Citizens United must be overturned.
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.
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.
A thing you can right now do is read it (1-2 hours): 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
Diotima’s ladder of love (20 minutes) https://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/103/jowett_symp_A.htm
cuz even alluding to it makes texans uncomfortable. doth protest too much i think
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
Usually cerebral palsy, I think, or (less commonly) epilepsy. I'm not sure it's still that common in the UK; I don't think I've heard it in the wild since the 80s [1], though some of that may just reflect the people I talk to as I get older.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Deacon#Blue_Peter_and_cul...
The only way for you to achieve the goal of making sure nobody’s feelings are hurt by words is to take away the power of the words. You only give the words MORE power by reacting to them.
Who said anything about scolding anyone lol. I responded very calmly.
I'm sorry, but you'll never win me over that the world be a better place if only we could bring back overtly prejudiced speech.
Actions have consequences. You can say whatever the hell you want, but doesn't mean you deserve respect, or not to be corrected, or not to face the consequences of saying overtly bigoted words.
The fact is... calling negative things gay implies being gay is bad, and therefore we should stop calling negative things gay if we want to support all the good people in the LGBTQ community.
>I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that
Making a point of trying to shame other people for using words you don’t like is a losing game in the long run.
The “actions have consequences” argument is what lead us to where we are now where you can see an obvious backlash.
Heck the papa John’s pizza guy got fired for using a magic word in an obviously non-derogatory way, and it was the same “actions have consequences” mentality even though basically nobody would be genuinely offended by his usage of it.
If you continue to make a big deal out of every usage of gay and retarded those words will only grow in power and popularity because you are showing someone that they have the power to get you to freak out if they use them.
You can see the opposite effect with traditional swear words, which are so used in popular media that they have lost almost all of their power.
In fact, the culture at the school changed, and people stopped saying gay so much. It was very cool.
You should try standing up for something you believe in sometime, maybe you'd like it.
Sure, use whatever derogatory or offensive words you want, I don't really mind, but I am damn sure going to judge you based on it.
I don't tend to be the "don't use that word" type of person though. But I'm absolutely the "get the fuck out of this 'will make me dumber' conversation" type of person.
The genuine hateful usage is the actually bad thing that people want to stop, but many people mistakenly think they are fighting hatred by policing other people’s vocabulary.
The idea that gay people walk around and hear "Oh that's gay as hell!" whenever someone stubs their toe, or loses in a game or whatever and don't have that affect them is silly and it clearly progresses into a culture where people don't feel comfortable being themselves.
It's a good thing that since I've grown up we don't say "oh you're not acting black enough", or "oh that's so Jewish", or any other variation of things that may not seem harmful at the time but end up perpetuating a "right" and a "wrong" whether intentional or not.
All I'm saying is that making it your personal mission to make sure nobody uses the words in any context has lead us to where we are now, where we have a big backlash and young people are using gay and retarded more than they ever would have if we maybe just chilled out a little bit with the language policing.
We have taken this magic word mindset so far that we created a broad set of words that were so taboo you could get fired for using them in ANY context, even if you are talking about the word itself (like the case with the Papa Johns guy). And we had institutions like Stanford coming up with inane things like the "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" where they wanted to police words like "crazy" and "dumb".
I think about this quote from Ricky Gervais a lot. He's had more than a few controversies, which you may or may not agree with but I think his take here is apt.
"Please stop saying 'You can't joke about anything anymore'. You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system."
>I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that
Making a point of trying to control which words other kids are using counts as policing language in my opinion.
Is telling people that they can't tell other people which words they use a form of language policing?
(In a thread concerning Plato, I thought this question needed to be asked.)
And I don't think elections or "the culture" should have anything to do with it. If that's how we made every decision, life would only improve for whoever exists in the overall majority. What if we each chose to have some integrity and do the right thing, even when there's nothing measuring it? It wouldn't kill us, I don't think.
Trump's openly crude behavior is normalizing such behavior amongst the impressionable.
And society will be worse for it for a long time to come.
It is a shortening of spastic.
The issue is only when professor suspect of being liberal changes assigned reading in any way. That is the only possible big issue
/s
Universities that have accreditation (typically regional accreditation for nonprofit and private research universities) have to meet certain standards for certain curriculum design. Within those requirements there is wide latitude.
(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?)
PHILOSOPHY 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.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.
in particular the big trade cities like Venezia had been pulling out anything and everything as the ottomans closed in; had been going on for a while before Constantinople fell.
but broadly speaking, yeah the collapse of the Byzantines and their stores of classical history is what drove the rediscovery and later the Renaissance
It's almost like the bullying is trickling down, right?
Now, if they actually banned a book, like "you will go to jail for having this" I would be concerned.
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.
There's certainly a lot to be said about the manifold interpretations of Platonic Idealism; what I'm saying is that when we've historically introduced new philosophy students to things like Jowett's translations ("But tell me, Zeno, do you not further think that there is an idea of likeness in itself, and another idea of unlikeness, which is the opposite of likeness, and that in these two, you and I and all other things to which we apply the term many, participate-things which participate in likeness become in that degree and manner like; and so far as they participate in unlikeness become in that degree unlike, or both like and unlike in the degree in which they participate in both?"), there's also a grammatical issue. Yes, I can deconstruct that and reassemble it in more colloquial terms. The problem is that for a lot of students, they don't develop interest enough to engage in the deconstruction until after they've gone through the arduous process of reading that and thinking "WTF?!"
I’m not convinced that better translations are doing much to fix the deeper issue in most readers: the lack of broad exposure to the Western canon which seems to cultivate a real preference for rigor over comfort.
I want to go try some Plato in Greek. Do you have the reference for that passage? (Thankfully I got the unabridged Liddell and Scott lexicon which encompasses Attic not just New Testament words so I’ve been able to read Homer.)
They probably had this attitude, but I didn't find it objectionable at all, and I'm not a native English speaker. If a 19-year old engineering student can't read that, even in his own language, what's the point? The guy's a bore.
I think it's probably better to just read them having picked them off a bookshelf than in a class though.
Plato is not exactly burning up the airwaves right now. Most likely the only exposure most people will have to this work (or any of the libraries of work that's been banned in this manner) would be at college, assigned to them for a class.
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.
No longer? Flagging comments isnt a new feature, and if anything, the site has been getting more political as time goes on, not less.
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://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.I don’t see Paul acting like every opinion is equally valid when it directly affects something he cares about. He seems to happily participate in “useless” political discussions when he has a strong opinion.
Topics about someone's identity aren't things that one can easily change - and certainly not from text on a screen from some stranger on the internet.
Discussions about things that are core to someone's identity (in that setting) aren't useful.
Religion and politics in that context extend beyond one's claims about a soul or which end of the political spectrum is more soulless. Asking about how to maintain an F150 in /r/fuckcars is similarly not going to be a useful discussion since the identity of the people in that subreddit is in conflict about something that is quite legitimately discussable.
Keeping one's identity small (and topical to the subject matter at hand) given that it isn't in conflict with one's identity makes for a place that is much easier to moderate and keep a civil discussion.
One can discuss the impact of Section 174 or ZIRP without invoking politics. However, once politics (or religion) is involved in a comment everything downthread of it becomes more difficult to moderate.
So it's not the "ignoring politics" that's at issue - many topics in today's world are intimately intermingled with politics. However, discussing that politics directly makes this an environment that people tend to not want to participate in.
Turn on showdead and look at the comments in this post to see the types of things people don't want to participate in... and how much worse the site would be if those were acceptable topics.
There are many places where one can discuss those topics. Not every site has to be all things for all people. This one is thankfully one of the places where discussion on politics and the related identities doesn't happen.
Well, even Republicans accepted that an insurrection was a bad thing:
> There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill. This is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.
* https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1346909901478522880
* https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/marco-rubio-2021-tweets-...
Are insurrections, now five years later, a good thing?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
Just not THIS insurrection?
That's all very fine and well in theory, but it's like saying the topic of the ship taking on water is not allowed to be discussed when you're on a Star Trek cruise:
* https://startrekthecruise.com
Sure: a gash in the haul doesn't cover things like Kirk, Picard, Sisko, or Janeway, but it's kind of a prerequisite that nothing is happening to hull integrity before the others topics can be entertained.
We have always discussed politics here. I agree with your point that HN shouldn't just be a forum for political content, I regularly flag posts about 'President posts insane thing on Truth Social' or 'Congressperson votes in ways people don't like,' but the intersection of economic, technological, intellectual, and political power is always going to throw up challenging ethical issues.
You cannot isolate technology from forces that shape and harness it. It is fine to restrict political discussion lest it overwhelm other more fruitful discussions, however burying one's head in sand while the society is being "engineered" is not the mark of a curious person.
Professors should be free to teach whatever they want that's relevant to their courses. Students are adults and can make up their own minds.
For me, at least, this is one of his most important essays and worth re-visiting from time to time - https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
"I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan."
I read Graham’s point as narrower than “there’s nothing to learn.” He explicitly says: “There are certainly some political questions that have definite answers.”
The warning label is about identity capture. Once a view becomes part of who you are, the odds of real updating drop: “people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity.” Or, put positively: “you can have a fruitful discussion … so long as you exclude people who respond from identity.”
So the issue isn’t the topic. It’s what happens when belief turns into a kind of badge.
Ellison basically said, repeatedly, that we need AI to keep the poors in line and prevent "bad behavior"
Project 2025 never says it loudly but its unambiguous in those aims
One prominent example was formal logic, which was significantly developed in the middle ages, but received scant attention in the Renaissance.
Speaking of reconciliation, might I interest you in a reconciliation of Aquinas and Spinoza, by way of Galois Theory?
I would encourage fellow like-minded Aggies to do the same.
Drs Austin and McDermott are surely spinning in their graves right now.
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.
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.
PS. Hook'em Horns :)
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.
Quite sad to see the school administration get compliance here.
slater•1d ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20260107085450/https://dailynous...