one of the few correctly attributed instances for the concept of terrorism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com