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Comment by igorkraw | Hacker News Reader

If you don't want to look at human remains, what are you doing at an academic presentation about human remains? It's not some anthropology mystery box, attendees have some idea of what the presentation will be about.

I'm not sure what you mean, Catholic churches and tombs do get studied. Including historical human remains. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34031599

And if the community served by Notre dame consented that's fine. But I have been in places in Italy that specifically shut down the mass and certain parts of the churches to tourists because people use these places to have communion with God. The whole point is about respecting the communities you want to research. You can replace catholics with whatever group you identify as, and the taboo being violated by whatever thing you find is the red line

But no one is argueing we should be allowed to just do whatever and waltz all over people's wishes, of course there are limits, and of course we should take people's beliefs and traditions in to account. I don't think there is any serious researcher left who feels any different, even though there might be disagreement on where the limits are exactly.

And that's really what this is about: what is reasonable? If a group doesn't want to learn about past acts of violence and prohibits anyone else from studying it, is that reasonable? Are the victims of said violence also not entitled to this research?

Italian Churches may close their doors, as is their right, but Italian churches aren't preventing entire areas of research from happening. Churches did in the past, and still try today at times, and people generally aren't too positive about that. Even most hard-core young-earth creationists don't really make any effort to stop research from happening: instead they do their own "research" in an attempt to refute the genuine research.

I would say that a large part of why Western culture has slowly becoming more liberal and empathic over the centuries is the study of history, and understanding what happened, and more importantly why.

I would strongly encourage everyone to object to anything they don't like, either as an individual or as a group, but I think it's foolish to simply shrug and accept any objection without any examination on how reasonable it is. "I don't want you to take a picture of me" is reasonable. "I don't want you to take a picture of anyone of my ethnic group" is not.

People are just getting tired of critical theory. Heard it once, heard it all. It adds nothing of substance. Which would be fine, if it did not get in the way of actual research.

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