> or leading an effort to prevent an invited campus speaker from being heard, and the university didn't gently smack the basics into the student, I stopped donating.
The student was using his free speech and you was angry the university did not prevented him from using it by force. Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those.
> Even if a large slice of liberal/progressive hadn't gone rabid, maybe we still would've ended up in the horrifying situation of Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and the various actions following.
No, we got those because far right was consistently excused, because people like you always blame left for what right does. We got nazi salutes, because these people were deep in far right wing echo chamber, because media refused to admit it and those who said it were punished.
Maybe if these people were not consistently radicalizing, the left response to them would be milder. Left was responding to real thing that was happening and it was proven right.
It is funny - far right attacking others is their free speech, everyone else must prioritize far right. And whatever far right do is always fault of someone else.
This crosses into personal attack and you can't do that here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit out such swipes in the future, as the rules ask, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: this has unfortunately increasingly been a problem with your account lately:
You've made many fine contributions to HN in the past and I don't recall your account having been involved in so much ideological and political flamewar. Could you please fix this? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
IIRC, there was an invited talk at the unversity, and some student organized people to go in to the talk and disrupt it, such that the speaker literally couldn't be heard.
That's not the student exercising their free speech. It's the student denying the benefit of free speech to their fellow students and the rest of the university.
The university apparently hadn't yet educated the student on the basics of university, and there was not yet any sign that the university was going to. Reporting followed up with the student, when they promoted their personal brand, and solicited funding to continue their fight.
(You might be happy to know that, instead of my modest donation going to the university with the student who thought a first-rate university was the place to ignore the fundamentals they teach, and instead play self-promoting influencer... IIRC, that was the year the money went to a homeless trans person, who'd been through more hell than most people can imagine, and who needed a discreet laptop so that they could practice coding job skills, but without the laptop getting violently stolen from them in whatever shelter they could get into. I'm not making this up, and the contrast was striking.)
Regarding your other comments, much of the rabid left didn't seem to be acting as the savvy political operators you suggest: a whole lot of people were mindlessly flinging their poo, and playing right into the hands of some of the worst of their adversaries. Maybe it was partly a combination of crisis mode over the best of intentions (e.g., help those who need help), and anger and fatigue from same (which I certainly felt), but there also seemed to be a whole lot of not knowing any other mode of reasoning or acting. Maybe that's not their fault -- you might blame the deterioration of popular journalism, social media sites preying upon their users, and a dearth of visible role models demonstrating anything else -- but that seems to be where we are, for large slices of the vocal population. And there's been a lot of counterproductive.
I am not saying they are super savy. I am saying they were right about the right.
They were right, because they were not determined to excuse dveryone on the right up to absurdum and because they read what right actually said.
Moderate right and center consistently and always excused far right and refused to beloeve it exists even when it was completely apparent. And consistently deployed double standards where right was excused and left acts massively exaggerated.
> Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those.
Do you know OP personally? Do you really think it's reasonable to assume that everyone in the universe (except for you, perhaps) is a hypocrite like this?
There's plenty of people that feel the administrative force of the university shouldn't be used to suppress either side. Let the gun club invite Luigi. Let the trans club invite the Stonewall rioters.
You're welcome to say you dislike the speaker. You don't have to attend. But you shouldn't have the authority to stop other people from inviting them to speak, or to stop other people from listening.
I see it not as 'right is the way they are because' but 'this is what the right exploited, and I too allowed myself to go down a crappy path'. It's a pretty brave, honest, and self reflective post.
I think we got the far right reality of today by liberals completely ignoring working class pain and appearing to solely focus on a controversial minority. I say appearing because they didn’t seem to do anything else.
This allowed the current administration to step in by promising something different, with no intention of delivering anything but tax relief for the wealthy and unchaining corporations from those pesky regulations that prevent higher profits.
The student was using his free speech and you was angry the university did not prevented him from using it by force. Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those.
> Even if a large slice of liberal/progressive hadn't gone rabid, maybe we still would've ended up in the horrifying situation of Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and the various actions following.
No, we got those because far right was consistently excused, because people like you always blame left for what right does. We got nazi salutes, because these people were deep in far right wing echo chamber, because media refused to admit it and those who said it were punished.
Maybe if these people were not consistently radicalizing, the left response to them would be milder. Left was responding to real thing that was happening and it was proven right.
It is funny - far right attacking others is their free speech, everyone else must prioritize far right. And whatever far right do is always fault of someone else.