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Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

Really? If you speak ill of "white people, Christianity, and non transexual heterosexual men" will you lose your job? Will you lose your job in liberal universities if you speak ill of Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, African Americans? In case of perceived bias, I'm a swing voting (95% Dem) Jew.

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The worst thing is that the white left decides what is offensive or not. I’m Asian and most of the things they claim as racism against Asian are so cringe, literally nobody cares.

Same goes with the latinx movement. Actual people from latin America find it stupid and in some cases, ironically, offensive

Yes, it's cringe because it's said as a laughing matter and can have no consequences nowadays or it mostly doesn't. I used to think this way too before and I am still not liberal but the thing with racism is, the start might be jokes but once it's systematic because "nobody cares it's just jokes" those same words might start to hit differently.

The liberals can be overreaching about such matters, but I personally think racial slurs shouldn't be tolerated a lot.

This is just my 2 cents on the subject.

The point is, banning things does not solve problems. It just complicates things, force people to act in certain ways to make sure they aren't racist, instead of being genuine. When I'm accepted into interviews for jobs that aren't going to hire me anyway... it just wastes my time and their time.

The problem isn't much about racism, it is about some people act like jerks. And people can be jerks with or without racism.

The point of banning racism is so people don't feel comfortable doing it in public Because once that's there, systematic racism is going to be back, things won't stop at the random jerk level. Being a jerk might be because someone had a bad day etc, it's not loaded, you can counter it and it's not organized hate. But racism is different, racism targets anyone who looks like you, and it's usually organized efforts and loaded with ideas about dehumanizing people.

sometimes things escalate and this same random jerk might murder you if they think there is a high chance they will escape the justice system because you're basically a subhuman under the new laws that these lighthearted racists passed.

You can't make everyone good and decent, but you can for sure punish the racists and limit their access to power and that's what banning does in this case.

What would be illegal under this law? If a couple guys are sitting having a beer at home discussing their opinion on the difference in races and how some are better than others would that be illegal? If the neighbor overhead and turned them in, how long would they go to jail for over this private conversation that had previously been protected by the 1st? Would you advocate taking their children away from them? Does this law extend to people saying bad things about whites? What other speech would be outlawed as dangerous? What political ideas are banned? The 1st amendment exists for a very important reason. Restricting speech is a slippery slope that can rapidly lead to the party in power staying in power by banning opposing ideas.

Yes, depending on what you say, absolutely. If I stood in my classroom and made blanket disparaging statements about cis men or Christians or white people, I guarantee students in those groups would go to the admin and complain. If what I said was bad enough, I’d likely be fired.

You wouldn’t get fired at Rutgers:

https://torontosun.com/life/rutgers-professor-calls-white-pe...

Or Drexel:

https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/26/health/drexel-professor-white...

Or Yale:

https://news.yahoo.com/psychiatrist-delivered-lecture-yale-d...

But say things that are embarrassing yet true of minority students at Georgetown, and you’ll be fired and disowned by the college in under 48 hours:

https://news.yahoo.com/georgetown-law-professor-fired-over-1...

To be clear when I wrote my post I had in mind classroom instruction. The first two links are about comments made outside of the classroom, by tenured professors nonetheless. Hard to fire them for almost anything, but it does happen from time to time. The Drexel professor was later placed on administrative leave and then resigned.

The Yale link was about a lecture given by someone not affiliated with the University.

> you’ll be fired and disowned by the college in under 48 hours:

Yes, much easier to do with adjuncts compared to tenured professors.

Modern progressivism does distinguish instances of “punching down”, yes. That’s no secret and is not intended to be.

That’s not the point, though. Turning this into a “what about the white men!” whinge is blatantly misrepresenting this scenario as the result of “modern progressivism” when it’s actually something else.

I believe that you’re not going to find many proponents of the sort of progressivism that the “white about the white men!?”crowd fight against, that are actually in favour of this decision. Furthermore I believe that you’d find plenty that are against it.

Around the proponents of this ideology are concentric circles of people making misguided attempts to “capitulate to this PC culture”, often as an ass-covering tactic. By the time you get to a layperson perceiving ‘the culture’, it’s a xerox of a xerox of a xerox created by various corporate HR, PR, and marketing departments. Then, of course, you’ve got the people revolting against Big Org #836 mandating wearing pronoun pins in the office when that’s clearly not something any trans person would advocate for. The collective facepalming at misguided attempts to pander to “LGBTQIA+” is a big part of the current queer community / culture. This is just the community I am familiar with. I imagine it’s the same elsewhere.

I don’t believe that this is much of a ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy. It’s pretty easy to draw a logical bound between those that believe in the cause, and the rest.

I do not believe that this action was taken as a genuine act of modern progressivism. It’s a typical corporate ‘make this go away and don’t upset the minorities with megaphones’ action. But we’ve got some great keywords like “university” and “Muslim” which opportunists obnoxiously use to fuel the culture war.

Wouldn't offending muslims be punching down then?

   > Modern progressivism does distinguish instances of “punching down”

And many would argue the concept of this being "punching down" requires at least a subconscious belief that those groups are somehow beneath other groups in the first place. Furthermore, why support punching at all?

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