9 ms·
Texas A&M bans part of Plato's Symposium
- slater 9mo agoserver seems to be hugged. https://web.archive.org/web/20260107085450/https://dailynous.com/2026/01/06/texas-am-bans-plato/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260107085450/https://dailynous...
- bediger4000 9mo agoI thought we were broadly against colleges and universities banning politically incorrect speech. Wasn't that a huge talking point 2-3 years ago? Didn't we bring back freedom of speech?
- LocalH 9mo ago[flagged]
- NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago[flagged]
- freejazz 9mo agoYes
- NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago[flagged]
- freejazz 9mo agoYou should ask them, not me. Maybe also read the article while you're at it.
- anigbrowl 9mo agoBecause they're massive hypocrites, a concept that is surely familiar to you.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago[flagged]
- freejazz 9mo agoOnly one here supposing they would be harmed is you
- NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo agoIf it interferes with their opportunity to engage in their favorite narratives, such as espousing racial ideology, this turn of events can't have done anything except impair that. And you don't seem to be making the argument that they did this without realizing the consequences, or anything of that nature. Perhaps you are confused, I see that alot from people who don't use punctuation.
- freejazz 9mo ago>If it interferes with their opportunity to engage in their favorite narratives, such as espousing racial ideology, this turn of events can't have done anything except impair that. Yet they did it. >And you don't seem to be making the argument that they did this without realizing the consequences, or anything of that nature. Perhaps you are confused, I see that alot from people who don't use punctuation. I'm not. I don't need to make any arguments. It is a fact that it was done and it is a fact who it was done by. There is no disputing that. You can guess whatever reasoning you want, I do not particularly care. It was done by the Texas Board of Regents, not liberal woke purple haired coast elites. Get a grip already. > Perhaps you are confused, I see that alot from people who don't use punctuation. Funny coming from the poster with a bunch of posts that are flagged. I didn't even flag them!
- uncletscollie 9mo agoFreedom of speech is now defined as the person with the most power or who screams the loudest has the final say. That is what happens when you elect a dictator.
- gosub100 9mo ago[flagged]
- tstrimple 9mo agoYou let the Nazis have their speech and now they are running the country. Let's see how they respond to your well reasoned arguments.
- daveguy 9mo agoIt has been that way in the US since the supreme court decided that money is equivalent to speech. And the effects have been ramping up ever since. If there is only so much bandwidth in communication, then using money to monopolize airwaves directly reduces the speech of those who cannot afford the excessive cost that results. Monopolize here is used in the sense of dominating the available supply (of bandwidth) and bidding up the price. Citizens United must be overturned.
- zeroonetwothree 9mo ago> elect a dictator
- lukev 9mo agoIt's really depressing how the popular discourse around these topics so consistently fails to address any kind of bad-faith reasoning on topics like this. Politicians complaining about free speech almost uniformly are referring to speech they don't like. Just like when they say they want to be "moral" its their morals, and when they say they want safety it's safety for a certain kind of person. But the media (institutional AND social) ends to just accepting their stated motivations at face value. And at this point it's making us all look like idiots.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ToValueFunfetti 9mo agoWho is "we" here? I can't count how many times I've argued against just an apparently broadly-held view that free speech ends at the first amendment and isn't a general principle that should be practiced at, eg., universities. Looks like when I argued that here, I was told that I should pick a different term for the principle of free speech in order to disambiguate from the first amendment (they recommended calling it 'my personal content preferences'). Likewise uncountable is the number of times I've said normalizing free speech restrictions against the other side will come back to bite you once they're (inevitably, especially given these tactics) in power. I can see how 'pro-speech' might have appeared to be a right-leaning position when violations were typically against right-leaning expression, but I never got the sense that either side really gave a damn.
- watwut 9mo agoMajority of that was bad faith argument designed to create exactly this situation. And it succeeded.
- A_Duck 9mo agoOne thing we know is that few of the people debating this have actually read Plato's Symposium A thing you can right now do is read it (1-2 hours): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm#link2H_4_0002 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm#link2... Or just the two sections in question: Aristophanes’ myth of split humans (7 minutes): https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/eros/platos-other-half https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/eros/platos-other-half Diotima’s ladder of love (20 minutes) https://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/103/jowett_symp_A.htm https://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/103/jowett_symp_A.htm
- aestetix 9mo agoDon't forget the extremely loaded context surrounding Alcibiades.
- nerdsniper 9mo agoI have no idea what this context is.
- cafard 9mo agoI haven't looked, but I imagine that Wikipedia gives a reasonable account of Alcibiades.
- red-iron-pine 9mo agopresumably it has to do with the gay cuz even alluding to it makes texans uncomfortable. doth protest too much i think
- codyb 9mo agoI've heard an uptick in derogatory terms being thrown around recently and while unsurprising, it sure is sad. Recent events... - Went to a concert, an underage kid with a fake ID couldn't get a beer, turned to me and goes "Isn't this guy a f----" Uh... well, he may be making your night less enjoyable, but I don't see why gay people have to catch strays cause of it... "I don't think I'd call anyone that" was my response, and "it's okay to be gay" was a follow up - My boss said something was retarded. I'm a bit wishy washy on the r-word myself as, while I'm friends with people with Down Syndrome and other maladies, it never occurred to me to relate the word to them (especially since they're generally really very nice people) It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association) But now I've stopped using it entirely, although in this case I did not correct my boss (who I respect as a person and enjoy working for very much) - One of my other friends called something "gay" recently "Don't call things gay bro" was my response. As my mom explained to me in sixth grade "even though you don't really even have an idea what it means to be gay, when you say that negative things are gay, you're implying that being gay is negative, but gay people just are themselves and don't deserve that" I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that and I'm damned proud of it All these losers trying to turn back the times to put gay people back in the closet give me "peaked in middle school" vibes, and it's sad to see that it's also slowly becoming normalized with people who I don't even think have that inclination or care to say prejudiced shit again too
- aebtebeten 9mo agoWhen even an old independently wealthy dude whose favourite pupil thought some people are slaves by nature is too "woke", who can we teach? Dick and Jane? (oh, I see the problem now; they're supposed to be implied to be, by strategic omission, old independently wealthy slave-owning dudes who were into the flute girls?)
- aebtebeten 9mo agoPHILOSOPHY 101 by Gray and Sharp See Dick. Dick thinks about people. See Jane. Jane thinks about events. See Spot. Spot keeps a close eye on the two intellectuals.
- freejazz 9mo agoWhat a joke
- ashleyn 9mo agoIt really begs the question of, how much is this obsession with controlling others' gender actually going to end up negatively impacting the US's competitive edge in higher education? Between this and firing qualified TAs who did their job, we're well beyond just impacting gender studies majors at Evergreen College. How much longer until it cuts into mathematics, merely because an author was part of the reigning administration's monster of the week?
- greenavocado 9mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bo1024 9mo agoIt’s an issue, but a small part of it. The funding cuts and immigration barriers have already laid foundations for a massive harm to the US’s edge in research and education.
- philistine 9mo agoThe US got the bomb in large part because the Nazi intelligentsia didn't like Jewish physics. If the person who unifies the four forces is transgender, will the US recognize and teach it?
- 0928374082 9mo agoThe US got a lot of things in a lot of fields because the sort of people who were smart enough to make those advances were also smart enough to get far away from the Reich while the getting was still good. Similarly, I believe the Renaissance was not so much a "rebirth" of culture as it was italian port cities suddenly benefiting from a sudden influx of highly educated people bugging out from Constantinople; more a translation than a reappearance.
- red-iron-pine 9mo ago
- PaulHoule 9mo agoFunny that conservatives want people to read the classics.
- andrewflnr 9mo agoI'm pretty sure they still do, actually. What I suspect happened is that someone high up the food chain put out a broad directive to remove "gender ideology" without thinking too hard about the consequences, and then some relatively unimaginative admins lower down decided to implement it Consistently With No Exceptions. Just doing their jobs "fairly". I expect they'll fix the glitch, frankly, at least the immediate glitch.
- wat10000 9mo agoThis smells of malicious compliance to me. Similar to removing the Bible when given a directive to remove texts containing sexual material.
- andrewflnr 9mo agoCould be. That would be funnier, for sure. Actually, the Bible definitely contains gender ideology, so I guess they do have to ban it.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- gsf_emergency_6 9mo agoGenuinely confused here: are you saying that those who are on the side of the professor are conservatives?
- aebtebeten 9mo agoFor a different professor, there's Dr. Bob Altemeyer, who wrote a book in 2006 (after 40 years of research) that includes a section on evidence-based deradicalisation[0] of authoritarian followers, pp240-245: https://theauthoritarians.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/TheAuthoritarians.pdf#page=247 https://theauthoritarians.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/The... (for objections, see [1]) That's nonfiction, and anachronistic. As far as fiction in the correct setting goes, I'm drawing a blank, and I even had to read things like "At the Bridge" and "The Tin Drum" in school (as well as watch dokus like "The White Rose" and "Triumph of the Will"[2]). Most stories I know are of the unrepentant[3]; maybe I can dig some repentant ones up later? [0] dereactionalisation? [1] some discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278 [2] if I am overly paranoid, maybe it's because it's difficult to see anyone's GOAT propaganda these days and not compare it with Riefenstahl; she made the https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropeCodifier https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropeCodifier ? [3] including, but not limited to: Oberleutnant (as he was then) "Kongo" Müller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Müller_(mercenary) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Müller_(mercenary) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGAUW1ZF2xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGAUW1ZF2xI Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen#Gehlen_Organization,_1947–1956 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen#Gehlen_Organiz... https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/bnd-bundesnachrichtendienst-nationalsozialismus-ns-taeter-100.html https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/bnd-bundesnachrichtendienst-n... SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#American_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#American_car... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zcU85O82XE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zcU85O82XE ("doctor were-ner von brawn") (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38759207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38759207, and elsewhere on HN, for wholesale vs retail sellers) lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro You too may be a big hero Once you've learned to count backwards to zero "In German, und Englisch, I know how to count down Und 我学习中文!" says Wernher von Braun EDIT: (haven't been using that Gemini, sorry) Schwarzenegger's neighbours retreated into the bottle[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_P-0I6sAck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_P-0I6sAck [4] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/85221-atticus-said-naming-people-after-confederate-generals-made-slow-steady https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/85221-atticus-said-naming-p...
- ofrzeta 9mo agoLet the king decide what to read in his universities and you are good. It's also hard to stomach how the professor said he doesn't teach "ideology" but the administration doesn't even bother to refute this or anything. They just stubbornly repeat their allegations and confront him with an ultimatum. It's almost like the bullying is trickling down, right?
- browningstreet 9mo agoFalling in line.
- aebtebeten 9mo agoI'm sure some philosopher somewhen had something to say about whether or not being alternately servile and arrogant constitutes living the good life?
- lordleft 9mo agoNot to minimize the significance of this but prohibiting a portion of a reading is like slapping a "parental warning" on a Rap CD in the 90s -- if I was an undergrad, I'd only want to read those excerpts more.
- gosub100 9mo agoSimilar vein: reading in general is down, overall. Especially among young people. "Banning" a book isn't affecting anyone, it just gets a bunch of people riled up on two political tribes. Now, if they actually banned a book, like "you will go to jail for having this" I would be concerned.
- petsfed 9mo agoThe real barrier to students reading Plato has historically (and correctly) been the dismal quality of translations available. I always hated reading plato because the translations available to me were significantly more concerned with carrying into the modern day the wonky syntax and sentence structure of ancient Greek philosophical writing, and less concerned with translating the underlying ideas into language understandable by a 19 year-old engineering major who can barely spell their own name.
- pklausler 9mo agoI think that it would be easier to get younger people to study Quenya to be able to read fragments of Tolkien in the "original" than it would be to somehow get them to learn to read classical Greek. But it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek, and then there's a lifetime of really great stuff that opens up for one to enjoy.
- nemo 9mo ago>it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek I studied Attic, Koine, and Homeric, as well as a few other dialects for 10 years through college until I left my PhD program in Classics. Learning Greek was _very_ hard and even after that time I still had many gaps.
- syngrog66 9mo ago[flagged]
- adamc 9mo agoThis is where MAGA leads. I'm gradually tuning out Hacker News, because it persistently tries to ignore the politics that are destroying the United States and freedom of enquiry. There is a dead comment below that tries to raise an argument but was killed instead. This is no longer a place to go to discuss ideas.
- DaSHacka 9mo ago> This is no longer a place to go to discuss ideas. No longer? Flagging comments isnt a new feature, and if anything, the site has been getting more political as time goes on, not less.
- jalapenoh 9mo ago[flagged]
- djoldman 9mo ago> I'm gradually tuning out Hacker News, because it persistently tries to ignore the politics that are destroying the United States and freedom of enquiry. There are many places that focus on, allow, or encourage political content. Hackernews is not one of them, as by express design, it deems politics as off topic: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- shagie 9mo agoThis essay also likely influenced the "what are things appropriate for HN": https://paulgraham.com/identity.html https://paulgraham.com/identity.html I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. ... Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions. Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.
- pklausler 9mo agoWant to know what a retreat from the Renaissance and scientific Enlightenment back into medieval mindlessness looks like? This is what it looks like.
- jhanschoo 9mo agoI'm a bit peeved at this caricaturization of earlier eras. In fact, significant fields of modern philosophy received great innovation by churchmen, and they were of course constantly attempting to reconcile Christian dogma with Greek and especially Aristotelian thought. One prominent example was formal logic, which was significantly developed in the middle ages, but received scant attention in the Renaissance.
- aebtebeten 9mo agoThey developed a great deal of formal logic, but looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroco#:~:text=In%20the%20terminology,particular%20negative%20conclusion%2e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroco#:~:text=In%20the%20term... (with the hindsight from Boolean logic, admittedly!) it seems more like they were mostly slathering on the tech debt. How am I mistaken? Speaking of reconciliation, might I interest you in a reconciliation of Aquinas and Spinoza, by way of Galois Theory?
- jhanschoo 9mo ago> Speaking of reconciliation, might I interest you in a reconciliation of Aquinas and Spinoza, by way of Galois Theory? This is kind of bad faith. > They developed a great deal of formal logic... it seems more like they were mostly slathering on the tech debt. How am I mistaken? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/ > Abelard was the greatest logician since Antiquity: he devised a purely truth-functional propositional logic, recognizing the distinction between force and content we associate with Frege, and worked out a complete theory of entailment as it functions in argument (which we now take as the theory of logical consequence). His logical system is flawed in its handling of topical inference, but that should not prevent our recognition of Abelard’s achievements. and you might be more familiar with Ockham's Razor. There are others, but you can do your own research if you're interested. There was a lot of work that needed to be done in between Aristotle's incomplete Syllogisms and the incomplete understanding of propositional logic that Sophists used, that helped birth Frege's Begriffsschrift.
- cozyman 9mo ago[dead]
- breckinloggins 9mo agoI am a former student and graduate of this department at Texas A&M. I just called The Association and informed them that I consider this completely unacceptable and will not consider donations to the university unless this policy is reversed. I would encourage fellow like-minded Aggies to do the same. Drs Austin and McDermott are surely spinning in their graves right now.
- fuzzfactor 9mo agoI would say that the most respectable universities are traditionally institutions of higher learning. It's always been possible for any of them to decline into lesser institutions of not-as-much-higher-learning as they started out with. Wouldn't leadership integrity and actual scholarship make the big difference between those that are able to strive higher each generation compared to those who strive lower? Who is it that wants to aggressively devalue Aggie degrees that have already been earned, especially in the eyes of the world, along with any to be granted in the future anyway? It's not only "The Eyes of Texas" that are upon this.
- 1659447091 9mo ago> It's not only "The Eyes of Texas" that are upon this. Referencing the University of Texas (Austin) school song in a reply to an Aggie, them fightin' words More related, with A&M generally being traditionally conservative* and also being a research university that values higher learning -- yet still a public school -- they are going run up on these issues given the current state of "conservative" (maga) politics. UT is getting the same pressure, but being a traditionally liberal leaning school with a rich history of protest leading to change, they are able to resist a bit more -- which I always respected (except for Thanksgiving rivalry games) -- but even they are slowly caving-in. Texas use to mind its own business, scoff at whatever ideology the federal government was pushing and, for the most part, let people and institutions be. How we became a maga lapdog is truly baffling. *Has the George H.W. Bush library and a Corps of Cadets (student military organization) that deeply intergraded into school tradition, for starters. Also, oil money.
- 9mo ago
- tsoukase 9mo ago[flagged]
- dragonwriter 9mo ago> I am really confused with the fights around gender of the last 5 years. As a doctor I have a solid grasp of the five dimensions of gender (genital organs, genetic, social, psychological and legal). So there can be 2^5 = 32 genders Biological sex has multiple dimensions, ascribed gender (which is social, and of which legal gender is one of many forms) has a number of dimensions per form that depends on the particular social milieu, gender identity (which is a mix of social and psychological) has multiple dimensions that vary, again, at least by social milieu, and many of the dimensions involved are not strict binaries. So both the base and exponent in your formula are unjustified. So, no, doctor (of what?) or not, I don’t think you have a solid grasp of anything relating to gender.
- tsoukase 9mo agoThere is no need to repeat the word social so often. We can argue infinitely at any level of substraction. In humans there are two sexes. In some other species there are eight. Start from there and build your way up.
- thenewwazoo 9mo ago> In humans there are two sexes. You claim to be a doctor (again, of what?). Have you even heard the word intersex before? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
- tsoukase 9mo agoI am neurologist. There is a spectrum between but the result situation is either a disease, infertile, unsustainable long term or... made up for hype. If you can point a person that has distinct characteristics and not a mix/overlap, then I admin there is a third sex.
- 9mo ago
- BrenBarn 9mo agoIt's wild how there's so much overlap between the faction that wants to champion "European culture" and "Western civilization" and the faction that will do things like this.
- trueismywork 9mo agoFor them European culture means colonial culture, not modern liberal culture. So there is no dissonance.
- red-iron-pine 9mo agoit means Texas Protestant Christian culture
- BrenBarn 9mo agoPlato is not exactly modern culture of any kind.
- satiric 9mo agoFor those like me wondering what in this syllabus they should be looking at, the key bit is the required reading in the middle of the second page: "Plato, excerpts from Symposium" instead of just "Plato's Symposium". Edit: weird. On the app I'm using ("Harmonic") it redirects to a syllabus PDF. But when I open in a browser it opens to an article.
- roody15 9mo ago“ Dr. Peterson said he would reluctantly alter the course and replace the disputed modules with “lectures on free speech and academic freedom.” But he was angry, he said, as well as bothered by the sense that students would receive a less rigorous, challenging education in his classroom. ” Quite sad to see the school administration get compliance here.
- damnitbuilds 9mo agoWoke vs MAGA, education is the victim.