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Comment by adamiscool8 | Hacker News Reader

>a handful of federal agencies confirmed earlier this month in court documents that they cut grants if researchers’ projects “expressed, or were presumed to express, viewpoints disfavored by the Administration.”

Why is this bad? The Administration is democratically elected so nominally represents the viewpoints of the majority people - why should taxpayer funding go to disfavored research?

>The UC researchers allege the grant terminations violated their First Amendment rights by targeting their work based on viewpoint and subject matter and have asked the federal judge overseeing the case to rule the revocations unconstitutional.

More weird fascist technocratic fantasies from academia. Why would you be constitutionally entitled to continued public funding?

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>Why is this bad?

I don't think anyone voted for the gov to use a crude, ridiculous keyword list with many more false positives than not to terminate the funding of any and all research that simply uttered a bad word regardless of context. I'm not sure why you're pretending they did.

I suggest you actually read the first amendment. Maybe you'll understand then.

Read all the comments here, at this time, there are no civil conversations. It's all a echo chamber. You won't find anyone who wants to engage in actual conversation about the topic.

There's numerous civil conversations happening. Why would you tell such an easily disprovable lie?

Could you explain how the people talking about their experience having to avoid specific words in their grant request were somehow uncivil? I'm not sure I understand. Was the objectively ridiculous nature of the situation being laid bare to you uncomfortable and thus "uncivil"?

At the time of writing my post 90% were pure complaints about administration, one thread went as far as Russian state actors or aliens.

I'll take all the downvotes, I really don't care but if you can't see this then you're part of the echo chamber... sorry.

At the time of writing your post 90% of them were talking about the article. That, obviously, necessitates talking about the administration. I guess you interpreted people saying anything other than "I love this admin" as "uncivil". But, well, you already moved from "none of the threads are civil" to "90% of the threads aren't complimenting enough".

You know that, of course, which is why you refused to explain how the people talking about their experience having to avoid specific words in their grant request were somehow uncivil. Very dishonest and abhorrent.

The only one in an echo chamber is you, apparently one you've hallucinated into existence. The only 'individual' here being uncivil is you trying to gaslight everyone into believing any and all criticism of an administration is "uncivil".

And, no, I didn't downvote you.

I accept your concession.

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