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Comment by rscoots | Hacker News Reader

You'll admit that the category of 'anyone who has compared mainstream American politics to Nazism in a published article' is a pretty wide net though?

Although we find it distasteful it seems to be a pretty common refrain/analogy of those in politics & media.

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> You'll admit that the category of 'anyone who has compared mainstream American politics to Nazism in a published article' is a pretty wide net though?

No, I won't. "Published an article in a national periodical about mainstream American politics at all" is already a really small net! "Did it in the past two months" vanishingly less so! "And is giving a PR speech for their university" and I bet we're down to population size ~1.

I think universities as a whole would be a lot better off if they stopped considering this body of op-ed-cum-think-tank-writers pretending to be journalists worthy of serious attention at all, Nazi comparisons or no. And I think it says a lot about Mounk's own social circles that he considers this behavior de rigueur.

> a very similar situation

You're saying university DEI initiatives are "a very similar situation" to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. Do you really think this? Not only no difference in kind, but close in degree?

You seem to be adding in additional, somewhat frivolous conditions that none of the parties involved even alluded to. So yes that might drive down the number to a conveniently hard-to-research amount.

Let's start with your "2 months" figure. Who cited that as part of the reason for the disinvitation?

The timeframe and forum makes it fair to characterize this as his current, considered, strongly-held opinion. That has bearing on whether we consider this a situation of "we disinvited him because we don't want our PR handled by people currently advancing opinions contra political sensitive aspects of our university admissions policy" vs. "we disinvite everyone who made a cringeworthy analogy to the Third Reich" (Mounk's characterization).

That's what you think, but I'm asking who at MIT has taken that position re timeframe that you have evidence of?

You have moved the goalposts immensely from "is Mounk's conclusion about Nazi comparisons accurate?" to "do you have proof from the horses's mouth that MIT would not have done this had he written this 5 years ago?"

I was rate limited.

You brought up timeframe (and many other conditions) as a rebuttal to the author. I'm just pointing out that you can't be sure that any of those considerations even entered the minds of MIT's admins. I hope we can at least agree that this opaqueness is an issue and could inspire future, less-careful censors.

If you're taking a position of absolute radical skepticism, you should be asking the same questions of Mounk's claim to know MIT's exact conditions, not using such hearsay as your own argument's starting point.

Glad you agree you and Mounk have both made assumptions u can't back up.

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