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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

> I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis.

It's amazing that now we're getting hit from both directions in this regard. The left would like minorities treated with kid gloves, and now the right wants to muzzle schools that would say anything critical of white people or positive about minorities.

I don't know how we got to this place, but damn, it sucks. The 90s seem so quaint by comparison. I'm already looking back and thinking that 80s/90s were a really special era. After a bunch of crazy shit, and before the next wave. Not perfect, there were some incidents, but it just pales in comparison to what happens every year now.

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The 80s and the 90s do seem in retrospect to be exemplars of what I consider the college experience.

By the end of the 80s, the canon wars had been fought and lost, so any topic was fair game for study. In loco parentis had been gone for a while. Ethnic boundaries were all but gone, and class boundaries were disappearing as well as more people went to college.

By the time the 90s rolled around university life seemed to be the free-wheeling intellectual pursuit with a healthy dose of libertinism that I considered the college experience. I grew up in that era, so maybe I am just a product of it. But there seems to be something pure in that model of university life.

In later years after the 90s, taboo subjects became more common, in loco parentis returned under the guise of limiting legal liability, tuition costs made class differences more stark, and most sadly of all I think we've lost a bit of the universality of the human experience thing, and focus too much on identity and how that divides people.

I suspect in the 80s the job market was acting like having a degree implied a graduate was in the top 5% of humans by ability. Now it'll be more like top 33%. That is getting dangerously close to signalling that someone has a warm body as opposed to an unusually bright mind.

I suspect that is the driver behind a lot of the points you make - it isn't possible for universities to maintain a little culture of intellectual curiosity off on the side when double-digit percentages of the population are moving through them.

Culture is a shared fiction of unity and greatness that enables great civilizations to overcome otherwise inevitable tribal warfare. So Native Americans and Pilgrims sat down together for a Thanksgiving feast with Turkey and mashed potatoes. Should we teach this to children despite there being more to the story? Well it depends, do we want descendants of Pilgrims and Native Americans to sit down for a Thanksgiving feast today, or do we prefer various 2020-style riots to go on? That's the original political correctness, prioritizing getting along over being right. It's not wrong to tell kids that being a boy or a girl doesn't matter, just follow your dreams. Some day they will discover that it sometimes does matter, and that being born 200 years earlier would have sucked. But by then they will develop good habits like striving for individual equal treatment over tribalism. Where left gets it wrong is treating children like adults when it comes to gore and sexuality and adults like children when it comes to free speech.

> Where left gets it wrong is treating children like adults when it comes to gore and sexuality and adults like children when it comes to free speech.

And denying the primacy of objective reality (as best we know it, subject to intellectual inquiry and criticism) over subjective experience (which they say is inviolate and unquestionable).

The issue in a nutshell is that folks use the language of objective reality, science, and nature, as a political cuddle and then deny doing it. When that can stop we can actually sit down and have an adult conversation.

> folks use the language of objective reality, science, and nature, as a political cuddle

Did you mean "political cudgel"?

I agree people in power always have a collection of "facts" they pull out to "prove" things. Public arbiters of conversation (op-ed columnists, bloggers, etc.) ought to call those into question as a matter of routine.

Haha, what a typo! That's funny, yes.

We're in the midst of epistemological de/re-territorialization between objective and subjective and frankly, when I hear or read people frame their opinions as fact/truth/reality/nature/science I instantly shutoff and encourage others to do the same. Specifically, I'm an anti-reificationist and if I catch a wiff of people reifying their symbolic universe, they instantly lose my respect.

Sorry I don’t mean to be following you. I have been trying to find a way to actually agree with you on something.

I found it! We are both absolutely rigid when it comes to reificationism. We happened to move to different sides of the political spectrum is all. It’s fascinating to me. I was a normal person not knowing politics 1.5 years ago. I got radicalized mostly in 2022 to the left.

Thanks for teaching me that word and amazingly I not only whole heartedly agree with everything you’re saying. I’m interested in your insights. Sorry if I behaved rudely to you in other comments. Im autistic and I forget to be an empathic person sometimes.

"But by then they will develop good habits like striving for individual equal treatment over tribalism."

Do you think there is absolutely no "tribalism" right now, in the public debate?

as I understood it the whole thing with pilgrim's natives and turkey never happened and that thanksgiving was a post civil war holiday that somehow turned into that.

> and now the right wants to muzzle schools that would say anything critical of white people or positive about minorities.

I don’t think this really true. It’s the sort of thing you’ll read on Reddit comment threads and breathless NPR article titles but when you actually dig into the story it ends up being a boring story about, sticking to facts and not some alt-history histrionics.

Almost like Sneetches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie...)

Contention creates a magnet for nonelastic investment in things monetary as well as social will. A surveillance economony that creates opportunity like today's commercialized internet would have been a wet dream for Sylvester McMonkey McBean.

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