Noteworthy difference being that, I believe, Riot employees are identified as such and their communication is public (in the eyes of Riot) not private.
In this case I think it might very well be a case of "The Aristocrats" humor like they mentioned in the article (CAH). I disagree with withdrawing the invitation based upon private communication here, but if it was publically visible and said "hey we're Harvard Students" I can understand Harvard's position and cautiously agree with them.
Extend this to any place connected to the internet or other means of collecting information and linking it to you. Social media is just the easy way in.
I saw this firsthand with a former flatmate of mine. He passionately studied Semitic languages and Persian at uni, spent a lot of time traveling or studying abroad in Israel, Arab countries, and Iran. His social circle in Europe was heavy with immigrants from those countries and with them he seemed to be the best of friends. And yet he loved to visit 4chan and collect anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim memes to repost elsewhere just for the lols. Deciding if a person is "really racist" or not has become a challenge in our age.
But making that shit turn up everywhere just normalizes it. People start seeing those things and agreeing with them, no matter how "ironically" he intending them to be taken.
Ideas like "let's get Donald Trump elected for the lulz" have real-world effects. "It was just for laughs, mate" isn't really a good excuse. At a certain point, it approaches "watching the world burn" territory.
I'm not making a claim either way on the idea that Donald Trump was "meme'd into office" as has been claimed elsewhere.
My statement is that attempting to get someone elected president just because it would be "funny" to see that person as President has real-world consequences. At some point these things go beyond being "just a prank" regardless of how effective they are at actually accomplishing their goal. Were they to actually accomplish their goal, it would have real-world consequences beyond just providing more fuel for their image board meme battles.
Why do we need to decide if someone is "really racist" in the first place? To make ourselves feel good about being morally superior? To feel offended on behalf of people who we may not even understand?
Political correctness really has gotten out of hand, and the sooner people realize this, the sooner they'll begin to understand how we ended up with Trump as president.
The pendulum swings both ways. Be careful how hard you push it.
I think it’s entirely normal that if you have a friend who expresses two completely opposite sentiments, you wonder which of them he/she really espouses. It has nothing to do with feeling good or superior.
Trump is also politically correct, just not the kind we're used to. He didn't say anything about the Portland knife attack and had a lot to say about the London one. Doing so kept his base happy.
Don't be fooled into thinking Trump is not a politician.
If you're not posting under your confirmed real name, in a facebook group under the control of the private university, there's probably nothing they can do.
There's a pretty wide spectrum between "do whatever you want" and "let's implement thought-crime." I don't understand how me saying that something is a bad idea for anyone to do somehow becomes "policing" what other people are thinking. Could you please explain that to me?
We'll have to create a public and a second, private, personality just like in the old days of the police state.
Society is more open than it probably was ever before but at the same time, if close minded leaders of fascist political or religious color came into power they'd have their tools handed to them to create an oppressive apparatus never seen before.
> The students in the spinoff group exchanged memes and images “mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust and the deaths of children,” sometimes directing jokes at specific ethnic or racial groups, the Crimson reported. One message “called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child ‘piñata time’” while other messages quipped that “abusing children was sexually arousing,” according to images of the chat described by the Crimson.
You know, if that's your personality, I'm OK with you feeling ashamed enough that you feel the need to keep it private.
So they can keep out everyone they don't really like by an arbitrary set of rules?
Maybe you spit out chewing gum somewhere one night and violated the rule of not spitting for one example.
I'm not saying that these students are good people or that I endorse anything they said. I'm defending the right of privacy and free speech for anyone at any time.
I wouldn't! But if I did something shitty (let's be real here, you're not offended, you're upset at the notion that words have consequences), it would be entirely within your rights to react to what I did. And mine to defend myself, and my employer to decide whether the cost of being represented by someone with my views was commensurate with its return.
Look, nobody is arguing that Harvard is doing something that is literally illegal.
But that is their only defense.
What we are arguing is that the Harvard administration is full of terrible people who can go F themselves. Because they do not care about students and they do not care about freedom of thought.
Maybe they are just going to start expelling people because they publicly disagreed with them about tuition hikes or something else that is arbitrary. Who knows!
That wouldn't be illegal either. Would you defend them for that?
The claim that Harvard "doesn't care about students" is reality-denying. Harvard has students who these people, with their racist propaganda, would do harm to (and if you don't understand that we're dealing with literal and concrete racist propaganda, you are naive or dissembling). Should Harvard not care about those students (and faculty, and staff, etc. who would similarly be affected)? There's nothing sacrosanct about racist propaganda that deserves to be defended at a private institution--and Harvard refusing to make their community worse is commendable. It's not comparable to complaints about university policy at all to a degree that is not merely ridiculous but actively malicious on your part.
I don't particularly care about, and it sure seems like Harvard doesn't either, students who, after being found out and asked to explain their super gross actions, didn't. Didn't present what they'd done (as they'd been asked to), didn't explain, didn't apologize. This group had over a hundred members. About ten decided not to own up to what they'd done and were shown the door for it.
Trying to hang the consequences of racist behavior on the institution that refuses to put up with racist behavior is head-screwing. Maybe...don't be racist? Or at least not openly? And then you can go to Harvard like Mommy and Daddy wanted instead of having to explain why you're not. Harvard's in my own backyard; I'll applaud them doing what they can to keep my backyard free of racist propagandists where they can.
Yes. Free speech only applies to government censorship, not what private individuals or institutions choose to use to filter those they care to listen to, associate with, or otherwise give the time of day to.
Likewise, privacy isn't really a concern here, since it isn't like the organization broke into their accounts to check up on their privately held conversations or beliefs. It was posted into a group with many other loosely associated members, and was brought to the organization's attention.
In your gum spitting example, it's like spitting out gum in your back yard behind a privacy fence versus spitting out gum in your employer's parking lot and having your boss step in it moments later. It's not private, and it may have consequences.
Harvard also has the right to turn away those it doesn't deem fit, by its own standards. Free speech is protected in the sense that the government cannot limit it, not that every private place has to tolerate all forms of speech at all times.
They were allowed to speak. They did speak. "Freedom of speech" applies only and strictly to governments, not to a private institution. And that's because the only way "freedom of speech" matters is if others are free to react to you as they please; Harvard might not like you and might tell you to get the hell out of their (and my, as it happens) neighborhood.
If you don't like that, then you have options. One, don't be cretinous. Two, hide it better. Three, accept that being cretinous will cost you opportunities and own it.
Actions have consequences. You don't get to hide behind "my free speech". Own what you do.
* What these students did or didn't do does not matter in this case.
* Harvard can withdraw the acceptance for anyone at any time for any reason.
We don't need to argue about privacy or free speech here. All we can argue about as a first point is if Harvard should have the ability to withdraw their acceptance or not.
And of course they should, because free association exists (pursuant to the bounds of contracts, which don't appear to be violated here--h/t kudu), so why are you whatabouting?
Racists are not a protected class. I see no reason why Harvard should not be allowed to act the way they did.
It is unfortunate that they chose to share those memes on a Facebook group chat though, I think the debate is about how not "private" a lot of our "private" chats have become and how sometimes people are just not thinking about where there communications are stored enough. If they had printed pamphlets with the material and shared them with classmates I think the same consequences would have happened, but they would have had more time to stop themselves and think about what could go wrong. Now sending offensive jokes is easy and "private" channels are deceptively public.
Not true that Harvard can withdraw the acceptance at any time for any reason. There is a specific set of circumstances in which it can be withdrawn (in this case, where the person's integrity/moral character is in doubt); otherwise, the unconditional offer of admission could be considered a legally binding contract between the university and the student.
I think the OP was observing that the development of an apparatus for monitoring and transferring communication logs to decision makers is a tool that can and will be abused by future authorities, regardless of whether they are doing right or wrong.
I don't think it's ever really been okay to say horrible things in public and have no reprecussions. I'm pretty sure that if someone could prove that you had said these things at most points in history the acceptance would be rescinded. I think a lot of it is that with the internet it's much easier for people to find out about these sorts of things.
I don't think a private Facebook chat counts as "in public." Yes, it is much easier to find out about this kind of stuff because of Facebook but that doesn't mean that there is no expectation of privacy at all.
Or one just have to accept that actions have consequences. This has always been true and, like everything else, computers haven't changed anything they've just made it more efficient.
another example why shenanigans shouldn't be done on Facebook. if you wanna $#!K around do it on a platform that isn't personal how is this so hard to understand ? (mind you this does seem excessive from what they are reporting)
What platform isn't personal? Sure, you don't use your real-name here or there, but it can and will be linked to you in the future. Any online and offline activity has a real chance of being linked to you at some point in the future.
true enough, but as long as law enforcement don't need to get involved (obv don't do stupid stuff) a username is easier to throw away then a Facebook account... But even then I suppose it wouldn't be possible - Big Brother here we come.
How is this excessive? They were promoting the sort of hate speech you find in the darker corners of 4chan and /r/The_Donald. Harvard is fully within their rights to require a certain level of civility and maturity of their applicants.
excessive on the posts they posted, not Harvard's actions. I think it isn't enough of a punishment for what they did. It's on a public page representing Harvard I don't expect any less.
Someone at a state school would have the same thing happen to them if they pulled stuff like this. No reason why they should be treated with kid gloves because they got into Harvard.
Kind of scary that nothing on facebook is ever private. High school or parents should start teaching kids about online privacy...and financial literacy.
FB issue aside, I think people should be allowed to joke about whatever they want in private. However some people bring jokes from 4chan and b/ into the workplace. High school and college students probably have a harder time drawing the line between facebook and the classroom.
>FB issue aside, I think people should be allowed to joke about whatever they want in private.
They were allowed to post it, nothing stopped them. Its just that after they did Harvard made the (IMO reasonable) decision to revoke their acceptance.
Why? People are totally within their rights to share these things in public or in private. Private institutions, including Harvard, are totally within their rights to rescind admissions offers because of it.
Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. And from a legal perspective free speech just means the government can't punish you for protected speech. Individuals and entities are free to discriminate based on your protected speech all they want.
Free speech means exactly freedom from consequences. You're confusing the value of free speech with the specific contractual guarantee provided by the government. In other words, a university that commits itself to free speech contradicts that commitment by unaccepting students based on their speech.
Curiously their school paper (or w.e.) recently posted a treatise [1] on free speech, including this bit:
> We also believe that the essential definition of free speech has itself been twisted and clouded. Free speech only entails the right of every individual to “speak freely.” It does not give one the right to speak free of criticism or protest. It does not give one the right to say something which could reasonably be construed as inciting chaos or violence. It does not give one the right to any forum that one desires... Certain speakers do not deserve the platform Harvard University offers, especially when their rhetoric runs antithetical to the values we should all hold dear.
Also many news outlets have mentioned this bit from their admissions policy:
> the university reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission if the admitted student “engages or has engaged in behavior that brings into question their honesty, maturity or moral character,”
One might claim their "speech" displays a lack of maturity and moral character and avoid a paradox.
I assumed all along that the reason for their unacceptance was the "speech which displays a lack of maturity", but this is also inconsistent with the value of free speech. Even though their official view on free speech might be deliberately vague, this doesn't seem to be the attitude displayed by the Harvard community who (in my observation) have taken a more traditional and Berkeleyan philosophy. Even if Harvard's action isn't hypocritical, it's still permissible and reasonable to criticize them for behaving in a manner incongruent with the value of free speech, even though they believe restricted speech is free speech.
Wasn't this stuff posted on a general group page for that year's Harvard students? That doesn't exactly sound like a private gathering where the school has no interest.
Forcing new members to post obscene content to the main chat I think was their damnable offense here.
Both the main and offshoot were technically private chats, but the people in the main chat didn't sign up for that kind of behavior.
It's the difference between playing Cards Against Humanity with a few people and walking around school telling other students your most obscene card combos as jokes.
"Private" seems to have a very different meaning in 2017 from what it did in 1987, e.g.
I think that people are mistaken when they believe that they can have private electronic conversations. Even in-person conversations are mildly suspect. If you're a part of a social media group where you don't know every single person in the group, or you are not certain whether newly invited members of the group can see old messages, you should assume this content will get published by a news agency. "How would it look to my boss, my parents and all my friends and family if they were to read what I'm about to write?"
We can mull about technical solutions to this problem and social solutions too. But as frustrating as it is, I believe that this is a net benefit to society. We've rooted out a lot of corrupt individuals with this same sea of audio/video sensors. We must now adjust to the reality that our electronic conversations have a very high likelihood of being leaked.
If it was really private, the school wouldn't have heard about it and this would never have happened. If I call you names in private, and someone tells you, you'd be well within your right to be upset about it.
Probably not. At State U, you'd have a decent lawsuit if they jerked an admission over ('merely') offensive speech.
This kind of filtering probably goes on all the time, but it's hard to connect the admission decision to particular conduct by the student. Here, it's not difficult, because Harvard isn't bound by the First Amendment like a state school.
ed: Here's a case that seems wrongly decided, but shows that the case is merely decent, not a slam dunk: How much free-speech protection does a college applicant have? This federal court says: Zero.[1]
Maybe, but it would be illegal. That college students are frequently too poor or unknowledgeable to defend their free speech rights doesn't make it okay.
On the one hand, yeah, that shit is offensive and I'm not too keen on elevating a person who makes jokes about sexual assault or violence against minorities.
On the other hand I'm terrified at the creeping surveillance society that has institutions examining all of our utterances for "wrong speech", which is much too close for comfort to "wrong think", which is much too close for comfort to "wrong person".
I am perfectly fine with private organizations banning whoever they like for posting racist shit.
Racist shit is "wrong speech". If I have friends who start uttering racist shit, and I can't talk them out of it, they are no longer my friends. (This has happened precisely once, no regrets. Thanks, Fox News, for poisoning an old man's mind.)
Posting racist memes is wrong, saying racist things is wrong, thinking racist thoughts is wrong. How did we get here, that racism falls under the scare-quotes version of "wrong speech" and not actually wrong speech??
every time these topics come up, someone always claims 'b-but muh freeze peach' - 'free speech' refers to the right to voice one's opinions without government retaliation or censorship. society and organizations still have the right to act accordingly. you can't walk into a wal-mart yelling racial slurs and claim 'free speech' as reason to not get kicked out
No, there was a private group that required offensive material be posted to the main Harvard group to get access. The main group was private only inasmuch as you had to be an (incoming?) Harvard student.
This is no different than students posting offensive material on a physical message board on some main through fare on campus.
Edit: Actually, it's somewhat unclear to what degree and what material was required to be posted on the main chat, and what portion was in a separate private chat (still likely associated with Harvard in some way?). The article is unclear on these points. Harvard still has the right to gate admissions how they like (and they state that includes "moral character"), so if they are able to determine you are participating in actions they don't approve of, then they have grounds to reject you or revoke your prior acceptance. Just as if they Google'd you on your initial application and found verifiable and unsettling information.
People protecting the right of racists to spread racism, support racism. It cannot be any other way. You cannot claim that you dislike racism, and and also want to preserve it.
Also, "Free speech" refers to the fact that the government cannot bust in to your house with a SWAT team and arrest you for speaking something that they don't like. Private companies can enforce whatever speech rules they like, and that doesn't interfere with the free speech of the individual. They can walk outside and state those things. There are already numerous hate speech laws covering the fact that the first amendment does not mean that you have a right to say whatever you want in a private space.
I don't disagree with Harvard's decision, or any decision made by a private institution or person.
I disagree with the notion that certain types of speech or thought are universally wrong. Personally - I believe racism is wrong - but I disagree with the notion that it's "wrong think". It's simply a different world view.
To re-iterate: I don't agree with what the students said or did. I agree with Harvard's decision. I don't agree that protecting someone's right to speak freely and openly supports their agenda.
One that states that people with more melatonin are fundamentally inferior and should be subservient to people with less melatonin. It is a point of view that is objectively and morally wrong.
I wonder whether you would support the right of people to state that PoC should be sterilized, or the rights of people to call people to attack PoCs. Because that is what more and more people have been calling for in America. That is what Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the alt-right, advocates.
The problem with these 'different world views' is that even without directly stating that people should attack minorities, these statements lead to people beating up black people on the streets. The more these ideas and 'world views' are accepted, the more acceptable it will become to think and state such things, leading to a resurgence of people who think that PoCs should be murdered. That will then directly impact the probability of someone acting upon those beliefs.
The reason why the rest of the world does have as bad a racism problem as America, is because they took steps to alienate people who had such views.
There is no such thing as an objectively correct or incorrect world-view. It's an opinion and is shaped by culture, circumstance, and upbringing.
To answer you question - Yes, I would support the rights of people to state whatever they wish. I also support the rights of individuals such as you or myself to call those people morons, and to not associate with them.
Suppressing speech, and demonizing people for their views (no matter how "objectively wrong") does not solve any problem. It only breeds hate and contempt and radicalizes people more.
> There is no such thing as an objectively correct or incorrect world-view.
Of course there is. If I have the world-view that I am the most successful person in the world, yet 90% of people have not heard of me, then that world-view is false. If I have the world-view that climate change is just something made up the scientists to get more funding, then that world-view is false. If I have the world-view that some people are inferior because of their skin-colour, then that world view is scientifically false. As best as we can objectively measure, those world-views are false.
> Suppressing speech, and demonizing people for their views (no matter how "objectively wrong") does not solve any problem.
You are incorrect, and you mistake how facism works. Facism is not after the truth, facism is not after peace. The only peace that facism, and facists want, is peace through the absence of justice. The only goal of white supremacists, is to create a world in which PoC either no longer exist, or are subjugated. They will abuse any system and platform that you give them, to spread their philosophies and ensure more people join their cause. They continue to be a thriving community because the educated population have ignored them out of politeness. The sole goal of them is to further their philosophy. The only way we can stop that, is by depriving them of platforms from which to speak their hate.
Let us not forget the last time we tried to bargain with white supremacists. Several deals were forged, and as soon as the facists had got a firm position, they went back on the deals and moved into Poland, and meanwhile began exterminating parts of their populations that they deemed inferior. The only reason they were able to do that was because they were ignored and thus tolerated by the educated population.
If you think I am being paranoid, let us look at what the leader of the large political movement called the "alt-right" stated only a few years ago:
""""Instead of asking how we can make reparations for slavery, colonialism, and Apartheid or how we can equalize academic scores and incomes, we should instead be asking questions like, "Does human civilization actually need the Black race?" "Is Black genocide right?" and, if it is, "What would be the best and easiest way to dispose of them?" With starting points like this, wisdom is sure to flourish, enlightenment to dawn. """"[0].
There is lots of speech I dislike and don't support, but I don't oppress speakers or advocate for their oppression because I don't want people oppressing me when the tide turns. Supporting free speech is not the same as supporting the content of the speech.
Also worth pointing out that Harvard receives a lot of public dollars, so it's not the canonical private institution. Remember when everyone freaked out that the salvation army wouldn't employ openly gay preachers (but would employ homosexually in any other role) because though they were a private entity, they received NYC tax dollars, and then everyone freaked out when the SA announced that they would decline those tax dollars and reduce the scope of their work in the city accordingly?
Private organizations going "nah, we don't want you here, get out" isn't oppression. Your right to free speech doesn't supersede my right to free association.
Yours is the argument posed by employers who posted "Blacks need not apply" adverts. Are you sure that's the hill you want to die on? Anyway, by "oppression", I was referring to the OPs implicit suggestion that were prohibit unpopular speech, which is oppression.
Race is a protected class where we as a society have explicitly decided that there are societal benefits to overriding free association in the course of the transaction public business (emphasis on public, both in the governmental and the "running a business" sense of the term). "Racist jerk" is not a protected class.
So, yes, I'm quite comfortable with this hill. It has a nice shining city on it. Shame its originators abandoned it. (They never really liked it anyway.)
Race wasn't protected in the fifties either, and yet few would argue that it only became oppressive when the laws were changed. Those who would support your argument are the very same you would evict from your holy hill!
If racist jerks end up actually oppressed instead of having to deal with the consequences of their very specific and very active choices (which stand in stark contrast to the genetic/external-social of "race"), I am entirely and one hundred percent onboard with having a conversation about whether society is made better by considering them a protected class. I will not hold my breath on either the likelihood of that oppression nor on whether society is made better by enabling them.
Do you have an actual argument, or are you just whatabouting?
I'm not out passing any laws banning racist shit, but it sounds like you're saying I can't even get it out of my life if I want to. Again, how did we get here??
Why does it sound like that to you? I'm all for freedom of association, I just don't think we should suggest that entities which don't prohibit offensive speech (E.g., the government) are necessarily supporting it.
> There are already numerous hate speech laws covering the fact that the first amendment does not mean that you have a right to say whatever you want in a private space.
It's exhausting to me that there are huge swaths of commenters that immediately jump on the legal protections for free speech and lecture us on how that First Amendment only protects you from government retaliation.
Everyone knows that. Nobody (except the most ill-informed) dispute it. But the First Amendment is not and was never intended to be the end-all and be-all of free speech. Freedom of speech is a value held by society. The First Amendment is a legal protection afforded that value in law.
When people and organizations start clamping down on speech, yes, that is a violation of the principle of freedom of speech, even if it has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Yes, there has to be a reasonable balance between your freedom to associate with people who say obnoxious things and their freedom to say obnoxious things. Nobody disputes that either.
But there's been an increasingly clear trend of people being banished from workplaces, universities, and other spaces because of their speech, people who would not have been so punished in the past. Part of it is the Internet puts our words in a public space, accessible to everyone. Part of it is the Internet foments mobs of offended people who come after you. Part of it is that people seem to be becoming more and more intolerant of dissenting views.
This is an extremely dangerous long-term trend. It points to a more factious, divided populace. It points to eventual government restrictions on speech. Authoritarian governments rarely start out by banning speech everyone supports. They start banning speech everyone finds dangerous and offensive. Having Brownshirts beating up Communists for their speech ends with Nazis rounding up Communists.
> There are already numerous hate speech laws covering the fact that the first amendment does not mean that you have a right to say whatever you want in a private space.
Free speech means the government won't arrest you for it. It does not mean private institutions and friend groups must endure it. Free speech does not mean speech without consequences.
No one is taking away their free speech. They're absolutely free to keep saying whatever they like (within the law of course). Booting someone for immoral conduct explicitly falls within Harvard's reserved rights as a private entity as plainly laid out in their terms of acceptance. Nothing to do with free speech.
I want to respond to you in good faith but I'm afraid to because I get the strong impression that you will not respond in kind. Therefore I choose to say nothing further.
It's not easy to draw line. What about some light racist jokes? Or jokes demeaning wives(fairly common in India) or blonde women?
Most seems fine with it but what happens when this line move a bit more further? In Hollywood movies, I have seen comedies doing all this and people applauding it.
I believe we need a firm policy of no jokes with a hint of racism or sexism.
Or have absolute free speech. You can't be cherry picking stuffs.
I think cherry-picking is far more reasonable of a proposal than somehow developing a black-and-white rule out of an infinite space of infinite dimensional speech or abandoning the pursuit of rational discourse by allowing absolutely everything in every context.
> Posting racist memes is wrong, saying racist things is wrong, thinking racist thoughts is wrong. How did we get here, that racism falls under the scare-quotes version of "wrong speech" and not actually wrong speech??
There has never been, there never should be, and most likely there never will be (no matter how your crowd fights for it) such a thing as wrong speech. At least not outside of totalitarian states.
As long as anyone accepts the concept of wrong speech, anything can be labelled that, and wars can explode over the littlest thing.
If it's of any indication: listen closely how the politicans argue that we always need more surveillance and never less. They seem to have their speeches ready even before the incident happens.
I agree that what they posted was offensive. But we can't start holding graduating high school students to the same standards we hold world and business leaders. Ironically, we didn't for Trump, but that's certainly the idea.
Revoking one's admission to Harvard is a really rough way to teach the lesson of what you're supposed to and not supposed to say. College is the time to not only learn new ideas, but also to un-learn things that you may have learned in a toxic environment. I can say that I certainly did, and it's only fair that we allow others to fail in a similar way.
I believe that actions like this only further foster the alt-right and do a great disservice to our current political atmosphere. These kids have no positive way to understand their punishment - they have been reprimanded by a power that controls their fate, without warning. The odds that they'll "learn" from their "mistake" is highly unlikely.
Comparing this to fascism is a little heavy, but not out of line.
I don't think that standards should be lowered for high school seniors. These are people who are legally allowed to vote, join the army, buy guns, etc.., and for these people it's go to Harvard. They should know that it's unacceptable to share memes about sexual violence, racism, and whatnot, especially on Facebook. When I was in 6th grade (I'm 21 now), my school gave us the talk about the internet, saying that whatever you post on the internet is forever. This might have been exaggerated, but definitely not for a Facebook account that had your name attached to it, and a group chat that's directly splintered from your incoming Harvard class group page.
At the same time, I have a bit of a personal story. When I was in 8th grade, I made a Facebook account, and uploaded a random picture with a random caption involving rape - at the time my friends and I used the word like when you beat someone at a video game... Yeah it was pretty bad. My mom found the picture and responded by screaming at me and basically taking my computer away for a while, and my Facebook deactivated for much longer. I didn't understand at the time why it was such a big deal (maybe more explaining could have happened) but that interaction both makes me cringe every time I think about it and might have been the best thing to happen to me. Maybe getting the acceptences revoked is just the kick in the ass that they need.
I'm not saying that they're equivalent. I'm just saying it's the kick in the ass they needed, because otherwise they would just be privileged guys going to Harvard, sharing offensive memes and not understanding why it's wrong until the next worst thing happens. Obviously the thing where their parents punish them is not happening anymore, they're adults now.
At 18, you can't sign a lease without a co-signer, you probably can't rent a car. You can't purchase alcoholic beverages or tobacco products in the US. Yes, you can join the military, but there you spend time under very close supervision.
Universities used to use the term "in loco parentis": I can see a deferral of admission being a suitable equivalent of screaming and taking the computer away.
When I was graduating high school not long before you, it was still socially acceptable to use gay slurs. The social change happened fast, and not evenly in all places. Society needs to have some grace of we aren't too have a huge group of people bitter about being punished for breaking a new social rule. Besides that, we have a tendency to oversimplify and assume every race-related thing is racism, so I don't trust or society to police speech.
There are more offensive slurs than "gay", but my point wasn't to make an equivalence, only to say that punishing someone in accordance with a relatively new social norm isn't a universally good idea.
When I was graduating high school not long before you, it was still socially acceptable to use gay slurs. The social change happened fast, and not evenly in all places. Society needs to have some grace of we aren't too have a huge group of people bitter about being punished for breaking a new social rule. Besides that, we have a tendency to oversimplify and assume every race-related thing is racism, so I don't trust or society to police speech.
Counterpoint: say you had been admitted to Harvard and were coming from Mexico, or were the victim of a sexual assault during high school. How would you feel if you found out that your new classmates had been sharing racist images, or memes about the abuse of children? What if one of those students had been placed as your freshman roommate?
> College is the time to not only learn new ideas, but also to un-learn things that you may have learned in a toxic environment.
Despite my counterpoint above, you are of course right. I knew of one very aggressive student at Harvard who went around putting posters up of dead fetuses to protest abortion and was against gay marriage - his family was extremely right wing, and that's what he was brought up to believe. Now he's out of the closet, living in SF, and is one of the most liberal people I know. That story may sound clichéd, but I promise you it's true.
But at the same time, there must be a line drawn somewhere, surely? If I write an extremely offensive admissions essay claiming immigrants are sub-human I shouldn't expect to be admitted.
But at the same time, there must be a line drawn somewhere, surely?
Yes - it's fully reasonable for Harvard to rescind admission for someone who's a convicted felon, for example.
But posting offensive memes on the internet isn't illegal. Saying racist/sexist things isn't illegal. It's certainly something to have a conversation about, but not to totally alter their future.
If I write an extremely offensive admissions essay claiming immigrants are sub-human I shouldn't expect to be admitted.
Absolutely! And if that is your submission to Harvard, that is entirely fair. I just don't think memes in a private Facebook group is something that you put up as your submission. Again, it's one thing if Harvard warned them, and they held their ground. It's another thing entirely to do it without warning, or a chance to explain themselves.
In these cases, condoning them creates and contributes to an environment in which they are acceptable. The only way we are going to remove sexual assault and racism from the world is for every one to understand that these things are never acceptable in any context. Thus, while not equivalent, allowing it to be condoned in private groups is directly contrary to our goals as a society.
Bear in mind that this argument is not intended as an argument for "thoughtcrimes" to be made illegal, it is made as an argument for creating and encouraging strict rules against this behaviour in privately-owned spaces. Facebook is not a 'public space', they just choose to give you those rights.
> In these cases, condoning them creates and contributes to an environment in which they are acceptable.
No, it doesn't, and you literally have no ground to make this argument. You're welcome to try linking "research" that supposedly suggests "this something or other" and then I'll be happy to point out how they don't actually make your case, if you wish.
> The only way we are going to remove sexual assault and racism from the world is for every one to understand that these things are never acceptable in any context.
And yet none of these students committed a hate crime or assaulted anyone. It's almost as if thought policing were useless and someone who's evil will do horrible things because they want to and not because "something something bad environment", just like a good person (the overwhelming majority, thankfully) won't do them, no matter the context.
And, guess what, your country has come a long way from the segregation of the 60s without needing to ban jokes. And nothing says this trend won't continue. Of course, the regressive left and the reactionary right are trying their damnedest to put setbacks or even make you walk back, but let's hope they're just noise that will die out eventually.
> Thus, while not equivalent, allowing it to be condoned in private groups is directly contrary to our goals as a society.
No, it isn't. Happiness isn't and shouldn't be mandatory. You're free to call someone out or leave if someone makes a joke you don't like, you don't get to tell them to not make it.
> Bear in mind that this argument is not intended as an argument for "thoughtcrimes" to be made illegal
Yes it is, but your rationalization isn't the worst I've read. Still incorrect, obviously.
> You're free to call someone out or leave if someone makes a joke you don't like, you don't get to tell them to not make it.
If you are a private company, such as an american university, or facebook, you absolutely do get to decide to tell people not to make jokes, and you absolutely do get to make hiring decisions based on bad jokes.
> It's almost as if thought policing were useless
This is not thought policing, this is looking at someone's jokes and attitudes towards People of Colour and women and deciding as a private company if you want a toxic person, someone who thinks that it's alright to joke about sexual harassment, in your private space.
> someone who's evil will do horrible things because they want to and not because "something something bad environment"
There are no evil people, there are only people who have been brought up in an environment where the actions they have taken are acceptable. What, you think people who do evil things are genetically predetermined to do them? It's rubbish. Hundreds of psychopaths have been born and never hurt a fly, it's about upbringing and social rules, rather than some "innate need to do 'bad'".
> And, guess what, your country has come a long way from the segregation of the 60s without needing to ban jokes.
Actually, the country I live in, like most European countries, has hate speech laws. We no longer have quite as bad a problem with racism as the US does.
> And nothing says this trend won't continue.
The 915 surviving and growing white supremacy hate groups, along with the 'alt-right' (The leader of the alt-right has openly written that he wants to exterminate black people), says otherwise. That young people feel that they can support such openly racist and anti-PoC movements, says a lot about the atmosphere today.
> but let's hope they're just noise that will die out eventually.
I'm pretty sure they said the same thing about the National Socialist Party...
> No, it isn't. Happiness isn't and shouldn't be mandatory.
We're not making happiness mandatory, we're making blatantly abusive speech against the law. I mean, it should be covered under the various "harassment" legislation, but shrug apparently not.
> There are no evil people, there are only people who have been brought up in an environment where the actions they have taken are acceptable.
Funny, serial killers still exist and will continue existing, even though society has condemned that for a long, long time.
Yes, some people are born with their wires misshapen, just like there're people born deaf. What? Did you think that the brain was, somehow, our only organ that couldn't get messed up since birth?
> What, you think people who do evil things are genetically predetermined to do them? [...] Hundreds of psychopaths have been born
So, are they or are they not born? You're contradicting yourself.
> Actually, the country I live in, like most European countries, has hate speech laws. We no longer have quite as bad a problem with racism as the US does.
Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. A friend of mine (hailing from my latin american country) and the refugee crisis tell me otherwise. If so-called "hate speech" is banned openly, it just happens behind doors, using so-called "coded language".
> The 915 surviving and growing white supremacy hate groups, along with the 'alt-right'.
So do TERFs, the militant branch of BLM, AntiFa, etc. If we're going to judge by fringe groups, they just happen to be more visible every day on both sides. And they don't represent the majority, it's as if they were called "fringe" for a reason.
> I'm pretty sure they said the same thing about the National Socialist Party...
And it did die out. Some people might be itching to call anyone they disagree with "nazis", but they aren't.
> We're not making happiness mandatory, we're making blatantly abusive speech against the law
Funny how you earlier in this very same comment said that you weren't arguing for thought policing. Glad you decided to become honest at the end.
> I mean, it should be covered under the various "harassment" legislation, but shrug apparently not.
Harassment requires a victim. Yanow, someone being harassed.
---
Anyways, you contradicted yourself twice, and one of those times was the very same thing you pretended you weren't arguing for. That's just dishonest argumentation, meaning this discussion is pointless, so I won't engage you further.
> Counterpoint: say you had been admitted to Harvard and were coming from Mexico, or were the victim of a sexual assault during high school. How would you feel if you found out that your new classmates had been sharing racist images, or memes about the abuse of children? What if one of those students had been placed as your freshman roommate?
As a gay person who has suffered quite a bit of discrimination and bullying from other people and who hails from a different Latin American country I advise you to stop being offended on behalf of other people. Nobody needs this patronizing attitude. It literally helps nobody.
> The odds that they'll "learn" from their "mistake" is highly unlikely.
Learning that your actions have consequences and that no one is responsible for facing those consequences but you is more valuable than any other single lesson they'd have learned in college. And they didn't even have to pay tuition to find that one out.
> Revoking one's admission to Harvard is a really rough way to teach the lesson of what you're supposed to and not supposed to say.
> Comparing this to fascism is a little heavy, but not out of line.
Are these students already not submitting themselves to be judged by Harvard's exceptionally high standards? This isn't some good state school and these aren't students who have earned their place by paying taxes and getting good grades. If Harvard sees this kind of behavior, decides that they made a mistake when choosing these students (they want students who will represent them well for the rest of their life, and character is very much in play during college admissions)... I think it's more than fair to say that these students should lose their place to someone who hasn't so easily proven themselves as a risk to Harvard's brand.
I don't think one should have to be a world or business leader to know that this kind of behaviour is wholly inappropriate. Sometimes (often) real life doesn't pamper us with slaps on the wrist or warnings when we do something completely idiotic. And if they somehow did not realize their behaviour was inappropriate, maybe they weren't quite mentally acute enough for Harvard in the first place and just got filtered out early.
Dystopian fiction has given so much terrorizing weight to the concept of "thoughtcrime" and "wrong think" that I think people forget how much positive effect a culture can have on widespread mindsets and stopping ignorance.
There are some ignorant thoughts that have almost entirely fallen out of the collective consciousness (in terms of serious belief, not abstract discussion of the past). (As a random example, there are vanishingly few ignorant people left who genuinely believe that disease is a punishment of the wicked that should not be interfered with, "ostracize the lepers", etc.) There are many more that need to.
If you think that some people are inherently "lesser" than others and can be treated as such, that's wrong. If you think that it's OK to assault people, that's wrong. Whether that turns into violent action or not, it still pervades other actions and societal structure, and it's the source of more subtle discrimination; that it has gone as far as being written and conveyed in ways that influence others makes it more than just thoughts. It's a good thing to influence society in ways that make people who think and write and talk and influence others in that way less successful, favoring people who don't, and over time find that fewer people think that way.
Because the same power that makes it possible for institutions to do that also gives us a check on those institutions. It seems entirely fine for an institution to look at the kind of person they're accepting and be selective in this way. If we start seeing institutions be selective for things we don't want to see selection on, we can push back on those institutions. There's no slippery slope here.
We're not talking about violent suppression of free speech. We're talking about non-violent exercise of the right to free association, to shun racists and sexists.
Punishing speech independent of action isn't a new or controversial concept among certain political strains, most especially among those that also include the conceit of having some special access to virtue beyond that available to others contending for the same power. What you're suggesting here falls right in that line. But it's rarely stated so openly, and while I like nothing else about it, I must admit I like the honesty.
We punish speech all the time, in certain limited and well-defined ways, and is not particularly controversial. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce... . Threatening someone with bodily harm can be punished, as can libel. These don't cover this particular case, but your statement is vague enough I think this response is warranted.
In general, it's important to note that the separate between speech and action isn't as clear cut as you assert, especially speech made in a public forum. Speech affects others, and words can be used to cause others pain or discomfort. Speech has direct consequences on others just like any action, and this must be considered. Which isn't to say that speech doesn't deserve broad protections, of course.
I agree that I could've been more clear in my prior comment. Here's one in which I more precisely formulated the argument I'm trying to make here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14489045
That's more clear, but you're still talking in pretty broad generalities. Let's focus on the concrete case here: if you were Harvard staff, and people were posting these things on your incoming freshman forum, what actions would you take? I get your point on proportionality of response, but it's not clear what you think would be a fitting response to this incident.
Sure, let's do that. Leaving aside all questions of whether or not this falls within Harvard's disciplinary remit - we'll assume that it does - I would have these students begin their academic careers at the school on disciplinary probation, which I gather is contemplated within its policies on maintaining an acceptable standard of conduct among students. Disciplinary probation, from what I've been able to find in a cursory examination of Harvard's public website, also provides formal grounds for more decisive action should the unacceptable conduct persist.
That seems to me a reasonable middle ground between on the one hand doing nothing, which I agree would be a highly questionable decision even from the purely cynical perspective that anyone accepted to Harvard may reasonably be expected not to violate the eleventh commandment in such damnfool fashion and if they don't already know that then they better get on learning - and, on the other hand, rescinding these prospective students' acceptance, with the concomitant potentially very significant impairment of their lifelong prospects, on the basis of they posted some tasteless images to a private Facebook group.
OK, I think I understand your position better then, and largely agree. I'm curious: could you imagine a situation where expulsion would be warranted for these students? Like if they continue to engage in this behavior after being put on disciplinary probation?
Oh, certainly! That's what "disciplinary probation" means - it makes a clear statement that what they've been doing doesn't fly in the society they aspire to join, and gives them an opportunity to demonstrate that they've grasped this and are willing to behave themselves accordingly - or, conversely, that even having had the limits of their desired pale made clear, they scruple not to transgress further.
I found your argument unconvincing and your conclusion not adequately supported. I have read history and I do not believe your interpretation is correct.
I agree. The ability to speak one's mind is good, important thing to have in our society. But it's not primary to being a good person. An institution should be able to set its own standard of decency.
> There are some ignorant thoughts that have entirely fallen out of the collective consciousness (in terms of serious belief, not abstract discussion of the past). There are many more that need to.
After decades of denazification and tabooisation of national socialism and anything related, we still have a shocking proportion of Nazis in Germany. Openly self-identified Nazis, only a fraction of a percent, but people who agree with statements like "A strong leader (Führer) would be better than democracy" or "Jews are foreign bodies in the German people" - 15-20% according to some studies. And it's not talked about much, but in my opinion we have a bigger problem with right wing terrorism than with islamic terrorism here.
In the US, it is similar. Decades after the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, rampant racism again, people flying the confederate flag, white people killing black people.
What do I want to say with that? People often wish back the past few decades, before social media, which seemed more "civilized". I honestly think now, no, people were not more civilized, we just kept a tighter lid on what people thought.
I don't want to hear the racists, bigots, sexists either... but just silencing them does not seem to actually change peoples minds.
And also (I say this as a left-wing/liberal), I myself want to have a space where I can just say what the fuck I want, without consequences. "It is not my revolution" if I can't say idiotic things in private.
(Edit: And of course, you are right, and I agree with your comment. Please don't view this as a refutation, but as a second-order correction :-))
And also (I say this as a left-wing/liberal), I myself want to have a space where I can just say what the fuck I want, without consequences. "It is not my revolution" if I can't say idiotic things in private.
This wasn't particularly private. There had to be some sort of invitation, but it wasn't like the participants all knew each other. The offline analogy isn't a few friends over your house for dinner, it's speaking at a birds of a feather session at a conference.
Do you think Harvard would have rescinded the acceptance of an admitted student, if one of his high school friends forwarded a one-to-one email the admitted student had sent him which contained one of these memes? I tend to think not.
Dystopian fiction has given so much terrorizing weight to the concept of "thoughtcrime" and "wrong think" that I think people forget how much positive effect a culture can have on widespread mindsets and stopping ignorance.
Authorities, especially institutions of higher learning, shouldn't be in the business of policing their student's speech. That's not "culture." That's oppression. Using bad actions in the service of good is still a bad idea.
If you think that some people are inherently "lesser" than others and can be treated as such, that's wrong.
I sure think it's wrong. But policing that thought by policing speech that results from it is also wrong.
If you think that it's OK to assault people, that's wrong.
Is Harvard going after the "punch a Nazi" memers and advocates with as much vigor? As a liberal, I find that much more distrubing because in that case people are dressing up bad actions and teaching young people to think of them as somehow good and socially redeeming. Is that what we want? Jingoistic ideologues who can commit guiltless violence, supposedly in the name of your values and love? (Ironically, the most used word to describe an emotion at the Nuremberg rally filmed by Leni Reifensthal: Love.)
that it has gone as far as being written and conveyed in ways that influence others makes it more than just thoughts.
Yup. That's called speech. So what you want is authoritarian control of speech. In institutions of higher learning. Like Berkeley, maybe?
> So what you want is authoritarian control of speech.
Nope. Say anything you like. Learn to live with the consequences, which can and should include rejection by widespread parts of civilized society, and bask in the solitude. The crickets will surely enjoy your free speech.
You shouldn't go to jail for it, but you can't demand that other people like it.
There's a bit of a difference between "I don't like this" and "I'm going to respond to this by attempting to destroy your social and professional life". It's disingenuous to pretend that your argument encompasses only the former, when identical contentions are so often deployed in support of the latter.
I think "rejection by widespread parts of civilized society" is a clear statement that I support both. Let me be explicit: racists and sexists should find it impossible to maintain a social and professional life, until they stop being racist and sexist. (And in the process, that also improves social and professional settings through their absence.) That's not a violent action, that's a highly effective non-violent action. And if it draws so much fire from the kinds of people it affects, perhaps that's because it works.
Well, yes, certainly social and professional exclusion of one's political opponents has some historical evidence for its efficacy as a tactic, at least in the short term.
Those of us who have qualms around consequentialism find this efficacy not reason enough to regard such behavior as exemplary of virtue. Those who do not have such qualms might be well advised to consider, from a utilitarian perspective, the ultimate outcomes which recent history has shown profligate use of this tactic to produce. And those who try to disclaim the grasp their political and cultural tendency has on power would do well to remember that this is, always and only, a tactic of hegemony, without which it cannot work at all.
In any case, as I said before, I like the honesty.
Framing bigots as "political opponents" has some efficacy as a tactic too, given people's allergy to politics. It's sad that this has, especially recently, become equated to politics. "How should we organize government", or "are certain functions better handled by government" are reasonable questions of politics. "Should we treat some people as less than other people" is not a question of politics, it's a question of humanity, that should be orthogonal to politics. It's possible to be toxic anywhere on the political spectrum, and it's possible to be decent anywhere on the political spectrum.
Go re-read the article and tell me again how they're "political opponents"? We're getting sufficiently abstract here that it's worth going back and re-reading what we're actually talking about. Their politics were never at question here, nor was this a political stage. This is a private university choosing who to admit, based on the culture they wish to encourage. Let's not elevate what they were doing to "politics".
If the article was "withdraws acceptances for people who advocated X political belief" (e.g. "less funding for universities", "less power to teachers' unions", "private healthcare", take your pick of things that the average university faculty is likely to disagree with), I'd be right there arguing against that; all of those are reasonably debatable topics in the right forums. Which is exactly why there's no slippery slope there: when it's something worth defending, there's no shortage of defenders. So why does there inevitably spring up an army of defenders to support bigots? There's no "first they came for" argument here; first they came for the bigots, and then they stopped and threw a party.
(On a technical forum, in particular, there ought to be an appreciation for historical pattern matching; today "bigotry against outgroups" looks a lot like yesterday's "bigotry against outgroups", and it really shouldn't be a battle that has to get re-fought for every outgroup. One of these days I have hope that people could simply complete the pattern and skip the next dozen instances of it. It's the same battle every time, all the arguments look the same, and the right and wrong answers are always the same.)
At this point, I don't feel like there are any new arguments to make here. I think both of us are well aware of the arguments, I don't think either of us is particularly inclined to change their stance, and I see little value in going through the motions. All the arguments either one of us might reasonably make are posted elsewhere. So, in the interests of the honesty you've expressed an appreciation for: let's stop wasting each others' time.
I don't think we're wasting each other's time. Certainly I don't feel as though you are wasting mine, and I hope I may prevail upon your apparently strained patience to the extent of responding to this comment of yours, because I think there's some value to be had in my so doing. Should you wish me to desist thereafter, I will comply without further demur.
> today "bigotry against outgroups" looks a lot like yesterday's "bigotry against outgroups"
In every case, bigotry against an outgroup relies upon defining members of whatever outgroup is targeted by their membership in that outgroup, and nothing else. People being basically decent as we are, the only way to support the argument that X outgroup has got to go, is by first establishing in the mind of one's interlocutor the certainty that membership in X outgroup is so bad, so utterly and uniquely exclusive by nature of every possible countervailing virtue, that in this specific case it is reasonable - indeed, that it's righteous - to mete out to members of X outgroup treatment whose infliction upon anyone else would be iniquitous in the extreme.
Such a concept is not easy to establish, people being basically decent as we are. Recent history recommends one method as especially efficacious toward that end - that of inventing or selecting a name generally used in reference to a given outgroup, and then investing not the members of that outgroup directly, but rather that name in itself, with all the opprobrium that can be laden upon it. The nature of the name isn't so important; be it a demonym, an ethnonym, a name of choice, or a slur, what matters is that it be generally understood outside the targeted outgroup that the group is the object of the name. Then, by making people despise the name, you can make people despise the group, as well.
There is a subtlety here - it's very hard, people being basically decent as we are, to convince one human being to look upon another not as a fellow deserving of at least some basic modicum of decency, but rather as a disease upon the body politic, meriting excision therefrom by methods otherwise too brutal or mean to be seriously contemplated. But language is the tool we use to understand the world around us, and it should be hardly controversial in the modern age that, by modifying the way we understand language, one may modify the way we understand our world. By investing a name with contempt, therefore, we can heap contempt upon those whom that name describes, much more easily than we could achieve the same end without the same semiotic indirection.
Don't you think it's interesting that you've spent your entire participation in this thread inveighing against "racists" and "sexists" and "bigots", and making very clear that those whom you so describe, you have no problem seeing excluded from social and professional life by means which you'd consider totally unacceptable if applied to those whom you do not place in the categories those names describe? I think it's interesting.
But, as you've rightly pointed out, we are getting awfully abstract, and should bear in mind the situation we're actually talking about here. In that connection, I also think it's interesting how broadly you define these categories you're using. We are, after all, talking about some eighteen-year-old jackasses, which is to say some eighteen-year-old men, who have posted some deeply tasteless and shameful meme pictures on Facebook, mostly in a private group.
That such behavior should be firmly discouraged, we agree; I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread that I would regard disciplinary probation - that is, preemptive advancement to strike two of the notional three, with one more incident of misconduct resulting in summary expulsion - as a proportionate response. Where we part company is in that you find such a response arrantly insufficient. Nothing will do by you but that these young idi...
Could you tone down the flowery language? I mean, I'm castigated for the flowery language on HN, but man... Say as much with fewer words, and your point will be all the more powerful! (Pot, meet kettle! -- I know!)
Clearly I have abused more than one person's patience today! I hope you'll accept my apologies for so doing; concision isn't my first skill, and I tend to lose my grasp of it when I'm working on making a point.
In the interests of short-circuiting a large number of arguments, including the whole question of whether it's important to be tolerant of intolerant people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I have seen, first-hand, across multiple communities, the effects of attempting to include everyone, including those who hate others and make them feel unwelcome, versus the effects of creating a community that actually feels welcoming. See also the interminable arguments about codes of conduct. This isn't an abstract question for me.
I'm going to skip responding to the arguments that I consider entirely addressed by the above.
> I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread that I would regard disciplinary probation - that is, preemptive advancement to strike two of the notional three, with one more incident of misconduct resulting in summary expulsion - as a proportionate response.
If the argument in this particular thread was along those lines, a matter of degree rather than one of action versus inaction, then that would come across a lot more reasonably. A general reaction of "of course this behavior shouldn't be tolerated; what's the best way to address it and make it stop happening everywhere" would be entirely reasonable. (There are interesting questions there, such as the value of attempting to fix deep-seated problems in 10 people versus the value of demonstrating consequences to a larger set.) This branch of the thread, however, has not led in that direction. I had not thus far commented on whether another response might have been appropriate; as a matter of fact, I'd consider either response perfectly fine.
> You're talking about "racists" and "sexists" and "bigots" as though the subjects of the discussion were, not some young damn fools who, like most young men, enjoy shit-stirring and seeing what they can get away with before someone reins them in
> We are, after all, talking about some eighteen-year-old jackasses
...who were applying to Harvard. If we want to paint the full picture of context here, I think saying that Harvard has higher-than-average standards is perhaps an understatement.
The terms refer to entire classes of behavior, not only the most extreme examples of such. It includes people who commit the most horrific acts of violence, people who make communities unwelcoming to specific genders/races/etc, people who repost hateful images and jokes, and people who try to put on their best cherubic faces and defend them in the most flowery and elaborate language. There are most certainly matters of degree and nuance, and not binary; one can be "more sexist" or "less racist", unlike "more dead"; they're comparable adjectives. That doesn't make the labels inapplicable.
And I find that using those terms tends to get people who might otherwise dismiss labels like "offensive" as "political correctness" to actually think about what they're defending. (I also find it an interesting choice by the original article to use "offensive" in the title rather than a more specific term; I think that makes a noticeable difference in framing.) Using them does not imply a lack of nuance; if you consider the terms themselves entirely un-nuanced, perhaps you should consider whether and why you find it appropriate to attempt to minimize their actions by avoiding the labels.
I would also suggest that, while there are extreme members of such groups that might revel in such labels, there are many people who might take pride and glory in being called "offensive" yet flinch back from being called "sexist" or "racist". Using more precise terms like those gets more people to question their behavior.
I have seen, first-hand, across multiple communities, the effects of attempting to include everyone, including those who hate others and make them feel unwelcome, versus the effects of creating a community that actually feels welcoming.
I'm all for that. But when people have gotten to the point of excluding those who are perfectly fine with "live and let live" and one starts harassing them, then things have gotten quite out of hand. Your desire to ostracize -- there is no hate here for you? Honestly? I don't expect an honest answer from you, but know in your heart, that if you have hate in it, then you should be included in those who hate others and make them feel unwelcome.
And I find that using those terms tends to get people who might otherwise dismiss labels like "offensive" as "political correctness" to actually think about what they're defending.
Look, just because I advocate for people being able to do what they want in their own bedrooms doesn't mean that I advocate [insert particular action here]. Defending speech doesn't automatically make you an advocate for what has been said. In fact, that very fallacy is used by authoritarian regimes to justify their censorship. For like the 6th time, get a clue. I'm not defending what you're reacting against. I'm saying that how you propose to react against it is a bad idea and if it spreads will itself foster more injustice.
The worst thing that could happen to this post is to have it be used as convenient feces to fling at the Blue Tribe whenever feces are necessary.
What is the Blue Tribe going to do to get the other parts of the Blue Tribe to stop being secretly hateful authoritarians?
I see no hypocrisy in treating groups whose actions hurt others
For one who decries both hypocrisy and false equivalence, this looks a lot like you're engaging in a bit of it yourself. Ostracizing people from organizations deemed important by society and important to people's lives and careers carries a lot more consequence than some college aged kid posting some memes. Is it because they're the children of privilege? Hereditary blame is one sure sign that your thinking has reached toxic levels of tribalism and othering.
> But when people have gotten to the point of excluding those who are perfectly fine with "live and let live"
"those who are perfectly fine with 'live and let live'" is more or less the definition of the group that welcoming communities welcome. What exclusion are you referring to, here? Because it isn't what was discussed in the article, nor anything I've advocated, nor anything I've seen advocated elsewhere in the parts of this overall comment thread I've read.
> Your desire to ostracize -- there is no hate here for you?
I don't desire to ostracize; I desire an absence of hate. The ideal case would be that nobody has hate to spread; attempting to limit the damage done is a fallback position.
> I'm saying that how you propose to react against it is a bad idea and if it spreads will itself foster more injustice.
I'm not (here or anywhere) suggesting exclusion as a first and only resort. I'm suggesting that it's an entirely valid tactic for people unwilling to learn to "live and let live", to make things more pleasant and welcoming for those who do. To paraphrase the description of an anti-harassment team in one community I'm fond of, de-escalation is always the first resort.
> Ostracizing people from organizations deemed important by society and important to people's lives and careers carries a lot more consequence than some college aged kid posting some memes.
I don't have the impression that the entirety of the groups were excluded; it sounded, from the article, more like they were excluding ringleaders and people who specifically stirred things up. I might also hold a different opinion if there was some genuine sign of recognizing the screwup and attempting to improve that was being ignored in favor of putting on a show. But as long as we're talking about the consequences to people's lives and careers, also consider the other students they'll interact with over the coming years, not just those 10 students.
> Is it because they're the children of privilege?
Nope. And I'm not sure where in anything I posted you would have gotten that from.
Let's take this in another direction, please. You suggested elsewhere in this thread that you'd have been fine with some form of academic probation. That also suggests that you'd be fine with the consequences of such if the behavior continues. So if this is just a question of degree, then as far as I can tell we're on the same page and disagreeing about positions not actually held. As posted here and elsewhere, I'm similarly in favor of de-escalation and proportional responses. Bans and exclusions are near-last resorts, to use with 1) people who show no indication of recognizing and changing their behavior, or 2) people who would be put in a position where they could do a lot of damage. This isn't "screw up once and you're excluded for life", and if you thought that's what I was advocating, then let's just chalk it up to limitations of the medium and move on.
People can change, though it's not necessarily the job of everyone and every group in society to put up with them while they do.
lets have a more realistic conversation about the consequences of shunning and ostracizing people, even if those people are noxious (in some way).
does it really work? it seems to work in-so-far-as it purges specific communities of specific people. it doesn't remove those people from larger society and it most certainly doesn't change their mind. it makes them feel aggrieved to the point where they lash out with redoubled violence. it radicalizes people into extremists where before they may have merely been insensitive now they will be resentful and hateful.
backlash is a real thing and we ignore it at our own peril.
> it seems to work in-so-far-as it purges specific communities of specific people
I'll take that; that's progress. If the only effect is to improve such communities, that's a good enough reason. And if we can get people to stop making "but free speech!" arguments against it, and start talking about free association, it'll have a much more widespread effect.
Here's what this kind of thinking has done in the US: The left has crammed themselves into cities, effectively reducing their voting power outside of those cities. This sort of thinking has been "effective" -- in that Donald Trump is now president.
And if we can get people to stop making "but free speech!" arguments against it, and start talking about free association, it'll have a much more widespread effect.
What you want, is for "your side" to infiltrate virtually all of the ruling boards of all non-governmental organizations in society and have them start enforcing your particular views, on pain of marginalization and expulsion. We in the US once had that widespread condition with the form of the belief system called "Christianity" and such tactics were often used to try to coerce so-called "proper" behavior from atheists, homosexuals, and polygamists. Would you justify having such widespread social coercion once again, because this time, supposedly the "correct" side would win?
Progress throughout history has been made through commerce and people coexisting and really talking to each other. One group enforcing its will over another has always resulted in overt injustice, or covert injustice -- even in the case of the Civil War. (The victims I have in mind in that last reference are all black people, despite the clear progress of abolition.)
I'm all for people talking about "free association." Infiltrating all of the ruling committees of otherwise politically neutral non-government organizations and issuing edicts for what you shall believe, on pain of expulsion, is not at all supporting of or supported by the notion of "free association" -- anymore than using one's status and authority to get someone else to say yes to sexual intercourse is truly consensual sex. True freedom is truly consensual choice, and it's not really consensual if the big motivator is fear.
If I cared to talk about politics (rather than carefully avoid them), I think you'd find that my political beliefs are quite different than you might expect. I'm not looking forward to excessive political pendulum swings in the opposite direction, either. (There's an interesting counterpoint to the Overton window, in that extremists in the one direction can make extremists in the other direction seem more acceptable.)
But no, you have not described what "I want" at all. What I want is for people to stop hating each other and hurting each other. Failing that, I'd like people who hate others to do as little damage as possible, and I'd like as little interaction with them as possible, because quite frankly, life's too short.
In the long term, yes, someone needs to be doing the job of educating people, and instilling better values; it really shouldn't be hard to convey a simple value system that covers tolerating the next dozen groups and not just the last dozen groups, because the patterns are just not that hard to match. I certainly agree that fear is not the best motivation, nor is it ideal. But it is not the job of every last person in society to exercise the patience of a saint and try to fix such problems on an individual basis; it's hard enough to try to fix them at scale. Exclusion is not ideal, but as a near-last resort, it helps with damage control.
As an aside, I also find your use of the term "infiltrating" interesting; that has fascinating ingroup/outgroup connotations for who you consider infiltrators versus who belongs. That's not meant as an attack, nor am I suggesting you intended the choice of words as one, just an observation.
I certainly agree that fear is not the best motivation, nor is it ideal. But it is not the job of every last person in society to exercise the patience of a saint and try to fix such problems on an individual basis
A government that is ruling through fear has lost its moral justification. That you'd just say it's not the best nor ideal -- I find this highly suspect. You'd really take a grudging, fake consensus, over just giving people the opportunity to talk as they will and live and let live? It really is analogous to taking fake consent for sex!
I'd like people who hate others to do as little damage as possible, and I'd like as little interaction with them as possible, because quite frankly, life's too short.
You don't have to look far to find the depredations of people in authority who secretly hate. I'd like hateful authority to do as little damage as possible, and I'd like as little interaction hateful authority as possible, because quite frankly, life's too short. (Not to say that all authority is hateful, of course.)
As an aside, I also find your use of the term "infiltrating" interesting; that has fascinating ingroup/outgroup connotations for who you consider infiltrators versus who belongs.
There is a pattern of "activists" and media critics doing this to various spheres of interest, and to specific organizations, as well as explicit talks in political groups about doing exactly this. I think "infiltration" is a very apt way of describing such insincere political-agenda driven behavior in a non-political group. As for who belongs: Those who are primarily and genuinely passionate about the area of interest.
The poor, the downtrodden, the beleaguered -- people like that have their passions, and they are often the most stalwart and pure in their interests. Very often, for these reasons, they produce the best art. It's no wonder then, that they react to "Carpetbaggers" with passion and vehemence. It's not so different when it comes to interest groups of the affluent. If you want society to make progress, then enable as much sincere, passionate interaction as possible. Balkanizing society into strict divisions based on political viewpoint is exactly the wrong thing to do. Fostering a society where people can interact with those of different viewpoints is the right thing, and this will require the ability to interact with those of highly differing viewpoint -- just so long as it's all live and let live. The version of "tolerance" where it's alright, just so long as everyone agrees with me -- this is just like the "multiculturalism" of many Muslim and Christian fundamentalists, who are all for tolerance, so long as everyone converts to their religion.
In the first paragraph of your response, you've already gone far beyond the bounds of any reasonable discussion. The rest of your post is answered in my response elsewhere in the thread, and I'm done putting energy into this discussion.
The philosophical grounding is the same. If the progressive left were wholly on the side of right, they wouldn't have to throw things like free speech under the bus, or vilify things like the values of the founders of the US. Authoritarians like that would rule by force and shame rather than the consent of the governed. Many under the "progressive" flag have dehumanized their opponents in their hearts, and so have lost the true philosophical grounding of justice.
And thus you dismiss all of them in one breath with "many have", and attempt to demonize anyone who would dare to say "in some spaces, some speech is not OK". You don't have to dehumanize someone to observe that they're causing problems and harming others. And you don't have to paint anyone who disagrees with you as an absolutist authoritarian with no sense of nuance. Next time, try addressing the arguments made, not the arguments that are easier to dismiss. I say "next time", because I really have no further interest in wasting more of my time here.
Let me be explicit: racists and sexists should find it impossible to maintain a social and professional life, until they stop being racist and sexist.
In other words: People you very strongly disagree with should find it impossible to maintain a social and professional life, until they stop disagreeing with you. For a society that values consensuality and freedom, this is shortsighted and naively self-centered thinking. Who in the world are you to judge? For much of the 20th century, the majority in supposedly "enlightened" societies prosecuted such a program against homosexuals. Many people doing this even thought to themselves that it was alright, because it was a choice -- just as I've read you advocate about other people's personal philosophy and political thought.
That's not a violent action, that's a highly effective non-violent action.
The human instinct around exclusion from a group is very strong. In prehistoric days, exclusion from the group was tantamount to a sentence of slow, lingering death. For this reason, when a group of people crosses the moral line of using such coercive tactics to enforce their will on another group, they are very close to the parallel moral line involving violence.
Freedom is consensuality. Consensuality can clearly be violated through power and social/emotional pressures that fall short of physical violence. A social/political movement that seeks to enforce its will against those it labels as "wrong thinkers" does not truly believe in consensuality.
Throughout history, such actions are only "highly effective" in contexts where there is effectively absolute political power, and even then, the authorities must escalate even beyond violence to assert their will. Short of that, we know from history that coercion always produces backlash. If you are truly on the side of justice, then you will eschew all forms of injustice, even when they are supposedly for the good. If you are truly for consensuality, then you should strive to convince your political opponents. It's not for me to know one way or another, but if you have devolved to the point where you have given up convincing, and only want to ostracize and shame them, then everything I know about human nature suggests to me that you are in danger of dehumanizing others in your heart and placing yourself above them. Historically, anyone who gets to that point has made the same mistake in their heart has become an opponent of social justice. It is exactly this mistake that was made against homosexuals, jewish people, and black people in the 20th century US. (Note the specificity of context/location when formulating your response.)
> In other words: People you very strongly disagree with
Those are certainly "other words", but ones that present an entirely incorrect picture of the post you're responding to.
In summary: it's not in any way hypocrisy to treat people and actions that harm others differently than people and actions that don't. And it's a really common derailing tactic to equate the two, and try to treat both as similarly "oppressed groups". (It's also a tactic that tends to produce arguments that sound quite appealing in the abstract, especially if you're of a mind to seek broader patterns and categories, which is not an uncommon trait here.)
I'll also note, in brief, that I'm not advocating a zero-nuance policy of immediate exclusion for the slightest offense. That's not a supportable position, and certainly not the one I hold. I do, however, consider exclusion a perfectly reasonable approach for maintaining more pleasant, welcoming communities. And it's not the job of every such community to put up with people who would make it worse, or to attempt to correct such people.
it's not in any way hypocrisy to treat people and actions that harm
For one who decries false equivalence of equating some non-violent action to violence, I find your application of "harm" here a real stretch, and a bit hypocritical besides!
I'll also note, in brief, that I'm not advocating a zero-nuance policy of immediate exclusion for the slightest offense. That's not a supportable position, and certainly not the one I hold. I do, however, consider exclusion a perfectly reasonable approach for maintaining more pleasant, welcoming communities. And it's not the job of every such community to put up with people who would make it worse, or to attempt to correct such people.
I wonder if you're the sort of person who would advocate that a non-political group make a political statement, then make everyone sign or make some sort of pledge in support of it and throw out those who don't. Such behavior called a perfectly reasonable approach for maintaining more pleasant, welcoming communities is every bit as hypocritical as and toxic as 80's frat boys doing the enforced-fun aggression, questioning your sexuality, then gay bashing you if your answer doesn't satisfy them.
You talk elsewhere about being too abstract. The chief emotional dishonesty here in our blue tribe, is the degree to which hate and emotional aggression actually rule the tribal, othering behaviors. I've been racially harassed to the point where police had to get involved. The epiphany that I had sometime afterwards, was that there was a real joy, real glee to those "poor white trash" kids. In their minds, I'm quite sure, that they were making the world a better, more "real" and beautiful place, at least for the "real" people. Now I look over at others on the left, and I see essentially the same thing.
Have you dehumanized others in your mind, in your heart of hearts?
> For one who decries false equivalence of equating some non-violent action to violence, I find your application of "harm" here a real stretch, and a bit hypocritical besides!
I don't think it's unreasonable to use the term to refer to non-physical harm. I'm certainly not equating it to violence.
> I wonder if you're the sort of person who would advocate that a non-political group make a political statement, then make everyone sign or make some sort of pledge in support of it and throw out those who don't.
If you mean a political statement like the support of a political candidate or party: no, absolutely not. (And that's an area where I've definitely seen the kind of tribal behavior you mentioned, and I'm not a fan of it.)
If you mean a statement like a code of conduct, attempting to create a welcoming community (which I don't consider political), then: still no, but I'd require people to abide by it whether they signed it or not. For the purposes of the community, I'd prefer that they're doing so because they believe in it, but I'd settle for them following it because they want to participate in the community more than they want to be hateful.
> The chief emotional dishonesty here in our blue tribe
"our" is broadly speaking incorrect here, though I certainly share its values with respect to tolerance.
> is the degree to which hate and emotional aggression actually rule the tribal, othering behaviors
I've certainly seen some of that. Not a fan. But given a limited amount of time and energy with which to change the world, I don't see that as very high on the list of priorities.
I don't think it's unreasonable to use the term to refer to non-physical harm. I'm certainly not equating it to violence.
Are you claiming that fear of ostracizing isn't in the same general category as the without-violence-but-convincing threat of violence? I don't see how you can honestly say they aren't both in the category of severe. (I've personally dealt with both.) There doesn't have to be any equivalence for my objection to stand. The factual, even physiological truth, is that both of these are highly emotionally severe and stressful. Any activism that cares about its moral compass needs to be very wary if it finds it's only accomplishing a doppelganger of its goals through such emotionally severe and threatening means. Something is just if it appeals to people's inner sense of justice. Accepting a facsimile of that because you can make people fearful enough to play along -- something is very wrong here!
But given a limited amount of time and energy with which to change the world, I don't see that as very high on the list of priorities.
The real trick is to be able to really change the world, instead of having it change you into one of the villains. Civilization has started to figure out that violent coercion only leads to destructive cycles. Our culture now needs to also start making the same realization about short-of-violent coercion.
Nobody brought up 'convincing threats of violence' before now. But since you did, yes, I'd absolutely claim a difference. It's one thing to fear being excluded from a group, and quite another to fear for your safety, whether there's an actual threat or simply something that feels ominous. And even when exclusion or banning is on the table, there's a step between quietly removing someone from a community (leaving them to make a scene or not) and loudly warning people about the threat they pose; it takes a lot more direct concern for others' safety to warrant the latter. And if you read the article, there were multiple incremental steps taken, and not everyone involved was ejected, nor does it sound like anyone was named who didn't want to be.
For that matter, exclusion is typically entirely reversible, given appropriate reasons to do so.
More importantly, however, you're focusing on the effect on the excluded, and ignoring their effect on others.
If you're asked to be quiet in a library, you're not being oppressed; even if you're talkative by nature, you can manage to shut up so others can ready and study. If you don't, you'll be asked to leave, or ultimately made to. But that doesn't mean people in the library go around with that fear and threat as the ultimate reason, any more than people go around with 'I might go to jail' as the only thing stopping them from injuring someone.
The same goes if you're participating in a community with a code of conduct that makes it welcoming and comfortable. Even if you're naturally toxic and obnoxious, hopefully you can manage to suppress that tendency in order to participate in the community. If not, you'll be asked to leave, or ultimately made to. But people participating in the community don't have that at the forefront of their minds all the time. That's largely the point.
Nope. Say anything you like. Learn to live with the consequences
Having found that much of the modern world has quite effective protections for free speech and free association, authoritarians have learned this "one weird trick" to hide their activities. Here's the dishonest trick: Just because it's not in the set of rules enforced by city, county, state, and federal officials, then it's not censorship. That's the same as saying that anything you do is OK, so long as it's not against the letter of the law somewhere.
The whole point of free speech is to prevent authority from chilling dissent and coercing fake-agreement through fear and power. How does it matter if that sort of thing is happening through non-government organizations? Our country and most of the western world has a long history of oppressing groups largely through such non-government oppression. The manner in which homosexuals were oppressed is almost the same manner in which you would like your political views enforced. Do you know what people used to say about this? "You shouldn't go to jail for it, but you can't demand that other people like it."
You shouldn't go to jail for it, but you can't demand that other people like it.
There were laws against homosexuality in the western world, but the societal enforcement mechanisms were operating with far more frequency in the 20th century. There were laws suppressing black people, but the instances of societal enforcement mechanisms were far more frequent than arrests. Far more people read the posted sign or subtly got the funny vibe than were arrested. In many places where there were no specific laws against being Jewish, there were many, many instances of people being excluded from the best connected clubs and social circles on this basis. What you want are these kinds of societal enforcements operating, but on the basis of your particular ideas of what's right and wrong. So long as no one is being injured or killed, and no state "monopolizers of violence" are at play, then it's okay.
It's not okay. If you are trying to force instead of convince then you are being a crappy, oppressive person. History is full of such people, most of whom thought they were doing right. In the same way, history is full of crappy violence, committed by people who thought they were fighting for justice. Thankfully, civilization has made progress, and we are now in the process of groups giving up violence as a means of enforcing their will. Similarly, we as a civilization are better understanding that groups of people using other forms of societal pressure to enforce their will short of violence are also oppressive. What you are advocating is that same kind of crappy non-consensual illusion of agreement, and justifying it because governments aren't doing it, and because in your mind, it's "might for right."
Convince, not force. Consensuality should be at the core of any 21st century intellectual's morality, and true consensuality is never begrudging.
> Our country and most of the western world has a long history of the whole of society oppressing groups largely through such non-government oppression.
> people read the posted sign or subtly got the funny vibe
Or the bigoted meme? It's a great argument; you might consider exactly which point it's a great argument in favor of.
I am amazingly uninterested in arguments for why it's important to support racism and sexism, or in attempts to paint racists and sexists as an oppressed group that needs protection, or in attempts to equate freedom of association as equivalent to violence, or in attempts to call it "your particular ideas of what's right and wrong". Enjoy beating up that strawman as long as you like, but it has little to do with any actual position I'm advocating.
I am amazingly uninterested in arguments for why it's important to support racism and sexism
I am amazingly uninterested in "aguments" where you put words in other people's mouths. Where do I support racism and sexism? Please provide a quote. (Big fail for you here!) As it so happens, I'm a liberal non-heterosexual brown person. Violence is wrong, no less so if it's done against vile, violent people. Coercion is wrong, even if it's done against people I dislike. The suppression of free speech is wrong, no matter who is talking.
in attempts to equate freedom of association as equivalent to violence
It's certainly not equivalent to violence. However, it's still fake and crappy if you're just interested in getting your way, and have reduced certain other human beings in your mind to some status where their consensuality doesn't matter. That's the whole reason why democracy is the best form of government we have so far: it respects consensuality the best out of every other system we've tried.
"your particular ideas of what's right and wrong". Enjoy beating up that strawman as long as you like, but it has little to do with any actual position I'm advocating.
So your ideas of "social justice" are better than everyone else's? You claim to have some sort of line to "the truth?" A close friend of mine received some sort of award and several hundred dollars for her work in social justice, and she agrees with much of what I have said.
You said yourself in this very discussion that you want "your side" to infiltrate all of the organizations and force the certain people you think are "bad" because they disagree with you. You want society to run in this way, and even if it just succeeds in creating pockets of people who think like you, that's great. Well, that's exactly what you said, and my position is precisely this: Thinking this way is crappy and it's emotionally dishonest. It creates an oppressive fake "consensus," and it convinces absolutely no one. The kind of society it would create would be just as truly about "justice" as the Christian religion dominated society of the 19th century was truly about "Christian values" -- only on the surface! This is my position, and exactly this. The only "straw-manning" that's been done has been yours. You are the one philosophically advocating coercion. Honestly, does the thought of coercing all of those horrible people to leave groups not strike you as righteous vengeance? Are you honestly free of hate of people in your heart?
I agree with many of your political aims, but be honest with yourself: Your position is weak someplace, and thus you have turned away from convincing and towards coercion.
I dislike these absolutist arguments. It ignores any sort of context or nuance and generally shuts down discussion. In general, I understand and sympathize with your line of reasoning, and championing of free speech. However, I think you are going too far.
Consider HN: we have down votes, comment flagging, and moderators. That is very much the policing of speech. Would you consider this oppression?
I dislike these absolutist arguments. It ignores any sort of context or nuance and generally shuts down discussion. In general, I understand and sympathize with your line of reasoning, and championing of free speech. However, I think you are going too far.
Absolutist argument? Where do you get that? Who's being absolutist? What evidence do you have that I don't have "a line?" Do you have any evidence that I support people yelling "fire" in a theater? Please provide your evidence, as I do take an absolute stand against people putting words and positions onto others on HN with no evidence.
It ignores any sort of context or nuance and generally shuts down discussion.
So are you basically saying it's okay to engage in partisan thought and speech policing of political viewpoints of graduating high school seniors by trolling through their social media?
Consider HN: we have down votes, comment flagging, and moderators. That is very much the policing of speech. Would you consider this oppression?
No. I don't get instantly excluded for voicing an opinion. Instead I get feedback. There's the difference. Is there a real flow of information? Is there a real marketplace of ideas? Or is it, "put up or shut up?" That's the difference.
> Authorities, especially institutions of higher learning, shouldn't be in the business of policing their student's speech. That's not "culture." That's oppression.
I considered that to be an absolutist argument. I think there are contexts in which authorities (EDIT: non-governmental authorities) can police speech in a way that is not oppressive. And not just the usual "shouting fire in a crowded theater" sense. If you are using a public forum to be disruptive and is detrimental to the other students, it can be appropriate to levy some sort of disciplinary action. If you start shouting racial epithets in a crowded theater, for example, I think it is appropriate for you to be thrown out. So the line is not clear cut, there is a level of subjectivity at play.
> So are you basically saying it's okay to engage in partisan thought and speech policing of political viewpoints of graduating high school seniors by trolling through their social media?
In this case, the students posted the offensive material on a public forum moderated by Harvard staff. I wouldn't consider this "trawling through social media".
> I don't get instantly excluded for voicing an opinion. Instead I get feedback. There's the difference.
So if Harvard had put these students on academic probation or something instead, you wouldn't necessarily have a problem? That's something I can get behind. I thought you were opposed to any action being taken against these students of any kind.
> Authorities, especially institutions of higher learning, shouldn't be in the business of policing their student's speech. That's not "culture." That's oppression.
I considered that to be an absolutist argument
That item just on happens to be on the other side of my "line." By your logic, anyone who has a position on the wrong side of your "line" is "absolutist." I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I think there are contexts in which authorities (EDIT: non-governmental authorities) can police speech in a way that is not oppressive.
Sure. There's definitely a line. The point at which authority, even non-violence based non-governmental authority, can be used to suppress dissent through societal and/or economic coercion, there is a moral line which has been crossed. It's even built into human psychology. The psychological threat of exclusion from a group is very strong, because in the prehistoric past, exclusion from the group was tantamount to a sentence of slow, lingering death. An organization using such a fear to enforce a political view is crossing a moral line parallel and nearby the moral line crossed by an organization (or an informal association of "activists") using the fear of violence to do the same.
So if Harvard had put these students on academic probation or something instead, you wouldn't necessarily have a problem? That's something I can get behind. I thought you were opposed to any action being taken against these students of any kind.
Sure. I wouldn't be "getting behind" that, but I wouldn't be "up in arms" against something like that, since it is temporary and non-exclusionary.
The argument presupposes that we are somehow aware of some sort of perfect moral standard at this point in time and that the only thing left to do is to implement it to all of society through the method you describe.
In the era where they saw disease as a divine punishment, most people no doubt held this belief as well.
In reality, moral standards will shift around as they always do, some parts will lose their luster and others will be strengthened. New standards will emerge and make our current progressive ideals seem distant and alien, the same way we look at medieval ostracism.
I agree with much of your thought, but we've seen just now in the US that members of the republican party basically believe if you get sick and didn't earn health insurance on your own, you deserve to die, which is effectively the same thing as "disease is a punishment of the wicked" (or poor).
> Dystopian fiction has given so much terrorizing weight to the concept of "thoughtcrime" and "wrong think" that I think people forget how much positive effect a culture can have on widespread mindsets and stopping ignorance.
I didn't read past this. Were you under the impression that thought policing is only a matter of fiction? You don't read world news, do you? I wouldn't be surprised since only an echo chamber would spouse this kind of view but you should read a little more about places like North Korea.
Thought policing is not a good thing, it will never be a good thing.
Cultural influence goes both ways, certainly, and your suppositions of ignorance are unwarranted, unwelcome, and incorrect. I'm not suggesting policing thoughts, nor that a government should ever be in this business. I am suggesting that private institutions have every right to choose who they accept or associate with, based on the kinds of culture they wish to promote or discourage.
Harvard could admit only valedictorians. It could admit only those with perfect scores on the SAT. It doesn't do either of those things. Rather it spends a lot of time and energy putting together a class that it thinks will be greater than the sum of its parts. As a private organization it is perfectly entitled to pick and choose what matters to it.
In that light, why not consider the character of the people it decides to bring into its community? And once it has decided to consider character, what justification can their be for limiting themselves to only considering manicured (and sometimes manufactured) personal statements and letters of recommendation rather than available data that might have a chance of being actually revealing?
Would you object to the Catholic Church looking into the social media histories of candidates for the priesthood?
No, but on the other hand, membership in the priesthood implies a direct responsibility for the wellbeing of those in your pastoral care, and a degree of authority, derived from one's position, which can be abused to do great harm. I'm not really sure what there is about being a freshman at Harvard that merits the same extent of scrutiny.
Every Harvard student has a shared responsibility with every other student for the quality and tone of the community as a whole. Harvard cultivates a very specific type of community. These candidates signaled to Harvard through their actions that they are not conducive to the community Harvard is trying to cultivate (whether true or not).
But I think this behavior is nothing new. It is just revealed in a persistent form when you put it on a chatroom with your name next to it. One hears about this kind of stuff everywhere, all over the world. It fits the stereotype of the entitled rich white guys from the ivy league, but it's also not that uncommon in the non-ivyleague world. Yes, its unacceptable to share this publically, or with coworkers.
But that's a pretty huge penalty. High school kids do stupid shit. There are some people there who lost their admission who probably were very lucky to get into harvard, who don't have 10 other ivy league schools to go to.
And neither is schools denying access for those they deem undesirable. Fifty years ago, if information about a candidate participating in unsavory activities reached the admissions office in some manner and they were able to verify it (or not, it's really up to them whether the rumors themselves are bad enough), they could, and I'm sure did, use that to deny admission to candidates.
> But that's a pretty huge penalty.
That happens all the time. Life isn't fair, and Harvard admissions certainly aren't "fair", by whatever standard you can come up with. They specifically admit candidates on a very diverse set of criteria, which includes things such as the promotion of multiculturalism, because it's believed that exposure to different types of people provides an overall benefit to the student body. It should come as no surprise that if they are willing to admit otherwise lesser scholastically qualified candidates to promote this facet of the Harvard experience, they would be just as willing to reject people on the same grounds. Put simple, grades and SAT scores are not all that matters, and just as a college may reject you after admission has been granted if your last semester of High School has horrible grades, they may reject you if they discover evidence that they think you are not the type of student they want attending.
> There are some people there who lost their admission who probably were very lucky to get into Harvard, who don't have 10 other ivy league schools to go to.
Nobody has to go to an Ivy league school. In the same way you can screw up a big test and get a bad grade in High School, you can screw up your image and how you are perceived morally. They screwed up, and at least one avenue was closed to them. Their life may be different, but it's not like they are being jailed. They can go to some other school. I'm positive people have been rejected and even expelled for Harvard with less evidence. Their life will go on, and if they were able to get accepted to Harvard I'm sure they'll do okay going somewhere else, as long as they can curb whatever impulse caused this incident (whether it be ignorance of how it would be perceived, too much acceptance of peer pressure, or actual racism. I'm sure it was slightly different for each of them).
<As a private organization it is perfectly entitled to pick and choose what matters to it.>
This is an aside, but I don't entirely agree. The tax exemption Harvard receives on its massive endowment is, per undergraduate, worth much more than the direct government subsidy public universities receive per student. UC Berkeley alone enrolls more low income students than the entire Ivy League combined (this is true of several UCs). Harvard also gets a monumental amount of funding directly from the federal government, and while much of this is in the form of research grants, it is allowed to redirect a substantial portion of this to operating costs.
Harvard gets this government favored status (in many ways, far more favored by the government than a "public" university, which has many more obligations) precisely because it is ostensibly acting in the public interest.
I have some sympathy with this position, but de facto governments, state and federal, impose very very few restrictions on charities and non profits. As long as they aren't outright scams they can mostly do what they like. Even outright scams can skate along for a while.
There are two ways to fix this problem--assuming one thinks it's a problem.
One would be to leverage the myriad benefits we provide to do more to ensure that these organizations are acting in the public interest. That's a pretty tall order though. We'd be looking at a ton of new laws/regulations/bureaucracies to make tens of thousands of determinations. In this particular case, it's not clear to me that Harvard isn't at least not acting against the public interest.
The other way would be to eliminate the tax advantages and let the chips fall where they may. Again, assuming one thinks there is a problem, that seems the preferable solution to me.
> UC Berkeley alone enrolls more low income students than the entire Ivy League combined (this is true of several UCs).
Some context for those interested: Berkeley enrolls approximately 30k undergraduates; the Ivy League combined enrolls approximately 60k. The most commonly cited cutoff for "low income students" is recipients of federal Pell grants, which are (roughly speaking) available to US citizen or permanent resident undergraduates with a family AGI of <$50k.
According to https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive... from US News, 34% of Berkeley undergraduates receive Pell Grants. (Berkeley's own website claims 32%.) This is the second-highest of the top 25 national universities, behind only UCLA at 38%. As a result, there are approximately 10k students receiving Pell grants at Berkeley.
According to the same source, the percent of recipients in the Ivy league ranges from 31% at Columbia to 13% at Yale. Overall across the eight schools, it appears to be approximately 18% and slightly shy of 11k students.
From a preliminary examination, it appears that the claim is indeed true for other UC campuses (of which only UCLA is a top 25 university) but not Berkeley as stated. The UC system makes the claim about five campuses other than Berkeley: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/half-new-uc-stud...
While it is within Harvard's right as a private institution to dictate which speech it finds acceptable, it is perhaps still a bad idea. In today's culture, those in positions with the authority to moderate speech (e.g. online forums such as Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, etc.) are doing so liberally. I would prefer prestigious institutions of higher learning to specifically allow these kinds of offensive and hateful speech because they are shocking and uncomfortable, and the more ideas to which students are exposed the sharper their minds become.
Not to mention that filth like this serves as a kind of canary in the coalmine - if one can make jokes about violence against minorities without fear of repercussions, then that bodes well for ideas actually intended to be taken seriously.
I expected to feel conflicted before reading this article for the exact reasons you outlined. However, this line from the article made a difference:
> "The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group."
They were being deliberate shit heads. This wasn't a private chat, this was intentionally sharing offensive content with the explicit purpose of ruffling feathers and pissing people off.
To call this a "private chat" is misleading - this was essentially a public forum for an incoming class to share content and these 10 students should have had zero expectation of privacy. If I were on the AdCom, I wouldn't have kicked them out for posting objectionable content, I would have kicked them out for being sheer, utter morons.
Could you be denied admittance to Harvard because you showed up on campus at some kind of freshman event and started telling extremely offensive jokes in front of the whole gathering? How is a Facebook group full of people you don't know any different?
You probably couldn't if you did so as a student, especially if doing so for a student publication. Reminds me of how the University of Illinois rescinded a tenure offer to Steven Salaita after he was accused of being anti-Semitic in tweets about Gaza. He would have been safe if he had tweeted after officially accepting the job: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/world/middleeast/professo...
> Could you be denied admittance to Harvard because you showed up on campus at some kind of freshman event and started telling extremely offensive jokes in front of the whole gathering?
Probably depends how offensive you were. But yeah, sure you could. I am absolutely positive there are some prospective freshmen at Harvard who have had their admission rescinded based on their behavior during the pre-frosh weekend. Such incidents tend to be less publicized because they involve a single student, and there's normally an embarrassment factor involved.
Once you are on campus and admitted it would be more difficult...it would depend on the context. Certainly people have been kicked out (or rather, "asked to leave") based on sharing offensive material and memes, but in the cases I know of it was because that material was targeting specific individuals / people.
This was a university-moderated and maintained facebook group. There was absolutely no expectation on the part of the posters that Harvard could not read their words. You can get expelled for public speech on campus too.
That doesn't fly either. If you're a college student and decide to make a "private" White Power Resistance Cell with your friends and then advertise for it on campus using university-provided messaging, you still get expelled.
Again, Harvard did no "surveillance" here. They found these kids because they were posting garbage on Harvard's own forum.
Yet another SJW propaganda war against free speech i can't even grasp. Please read abut socialist culture marxism by ex kgb agent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0 >Yet another SJW propaganda war against free speech i can't even No one talking about this, freemarket i don't care, BUT we the people have to fight and post "hate speach" edege memes, about niggers, muh 6 millions, lolcaust, feminist totalitarian stte and other. We won't be silenced, by bunch of jews and SJW: 8ch.net/voat.co/tor proud user
Considering how competitive the acceptance criteria are for Harvard (2,056 out of 39,506 applications), this is just another decision point. Now 10 other people are able to get in, and the entire body of current and prospective students have learned a valuable lesson about privacy and free speech.
As a private institution, Harvard can choose to deny acceptance to anyone for any reason. I don't agree with their reasoning, but I agree with their right to decide.
Next time don't use Facebook. This is what 4chan is for.
That isn't completely accurate. An acceptance to Harvard is usually unconditional, and can only be withdrawn under very specific circumstances (in this case, they're invoking the circumstance relating to an admitted student's honesty/integrity/moral standing). Just wanted to clear up that there is a big difference between denying someone acceptance at the time of application and withdrawing one. (Source: also admitted to Harvard this year)
No, that there are times, places, and contexts on how to use free speech. If you knowingly and publically associate your name with something offensive, there could be private consequences.
Facebook is a public forum that happens to be visible to harvard staff. Students should know this.
It was private from the university. The only reason Harvard administration found out about the offensive stuff was because some student in that private chat screenshotted and sent it to them.
unfortunately for these 10 ex-applicants of Harvard they might not get into any University period for 2017/2018... This isn't a small implication to them for stupid posts online. I'm not 100% sure if I feel that's fair. them not getting into Harvard is one thing but losing education at this point in time is even worse.
Fair enough it was beyond stupid, sugar coating it isn't going to help. But this is more than just losing a place at Harvard. These individual are at a point in their life where they can finally expand their roots, learn and I use this word lightly but "rehabilitate". Due to the massive culture and intense work ethics they will need to gain to succeed at a place like Harvard. Mind you I do agree they need a form of punishment and Harvard is a business they can do whatever they want. But for these 10 individuals what good can this have for them? it's more like a slippery slope from here on in for them, you never know maybe a few of these individuals were just posting due to peer pressure and some might be blowing off steam just never taught there are better ways. There's things we don't know unfortunately and it just ends up being a sad display of events.
You can get fired from a job at private company for posting racist material on the internet. I'm not sure how acceptance to a private college is any different. It's better that they learn this lesson now, rather than when a salary depends on it. They're smart/accomplished enough to get into Harvard and they'll all likely rebound from this.
> They're smart/accomplished enough to get into Harvard and they'll all likely rebound from this.
only the part that is messed up with this is after you get enrolled you usually send out a letter to other colleges/university to decline their offers... in my past experience after a decline their isn't a second chance. this puts all of them on a 1 year stand by. Really this is fair? - and they still have another 4 years to grow up and grow before joining a professional 'salary' job 18-23 year old? generally they would be between 17-18 years old and for such an petty issue will now have a hell of a time rebounding.
I think it's fair. Put simply: don't be a racist and you won't find yourself on the outside looking in when it comes to things you care about. This isn't kids-being-kids; when I was 17/18 we certainly weren't passing around racist propaganda--and that's what it is, it isn't just "memes" and it shouldn't be minimized as "petty". Our brains weren't fully baked either, nobody's is at that age, but racist propaganda is a profoundly serious issue and Harvard, to their credit, understands that and refuses to minimize it the way you are doing.
And it's not a year, it's half a year; spring admissions are commonplace. That still super sucks for the people who got caught being racist turds; hopefully they learn from the seriousness of what they did (and they did it, and it was serious) and choose not to be racist turds going forward.
Yet another SJW propaganda war against free speech i can't even grasp. Please read abut socialist culture marxism by ex kgb agent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0 >Yet another SJW propaganda war against free speech i can't even No one talking about this, freemarket i don't care, BUT we the people have to fight and post "hate speach" edege memes, about niggers, muh 6 millions, lolcaust, feminist totalitarian stte and other. We won't be silenced, by bunch of jews and SJW: 8ch.net/voat.co/tor proud user
I think these memes illustrate a serious superiority complex of harvard (and other "prestigious" schools) students/alumni. I think this represents just the visible tip of the iceberg...I'm sure many more Harvard students still exhibit similar superiority complexes and thoughts even though they are too wise to not share such memes in a private chat.
1. Were the students given a warning before having their admissions withdrawn?
2. I'm curious why Harvard chose the nuclear option, rather than to use this as an opportunity to teach why the memes were considered offensive, and more appropriate ways to express themselves.
>I'm curious why Harvard chose the nuclear option, than to use this as an opportunity to teach why the memes were considered offensive, and more appropriate ways to express themselves.
Presumably they don't want nasty, highly offensive people in their institution. Which is perfectly reasonable. I wouldn't want anything to do with people like that either.
My fraternity got suspended because someone trash talked some administration person on our private chat page. Turns out one of our members really disliked the trash talker and the insult in general and reported the incident. The private group chat in Harvard probably either has a [for lack of better word] tattle tail, or even a shadow member who is associated with advisors to take into consideration what the new members are saying.
Long story short, these young people are getting their first dose of 'what happens in Vegas, is likely to cause long-term relationship issues'
I think an article such as this one is a clear example of the generational differences between older and younger people. I'm fairly close to these kids' age and I've browsed memes from /r/dankmemes and enjoyed them.
The thing is, is that these memes are supposed to be self-aware of how offensive they are. That's the joke. They're meant to be so offensive and ridiculous that reactions can be drawn from outside spectators so they can get offended and you can laugh at them for being a "normie".
I have no issue with these jokes unless they've been made in a sincere attempt at racism or sexism, and knowing my experience with the internet, I don't believe this is the case.
It's not a new thing. Dead baby jokes have been around forever, and popular comedians often use similar black humor. The article mentions the card game cards against humanity. Which is pretty popular and based on the same premise.
I used to really like black humor. I frequently told dead baby jokes and similar stuff. Thank god that wasn't recorded.
I'm alarmed to see many of the comments here outraged over the stuff the students said. I guarantee most of them have probably told a similarly offensive joke at some point in time, or at the very least have friends who have. Especially when they were younger.
I agree, but what is new is that suddenly kids are having their college acceptances revoked for dead baby jokes that the administrators probably also joked about 30 years ago, when they were 18.
> The article mentions the card game cards against humanity. Which is pretty popular and based on the same premise.
Except that the premise of Cards Against Humanity is that you are all opting in to the situation where you expect that, and usually an a somewhat private setting.
The equivalent to the CAH suggestion would be where some private group of people indicated that to become members, you had to go to a public cafe and play CAH loudly in public. Were that Cafe to get mad at you and ban you from their premises, getting upset at that outcome is rather silly. You either knew that was a possibly outcome, or you should have known. In any case, that Cafe is well within their rights to decide they want nothing to do with you anymore.
I wouldn't consider that equivalent at all. This was an invite-only private chat between students. So in other words, it would be like they were playing CAH in a dorm room and somebody in the group decided to tell on them to administration.
It's actually somewhat unclear exactly what happened. From the article:
Some of the group’s members decided to form an offshoot group in which students could share obscene, “R-rated” memes, a student told the Crimson. The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group.
But from wording later, the examples given seem to be from the private group? I'm also unclear if the private group some some offshoot of the main group within Facebook (that is, whether it's some Facebook sub-group feature, obviously they are members of the main group).
In any case, Harvard says they reserve the right to reject admission based on "honesty, maturity, or moral character" so if this information is brought to their attention, then it falls under what they consider valid acceptance criteria. It's no different than if they Google searched the applicant initially and found verifiable information that put the student in the same light.
Actually, it isn't. Racism is based in the belief that one group is superior to the other. If one is making an ironic joke, it does not imply any intent of racism on their part.
So should black comedians be jailed for their jokes when they generalize about other groups? Should Dave Chapelle be in prison for making jokes about white people, since that's what you're implying?
Racism is defined as prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.
Antagonism is hostility. You're actually the one who even mentioned this being black humor, so this can't be antagonism if we both agree these are jokes. Trying to make people laugh using taboo subjects is not antagonism.
As for prison, I'm implying what consequences you would assume for individuals who would be so vocal about what you would call their racist acts.
See my comment above. It's not any more racism than joking about dead babies means you actually want to kill babies. It's not any more racism than playing cards against humanity makes you an unforgivable monster. Black humor is extremely common and as old as time.
humor with the intention of ridiculing something by using its own tropes to the point of absurdity to show the wrongness/badness of the thing is a well-established form of satire and commentary.
a satirist is emphatically NOT in concordance or agreement with that which they are satirizing. I find it unreasonable that you are arguing against this basic premise. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. I hope I am because If I am really understanding you correctly it seems to me like you are making something far worse than a fallacious argument, but really something that rises to the level of destructive of the meaning of words.
You're assuming the people employing that black humor don't believe what they're saying.
I, and I expect the person to whom you reply, don't adhere to that assumption. I think that "just a joke", in this context, is the exhibition of profound naivete. And even if the speaker realizes it's a joke--the listeners often don't. See the /pol/ commentary elsewhere in this thread; /pol/ was "just joking" until those jokes were taken as articles of faith and became the core of a literally fascist movement.
Yes people employing black humor don't believe what they are saying. That's literally the whole point. I really doubt there are that many people that actually want to murder babies. Or do any of the insane things that come up in a good cards against humanity game.
Maybe you could make a utilitarian argument against black humor. Maybe you could argue that such jokes encourage actual baby killers and the world would be better without them. I really doubt that's true, but even if it was, it's a very different argument. People want these kids expelled because they think they are actual monsters, which is probably false. Not because of theoretical arguments of the utility of banning black humor.
Pols transition to conservatism has nothing to do with black humor, but how it's set up. It's a site that not only doesn't censor, but strongly encourages discussions on taboo topics. Of course it will attract people that believe taboo ideologies and are banned or ostracized elsewhere.
This is simply incorrect. /pol/ has never attempted to be "ironically" fascist. Its memes have always been a true reflection of sincere fascism and racism.
/r/dankmemes has similar subject matter but it's clear that it's ironic and it's black humor.
They are two fundamentally different things. Nobody is being indoctrinated into being a fascist from the latter. The former is actively attempting indoctrination.
Evaluating the sincerity of racism and sexism? You're overcomplicating it. The mere expression of it fouls the air and puts a world where people love and respect each other just a little further out of reach. It's like evaluating the motivations of a belching coal smokestack.
That's a very fair point. I've made plenty of these jokes before to my friends and sent memes that are blatantly offensive because of the taboo factor. It's black comedy. Similarly to how Aristophanes made fun of Socrates and basically created the genre of dark humor.
I'm probably around the same age you are, and I have to disagree with you that these kinds of jokes are harmless.
For one thing, cultures like this do provide safe havens to people who actually hold bigoted views 'sincerely'. I've been in IRL conversations that ran along these norms, and it was a really uncomfortable experience, especially as a member of a favorite 4Chan target group. It became fairly obvious over the course of the evening that one of the guys there really had drunk a fair bit of the 4Chan kool-aid, but how can you call him out when everyone is cracking the same jokes? Few things shut down open exchange of ideas faster than than the thought that the person you're talking to fundamentally doesn't respect you, because of who you are.
But that's not even the real problem I have with this kind of in-group offense culture - the real problem is that no one is ever as self-aware as they think they are. What you say shapes how you think, and then how you act, in ways we may never be consciously aware of. The students Harvard produces are going to end up in board rooms, courtrooms, and halls of power of all kinds all over the country; I expect them to be disciplined thinkers both academically and socially, who take these kinds of issues with the seriousness they deserve, not trollface memesters hiding their intellectual laziness behind image macros.
To your first point: It's certainly immoral to be a true bigot, but it's more immoral to silence dark humor simply because of the one individual who believes it. In fact, I would argue that attempting to stifle these individuals is what amplifies their tendency to hold bigoted views. For example, if you're in an in-real-life group conversation and you're all friends and you're roasting another friend for something he did, it's completely fine. But once someone goes too far and begins insulting him sincerely, you punish the person who made the insult, not the group.
As to your second point, I don't know why you think people who enjoy memes are somehow intellectually lazy. I don't really see how your logic works here as memes are simply jokes transmitted via the internet. Are you implying that anyone who makes jokes or enjoys dark comedy has to be intellectually lazy?
More immoral to silence bigotry than to be a bigot? I find that hard to accept. At the legal level, sure, no one should be prosecuted for being a dick. But that isn't what we're discussing here, we're talking about setting the tone of a community of people, in a way that maximizes both everyone's enjoyment and the amount of stuff they can get done. Tolerating bigotry fatally undermines both of those. As for the bad apples, certainly vilifying an individual for their opinions is way more likely to make them double down in righteous indignation, and ideally there'd be a more compassionate way to engage people like that in conversation, but at the very least we can prevent them spreading their ideas in fora we control.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good meme as much as the next millenial. But there are memes and there are memes. You seem to be implying that "beep beep lettuce" and Pepe wearing a Nazi uniform are equivalent to one another. And yes, by the definition of "dark comedy" we're using here, it is lazy. Everyone knows where the boundaries of generally accepted good taste are. There's no skill or wit involved in breaching them. You mention Dave Chappelle elsewhere in this thread; if you look at him, or Mel Brooks, or other 'great' dark comedians, all of the shock there is in the service of making some larger point about society. And sure it doesn't always work, but by your own argument there's not even a semblance of that kind of intent in 'dark meme comedy'. If all a joke is trying to do is give its audience a fleeting thrill of transgression, that's a pretty low form of humor.
I think we just have different views on how to approach bigotry. We both can agree that it is a black mark on our society and we should overcome it as a culture.
However, where we disagree is how to do it. I see the current climate of "preventing the spread of bigoted ideas" as creating what we know as the alt-right. If you check 4chan's /pol/, you will see an incredible amount of people admit to becoming alt-right because "so many snowflakes are always so offended and call me names". If, however, we as a society can more tolerate dark humor and bigoted comments, the bigots either stop talking or evolve to accept more tolerant views. This article as whole is perfect fuel for the alt-right to say "liberals are trying to control everything, even jokes".
To your second point: Pepe wearing a Nazi uniform is not dark comedy. It's racism. They're using memes to further their own ideology, as opposed to the Harvard students who were simply making fun of the offensive nature of the jokes.
Thirdly, I truly don't care for whether or not it's high or low humor. All I'm looking at is intent and whether or not an individual is actively desiring to inflict damage on another group of people. Alt-right memes do this, while the Harvard kids would be the first to admit they were simply making jokes who were not hurting anyone other than the people who decided to be offended by them.
> If you check 4chan's /pol/, you will see an incredible amount of people admit to becoming alt-right because "so many snowflakes are always so offended and call me names". If, however, we as a society can more tolerate dark humor and bigoted comments, the bigots either stop talking or evolve to accept more tolerant views.
No, the bigots then just push the line further, and further, and further, to normalize their bigotry because "yeah they're jokes but they make a good point, you know?"--and if you say "no, that's wrong," you get "it's just a joke, brah, why are you so offended?"
That's what /pol/ is. That's what it's been since its inception. It has been a bunch of useful idiots with a hard core of literal fascists being edged further and further right by pushing that line through rhetoric and through those "harmless" memes.
I used to be there. I spent a lot of time watching this. They turned people to actual hard-core bad shit through that "humor".
I used to be there too, and still am so I can observe how it's evolving. I'm not necessarily even disagreeing with you, but what I am arguing for is not normalizing the bigotry, it's to go back to not even considering their views. The issues arise when we give the alt-right names like "alt-right". It makes them sound powerful and organized.
They're not "literal fascists". Literal fascists were in Italy overthrowing the government 70 years ago. All these people have is the ability to create chaos. When we give them coverage and attention, we feed them. What you're advocating for is what we're doing right now - trying to shut off these toxic wells. But what it's simply doing is adding fuel to the fire.
I don't want to take from the gravity of the main topic, but it seemed notable that the online group -- and this is the larger one, not the subset that got in trouble -- identify as "bourgeois". Unless Harvard has really changed, then... nope!
> “As a reminder, Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character,” the group description states.
Whether you think that this was ok for Harvard to do or not, doing this kind of stuff in the official Harvard student Facebook group (managed by Harvard employees) given that description is just downright stupid.
Ivy league is such a joke. Who would go to a place that snoops on your communication, tells you what to think and believe, shames you for expressing yourself through humor, and has such fun policies as segregated graduation while at the same time banning people who are "racist" from attending the school.
These people are insane and I can't believe they run the country.
People worried about free speech rights should realize that Harvard is a private university.
If I held a party at my house and didn't want to invite you because you called my dog a 'mutt', you'd get laughed out of court if you tried to sue me over it.
People should be allowed to organize under whatever principles they want to organize under. Disallowing Harvard to use whatever criteria they want to use to admit students, unless of course they breach civil rights laws, is ultimately decreasing the amount of intellectual diversity in the world.
People that don't like Harvard can apply to any other college. There's no shortage of them to choose from. But if you tell Harvard what they can and can't do, you run the risk of destroying the individuality of Harvard.
Also, there's some mumbling about the fact that it was private speech that was supposedly surveilled on. Obviously it wasn't that private if school administrators caught wind of it. If you really want a private group, keep it truly private and don't tell anyone about it.
The lesson kids should be taking away from this is, don't let your friends drag you into dangerous situations. Harvard is a nationally recognized school, any screw-ups earn national attention. It's very much a "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" sort of situation.
I don't see anyone in the comments that genuinely believe what Harvard did was illegal. They have a legal right to do whatever they want (so long as they don't receive any taxpayer money whatsoever, which I'm not sure is true.) But we have a legal right to criticize them for it and be angry at them.
No, but they are saying that it's a free speech issue. It is a free speech issue, but not in the way they are saying. Your anger is misplaced if it's directed at Harvard.
who is "they" and what did "they" say, specifically? can you quote someone? the discussion of speech issues is often about culture and norms rather than about legal statutes.
> the discussion of speech issues is often about culture and norms rather than about legal statutes.
While it may be something that many people make a lot of noise about 'respecting', freedom of speech, tolerance of discourse, and a willingness to listen to others are not deeply held social or cultural norms I have witnessed in the US.
Private/public is, to me, not binary. There are degrees. A homeowner, for instance, does get a favored tax status where it comes to income taxes (though the home owner also pays heavy property taxes that largely offset this). Yet we wouldn't regulate what people are allowed to talk about in their own home.
But on this continuum, Harvard is pretty far toward the "public" side of private. Massive amounts of government funding and tax exemptions.
And anyway, the government wouldn't need to get in the business of running Harvard, it could just say "here are the criteria for receiving federal grants and the tax exemptions". Harvard would be free to choose.
Aren't you forgetting something? Money never comes with no strings attached. Harvard's government funding already came with conditions. Controlling Harvard's admittance policy (which has been in place for a long time) is evidently not something the government cares about.
What about government contractors? They're funded by the government. Your way of thinking about it taints every dollar that passes through government, forcing everything that deals with the government to be treated as part of the government.
You're going to have to do a better job articulating a meaningful difference between the two and why it should matter in this case. Money is money, and control is control. The government is already in the business of running schools. If it wanted to, it could open up another Harvard right down the street and fund and run that however it wants to. The government doesn't give money so that it can control Harvard, it gives money to Harvard so that Harvard can control the money.
If you want to change that, then you need to lead the charge. But it's a political question and not a constitutional one.
Folks always make this argument which this kind of thing comes up. Just because you as a private entity can limit free speech, doesn't mean you should. Censorship is generally a bad idea, and I as a private entity can be upset at Harvard for doing it.
The Internet has shown all of us that simple restrictions on speech go a long way towards creating a welcoming and friendly atmosphere. Attacking basic civility and hate speech restrictions on speech is putting principles before reality. You don't want to make any laws restricting truly public speech, but censuring private entities for that is counter-productive.
Cutting down on trolling, perhaps. But there appears to be an encroaching ideologically-driven purge in some areas against people expressing "incorrect" speech. Most of the complaints seem to be focused on youtube, twitter, and facebook (e.g. pewdiepie; also H3H3 productions appears to be having trouble; the site-wide purge of alt-right accounts on twitter and the banning of Milo; instapundit and james o'keefe were temporarily banned; I think nobody would be surprised if someone like Steven Crowder got in trouble someday soon; etc.).
> Attacking basic civility and hate speech restrictions on speech is putting principles before reality.
Now this is quite the 180° turn from how things really work. Setting in place "rules" because they might or might not "offend" someone isn't putting principles before reality how, exactly? It is, of course that's exactly what it is, but I'm curious to how you'd rationalize the opposite.
Apparently, you have never been the target of hate speech. I mean as an organization or platform, hate speech is gonna cause serious damage. You can't just tell individuals in your community or organization to ignore it. For example, in my country Myanmar,we just got free speech. But now we are dealing with hate speech which actually lead to hate crimes. The spread of religious hate speech causes one community of people to set fire/ kill another community of people. You can't just ignore hate speech.
Target the violence, not the speech. Perhaps it is a cultural thing. Being an American, we have a bit of a libertarian underpinning to our culture, so maybe it is different.
You use the term "hate speech" as if it is a definite thing, but the phrase is nebulous and can very easily be used to target expressions of an undesired ideology in the case that the authorities have an agenda to push (e.g. certain religious authorities may target another religion's evangelization efforts as hate speech; communists might target people trying to spread Western values of free enterprise; etc.).
I mentioned this in a comment above - Harvard is a private university that is blessed by favored government status. The exemption on endowment growth is worth more per undergraduate than public colleges receive from the state (apologize for no cite, I read that it is worth 3x more per undergrad than what Berkeley gets per undergrad from the state). Harvard also gets a massive amount of its funding from government research grants, and it does divert a substantial amount of it to general operating funds.
Harvard is pretty far from a purely private organization. I understand we live in a complicated world, and almost nothing is "purely" private, but there are still degrees of public and private, it exists on a continuum. Harvard, as far as "private" institutions go, is heavily supported by government money and favored status. It's nothing close to your analogy of a privately owned house.
I read that Harvard's endowment is not taxed because Harvard is a non-profit organization. No private non-profit university's endowment is. People are acting like the government treats universities like farmers. But unless someone can actually show that Harvard is getting special treatment that no other non-profit university is, I'm not buying it.
Yes, they get research grants. So do a lot of institutions. Who else is going to do research? Maybe Harvard gets more than most. So what?
Yeah but the line gets greyer the closer your 'private company' gets to being a public institution, whether in law or just in public perception.
The fact that you're saying "if someone found out about the private contents of the private group means it wasn't private enough" is kind of disturbing tbh.
"People worried about womens' rights in the early 20th century should have realized that Harvard was a private university. If I held a party at my house and didn't want to invite you because you were a woman, you'd get laughed out of court if you tried to sue me over it. People should be allowed to organize under whatever principles they want to organize under. Disallowing Harvard to use whatever criteria they want to use to admit students, unless of course they breach free speech rights, is ultimately decreasing the amount of intellectual diversity in the world. Women that don't like Harvard can apply to any other college. There's no shortage of them to choose from. But if you tell Harvard what they can and can't do, you run the risk of destroying the individuality of Harvard."
"People worried about reproductive rights should realize that Hobby Lobby is a private corporation."
"People worried about gay rights should realize that Chick-fil-A is a private corporation."
The choices of private organizations and individuals have huge effects, and it's reasonable to criticize them if we disagree with their actions. But on the other hand, I agree that it's important to give private organizations freedom. This is a difficult trade-off; we need to consider both sides of it, and whatever principle we decide on, we should apply consistently. So unless you'd also defend historical gender segregation at private universities, or defend Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, you should find a different defense of Harvard's actions.
You stated the exception without justification. You need to give an actual argument for why discrimination should be an exception but free speech shouldn't.
Free speech has historically been considered an extremely important right. In fact, free speech is a civil right--one of the originals. Why shouldn't it be included under your civil rights exception?
The civil rights movement itself exposed the need for specific legal protections for minorities, because leaving it all up to the "marketplace of ideas" only ensures that patterns of systemized oppression continue.
What happens when you don't restrict along protected grounds is that entire industries collude to exclude those classes of people. Mass hatred drowns out the whole marketplace.
And right now the entire university education industry is colluding to suppress certain types of speech; an incident like this could happen at most universities, not just Harvard. So why doesn't freedom of speech also deserve specific legal protection? You still haven't justified treating freedom of speech differently from freedom from discrimination.
I'm having trouble following your logic. In my original comment, I stated that Harvard should have a right to choose who they want to admit or not admit to their school, unless they wanted to discriminate on illegal grounds.
Everyone here is exercising their rights. The kids have a right to exercise their rights to free speech, and Harvard has a right to run a business the way they want to run it.
Harvard is not a public institution run by the state, so it is not obligated to respect rights that public schools have to. This creates more diversity in the marketplace rather than less.
Everybody can make the kinds of statements they want to make, and everybody can run the kinds of businesses they want to run, until those statements or businesses run afoul of laws. That's how America works.
You can tell Harvard that they should respect student's rights the way you want them to. They can in turn ignore you. You can in turn choose a different university.
The reason we have anti-discrimination laws is because without them, minorities would have no other options.
You seem to want blanket and blind enforcement of your idea of what rights are, without regard to the reasons why we have free speech and discrimination laws in the first place. It's for greater diversification and opportunities.
>The reason we have anti-discrimination laws is because without them, minorities would have no other options.
But those laws exist precisely because people fought to get them in place and be recognized as civil rights. How can you write several paragraphs that sound exactly like rationalizations used for segregation in the 50s [1] and then turn around and talk about anti-discrimination laws?
Well, just like anti-discrimination laws were set in place, so should laws that shouldn't allow businesses to discriminate based on someone exercising their free speech.
[1]: "They can in turn ignore you. You can in turn choose a different university." Seriously, stay classy.
I'm arguing that it's insufficient to point out that Harvard is a private institution, because the exact same argument could be used to justify discrimination. You have to show how free speech and discrimination are different.
I agree that under 2017 US law, Harvard has a legal right to kick out the students. Similarly, under 1930 US law, Harvard had a legal right to reject all female applicants.
I agree that those students can try to apply to a different university. Similarly, women rejected by Harvard in 1930 could apply to a different university.
I agree that this wasn't a good solution for the women rejected by Harvard in 1930, because most other universities would also reject them. I argue that it's also not a good solution for freedom of speech in 2017, because most US universities now suppress certain types of speech.
The reason we have anti-discrimination laws is because without them, minorities would have no other options. The reason we need free speech protections is because without them, people with the "wrong" opinions have no other options.
> I argue that it's also not a good solution for freedom of speech in 2017, because most US universities now suppress certain types of speech.
Well, if they want to change that state of affairs, they can go start a civil liberties movement to get "the right to post dank memes" enshrined as a legally-protected act.
Let me know so I can go sign their petition.
The point I'm trying to get across is that nothing about your argument that is compelling enough to convince a reasonable adult, much less a plurality of Americans to fight for it. Justice isn't free, just because you say things should be fair and the Constitution says it should be this way doesn't make your particular injustice worth fighting for. Civil rights for minorities was. What do I know, maybe dank memes will be in the future. I'm not holding my breath though.
I agree that dank memes in particular are not worth fighting for. However, I think the same policies and attitudes that get dank memes banned are also suppressing serious political speech. And the suppression of political speech on college campuses is an issue that a lot of reasonable adults take very seriously. See e.g. https://www.thefire.org/ and https://www.aclu.org/other/speech-campus
I'm not quite sure which position you're arguing for. Are you just arguing that Harvard should ban contentless offense such as dank memes, or do you also think Harvard should ban offensive political speech?
I'm arguing that Harvard should be able to use reasonable measures to affect campus discourse, up to and including an outright speech ban if that's necessary, given of course that it is appropriate with existing limitations on such speech bans. (time, place and manner restrictions)
You are asking about specific policy that I think Harvard should be able to or not be able to enact. The thing about policy is that it necessarily has a chilling effect. But symbolic actions like this one can send messages without making everyone feel like they're under the gun. Properly tailored, it scares the people that need to be scared and lets everyone else feel safe and protected.
I have no problems with the action that Harvard took. They did not rescind all of the invitations of those involved, and exercised good judgment. It was a nuanced and appropriate response to the situation.
If you remove the ability of school administrators to exercise judgment, then you're basically tying their hands together and things can rapidly devolve into a cesspool.
It's different because minorities can't choose to not be minorities any more. Racists can choose to not be racist--at least in public (or in 'private' chat groups which, let's face it, are leaky sieves).
Free speech has historically been considered an extremely important right as against the government. It's never been considered part of the accept all commers obligation of places of public accommodation.
It's a false analogy. A restaurant turning away a would be customer because he's black isn't the same thing as a restaurant turning someone away because he's wearing KKK regalia.
The words 'free speech' aren't a magical talisman. You have to explain how they actually apply, and in this case they don't.
If I understand correctly, you're pointing out that Harvard has a legal right to suppress its students' freedom of speech. I agree; I'm not arguing that Harvard has broken the law. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize Harvard, or complain about the trend towards universities suppressing freedom of speech, or even advocate for making what Harvard did illegal [0]. So I agree that "free speech" doesn't apply in a legal sense, but I don't think that's relevant to the discussion.
I'm saying that "suppressing its students' freedom of speech" is a category error in the first place. There's never been in the United States or elsewhere a widespread norm that offensive speech should not come with any consequences from fellow private citizens and from private organizations. When you said "Free speech has historically been considered an extremely important right" that's simply inaccurate with respect to the private context. It was never so considered. Certainly not as any sort of right, but not even as a general norm.
If you want to advocate for the desirability of adopting a new norm, from here forward -- fine go ahead and do it. But simply repeating the words "free speech" over and over again isn't convincing.
I disagree with your claim that there has never been a widespread norm. On university campuses in particular, there was a long-standing norm of tolerating radical and controversial opinions.
If a large group of private universities all retaliate against students for expressing certain opinions (which is what's happening) then that causes the same harm as if the government does it. As I've argued elsewhere in this thread, that's analogous to how discrimination is harmful even if it's by private institutions instead of by the government.
It's at least a little more defensible when you narrow it down to universities but even there it is a) not that old, emerging after the Vietnam protests and b) is more focused on free inquiry and the flow of ideas than free speech in the sense the government uses it.
You say "controversial ideas" but the memes are linked on this page. They aren't advancing ideas controversial or otherwise--they are simply offensive for the purpose of offending. That has little to do with free inquiry, no discussion is being advanced.
What harms specifically do you think are being caused here?
I agree that dank memes in particular aren't particularly important, but I'm worried that the same attitudes and policies that lead to dank memes being banned are also leading to serious political speech being banned. Do you agree that Harvard should not punish students for offensive political speech, if it's meant sincerely and advances an actual idea?
That's closer to the free inquiry norm, but better yet would be some connection to some intellectual pursuit.
"All Mexicans should be deported" expresses an idea -- it isn't offensive for the purpose of being offensive like the image macros, but it doesn't propose, advance, or engage with any kind of plausible research program or existing intellectual tradition. "Mexicans are genetically inferior to Americans" is more offensive, but at least it is the kind of statement that is plausibly connected to something that could be studied and dissected at a university.
That said, even for the first statement, were I leading Harvard I'd say it ought not garner any official response.
Honestly, I couldn't point to many people who were making good arguments during the election. Facts, reason, compromise, and logic are Trump's weaknesses, and those were jettisoned from the political process years ago.
I'd argue that Trump is what happens when the media and major parties stop making good arguments.
>> that no matter how good the argument is, it won't beat a bad one.
What kind of absurd, nihilist nonsense is this? Sounds like yet another example of Trump's opponents being unable to think critically and assuming their attempt at forcing terrible policy down the throats of common people is a "good argument" against the threat of facism.
Trump is winning precisely because there's no "good alternative", 99% of all "alternatives" are just less shitty, and even then only less shitty for certain segments of the population. People never resort to facism with good alternatives, yet strangely it's the default whenever they're stuck with a shit sandwich.
But I mean only all of history repeats this lesson, not like we'd expect anyone to understand that or anything.
Unfortunately, We don't live in an ideal world where everyone is rational and can't be easily manipulated.For example, in my country Myanmar,we just got free speech. But now we are dealing with hate speech which actually lead to hate crimes. The spread of religious hate speech causes one community of people to set fire/ kill another community of people. Hate speech and false facts travels fast and they come back again and again. Sometimes , well , most of the times, the only way you can win is to have zero tolerance for it.
I'm not entirely sure, but I don't think the situation is to be as censorious as possible. Such things tend to backfire (this is my favorite explanation for the rise of the alt-right), and there's a good chance that the humor was meant ironically (as is all dark humor), not sincerely. If we must punish hate speech, can we at least make sure it is actually, meaningfully hate speech?
Free Speech isn't "Consequence-Free Speech" and is a two way street. Sure, feel free to say/write the most despicable, racist thing imaginable. However, what is often forgotten is that there are consequences for everything that happens. As long as the government isn't restricting you from or putting you in jail or saying/writing it, the speech is free.
i watched 5 people fail to matriculate at my alma mater in 2002 for similarly adolescent idiocy. they happened to do it on campus during orientation, but little else seems different.
Harvard: We can revoke your admission if we see that you are an asshole.
Students: Let's be assholes over here in the corner, because stuff is totally private on Facebook.
Harvard: You're assholes, and also stupid.
One issue is the prevailing idea that all/most online interactions should be shared publicly. It would still have been ill-advised to make these jokes even in private, but I’d go so far as to say there’s a big concrete difference betweeen expressing yourself privately versus publicly. Your friends have a lot of context with which to judge you and your words, but the public doesn’t. You might say something sarcastically or in jest, but someone else might conclude that you believe it earnestly[1]. And if you ARE earnestly expressing yourself and feel like your ideas deserve public platform, then you need to have thought ahead about what kinds of responses you might get.
Yet another SJW propaganda war against free speech i can't even grasp. Please read abut socialist culture marxism by ex kgb agent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0
>Yet another SJW propaganda war against free speech i can't even
No one talking about this, freemarket i don't care, BUT we the people have to fight and post "hate speach" edege memes, about niggers, muh 6 millions, lolcaust, feminist totalitarian stte and other. We won't be silenced, by bunch of jews and SJW:
8ch.net/voat.co/tor proud user
i hate usernames, facebook, real name, i believe in merit not a reputation. If i you want to hate/like me based on posts thats ok, but not if you judge me on reputation/points.
Choosing anonymity means that "you" don't exist, only your posts. So we can't like or dislike you, only clean up after you. You're literally a seagull swooping in to shit on everything. Stand behind and take responsibility for your words or nobody is going to take you seriously.
Even pseudonymity is better than what you're doing.
369 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadIn this case I think it might very well be a case of "The Aristocrats" humor like they mentioned in the article (CAH). I disagree with withdrawing the invitation based upon private communication here, but if it was publically visible and said "hey we're Harvard Students" I can understand Harvard's position and cautiously agree with them.
> The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group.
Not to mention bad taste, it seems.
Ideas like "let's get Donald Trump elected for the lulz" have real-world effects. "It was just for laughs, mate" isn't really a good excuse. At a certain point, it approaches "watching the world burn" territory.
Do you have statistics to back that claim?
My statement is that attempting to get someone elected president just because it would be "funny" to see that person as President has real-world consequences. At some point these things go beyond being "just a prank" regardless of how effective they are at actually accomplishing their goal. Were they to actually accomplish their goal, it would have real-world consequences beyond just providing more fuel for their image board meme battles.
Political correctness really has gotten out of hand, and the sooner people realize this, the sooner they'll begin to understand how we ended up with Trump as president.
The pendulum swings both ways. Be careful how hard you push it.
Don't be fooled into thinking Trump is not a politician.
Maybe "repeat it often enough and it will be true" applies to you, but you don't get to project your thought processes onto others.
But, that aside, your claim of "normalization" remains baseless.
Society is more open than it probably was ever before but at the same time, if close minded leaders of fascist political or religious color came into power they'd have their tools handed to them to create an oppressive apparatus never seen before.
I thought this was always the case.
You know, if that's your personality, I'm OK with you feeling ashamed enough that you feel the need to keep it private.
Maybe you spit out chewing gum somewhere one night and violated the rule of not spitting for one example.
I'm not saying that these students are good people or that I endorse anything they said. I'm defending the right of privacy and free speech for anyone at any time.
Almost like it isn't about "free speech" at all.
But that is their only defense.
What we are arguing is that the Harvard administration is full of terrible people who can go F themselves. Because they do not care about students and they do not care about freedom of thought.
Maybe they are just going to start expelling people because they publicly disagreed with them about tuition hikes or something else that is arbitrary. Who knows!
That wouldn't be illegal either. Would you defend them for that?
I don't particularly care about, and it sure seems like Harvard doesn't either, students who, after being found out and asked to explain their super gross actions, didn't. Didn't present what they'd done (as they'd been asked to), didn't explain, didn't apologize. This group had over a hundred members. About ten decided not to own up to what they'd done and were shown the door for it.
Trying to hang the consequences of racist behavior on the institution that refuses to put up with racist behavior is head-screwing. Maybe...don't be racist? Or at least not openly? And then you can go to Harvard like Mommy and Daddy wanted instead of having to explain why you're not. Harvard's in my own backyard; I'll applaud them doing what they can to keep my backyard free of racist propagandists where they can.
Likewise, privacy isn't really a concern here, since it isn't like the organization broke into their accounts to check up on their privately held conversations or beliefs. It was posted into a group with many other loosely associated members, and was brought to the organization's attention.
In your gum spitting example, it's like spitting out gum in your back yard behind a privacy fence versus spitting out gum in your employer's parking lot and having your boss step in it moments later. It's not private, and it may have consequences.
If you don't like that, then you have options. One, don't be cretinous. Two, hide it better. Three, accept that being cretinous will cost you opportunities and own it.
Actions have consequences. You don't get to hide behind "my free speech". Own what you do.
* What these students did or didn't do does not matter in this case.
* Harvard can withdraw the acceptance for anyone at any time for any reason.
We don't need to argue about privacy or free speech here. All we can argue about as a first point is if Harvard should have the ability to withdraw their acceptance or not.
It is unfortunate that they chose to share those memes on a Facebook group chat though, I think the debate is about how not "private" a lot of our "private" chats have become and how sometimes people are just not thinking about where there communications are stored enough. If they had printed pamphlets with the material and shared them with classmates I think the same consequences would have happened, but they would have had more time to stop themselves and think about what could go wrong. Now sending offensive jokes is easy and "private" channels are deceptively public.
There you go-- freedom of speech.
FB issue aside, I think people should be allowed to joke about whatever they want in private. However some people bring jokes from 4chan and b/ into the workplace. High school and college students probably have a harder time drawing the line between facebook and the classroom.
They were allowed to post it, nothing stopped them. Its just that after they did Harvard made the (IMO reasonable) decision to revoke their acceptance.
Curiously their school paper (or w.e.) recently posted a treatise [1] on free speech, including this bit:
> We also believe that the essential definition of free speech has itself been twisted and clouded. Free speech only entails the right of every individual to “speak freely.” It does not give one the right to speak free of criticism or protest. It does not give one the right to say something which could reasonably be construed as inciting chaos or violence. It does not give one the right to any forum that one desires... Certain speakers do not deserve the platform Harvard University offers, especially when their rhetoric runs antithetical to the values we should all hold dear.
Also many news outlets have mentioned this bit from their admissions policy:
> the university reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission if the admitted student “engages or has engaged in behavior that brings into question their honesty, maturity or moral character,”
One might claim their "speech" displays a lack of maturity and moral character and avoid a paradox.
[1] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/25/commencement-201...
Putting hate speech in the internet doesn't make it magically more private.
Both the main and offshoot were technically private chats, but the people in the main chat didn't sign up for that kind of behavior.
It's the difference between playing Cards Against Humanity with a few people and walking around school telling other students your most obscene card combos as jokes.
I think that people are mistaken when they believe that they can have private electronic conversations. Even in-person conversations are mildly suspect. If you're a part of a social media group where you don't know every single person in the group, or you are not certain whether newly invited members of the group can see old messages, you should assume this content will get published by a news agency. "How would it look to my boss, my parents and all my friends and family if they were to read what I'm about to write?"
We can mull about technical solutions to this problem and social solutions too. But as frustrating as it is, I believe that this is a net benefit to society. We've rooted out a lot of corrupt individuals with this same sea of audio/video sensors. We must now adjust to the reality that our electronic conversations have a very high likelihood of being leaked.
> The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group.
This kind of filtering probably goes on all the time, but it's hard to connect the admission decision to particular conduct by the student. Here, it's not difficult, because Harvard isn't bound by the First Amendment like a state school.
ed: Here's a case that seems wrongly decided, but shows that the case is merely decent, not a slam dunk: How much free-speech protection does a college applicant have? This federal court says: Zero.[1]
[0](http://www.splc.org/blog/splc/2015/03/maryland-court-removes...)
There's just /b/ or whatever, there is no /Harvard/ board to insult the image of a multibillion dollar organization.
Regardless what the kids were posting, I'm not sure what they were thinking, using a name like that can't possibly end well.
On the one hand, yeah, that shit is offensive and I'm not too keen on elevating a person who makes jokes about sexual assault or violence against minorities.
On the other hand I'm terrified at the creeping surveillance society that has institutions examining all of our utterances for "wrong speech", which is much too close for comfort to "wrong think", which is much too close for comfort to "wrong person".
At the same time it's somewhat hypocritical of the school to do this as their attitude towards sexual assault on campus is pretty lenient.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/6/9/harvard-clery-sta...
Racist shit is "wrong speech". If I have friends who start uttering racist shit, and I can't talk them out of it, they are no longer my friends. (This has happened precisely once, no regrets. Thanks, Fox News, for poisoning an old man's mind.)
Posting racist memes is wrong, saying racist things is wrong, thinking racist thoughts is wrong. How did we get here, that racism falls under the scare-quotes version of "wrong speech" and not actually wrong speech??
This is no different than students posting offensive material on a physical message board on some main through fare on campus.
Edit: Actually, it's somewhat unclear to what degree and what material was required to be posted on the main chat, and what portion was in a separate private chat (still likely associated with Harvard in some way?). The article is unclear on these points. Harvard still has the right to gate admissions how they like (and they state that includes "moral character"), so if they are able to determine you are participating in actions they don't approve of, then they have grounds to reject you or revoke your prior acceptance. Just as if they Google'd you on your initial application and found verifiable and unsettling information.
Also, "Free speech" refers to the fact that the government cannot bust in to your house with a SWAT team and arrest you for speaking something that they don't like. Private companies can enforce whatever speech rules they like, and that doesn't interfere with the free speech of the individual. They can walk outside and state those things. There are already numerous hate speech laws covering the fact that the first amendment does not mean that you have a right to say whatever you want in a private space.
I don't disagree with Harvard's decision, or any decision made by a private institution or person.
I disagree with the notion that certain types of speech or thought are universally wrong. Personally - I believe racism is wrong - but I disagree with the notion that it's "wrong think". It's simply a different world view.
To re-iterate: I don't agree with what the students said or did. I agree with Harvard's decision. I don't agree that protecting someone's right to speak freely and openly supports their agenda.
One that states that people with more melatonin are fundamentally inferior and should be subservient to people with less melatonin. It is a point of view that is objectively and morally wrong.
I wonder whether you would support the right of people to state that PoC should be sterilized, or the rights of people to call people to attack PoCs. Because that is what more and more people have been calling for in America. That is what Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the alt-right, advocates.
The problem with these 'different world views' is that even without directly stating that people should attack minorities, these statements lead to people beating up black people on the streets. The more these ideas and 'world views' are accepted, the more acceptable it will become to think and state such things, leading to a resurgence of people who think that PoCs should be murdered. That will then directly impact the probability of someone acting upon those beliefs.
The reason why the rest of the world does have as bad a racism problem as America, is because they took steps to alienate people who had such views.
To answer you question - Yes, I would support the rights of people to state whatever they wish. I also support the rights of individuals such as you or myself to call those people morons, and to not associate with them.
Suppressing speech, and demonizing people for their views (no matter how "objectively wrong") does not solve any problem. It only breeds hate and contempt and radicalizes people more.
Of course there is. If I have the world-view that I am the most successful person in the world, yet 90% of people have not heard of me, then that world-view is false. If I have the world-view that climate change is just something made up the scientists to get more funding, then that world-view is false. If I have the world-view that some people are inferior because of their skin-colour, then that world view is scientifically false. As best as we can objectively measure, those world-views are false.
> Suppressing speech, and demonizing people for their views (no matter how "objectively wrong") does not solve any problem.
You are incorrect, and you mistake how facism works. Facism is not after the truth, facism is not after peace. The only peace that facism, and facists want, is peace through the absence of justice. The only goal of white supremacists, is to create a world in which PoC either no longer exist, or are subjugated. They will abuse any system and platform that you give them, to spread their philosophies and ensure more people join their cause. They continue to be a thriving community because the educated population have ignored them out of politeness. The sole goal of them is to further their philosophy. The only way we can stop that, is by depriving them of platforms from which to speak their hate.
Let us not forget the last time we tried to bargain with white supremacists. Several deals were forged, and as soon as the facists had got a firm position, they went back on the deals and moved into Poland, and meanwhile began exterminating parts of their populations that they deemed inferior. The only reason they were able to do that was because they were ignored and thus tolerated by the educated population.
If you think I am being paranoid, let us look at what the leader of the large political movement called the "alt-right" stated only a few years ago:
""""Instead of asking how we can make reparations for slavery, colonialism, and Apartheid or how we can equalize academic scores and incomes, we should instead be asking questions like, "Does human civilization actually need the Black race?" "Is Black genocide right?" and, if it is, "What would be the best and easiest way to dispose of them?" With starting points like this, wisdom is sure to flourish, enlightenment to dawn. """"[0].
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120216183528/http:/www.alterna...
Also worth pointing out that Harvard receives a lot of public dollars, so it's not the canonical private institution. Remember when everyone freaked out that the salvation army wouldn't employ openly gay preachers (but would employ homosexually in any other role) because though they were a private entity, they received NYC tax dollars, and then everyone freaked out when the SA announced that they would decline those tax dollars and reduce the scope of their work in the city accordingly?
So, yes, I'm quite comfortable with this hill. It has a nice shining city on it. Shame its originators abandoned it. (They never really liked it anyway.)
Do you have an actual argument, or are you just whatabouting?
Such as?
Everyone knows that. Nobody (except the most ill-informed) dispute it. But the First Amendment is not and was never intended to be the end-all and be-all of free speech. Freedom of speech is a value held by society. The First Amendment is a legal protection afforded that value in law.
When people and organizations start clamping down on speech, yes, that is a violation of the principle of freedom of speech, even if it has nothing to do with the First Amendment. Yes, there has to be a reasonable balance between your freedom to associate with people who say obnoxious things and their freedom to say obnoxious things. Nobody disputes that either.
But there's been an increasingly clear trend of people being banished from workplaces, universities, and other spaces because of their speech, people who would not have been so punished in the past. Part of it is the Internet puts our words in a public space, accessible to everyone. Part of it is the Internet foments mobs of offended people who come after you. Part of it is that people seem to be becoming more and more intolerant of dissenting views.
This is an extremely dangerous long-term trend. It points to a more factious, divided populace. It points to eventual government restrictions on speech. Authoritarian governments rarely start out by banning speech everyone supports. They start banning speech everyone finds dangerous and offensive. Having Brownshirts beating up Communists for their speech ends with Nazis rounding up Communists.
> There are already numerous hate speech laws covering the fact that the first amendment does not mean that you have a right to say whatever you want in a private space.
Care to point these laws out?
Relevant xkcd, as always!
https://xkcd.com/1357/
The government can't arrest you but people can shun you.
Or have absolute free speech. You can't be cherry picking stuffs.
There has never been, there never should be, and most likely there never will be (no matter how your crowd fights for it) such a thing as wrong speech. At least not outside of totalitarian states.
As long as anyone accepts the concept of wrong speech, anything can be labelled that, and wars can explode over the littlest thing.
Orwell is rollin' in his grave right now.
Revoking one's admission to Harvard is a really rough way to teach the lesson of what you're supposed to and not supposed to say. College is the time to not only learn new ideas, but also to un-learn things that you may have learned in a toxic environment. I can say that I certainly did, and it's only fair that we allow others to fail in a similar way.
I believe that actions like this only further foster the alt-right and do a great disservice to our current political atmosphere. These kids have no positive way to understand their punishment - they have been reprimanded by a power that controls their fate, without warning. The odds that they'll "learn" from their "mistake" is highly unlikely.
Comparing this to fascism is a little heavy, but not out of line.
At the same time, I have a bit of a personal story. When I was in 8th grade, I made a Facebook account, and uploaded a random picture with a random caption involving rape - at the time my friends and I used the word like when you beat someone at a video game... Yeah it was pretty bad. My mom found the picture and responded by screaming at me and basically taking my computer away for a while, and my Facebook deactivated for much longer. I didn't understand at the time why it was such a big deal (maybe more explaining could have happened) but that interaction both makes me cringe every time I think about it and might have been the best thing to happen to me. Maybe getting the acceptences revoked is just the kick in the ass that they need.
1) Get yelled at by an authority figure, or
2) Have your acceptance rescinded
I guarantee all of them will choose option 1. By the way, you're very lucky to have a parent who cares enough to teach you valuable lesson.
Universities used to use the term "in loco parentis": I can see a deferral of admission being a suitable equivalent of screaming and taking the computer away.
If we set out to send mixed signals about maturation to college students we couldn't have done a better job
You can't tell me this is at all equivalent to calling someone "gay"
> College is the time to not only learn new ideas, but also to un-learn things that you may have learned in a toxic environment.
Despite my counterpoint above, you are of course right. I knew of one very aggressive student at Harvard who went around putting posters up of dead fetuses to protest abortion and was against gay marriage - his family was extremely right wing, and that's what he was brought up to believe. Now he's out of the closet, living in SF, and is one of the most liberal people I know. That story may sound clichéd, but I promise you it's true.
But at the same time, there must be a line drawn somewhere, surely? If I write an extremely offensive admissions essay claiming immigrants are sub-human I shouldn't expect to be admitted.
But posting offensive memes on the internet isn't illegal. Saying racist/sexist things isn't illegal. It's certainly something to have a conversation about, but not to totally alter their future.
Absolutely! And if that is your submission to Harvard, that is entirely fair. I just don't think memes in a private Facebook group is something that you put up as your submission. Again, it's one thing if Harvard warned them, and they held their ground. It's another thing entirely to do it without warning, or a chance to explain themselves.You imply that media condoning racism, and sexual violence can be justified.
You imply that sharing memes in a private group is equivalent to a KKK meeting or actual sexual assault.
Bear in mind that this argument is not intended as an argument for "thoughtcrimes" to be made illegal, it is made as an argument for creating and encouraging strict rules against this behaviour in privately-owned spaces. Facebook is not a 'public space', they just choose to give you those rights.
No, it doesn't, and you literally have no ground to make this argument. You're welcome to try linking "research" that supposedly suggests "this something or other" and then I'll be happy to point out how they don't actually make your case, if you wish.
> The only way we are going to remove sexual assault and racism from the world is for every one to understand that these things are never acceptable in any context.
And yet none of these students committed a hate crime or assaulted anyone. It's almost as if thought policing were useless and someone who's evil will do horrible things because they want to and not because "something something bad environment", just like a good person (the overwhelming majority, thankfully) won't do them, no matter the context.
And, guess what, your country has come a long way from the segregation of the 60s without needing to ban jokes. And nothing says this trend won't continue. Of course, the regressive left and the reactionary right are trying their damnedest to put setbacks or even make you walk back, but let's hope they're just noise that will die out eventually.
> Thus, while not equivalent, allowing it to be condoned in private groups is directly contrary to our goals as a society.
No, it isn't. Happiness isn't and shouldn't be mandatory. You're free to call someone out or leave if someone makes a joke you don't like, you don't get to tell them to not make it.
> Bear in mind that this argument is not intended as an argument for "thoughtcrimes" to be made illegal
Yes it is, but your rationalization isn't the worst I've read. Still incorrect, obviously.
If you are a private company, such as an american university, or facebook, you absolutely do get to decide to tell people not to make jokes, and you absolutely do get to make hiring decisions based on bad jokes.
> It's almost as if thought policing were useless
This is not thought policing, this is looking at someone's jokes and attitudes towards People of Colour and women and deciding as a private company if you want a toxic person, someone who thinks that it's alright to joke about sexual harassment, in your private space.
> someone who's evil will do horrible things because they want to and not because "something something bad environment"
There are no evil people, there are only people who have been brought up in an environment where the actions they have taken are acceptable. What, you think people who do evil things are genetically predetermined to do them? It's rubbish. Hundreds of psychopaths have been born and never hurt a fly, it's about upbringing and social rules, rather than some "innate need to do 'bad'".
> And, guess what, your country has come a long way from the segregation of the 60s without needing to ban jokes.
Actually, the country I live in, like most European countries, has hate speech laws. We no longer have quite as bad a problem with racism as the US does.
> And nothing says this trend won't continue.
The 915 surviving and growing white supremacy hate groups, along with the 'alt-right' (The leader of the alt-right has openly written that he wants to exterminate black people), says otherwise. That young people feel that they can support such openly racist and anti-PoC movements, says a lot about the atmosphere today.
> but let's hope they're just noise that will die out eventually.
I'm pretty sure they said the same thing about the National Socialist Party...
> No, it isn't. Happiness isn't and shouldn't be mandatory.
We're not making happiness mandatory, we're making blatantly abusive speech against the law. I mean, it should be covered under the various "harassment" legislation, but shrug apparently not.
Funny, serial killers still exist and will continue existing, even though society has condemned that for a long, long time.
Yes, some people are born with their wires misshapen, just like there're people born deaf. What? Did you think that the brain was, somehow, our only organ that couldn't get messed up since birth?
> What, you think people who do evil things are genetically predetermined to do them? [...] Hundreds of psychopaths have been born
So, are they or are they not born? You're contradicting yourself.
> Actually, the country I live in, like most European countries, has hate speech laws. We no longer have quite as bad a problem with racism as the US does.
Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. A friend of mine (hailing from my latin american country) and the refugee crisis tell me otherwise. If so-called "hate speech" is banned openly, it just happens behind doors, using so-called "coded language".
> The 915 surviving and growing white supremacy hate groups, along with the 'alt-right'.
So do TERFs, the militant branch of BLM, AntiFa, etc. If we're going to judge by fringe groups, they just happen to be more visible every day on both sides. And they don't represent the majority, it's as if they were called "fringe" for a reason.
> I'm pretty sure they said the same thing about the National Socialist Party...
And it did die out. Some people might be itching to call anyone they disagree with "nazis", but they aren't.
> We're not making happiness mandatory, we're making blatantly abusive speech against the law
Funny how you earlier in this very same comment said that you weren't arguing for thought policing. Glad you decided to become honest at the end.
> I mean, it should be covered under the various "harassment" legislation, but shrug apparently not.
Harassment requires a victim. Yanow, someone being harassed.
---
Anyways, you contradicted yourself twice, and one of those times was the very same thing you pretended you weren't arguing for. That's just dishonest argumentation, meaning this discussion is pointless, so I won't engage you further.
Cheers.
Perhaps "redeem" is a better word choice there.
As a gay person who has suffered quite a bit of discrimination and bullying from other people and who hails from a different Latin American country I advise you to stop being offended on behalf of other people. Nobody needs this patronizing attitude. It literally helps nobody.
Learning that your actions have consequences and that no one is responsible for facing those consequences but you is more valuable than any other single lesson they'd have learned in college. And they didn't even have to pay tuition to find that one out.
> Comparing this to fascism is a little heavy, but not out of line.
Are these students already not submitting themselves to be judged by Harvard's exceptionally high standards? This isn't some good state school and these aren't students who have earned their place by paying taxes and getting good grades. If Harvard sees this kind of behavior, decides that they made a mistake when choosing these students (they want students who will represent them well for the rest of their life, and character is very much in play during college admissions)... I think it's more than fair to say that these students should lose their place to someone who hasn't so easily proven themselves as a risk to Harvard's brand.
There are some ignorant thoughts that have almost entirely fallen out of the collective consciousness (in terms of serious belief, not abstract discussion of the past). (As a random example, there are vanishingly few ignorant people left who genuinely believe that disease is a punishment of the wicked that should not be interfered with, "ostracize the lepers", etc.) There are many more that need to.
If you think that some people are inherently "lesser" than others and can be treated as such, that's wrong. If you think that it's OK to assault people, that's wrong. Whether that turns into violent action or not, it still pervades other actions and societal structure, and it's the source of more subtle discrimination; that it has gone as far as being written and conveyed in ways that influence others makes it more than just thoughts. It's a good thing to influence society in ways that make people who think and write and talk and influence others in that way less successful, favoring people who don't, and over time find that fewer people think that way.
Because the same power that makes it possible for institutions to do that also gives us a check on those institutions. It seems entirely fine for an institution to look at the kind of person they're accepting and be selective in this way. If we start seeing institutions be selective for things we don't want to see selection on, we can push back on those institutions. There's no slippery slope here.
We're not talking about violent suppression of free speech. We're talking about non-violent exercise of the right to free association, to shun racists and sexists.
In general, it's important to note that the separate between speech and action isn't as clear cut as you assert, especially speech made in a public forum. Speech affects others, and words can be used to cause others pain or discomfort. Speech has direct consequences on others just like any action, and this must be considered. Which isn't to say that speech doesn't deserve broad protections, of course.
That seems to me a reasonable middle ground between on the one hand doing nothing, which I agree would be a highly questionable decision even from the purely cynical perspective that anyone accepted to Harvard may reasonably be expected not to violate the eleventh commandment in such damnfool fashion and if they don't already know that then they better get on learning - and, on the other hand, rescinding these prospective students' acceptance, with the concomitant potentially very significant impairment of their lifelong prospects, on the basis of they posted some tasteless images to a private Facebook group.
I found your argument unconvincing and your conclusion not adequately supported. I have read history and I do not believe your interpretation is correct.
After decades of denazification and tabooisation of national socialism and anything related, we still have a shocking proportion of Nazis in Germany. Openly self-identified Nazis, only a fraction of a percent, but people who agree with statements like "A strong leader (Führer) would be better than democracy" or "Jews are foreign bodies in the German people" - 15-20% according to some studies. And it's not talked about much, but in my opinion we have a bigger problem with right wing terrorism than with islamic terrorism here.
In the US, it is similar. Decades after the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, rampant racism again, people flying the confederate flag, white people killing black people.
What do I want to say with that? People often wish back the past few decades, before social media, which seemed more "civilized". I honestly think now, no, people were not more civilized, we just kept a tighter lid on what people thought.
I don't want to hear the racists, bigots, sexists either... but just silencing them does not seem to actually change peoples minds.
And also (I say this as a left-wing/liberal), I myself want to have a space where I can just say what the fuck I want, without consequences. "It is not my revolution" if I can't say idiotic things in private.
(Edit: And of course, you are right, and I agree with your comment. Please don't view this as a refutation, but as a second-order correction :-))
This wasn't particularly private. There had to be some sort of invitation, but it wasn't like the participants all knew each other. The offline analogy isn't a few friends over your house for dinner, it's speaking at a birds of a feather session at a conference.
Do you think Harvard would have rescinded the acceptance of an admitted student, if one of his high school friends forwarded a one-to-one email the admitted student had sent him which contained one of these memes? I tend to think not.
Authorities, especially institutions of higher learning, shouldn't be in the business of policing their student's speech. That's not "culture." That's oppression. Using bad actions in the service of good is still a bad idea.
If you think that some people are inherently "lesser" than others and can be treated as such, that's wrong.
I sure think it's wrong. But policing that thought by policing speech that results from it is also wrong.
If you think that it's OK to assault people, that's wrong.
Is Harvard going after the "punch a Nazi" memers and advocates with as much vigor? As a liberal, I find that much more distrubing because in that case people are dressing up bad actions and teaching young people to think of them as somehow good and socially redeeming. Is that what we want? Jingoistic ideologues who can commit guiltless violence, supposedly in the name of your values and love? (Ironically, the most used word to describe an emotion at the Nuremberg rally filmed by Leni Reifensthal: Love.)
that it has gone as far as being written and conveyed in ways that influence others makes it more than just thoughts.
Yup. That's called speech. So what you want is authoritarian control of speech. In institutions of higher learning. Like Berkeley, maybe?
Nope. Say anything you like. Learn to live with the consequences, which can and should include rejection by widespread parts of civilized society, and bask in the solitude. The crickets will surely enjoy your free speech.
You shouldn't go to jail for it, but you can't demand that other people like it.
Those of us who have qualms around consequentialism find this efficacy not reason enough to regard such behavior as exemplary of virtue. Those who do not have such qualms might be well advised to consider, from a utilitarian perspective, the ultimate outcomes which recent history has shown profligate use of this tactic to produce. And those who try to disclaim the grasp their political and cultural tendency has on power would do well to remember that this is, always and only, a tactic of hegemony, without which it cannot work at all.
In any case, as I said before, I like the honesty.
Framing bigots as "political opponents" has some efficacy as a tactic too, given people's allergy to politics. It's sad that this has, especially recently, become equated to politics. "How should we organize government", or "are certain functions better handled by government" are reasonable questions of politics. "Should we treat some people as less than other people" is not a question of politics, it's a question of humanity, that should be orthogonal to politics. It's possible to be toxic anywhere on the political spectrum, and it's possible to be decent anywhere on the political spectrum.
How about framing political opponents as "bigots"?
If the article was "withdraws acceptances for people who advocated X political belief" (e.g. "less funding for universities", "less power to teachers' unions", "private healthcare", take your pick of things that the average university faculty is likely to disagree with), I'd be right there arguing against that; all of those are reasonably debatable topics in the right forums. Which is exactly why there's no slippery slope there: when it's something worth defending, there's no shortage of defenders. So why does there inevitably spring up an army of defenders to support bigots? There's no "first they came for" argument here; first they came for the bigots, and then they stopped and threw a party.
(On a technical forum, in particular, there ought to be an appreciation for historical pattern matching; today "bigotry against outgroups" looks a lot like yesterday's "bigotry against outgroups", and it really shouldn't be a battle that has to get re-fought for every outgroup. One of these days I have hope that people could simply complete the pattern and skip the next dozen instances of it. It's the same battle every time, all the arguments look the same, and the right and wrong answers are always the same.)
At this point, I don't feel like there are any new arguments to make here. I think both of us are well aware of the arguments, I don't think either of us is particularly inclined to change their stance, and I see little value in going through the motions. All the arguments either one of us might reasonably make are posted elsewhere. So, in the interests of the honesty you've expressed an appreciation for: let's stop wasting each others' time.
> today "bigotry against outgroups" looks a lot like yesterday's "bigotry against outgroups"
In every case, bigotry against an outgroup relies upon defining members of whatever outgroup is targeted by their membership in that outgroup, and nothing else. People being basically decent as we are, the only way to support the argument that X outgroup has got to go, is by first establishing in the mind of one's interlocutor the certainty that membership in X outgroup is so bad, so utterly and uniquely exclusive by nature of every possible countervailing virtue, that in this specific case it is reasonable - indeed, that it's righteous - to mete out to members of X outgroup treatment whose infliction upon anyone else would be iniquitous in the extreme.
Such a concept is not easy to establish, people being basically decent as we are. Recent history recommends one method as especially efficacious toward that end - that of inventing or selecting a name generally used in reference to a given outgroup, and then investing not the members of that outgroup directly, but rather that name in itself, with all the opprobrium that can be laden upon it. The nature of the name isn't so important; be it a demonym, an ethnonym, a name of choice, or a slur, what matters is that it be generally understood outside the targeted outgroup that the group is the object of the name. Then, by making people despise the name, you can make people despise the group, as well.
There is a subtlety here - it's very hard, people being basically decent as we are, to convince one human being to look upon another not as a fellow deserving of at least some basic modicum of decency, but rather as a disease upon the body politic, meriting excision therefrom by methods otherwise too brutal or mean to be seriously contemplated. But language is the tool we use to understand the world around us, and it should be hardly controversial in the modern age that, by modifying the way we understand language, one may modify the way we understand our world. By investing a name with contempt, therefore, we can heap contempt upon those whom that name describes, much more easily than we could achieve the same end without the same semiotic indirection.
Don't you think it's interesting that you've spent your entire participation in this thread inveighing against "racists" and "sexists" and "bigots", and making very clear that those whom you so describe, you have no problem seeing excluded from social and professional life by means which you'd consider totally unacceptable if applied to those whom you do not place in the categories those names describe? I think it's interesting.
But, as you've rightly pointed out, we are getting awfully abstract, and should bear in mind the situation we're actually talking about here. In that connection, I also think it's interesting how broadly you define these categories you're using. We are, after all, talking about some eighteen-year-old jackasses, which is to say some eighteen-year-old men, who have posted some deeply tasteless and shameful meme pictures on Facebook, mostly in a private group.
That such behavior should be firmly discouraged, we agree; I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread that I would regard disciplinary probation - that is, preemptive advancement to strike two of the notional three, with one more incident of misconduct resulting in summary expulsion - as a proportionate response. Where we part company is in that you find such a response arrantly insufficient. Nothing will do by you but that these young idi...
I have seen, first-hand, across multiple communities, the effects of attempting to include everyone, including those who hate others and make them feel unwelcome, versus the effects of creating a community that actually feels welcoming. See also the interminable arguments about codes of conduct. This isn't an abstract question for me.
I'm going to skip responding to the arguments that I consider entirely addressed by the above.
> I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread that I would regard disciplinary probation - that is, preemptive advancement to strike two of the notional three, with one more incident of misconduct resulting in summary expulsion - as a proportionate response.
If the argument in this particular thread was along those lines, a matter of degree rather than one of action versus inaction, then that would come across a lot more reasonably. A general reaction of "of course this behavior shouldn't be tolerated; what's the best way to address it and make it stop happening everywhere" would be entirely reasonable. (There are interesting questions there, such as the value of attempting to fix deep-seated problems in 10 people versus the value of demonstrating consequences to a larger set.) This branch of the thread, however, has not led in that direction. I had not thus far commented on whether another response might have been appropriate; as a matter of fact, I'd consider either response perfectly fine.
> You're talking about "racists" and "sexists" and "bigots" as though the subjects of the discussion were, not some young damn fools who, like most young men, enjoy shit-stirring and seeing what they can get away with before someone reins them in
> We are, after all, talking about some eighteen-year-old jackasses
...who were applying to Harvard. If we want to paint the full picture of context here, I think saying that Harvard has higher-than-average standards is perhaps an understatement.
The terms refer to entire classes of behavior, not only the most extreme examples of such. It includes people who commit the most horrific acts of violence, people who make communities unwelcoming to specific genders/races/etc, people who repost hateful images and jokes, and people who try to put on their best cherubic faces and defend them in the most flowery and elaborate language. There are most certainly matters of degree and nuance, and not binary; one can be "more sexist" or "less racist", unlike "more dead"; they're comparable adjectives. That doesn't make the labels inapplicable.
And I find that using those terms tends to get people who might otherwise dismiss labels like "offensive" as "political correctness" to actually think about what they're defending. (I also find it an interesting choice by the original article to use "offensive" in the title rather than a more specific term; I think that makes a noticeable difference in framing.) Using them does not imply a lack of nuance; if you consider the terms themselves entirely un-nuanced, perhaps you should consider whether and why you find it appropriate to attempt to minimize their actions by avoiding the labels.
I would also suggest that, while there are extreme members of such groups that might revel in such labels, there are many people who might take pride and glory in being called "offensive" yet flinch back from being called "sexist" or "racist". Using more precise terms like those gets more people to question their behavior.
> stcredzero ↗ I have seen, first-hand, across multiple communities, the effects of attempting to include everyone, including those who hate others and make them feel unwelcome, versus the effects of creating a community that actually feels welcoming. JoshTriplett ↗ > I'm all for that.
I'm all for that. But when people have gotten to the point of excluding those who are perfectly fine with "live and let live" and one starts harassing them, then things have gotten quite out of hand. Your desire to ostracize -- there is no hate here for you? Honestly? I don't expect an honest answer from you, but know in your heart, that if you have hate in it, then you should be included in those who hate others and make them feel unwelcome.
And I find that using those terms tends to get people who might otherwise dismiss labels like "offensive" as "political correctness" to actually think about what they're defending.
Look, just because I advocate for people being able to do what they want in their own bedrooms doesn't mean that I advocate [insert particular action here]. Defending speech doesn't automatically make you an advocate for what has been said. In fact, that very fallacy is used by authoritarian regimes to justify their censorship. For like the 6th time, get a clue. I'm not defending what you're reacting against. I'm saying that how you propose to react against it is a bad idea and if it spreads will itself foster more injustice.
The worst thing that could happen to this post is to have it be used as convenient feces to fling at the Blue Tribe whenever feces are necessary.
What is the Blue Tribe going to do to get the other parts of the Blue Tribe to stop being secretly hateful authoritarians?
I see no hypocrisy in treating groups whose actions hurt others
For one who decries both hypocrisy and false equivalence, this looks a lot like you're engaging in a bit of it yourself. Ostracizing people from organizations deemed important by society and important to people's lives and careers carries a lot more consequence than some college aged kid posting some memes. Is it because they're the children of privilege? Hereditary blame is one sure sign that your thinking has reached toxic levels of tribalism and othering.
Nice to find a point of common ground.
> But when people have gotten to the point of excluding those who are perfectly fine with "live and let live"
"those who are perfectly fine with 'live and let live'" is more or less the definition of the group that welcoming communities welcome. What exclusion are you referring to, here? Because it isn't what was discussed in the article, nor anything I've advocated, nor anything I've seen advocated elsewhere in the parts of this overall comment thread I've read.
> Your desire to ostracize -- there is no hate here for you?
I don't desire to ostracize; I desire an absence of hate. The ideal case would be that nobody has hate to spread; attempting to limit the damage done is a fallback position.
> I'm saying that how you propose to react against it is a bad idea and if it spreads will itself foster more injustice.
I'm not (here or anywhere) suggesting exclusion as a first and only resort. I'm suggesting that it's an entirely valid tactic for people unwilling to learn to "live and let live", to make things more pleasant and welcoming for those who do. To paraphrase the description of an anti-harassment team in one community I'm fond of, de-escalation is always the first resort.
> Ostracizing people from organizations deemed important by society and important to people's lives and careers carries a lot more consequence than some college aged kid posting some memes.
I don't have the impression that the entirety of the groups were excluded; it sounded, from the article, more like they were excluding ringleaders and people who specifically stirred things up. I might also hold a different opinion if there was some genuine sign of recognizing the screwup and attempting to improve that was being ignored in favor of putting on a show. But as long as we're talking about the consequences to people's lives and careers, also consider the other students they'll interact with over the coming years, not just those 10 students.
> Is it because they're the children of privilege?
Nope. And I'm not sure where in anything I posted you would have gotten that from.
Let's take this in another direction, please. You suggested elsewhere in this thread that you'd have been fine with some form of academic probation. That also suggests that you'd be fine with the consequences of such if the behavior continues. So if this is just a question of degree, then as far as I can tell we're on the same page and disagreeing about positions not actually held. As posted here and elsewhere, I'm similarly in favor of de-escalation and proportional responses. Bans and exclusions are near-last resorts, to use with 1) people who show no indication of recognizing and changing their behavior, or 2) people who would be put in a position where they could do a lot of damage. This isn't "screw up once and you're excluded for life", and if you thought that's what I was advocating, then let's just chalk it up to limitations of the medium and move on.
People can change, though it's not necessarily the job of everyone and every group in society to put up with them while they do.
does it really work? it seems to work in-so-far-as it purges specific communities of specific people. it doesn't remove those people from larger society and it most certainly doesn't change their mind. it makes them feel aggrieved to the point where they lash out with redoubled violence. it radicalizes people into extremists where before they may have merely been insensitive now they will be resentful and hateful.
backlash is a real thing and we ignore it at our own peril.
I'll take that; that's progress. If the only effect is to improve such communities, that's a good enough reason. And if we can get people to stop making "but free speech!" arguments against it, and start talking about free association, it'll have a much more widespread effect.
Here's what this kind of thinking has done in the US: The left has crammed themselves into cities, effectively reducing their voting power outside of those cities. This sort of thinking has been "effective" -- in that Donald Trump is now president.
And if we can get people to stop making "but free speech!" arguments against it, and start talking about free association, it'll have a much more widespread effect.
What you want, is for "your side" to infiltrate virtually all of the ruling boards of all non-governmental organizations in society and have them start enforcing your particular views, on pain of marginalization and expulsion. We in the US once had that widespread condition with the form of the belief system called "Christianity" and such tactics were often used to try to coerce so-called "proper" behavior from atheists, homosexuals, and polygamists. Would you justify having such widespread social coercion once again, because this time, supposedly the "correct" side would win?
Progress throughout history has been made through commerce and people coexisting and really talking to each other. One group enforcing its will over another has always resulted in overt injustice, or covert injustice -- even in the case of the Civil War. (The victims I have in mind in that last reference are all black people, despite the clear progress of abolition.)
I'm all for people talking about "free association." Infiltrating all of the ruling committees of otherwise politically neutral non-government organizations and issuing edicts for what you shall believe, on pain of expulsion, is not at all supporting of or supported by the notion of "free association" -- anymore than using one's status and authority to get someone else to say yes to sexual intercourse is truly consensual sex. True freedom is truly consensual choice, and it's not really consensual if the big motivator is fear.
But no, you have not described what "I want" at all. What I want is for people to stop hating each other and hurting each other. Failing that, I'd like people who hate others to do as little damage as possible, and I'd like as little interaction with them as possible, because quite frankly, life's too short.
In the long term, yes, someone needs to be doing the job of educating people, and instilling better values; it really shouldn't be hard to convey a simple value system that covers tolerating the next dozen groups and not just the last dozen groups, because the patterns are just not that hard to match. I certainly agree that fear is not the best motivation, nor is it ideal. But it is not the job of every last person in society to exercise the patience of a saint and try to fix such problems on an individual basis; it's hard enough to try to fix them at scale. Exclusion is not ideal, but as a near-last resort, it helps with damage control.
As an aside, I also find your use of the term "infiltrating" interesting; that has fascinating ingroup/outgroup connotations for who you consider infiltrators versus who belongs. That's not meant as an attack, nor am I suggesting you intended the choice of words as one, just an observation.
A government that is ruling through fear has lost its moral justification. That you'd just say it's not the best nor ideal -- I find this highly suspect. You'd really take a grudging, fake consensus, over just giving people the opportunity to talk as they will and live and let live? It really is analogous to taking fake consent for sex!
I'd like people who hate others to do as little damage as possible, and I'd like as little interaction with them as possible, because quite frankly, life's too short.
You don't have to look far to find the depredations of people in authority who secretly hate. I'd like hateful authority to do as little damage as possible, and I'd like as little interaction hateful authority as possible, because quite frankly, life's too short. (Not to say that all authority is hateful, of course.)
As an aside, I also find your use of the term "infiltrating" interesting; that has fascinating ingroup/outgroup connotations for who you consider infiltrators versus who belongs.
There is a pattern of "activists" and media critics doing this to various spheres of interest, and to specific organizations, as well as explicit talks in political groups about doing exactly this. I think "infiltration" is a very apt way of describing such insincere political-agenda driven behavior in a non-political group. As for who belongs: Those who are primarily and genuinely passionate about the area of interest.
The poor, the downtrodden, the beleaguered -- people like that have their passions, and they are often the most stalwart and pure in their interests. Very often, for these reasons, they produce the best art. It's no wonder then, that they react to "Carpetbaggers" with passion and vehemence. It's not so different when it comes to interest groups of the affluent. If you want society to make progress, then enable as much sincere, passionate interaction as possible. Balkanizing society into strict divisions based on political viewpoint is exactly the wrong thing to do. Fostering a society where people can interact with those of different viewpoints is the right thing, and this will require the ability to interact with those of highly differing viewpoint -- just so long as it's all live and let live. The version of "tolerance" where it's alright, just so long as everyone agrees with me -- this is just like the "multiculturalism" of many Muslim and Christian fundamentalists, who are all for tolerance, so long as everyone converts to their religion.
In other words: People you very strongly disagree with should find it impossible to maintain a social and professional life, until they stop disagreeing with you. For a society that values consensuality and freedom, this is shortsighted and naively self-centered thinking. Who in the world are you to judge? For much of the 20th century, the majority in supposedly "enlightened" societies prosecuted such a program against homosexuals. Many people doing this even thought to themselves that it was alright, because it was a choice -- just as I've read you advocate about other people's personal philosophy and political thought.
That's not a violent action, that's a highly effective non-violent action.
The human instinct around exclusion from a group is very strong. In prehistoric days, exclusion from the group was tantamount to a sentence of slow, lingering death. For this reason, when a group of people crosses the moral line of using such coercive tactics to enforce their will on another group, they are very close to the parallel moral line involving violence.
Freedom is consensuality. Consensuality can clearly be violated through power and social/emotional pressures that fall short of physical violence. A social/political movement that seeks to enforce its will against those it labels as "wrong thinkers" does not truly believe in consensuality.
Throughout history, such actions are only "highly effective" in contexts where there is effectively absolute political power, and even then, the authorities must escalate even beyond violence to assert their will. Short of that, we know from history that coercion always produces backlash. If you are truly on the side of justice, then you will eschew all forms of injustice, even when they are supposedly for the good. If you are truly for consensuality, then you should strive to convince your political opponents. It's not for me to know one way or another, but if you have devolved to the point where you have given up convincing, and only want to ostracize and shame them, then everything I know about human nature suggests to me that you are in danger of dehumanizing others in your heart and placing yourself above them. Historically, anyone who gets to that point has made the same mistake in their heart has become an opponent of social justice. It is exactly this mistake that was made against homosexuals, jewish people, and black people in the 20th century US. (Note the specificity of context/location when formulating your response.)
Those are certainly "other words", but ones that present an entirely incorrect picture of the post you're responding to.
In summary: it's not in any way hypocrisy to treat people and actions that harm others differently than people and actions that don't. And it's a really common derailing tactic to equate the two, and try to treat both as similarly "oppressed groups". (It's also a tactic that tends to produce arguments that sound quite appealing in the abstract, especially if you're of a mind to seek broader patterns and categories, which is not an uncommon trait here.)
I'll also note, in brief, that I'm not advocating a zero-nuance policy of immediate exclusion for the slightest offense. That's not a supportable position, and certainly not the one I hold. I do, however, consider exclusion a perfectly reasonable approach for maintaining more pleasant, welcoming communities. And it's not the job of every such community to put up with people who would make it worse, or to attempt to correct such people.
For one who decries false equivalence of equating some non-violent action to violence, I find your application of "harm" here a real stretch, and a bit hypocritical besides!
I'll also note, in brief, that I'm not advocating a zero-nuance policy of immediate exclusion for the slightest offense. That's not a supportable position, and certainly not the one I hold. I do, however, consider exclusion a perfectly reasonable approach for maintaining more pleasant, welcoming communities. And it's not the job of every such community to put up with people who would make it worse, or to attempt to correct such people.
I wonder if you're the sort of person who would advocate that a non-political group make a political statement, then make everyone sign or make some sort of pledge in support of it and throw out those who don't. Such behavior called a perfectly reasonable approach for maintaining more pleasant, welcoming communities is every bit as hypocritical as and toxic as 80's frat boys doing the enforced-fun aggression, questioning your sexuality, then gay bashing you if your answer doesn't satisfy them.
You talk elsewhere about being too abstract. The chief emotional dishonesty here in our blue tribe, is the degree to which hate and emotional aggression actually rule the tribal, othering behaviors. I've been racially harassed to the point where police had to get involved. The epiphany that I had sometime afterwards, was that there was a real joy, real glee to those "poor white trash" kids. In their minds, I'm quite sure, that they were making the world a better, more "real" and beautiful place, at least for the "real" people. Now I look over at others on the left, and I see essentially the same thing.
Have you dehumanized others in your mind, in your heart of hearts?
I don't think it's unreasonable to use the term to refer to non-physical harm. I'm certainly not equating it to violence.
> I wonder if you're the sort of person who would advocate that a non-political group make a political statement, then make everyone sign or make some sort of pledge in support of it and throw out those who don't.
If you mean a political statement like the support of a political candidate or party: no, absolutely not. (And that's an area where I've definitely seen the kind of tribal behavior you mentioned, and I'm not a fan of it.)
If you mean a statement like a code of conduct, attempting to create a welcoming community (which I don't consider political), then: still no, but I'd require people to abide by it whether they signed it or not. For the purposes of the community, I'd prefer that they're doing so because they believe in it, but I'd settle for them following it because they want to participate in the community more than they want to be hateful.
> The chief emotional dishonesty here in our blue tribe
"our" is broadly speaking incorrect here, though I certainly share its values with respect to tolerance.
> is the degree to which hate and emotional aggression actually rule the tribal, othering behaviors
I've certainly seen some of that. Not a fan. But given a limited amount of time and energy with which to change the world, I don't see that as very high on the list of priorities.
Are you claiming that fear of ostracizing isn't in the same general category as the without-violence-but-convincing threat of violence? I don't see how you can honestly say they aren't both in the category of severe. (I've personally dealt with both.) There doesn't have to be any equivalence for my objection to stand. The factual, even physiological truth, is that both of these are highly emotionally severe and stressful. Any activism that cares about its moral compass needs to be very wary if it finds it's only accomplishing a doppelganger of its goals through such emotionally severe and threatening means. Something is just if it appeals to people's inner sense of justice. Accepting a facsimile of that because you can make people fearful enough to play along -- something is very wrong here!
But given a limited amount of time and energy with which to change the world, I don't see that as very high on the list of priorities.
The real trick is to be able to really change the world, instead of having it change you into one of the villains. Civilization has started to figure out that violent coercion only leads to destructive cycles. Our culture now needs to also start making the same realization about short-of-violent coercion.
For that matter, exclusion is typically entirely reversible, given appropriate reasons to do so.
More importantly, however, you're focusing on the effect on the excluded, and ignoring their effect on others.
If you're asked to be quiet in a library, you're not being oppressed; even if you're talkative by nature, you can manage to shut up so others can ready and study. If you don't, you'll be asked to leave, or ultimately made to. But that doesn't mean people in the library go around with that fear and threat as the ultimate reason, any more than people go around with 'I might go to jail' as the only thing stopping them from injuring someone.
The same goes if you're participating in a community with a code of conduct that makes it welcoming and comfortable. Even if you're naturally toxic and obnoxious, hopefully you can manage to suppress that tendency in order to participate in the community. If not, you'll be asked to leave, or ultimately made to. But people participating in the community don't have that at the forefront of their minds all the time. That's largely the point.
Having found that much of the modern world has quite effective protections for free speech and free association, authoritarians have learned this "one weird trick" to hide their activities. Here's the dishonest trick: Just because it's not in the set of rules enforced by city, county, state, and federal officials, then it's not censorship. That's the same as saying that anything you do is OK, so long as it's not against the letter of the law somewhere.
The whole point of free speech is to prevent authority from chilling dissent and coercing fake-agreement through fear and power. How does it matter if that sort of thing is happening through non-government organizations? Our country and most of the western world has a long history of oppressing groups largely through such non-government oppression. The manner in which homosexuals were oppressed is almost the same manner in which you would like your political views enforced. Do you know what people used to say about this? "You shouldn't go to jail for it, but you can't demand that other people like it."
You shouldn't go to jail for it, but you can't demand that other people like it.
There were laws against homosexuality in the western world, but the societal enforcement mechanisms were operating with far more frequency in the 20th century. There were laws suppressing black people, but the instances of societal enforcement mechanisms were far more frequent than arrests. Far more people read the posted sign or subtly got the funny vibe than were arrested. In many places where there were no specific laws against being Jewish, there were many, many instances of people being excluded from the best connected clubs and social circles on this basis. What you want are these kinds of societal enforcements operating, but on the basis of your particular ideas of what's right and wrong. So long as no one is being injured or killed, and no state "monopolizers of violence" are at play, then it's okay.
It's not okay. If you are trying to force instead of convince then you are being a crappy, oppressive person. History is full of such people, most of whom thought they were doing right. In the same way, history is full of crappy violence, committed by people who thought they were fighting for justice. Thankfully, civilization has made progress, and we are now in the process of groups giving up violence as a means of enforcing their will. Similarly, we as a civilization are better understanding that groups of people using other forms of societal pressure to enforce their will short of violence are also oppressive. What you are advocating is that same kind of crappy non-consensual illusion of agreement, and justifying it because governments aren't doing it, and because in your mind, it's "might for right."
Convince, not force. Consensuality should be at the core of any 21st century intellectual's morality, and true consensuality is never begrudging.
> people read the posted sign or subtly got the funny vibe
Or the bigoted meme? It's a great argument; you might consider exactly which point it's a great argument in favor of.
I am amazingly uninterested in arguments for why it's important to support racism and sexism, or in attempts to paint racists and sexists as an oppressed group that needs protection, or in attempts to equate freedom of association as equivalent to violence, or in attempts to call it "your particular ideas of what's right and wrong". Enjoy beating up that strawman as long as you like, but it has little to do with any actual position I'm advocating.
I am amazingly uninterested in "aguments" where you put words in other people's mouths. Where do I support racism and sexism? Please provide a quote. (Big fail for you here!) As it so happens, I'm a liberal non-heterosexual brown person. Violence is wrong, no less so if it's done against vile, violent people. Coercion is wrong, even if it's done against people I dislike. The suppression of free speech is wrong, no matter who is talking.
in attempts to equate freedom of association as equivalent to violence
It's certainly not equivalent to violence. However, it's still fake and crappy if you're just interested in getting your way, and have reduced certain other human beings in your mind to some status where their consensuality doesn't matter. That's the whole reason why democracy is the best form of government we have so far: it respects consensuality the best out of every other system we've tried.
"your particular ideas of what's right and wrong". Enjoy beating up that strawman as long as you like, but it has little to do with any actual position I'm advocating.
So your ideas of "social justice" are better than everyone else's? You claim to have some sort of line to "the truth?" A close friend of mine received some sort of award and several hundred dollars for her work in social justice, and she agrees with much of what I have said.
You said yourself in this very discussion that you want "your side" to infiltrate all of the organizations and force the certain people you think are "bad" because they disagree with you. You want society to run in this way, and even if it just succeeds in creating pockets of people who think like you, that's great. Well, that's exactly what you said, and my position is precisely this: Thinking this way is crappy and it's emotionally dishonest. It creates an oppressive fake "consensus," and it convinces absolutely no one. The kind of society it would create would be just as truly about "justice" as the Christian religion dominated society of the 19th century was truly about "Christian values" -- only on the surface! This is my position, and exactly this. The only "straw-manning" that's been done has been yours. You are the one philosophically advocating coercion. Honestly, does the thought of coercing all of those horrible people to leave groups not strike you as righteous vengeance? Are you honestly free of hate of people in your heart?
I agree with many of your political aims, but be honest with yourself: Your position is weak someplace, and thus you have turned away from convincing and towards coercion.
Consider HN: we have down votes, comment flagging, and moderators. That is very much the policing of speech. Would you consider this oppression?
Absolutist argument? Where do you get that? Who's being absolutist? What evidence do you have that I don't have "a line?" Do you have any evidence that I support people yelling "fire" in a theater? Please provide your evidence, as I do take an absolute stand against people putting words and positions onto others on HN with no evidence.
It ignores any sort of context or nuance and generally shuts down discussion.
So are you basically saying it's okay to engage in partisan thought and speech policing of political viewpoints of graduating high school seniors by trolling through their social media?
Consider HN: we have down votes, comment flagging, and moderators. That is very much the policing of speech. Would you consider this oppression?
No. I don't get instantly excluded for voicing an opinion. Instead I get feedback. There's the difference. Is there a real flow of information? Is there a real marketplace of ideas? Or is it, "put up or shut up?" That's the difference.
I considered that to be an absolutist argument. I think there are contexts in which authorities (EDIT: non-governmental authorities) can police speech in a way that is not oppressive. And not just the usual "shouting fire in a crowded theater" sense. If you are using a public forum to be disruptive and is detrimental to the other students, it can be appropriate to levy some sort of disciplinary action. If you start shouting racial epithets in a crowded theater, for example, I think it is appropriate for you to be thrown out. So the line is not clear cut, there is a level of subjectivity at play.
> So are you basically saying it's okay to engage in partisan thought and speech policing of political viewpoints of graduating high school seniors by trolling through their social media?
In this case, the students posted the offensive material on a public forum moderated by Harvard staff. I wouldn't consider this "trawling through social media".
> I don't get instantly excluded for voicing an opinion. Instead I get feedback. There's the difference.
So if Harvard had put these students on academic probation or something instead, you wouldn't necessarily have a problem? That's something I can get behind. I thought you were opposed to any action being taken against these students of any kind.
I considered that to be an absolutist argument
That item just on happens to be on the other side of my "line." By your logic, anyone who has a position on the wrong side of your "line" is "absolutist." I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I think there are contexts in which authorities (EDIT: non-governmental authorities) can police speech in a way that is not oppressive.
Sure. There's definitely a line. The point at which authority, even non-violence based non-governmental authority, can be used to suppress dissent through societal and/or economic coercion, there is a moral line which has been crossed. It's even built into human psychology. The psychological threat of exclusion from a group is very strong, because in the prehistoric past, exclusion from the group was tantamount to a sentence of slow, lingering death. An organization using such a fear to enforce a political view is crossing a moral line parallel and nearby the moral line crossed by an organization (or an informal association of "activists") using the fear of violence to do the same.
So if Harvard had put these students on academic probation or something instead, you wouldn't necessarily have a problem? That's something I can get behind. I thought you were opposed to any action being taken against these students of any kind.
Sure. I wouldn't be "getting behind" that, but I wouldn't be "up in arms" against something like that, since it is temporary and non-exclusionary.
In the era where they saw disease as a divine punishment, most people no doubt held this belief as well.
In reality, moral standards will shift around as they always do, some parts will lose their luster and others will be strengthened. New standards will emerge and make our current progressive ideals seem distant and alien, the same way we look at medieval ostracism.
I didn't read past this. Were you under the impression that thought policing is only a matter of fiction? You don't read world news, do you? I wouldn't be surprised since only an echo chamber would spouse this kind of view but you should read a little more about places like North Korea.
Thought policing is not a good thing, it will never be a good thing.
In that light, why not consider the character of the people it decides to bring into its community? And once it has decided to consider character, what justification can their be for limiting themselves to only considering manicured (and sometimes manufactured) personal statements and letters of recommendation rather than available data that might have a chance of being actually revealing?
Would you object to the Catholic Church looking into the social media histories of candidates for the priesthood?
But that's a pretty huge penalty. High school kids do stupid shit. There are some people there who lost their admission who probably were very lucky to get into harvard, who don't have 10 other ivy league schools to go to.
And neither is schools denying access for those they deem undesirable. Fifty years ago, if information about a candidate participating in unsavory activities reached the admissions office in some manner and they were able to verify it (or not, it's really up to them whether the rumors themselves are bad enough), they could, and I'm sure did, use that to deny admission to candidates.
> But that's a pretty huge penalty.
That happens all the time. Life isn't fair, and Harvard admissions certainly aren't "fair", by whatever standard you can come up with. They specifically admit candidates on a very diverse set of criteria, which includes things such as the promotion of multiculturalism, because it's believed that exposure to different types of people provides an overall benefit to the student body. It should come as no surprise that if they are willing to admit otherwise lesser scholastically qualified candidates to promote this facet of the Harvard experience, they would be just as willing to reject people on the same grounds. Put simple, grades and SAT scores are not all that matters, and just as a college may reject you after admission has been granted if your last semester of High School has horrible grades, they may reject you if they discover evidence that they think you are not the type of student they want attending.
> There are some people there who lost their admission who probably were very lucky to get into Harvard, who don't have 10 other ivy league schools to go to.
Nobody has to go to an Ivy league school. In the same way you can screw up a big test and get a bad grade in High School, you can screw up your image and how you are perceived morally. They screwed up, and at least one avenue was closed to them. Their life may be different, but it's not like they are being jailed. They can go to some other school. I'm positive people have been rejected and even expelled for Harvard with less evidence. Their life will go on, and if they were able to get accepted to Harvard I'm sure they'll do okay going somewhere else, as long as they can curb whatever impulse caused this incident (whether it be ignorance of how it would be perceived, too much acceptance of peer pressure, or actual racism. I'm sure it was slightly different for each of them).
This is an aside, but I don't entirely agree. The tax exemption Harvard receives on its massive endowment is, per undergraduate, worth much more than the direct government subsidy public universities receive per student. UC Berkeley alone enrolls more low income students than the entire Ivy League combined (this is true of several UCs). Harvard also gets a monumental amount of funding directly from the federal government, and while much of this is in the form of research grants, it is allowed to redirect a substantial portion of this to operating costs.
Harvard gets this government favored status (in many ways, far more favored by the government than a "public" university, which has many more obligations) precisely because it is ostensibly acting in the public interest.
There are two ways to fix this problem--assuming one thinks it's a problem.
One would be to leverage the myriad benefits we provide to do more to ensure that these organizations are acting in the public interest. That's a pretty tall order though. We'd be looking at a ton of new laws/regulations/bureaucracies to make tens of thousands of determinations. In this particular case, it's not clear to me that Harvard isn't at least not acting against the public interest.
The other way would be to eliminate the tax advantages and let the chips fall where they may. Again, assuming one thinks there is a problem, that seems the preferable solution to me.
Some context for those interested: Berkeley enrolls approximately 30k undergraduates; the Ivy League combined enrolls approximately 60k. The most commonly cited cutoff for "low income students" is recipients of federal Pell grants, which are (roughly speaking) available to US citizen or permanent resident undergraduates with a family AGI of <$50k.
According to https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive... from US News, 34% of Berkeley undergraduates receive Pell Grants. (Berkeley's own website claims 32%.) This is the second-highest of the top 25 national universities, behind only UCLA at 38%. As a result, there are approximately 10k students receiving Pell grants at Berkeley.
According to the same source, the percent of recipients in the Ivy league ranges from 31% at Columbia to 13% at Yale. Overall across the eight schools, it appears to be approximately 18% and slightly shy of 11k students.
From a preliminary examination, it appears that the claim is indeed true for other UC campuses (of which only UCLA is a top 25 university) but not Berkeley as stated. The UC system makes the claim about five campuses other than Berkeley: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/half-new-uc-stud...
The claim may have been true five years ago, as reported here: http://news.berkeley.edu/2012/01/17/freshman-apps/
Not to mention that filth like this serves as a kind of canary in the coalmine - if one can make jokes about violence against minorities without fear of repercussions, then that bodes well for ideas actually intended to be taken seriously.
> "The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group."
They were being deliberate shit heads. This wasn't a private chat, this was intentionally sharing offensive content with the explicit purpose of ruffling feathers and pissing people off.
To call this a "private chat" is misleading - this was essentially a public forum for an incoming class to share content and these 10 students should have had zero expectation of privacy. If I were on the AdCom, I wouldn't have kicked them out for posting objectionable content, I would have kicked them out for being sheer, utter morons.
Probably depends how offensive you were. But yeah, sure you could. I am absolutely positive there are some prospective freshmen at Harvard who have had their admission rescinded based on their behavior during the pre-frosh weekend. Such incidents tend to be less publicized because they involve a single student, and there's normally an embarrassment factor involved.
Once you are on campus and admitted it would be more difficult...it would depend on the context. Certainly people have been kicked out (or rather, "asked to leave") based on sharing offensive material and memes, but in the cases I know of it was because that material was targeting specific individuals / people.
This was a university-moderated and maintained facebook group. There was absolutely no expectation on the part of the posters that Harvard could not read their words. You can get expelled for public speech on campus too.
> "The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group."
Again, Harvard did no "surveillance" here. They found these kids because they were posting garbage on Harvard's own forum.
That there is none?
As a private institution, Harvard can choose to deny acceptance to anyone for any reason. I don't agree with their reasoning, but I agree with their right to decide.
Next time don't use Facebook. This is what 4chan is for.
Facebook is a public forum that happens to be visible to harvard staff. Students should know this.
But the article says it was a private group chat, not public.
I mean, c'mon. Just because something says "private" doesn't mean it is.
only the part that is messed up with this is after you get enrolled you usually send out a letter to other colleges/university to decline their offers... in my past experience after a decline their isn't a second chance. this puts all of them on a 1 year stand by. Really this is fair? - and they still have another 4 years to grow up and grow before joining a professional 'salary' job 18-23 year old? generally they would be between 17-18 years old and for such an petty issue will now have a hell of a time rebounding.
And it's not a year, it's half a year; spring admissions are commonplace. That still super sucks for the people who got caught being racist turds; hopefully they learn from the seriousness of what they did (and they did it, and it was serious) and choose not to be racist turds going forward.
1. Were the students given a warning before having their admissions withdrawn?
2. I'm curious why Harvard chose the nuclear option, rather than to use this as an opportunity to teach why the memes were considered offensive, and more appropriate ways to express themselves.
Presumably they don't want nasty, highly offensive people in their institution. Which is perfectly reasonable. I wouldn't want anything to do with people like that either.
Long story short, these young people are getting their first dose of 'what happens in Vegas, is likely to cause long-term relationship issues'
The thing is, is that these memes are supposed to be self-aware of how offensive they are. That's the joke. They're meant to be so offensive and ridiculous that reactions can be drawn from outside spectators so they can get offended and you can laugh at them for being a "normie".
I have no issue with these jokes unless they've been made in a sincere attempt at racism or sexism, and knowing my experience with the internet, I don't believe this is the case.
I used to really like black humor. I frequently told dead baby jokes and similar stuff. Thank god that wasn't recorded.
I'm alarmed to see many of the comments here outraged over the stuff the students said. I guarantee most of them have probably told a similarly offensive joke at some point in time, or at the very least have friends who have. Especially when they were younger.
Except that the premise of Cards Against Humanity is that you are all opting in to the situation where you expect that, and usually an a somewhat private setting.
The equivalent to the CAH suggestion would be where some private group of people indicated that to become members, you had to go to a public cafe and play CAH loudly in public. Were that Cafe to get mad at you and ban you from their premises, getting upset at that outcome is rather silly. You either knew that was a possibly outcome, or you should have known. In any case, that Cafe is well within their rights to decide they want nothing to do with you anymore.
Some of the group’s members decided to form an offshoot group in which students could share obscene, “R-rated” memes, a student told the Crimson. The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group.
But from wording later, the examples given seem to be from the private group? I'm also unclear if the private group some some offshoot of the main group within Facebook (that is, whether it's some Facebook sub-group feature, obviously they are members of the main group).
In any case, Harvard says they reserve the right to reject admission based on "honesty, maturity, or moral character" so if this information is brought to their attention, then it falls under what they consider valid acceptance criteria. It's no different than if they Google searched the applicant initially and found verifiable information that put the student in the same light.
Personally, I couldn't care less what people believe, I care what people do. And in this case what they did was clearly racist.
Racism is defined as prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.
What these kids did was not racist.
Second, this was clearly antagonism directed against someone of a different race, and is therefore racist.
As for prison, I'm implying what consequences you would assume for individuals who would be so vocal about what you would call their racist acts.
So no, if you define a joke as 'black humor', the taboo IS the joke. If the intent of the joke is sincere racism, it's not black humor.
a satirist is emphatically NOT in concordance or agreement with that which they are satirizing. I find it unreasonable that you are arguing against this basic premise. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. I hope I am because If I am really understanding you correctly it seems to me like you are making something far worse than a fallacious argument, but really something that rises to the level of destructive of the meaning of words.
I, and I expect the person to whom you reply, don't adhere to that assumption. I think that "just a joke", in this context, is the exhibition of profound naivete. And even if the speaker realizes it's a joke--the listeners often don't. See the /pol/ commentary elsewhere in this thread; /pol/ was "just joking" until those jokes were taken as articles of faith and became the core of a literally fascist movement.
Maybe you could make a utilitarian argument against black humor. Maybe you could argue that such jokes encourage actual baby killers and the world would be better without them. I really doubt that's true, but even if it was, it's a very different argument. People want these kids expelled because they think they are actual monsters, which is probably false. Not because of theoretical arguments of the utility of banning black humor.
Pols transition to conservatism has nothing to do with black humor, but how it's set up. It's a site that not only doesn't censor, but strongly encourages discussions on taboo topics. Of course it will attract people that believe taboo ideologies and are banned or ostracized elsewhere.
/r/dankmemes has similar subject matter but it's clear that it's ironic and it's black humor.
They are two fundamentally different things. Nobody is being indoctrinated into being a fascist from the latter. The former is actively attempting indoctrination.
For one thing, cultures like this do provide safe havens to people who actually hold bigoted views 'sincerely'. I've been in IRL conversations that ran along these norms, and it was a really uncomfortable experience, especially as a member of a favorite 4Chan target group. It became fairly obvious over the course of the evening that one of the guys there really had drunk a fair bit of the 4Chan kool-aid, but how can you call him out when everyone is cracking the same jokes? Few things shut down open exchange of ideas faster than than the thought that the person you're talking to fundamentally doesn't respect you, because of who you are.
But that's not even the real problem I have with this kind of in-group offense culture - the real problem is that no one is ever as self-aware as they think they are. What you say shapes how you think, and then how you act, in ways we may never be consciously aware of. The students Harvard produces are going to end up in board rooms, courtrooms, and halls of power of all kinds all over the country; I expect them to be disciplined thinkers both academically and socially, who take these kinds of issues with the seriousness they deserve, not trollface memesters hiding their intellectual laziness behind image macros.
As to your second point, I don't know why you think people who enjoy memes are somehow intellectually lazy. I don't really see how your logic works here as memes are simply jokes transmitted via the internet. Are you implying that anyone who makes jokes or enjoys dark comedy has to be intellectually lazy?
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good meme as much as the next millenial. But there are memes and there are memes. You seem to be implying that "beep beep lettuce" and Pepe wearing a Nazi uniform are equivalent to one another. And yes, by the definition of "dark comedy" we're using here, it is lazy. Everyone knows where the boundaries of generally accepted good taste are. There's no skill or wit involved in breaching them. You mention Dave Chappelle elsewhere in this thread; if you look at him, or Mel Brooks, or other 'great' dark comedians, all of the shock there is in the service of making some larger point about society. And sure it doesn't always work, but by your own argument there's not even a semblance of that kind of intent in 'dark meme comedy'. If all a joke is trying to do is give its audience a fleeting thrill of transgression, that's a pretty low form of humor.
However, where we disagree is how to do it. I see the current climate of "preventing the spread of bigoted ideas" as creating what we know as the alt-right. If you check 4chan's /pol/, you will see an incredible amount of people admit to becoming alt-right because "so many snowflakes are always so offended and call me names". If, however, we as a society can more tolerate dark humor and bigoted comments, the bigots either stop talking or evolve to accept more tolerant views. This article as whole is perfect fuel for the alt-right to say "liberals are trying to control everything, even jokes".
To your second point: Pepe wearing a Nazi uniform is not dark comedy. It's racism. They're using memes to further their own ideology, as opposed to the Harvard students who were simply making fun of the offensive nature of the jokes.
Thirdly, I truly don't care for whether or not it's high or low humor. All I'm looking at is intent and whether or not an individual is actively desiring to inflict damage on another group of people. Alt-right memes do this, while the Harvard kids would be the first to admit they were simply making jokes who were not hurting anyone other than the people who decided to be offended by them.
No, the bigots then just push the line further, and further, and further, to normalize their bigotry because "yeah they're jokes but they make a good point, you know?"--and if you say "no, that's wrong," you get "it's just a joke, brah, why are you so offended?"
That's what /pol/ is. That's what it's been since its inception. It has been a bunch of useful idiots with a hard core of literal fascists being edged further and further right by pushing that line through rhetoric and through those "harmless" memes.
I used to be there. I spent a lot of time watching this. They turned people to actual hard-core bad shit through that "humor".
They're not "literal fascists". Literal fascists were in Italy overthrowing the government 70 years ago. All these people have is the ability to create chaos. When we give them coverage and attention, we feed them. What you're advocating for is what we're doing right now - trying to shut off these toxic wells. But what it's simply doing is adding fuel to the fire.
> “As a reminder, Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character,” the group description states.
Whether you think that this was ok for Harvard to do or not, doing this kind of stuff in the official Harvard student Facebook group (managed by Harvard employees) given that description is just downright stupid.
These people are insane and I can't believe they run the country.
If I held a party at my house and didn't want to invite you because you called my dog a 'mutt', you'd get laughed out of court if you tried to sue me over it.
People should be allowed to organize under whatever principles they want to organize under. Disallowing Harvard to use whatever criteria they want to use to admit students, unless of course they breach civil rights laws, is ultimately decreasing the amount of intellectual diversity in the world.
People that don't like Harvard can apply to any other college. There's no shortage of them to choose from. But if you tell Harvard what they can and can't do, you run the risk of destroying the individuality of Harvard.
Also, there's some mumbling about the fact that it was private speech that was supposedly surveilled on. Obviously it wasn't that private if school administrators caught wind of it. If you really want a private group, keep it truly private and don't tell anyone about it.
The lesson kids should be taking away from this is, don't let your friends drag you into dangerous situations. Harvard is a nationally recognized school, any screw-ups earn national attention. It's very much a "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" sort of situation.
While it may be something that many people make a lot of noise about 'respecting', freedom of speech, tolerance of discourse, and a willingness to listen to others are not deeply held social or cultural norms I have witnessed in the US.
Receiving government money doesn't transform an entity into a state actor for the purposes of the First Amendment.
If the government wants to run Harvard, then it can tell Harvard who it can and can't admit.
Doesn't it? "Who pays the piper..."
Ok, now I can see why we disagree.
Private/public is, to me, not binary. There are degrees. A homeowner, for instance, does get a favored tax status where it comes to income taxes (though the home owner also pays heavy property taxes that largely offset this). Yet we wouldn't regulate what people are allowed to talk about in their own home.
But on this continuum, Harvard is pretty far toward the "public" side of private. Massive amounts of government funding and tax exemptions.
And anyway, the government wouldn't need to get in the business of running Harvard, it could just say "here are the criteria for receiving federal grants and the tax exemptions". Harvard would be free to choose.
Yes, it does actually.
For example: http://www.bairdholm.com/publications-feed/entry/president-o...
If you want to change that, then you need to lead the charge. But it's a political question and not a constitutional one.
Now this is quite the 180° turn from how things really work. Setting in place "rules" because they might or might not "offend" someone isn't putting principles before reality how, exactly? It is, of course that's exactly what it is, but I'm curious to how you'd rationalize the opposite.
You use the term "hate speech" as if it is a definite thing, but the phrase is nebulous and can very easily be used to target expressions of an undesired ideology in the case that the authorities have an agenda to push (e.g. certain religious authorities may target another religion's evangelization efforts as hate speech; communists might target people trying to spread Western values of free enterprise; etc.).
Harvard is pretty far from a purely private organization. I understand we live in a complicated world, and almost nothing is "purely" private, but there are still degrees of public and private, it exists on a continuum. Harvard, as far as "private" institutions go, is heavily supported by government money and favored status. It's nothing close to your analogy of a privately owned house.
Yes, they get research grants. So do a lot of institutions. Who else is going to do research? Maybe Harvard gets more than most. So what?
The fact that you're saying "if someone found out about the private contents of the private group means it wasn't private enough" is kind of disturbing tbh.
The owners of the private group encouraged people to post offensive jokes to the main group to gain access to the private group.
> The founders of the messaging group demanded that students post provocative memes in the main group chat to gain admittance to the smaller group.
It's this that is, I think, the problem.
1) using the non-private group
2) Encouraging people to break the rules of the public group
3) Being so fucking easily led that you do so.
"People worried about reproductive rights should realize that Hobby Lobby is a private corporation."
"People worried about gay rights should realize that Chick-fil-A is a private corporation."
The choices of private organizations and individuals have huge effects, and it's reasonable to criticize them if we disagree with their actions. But on the other hand, I agree that it's important to give private organizations freedom. This is a difficult trade-off; we need to consider both sides of it, and whatever principle we decide on, we should apply consistently. So unless you'd also defend historical gender segregation at private universities, or defend Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, you should find a different defense of Harvard's actions.
Free speech has historically been considered an extremely important right. In fact, free speech is a civil right--one of the originals. Why shouldn't it be included under your civil rights exception?
What happens when you don't restrict along protected grounds is that entire industries collude to exclude those classes of people. Mass hatred drowns out the whole marketplace.
Everyone here is exercising their rights. The kids have a right to exercise their rights to free speech, and Harvard has a right to run a business the way they want to run it.
Harvard is not a public institution run by the state, so it is not obligated to respect rights that public schools have to. This creates more diversity in the marketplace rather than less.
Everybody can make the kinds of statements they want to make, and everybody can run the kinds of businesses they want to run, until those statements or businesses run afoul of laws. That's how America works.
You can tell Harvard that they should respect student's rights the way you want them to. They can in turn ignore you. You can in turn choose a different university.
The reason we have anti-discrimination laws is because without them, minorities would have no other options.
You seem to want blanket and blind enforcement of your idea of what rights are, without regard to the reasons why we have free speech and discrimination laws in the first place. It's for greater diversification and opportunities.
But those laws exist precisely because people fought to get them in place and be recognized as civil rights. How can you write several paragraphs that sound exactly like rationalizations used for segregation in the 50s [1] and then turn around and talk about anti-discrimination laws?
Well, just like anti-discrimination laws were set in place, so should laws that shouldn't allow businesses to discriminate based on someone exercising their free speech.
[1]: "They can in turn ignore you. You can in turn choose a different university." Seriously, stay classy.
I agree that under 2017 US law, Harvard has a legal right to kick out the students. Similarly, under 1930 US law, Harvard had a legal right to reject all female applicants.
I agree that those students can try to apply to a different university. Similarly, women rejected by Harvard in 1930 could apply to a different university.
I agree that this wasn't a good solution for the women rejected by Harvard in 1930, because most other universities would also reject them. I argue that it's also not a good solution for freedom of speech in 2017, because most US universities now suppress certain types of speech.
The reason we have anti-discrimination laws is because without them, minorities would have no other options. The reason we need free speech protections is because without them, people with the "wrong" opinions have no other options.
Well, if they want to change that state of affairs, they can go start a civil liberties movement to get "the right to post dank memes" enshrined as a legally-protected act.
Let me know so I can go sign their petition.
The point I'm trying to get across is that nothing about your argument that is compelling enough to convince a reasonable adult, much less a plurality of Americans to fight for it. Justice isn't free, just because you say things should be fair and the Constitution says it should be this way doesn't make your particular injustice worth fighting for. Civil rights for minorities was. What do I know, maybe dank memes will be in the future. I'm not holding my breath though.
I'm not quite sure which position you're arguing for. Are you just arguing that Harvard should ban contentless offense such as dank memes, or do you also think Harvard should ban offensive political speech?
You are asking about specific policy that I think Harvard should be able to or not be able to enact. The thing about policy is that it necessarily has a chilling effect. But symbolic actions like this one can send messages without making everyone feel like they're under the gun. Properly tailored, it scares the people that need to be scared and lets everyone else feel safe and protected.
I have no problems with the action that Harvard took. They did not rescind all of the invitations of those involved, and exercised good judgment. It was a nuanced and appropriate response to the situation.
If you remove the ability of school administrators to exercise judgment, then you're basically tying their hands together and things can rapidly devolve into a cesspool.
It's a false analogy. A restaurant turning away a would be customer because he's black isn't the same thing as a restaurant turning someone away because he's wearing KKK regalia.
The words 'free speech' aren't a magical talisman. You have to explain how they actually apply, and in this case they don't.
(Or did I misunderstand what you were saying?)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Law
If you want to advocate for the desirability of adopting a new norm, from here forward -- fine go ahead and do it. But simply repeating the words "free speech" over and over again isn't convincing.
If a large group of private universities all retaliate against students for expressing certain opinions (which is what's happening) then that causes the same harm as if the government does it. As I've argued elsewhere in this thread, that's analogous to how discrimination is harmful even if it's by private institutions instead of by the government.
You say "controversial ideas" but the memes are linked on this page. They aren't advancing ideas controversial or otherwise--they are simply offensive for the purpose of offending. That has little to do with free inquiry, no discussion is being advanced.
What harms specifically do you think are being caused here?
"All Mexicans should be deported" expresses an idea -- it isn't offensive for the purpose of being offensive like the image macros, but it doesn't propose, advance, or engage with any kind of plausible research program or existing intellectual tradition. "Mexicans are genetically inferior to Americans" is more offensive, but at least it is the kind of statement that is plausibly connected to something that could be studied and dissected at a university.
That said, even for the first statement, were I leading Harvard I'd say it ought not garner any official response.
Silencing those you disagree with will only enrage and mobilize those people, and those people vote. Hence, Trump.
I'd argue that Trump is what happens when the media and major parties stop making good arguments.
What kind of absurd, nihilist nonsense is this? Sounds like yet another example of Trump's opponents being unable to think critically and assuming their attempt at forcing terrible policy down the throats of common people is a "good argument" against the threat of facism.
Trump is winning precisely because there's no "good alternative", 99% of all "alternatives" are just less shitty, and even then only less shitty for certain segments of the population. People never resort to facism with good alternatives, yet strangely it's the default whenever they're stuck with a shit sandwich.
But I mean only all of history repeats this lesson, not like we'd expect anyone to understand that or anything.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
And the consequence for not supporting freedom of thought should be that the government takes away its billions of dollars from you.
[1] See also Poe’s Law.
Even pseudonymity is better than what you're doing.