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• watwut 2y ago
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  • handoflixue 2y ago
    > Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those. Do you know OP personally? Do you really think it's reasonable to assume that everyone in the universe (except for you, perhaps) is a hypocrite like this? There's plenty of people that feel the administrative force of the university shouldn't be used to suppress either side. Let the gun club invite Luigi. Let the trans club invite the Stonewall rioters. You're welcome to say you dislike the speaker. You don't have to attend. But you shouldn't have the authority to stop other people from inviting them to speak, or to stop other people from listening.
    • aaomidi 2y ago
      So, you’re saying basic protesting and sitins shouldn’t be allowed? Nah I’m sorry disrupting other events is a cornerstone of freedom of speech.
    • watwut 2y ago
      I don't need to know OP personally. The knee jerk "right is the way they are because of the left" gives the game away. Left is responsible for ehat they so and never ever excused with "right made them do it". Not even when they were 100% right in the hindsight. Right is not responsible for what they do. They are victims of circumstances even when they caused the circumstances.
      • _DeadFred_ 2y ago
        I see it not as 'right is the way they are because' but 'this is what the right exploited, and I too allowed myself to go down a crappy path'. It's a pretty brave, honest, and self reflective post.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • handoflixue 2y ago
        I don't think it's at all helpful to think of political groups as monolithic stereotypes like this.
  • e40 2y ago
    I think we got the far right reality of today by liberals completely ignoring working class pain and appearing to solely focus on a controversial minority. I say appearing because they didn’t seem to do anything else. This allowed the current administration to step in by promising something different, with no intention of delivering anything but tax relief for the wealthy and unchaining corporations from those pesky regulations that prevent higher profits.
    • aaomidi 2y ago
      The majority of people on the left want M4A, higher minimum wage, less income inequality. The politicians that represent them do not care. They get their seats secured as long as they toe the billionaire line. We have no real opposition party in the US.
  • neilv 2y ago
    IIRC, there was an invited talk at the unversity, and some student organized people to go in to the talk and disrupt it, such that the speaker literally couldn't be heard. That's not the student exercising their free speech. It's the student denying the benefit of free speech to their fellow students and the rest of the university. The university apparently hadn't yet educated the student on the basics of university, and there was not yet any sign that the university was going to. Reporting followed up with the student, when they promoted their personal brand, and solicited funding to continue their fight. (You might be happy to know that, instead of my modest donation going to the university with the student who thought a first-rate university was the place to ignore the fundamentals they teach, and instead play self-promoting influencer... IIRC, that was the year the money went to a homeless trans person, who'd been through more hell than most people can imagine, and who needed a discreet laptop so that they could practice coding job skills, but without the laptop getting violently stolen from them in whatever shelter they could get into. I'm not making this up, and the contrast was striking.) Regarding your other comments, much of the rabid left didn't seem to be acting as the savvy political operators you suggest: a whole lot of people were mindlessly flinging their poo, and playing right into the hands of some of the worst of their adversaries. Maybe it was partly a combination of crisis mode over the best of intentions (e.g., help those who need help), and anger and fatigue from same (which I certainly felt), but there also seemed to be a whole lot of not knowing any other mode of reasoning or acting. Maybe that's not their fault -- you might blame the deterioration of popular journalism, social media sites preying upon their users, and a dearth of visible role models demonstrating anything else -- but that seems to be where we are, for large slices of the vocal population. And there's been a lot of counterproductive.
    • watwut 2y ago
      I am not saying they are super savy. I am saying they were right about the right. They were right, because they were not determined to excuse dveryone on the right up to absurdum and because they read what right actually said. Moderate right and center consistently and always excused far right and refused to beloeve it exists even when it was completely apparent. And consistently deployed double standards where right was excused and left acts massively exaggerated.
  • dang 2y ago
    > Funny how people like you never ever > people like you always This crosses into personal attack and you can't do that here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit out such swipes in the future, as the rules ask, we'd appreciate it. Edit: this has unfortunately increasingly been a problem with your account lately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261348 (March 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152094 (Feb 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43147710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43147710 (Feb 2025) You've made many fine contributions to HN in the past and I don't recall your account having been involved in so much ideological and political flamewar. Could you please fix this? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
• giraffe_lady 2y ago
  It's kind of unreal that in the comments of an article about an actual (successful!) conspiracy between ultra-wealthy tech elite and extreme right activists to undermine american democracy for their own benefit, you're most concerned about liberal campus protests. You may not be as progressive as you think!
  • aaomidi 2y ago
    And to add to this. Speech is not created equal. What some students say in some college campus has very little power compared to the speech of one of the richest people __in history__. When someone famous and rich says something fucked up, the reaction to that isn’t deplatforming but rather a basic attempt at defense.
  • neilv 2y ago
    The anecdote was my writing mistake, not what I was most concerned about. (I started writing the anecdote, then decided what was important was the much larger problem, and oopsed the writing.) As for your point, I had some of the same thoughts about the overall article as you did. But I quoted a small piece of it, to narrow in on one point I wanted to make, which might be less obvious to people who think like us about the topic. Of course some wealthy and powerful have been undermining democracy; but what if that quote was honest: is it a valid criticism, and can we improve the situation? As long as we're stuck with billionaires, wouldn't it be great if more of them decided it was better to promote an informed and functioning democracy?
• UncleMeat 2y ago
  The disinvitation data is so incredibly small that there's no way on earth we can call this "rabid." In Haidt and Fukuyama's "The Coddling of the American Mind" they present data on disinvitations attempts. And it is in the tens of attempts nationwide. They even have to present the data with Milo Yiannopoulos removed since he made up a considerable portion of all disinvitation attempts. You can think that students are foolish for doing this. You can choose to stop donating because of a response by an institution. But to use this to claim that the left has "gone rabid" is ridiculous given the actual data. The students' behavior is not what drove voters towards the reactionary right. Breathless media coverage that blew this behavior completely out of proportion is responsible for this.
  • michtzik 2y ago
    The FIRE Campus Deplatforming Database claims to collect 769 successful deplatforming attempts.
    • UncleMeat 2y ago
      My number is per-year. The data above is since 1998. So in the last 27 years we've seen an average of 28 successful deplatforming attempts annually. The website cites 172 attempts (not necessarily successful) in 2024. There are thousands of colleges in the US. Surely hundreds of thousands of invited talks annually. I just cannot imagine thinking that this is a substantial social problem that should justify changing one's voting behavior.
    • mrguyorama 2y ago
      If you have been banned from running an event at every single college, every single local bar, every single local theater, etc, you still have just as much ability to get your message out as the vast majority of average people. Nobody has any obligation to provide you a platform. That is literally their first amendment right. If you want to use the government against "cancel culture", you are attempting to suppress people's first amendment rights of association. The founding fathers had to pay people to print their pamphlets. That option has always been available and was the very context that the first amendment was built around. The founding fathers never expected anyone else to carry their ideas. They expected ideas to be carried by their merit.
• dmonitor 2y ago
  You should interpret "not being able to posit your idea" as your idea losing so hard in the marketplace that people refuse to even consider it.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • ThrowawayR2 2y ago
    The right is winning elections and your side is not. Maybe consider stop being alienating liberals long enough to build a coalition that wins elections? Eventually the Democrats are going to recognize that hardline "if you're not with us, you're against us" progressives are costing more votes than they're worth and show them the door.
    • dmonitor 2y ago
      The "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality is exactly what won the current administration. People like the image of a strong man with his own opinions. Democrats have been retreating to the center on nearly every policy position, and it clearly isn't working.
• aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
• dang 2y ago
  We got complaints about your use of the word "rabid" and I think they have a point. That crosses into name-calling in the sense that the HN guidelines ask you not to do. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  • neilv 2y ago
    OK, sorry for violating the decorum. At the time I wrote it, thought it was an apt term, about behavior by "my own team", but point taken, and I think I have a better sense of the rule now, thank you.
    • dang 2y ago
      Appreciated! (I'm a bit squeamish about the word decorum but that's me being nitpicky)
• wat10000 2y ago
  This is a perfect example of the law of American politics that only Democrats have agency. Anything Democrats do is the responsibility of Democrats, and anything Republicans do is the responsibility of Democrats.