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Comment by rscoots | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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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