Comment by kweingar

  Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

  [..] The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time [..] was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened -- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

  [..] It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'

I am strongly reminded of my own governments (Sweden) attempts to introduce diversity programs into the school system, only to have each attempt ending in the court system that then finds the programs as discriminatory. In a few examples where they then went and tried to circumvent the anti-discriminatory laws, those attempts tend to favor the wrong demographic and get canceled shortly after. The very concept of favoring or hindering one demographic over an other in terms of grades or admissions are incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, which is the basis for those laws. It is somewhat understandable why politicians tries to work around laws that protect human rights, but the rulings of the courts are not surprising in the least. For now it seems that most those initiatives has died off with fewer attempts to challenge the courts on this issue.

Strong fundamental laws such as the European Convention on Human Rights exist for a good reason. It prevents political winds from undermining the very pillars that society is built on. It also forces those that want to create exceptions to design their ideas in general form, which has some nice side effects of illuminating contradictions and false premises. If political demonstration on university grounds are disrupting education, then it doesn't matter what political message they are shouting. Either you allow it all, or none of it. If you want to give women higher admission credits in programs where they are a minority, you got to give men higher admission credits in programs where they are a minority. If the consequences of such general rules are not fitting the political winds then the default is return back to the foundation that is human rights.

the main thing is that it's acceptable, meritorious even, to resent the privileged white male. But a jewish white male, that's racist. Also most white males in the ivies are jewish - the so-called privileged (non-jewish) white male is in fact underrepresented now vs. the general population.

Consistency is undesirable, because if everyone is breaking a law, you apply the hammer of justice only if they aren't a friend.

It's one of the best ways to look good to certain people as well,because you can claim to be just following the law.

The normative government continues to shrink while the prerogative government grows.

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The goal is power. Suppressing DEI, etc is just a simple way to find a group of people that have different values and eliminate them from the power structure.

When these people use "freedom of speech" all they mean is they want to say their vile Nazi stuff without people complaining.

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"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

Any organization is probably in violation of any number of rules and regulations due to the sheer number of them.

Just wait till the sniffling Marc Andreessen shows up to explain why this will save his small town brethren.

Like the whole initial excuse for the tariffs on imports from Canada "because of fentanyl" despite <1% of fentanyl coming into the US arriving via the Canadian border https://www.npr.org/2025/02/02/nx-s1-5283957/fentanyl-trump-...

Hmmm, is this akin to what Russia means, when it says "we do not negotiate with terrorists"?

Typical mafia technique ensuring perpetual extorsion.

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I’d like to get out while I can, but to what country? Any suggestions?

By the way the answer to your question is simple: the American people are fascists, not just the president.

It could be a feature not a bug. Inventible violations can be used as leverage for future requests/mandates.

But also diversity is banned.

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Plenty of Democratic voters are on board with taxing the rich and flattening those economic hierarchies.

The problem has been that the Democratic party is the neoliberal wing of the establishment. Its purpose has been to create the illusion that economic progress is possible while working hard to maintain the economic status quo. Cultural diversity was the distraction and consolation prize.

Now the establishment wants full, unquestioned, totalitarian control now and no longer cares about maintaining the illusion of choice.

Ultimately it wants a country run on plantation lines with voting rights restricted to wealthy white male property owners, a "Christian" moral narrative (really just racism, greed, supremacism, and sexual opportunism dressed up in bible rags) and no independent sources of intellectual dissent.

Which means the bare minimum of public education, no science, no difficult or non-commercial art, no free thought in universities or academia, and as little free travel and contact with the outside world as possible.

The most comparable country is North Korea. So the likely end will be a heavily militarised and even more heavily propagandised country, run as a pampered inherited monarchy which tolerates a certain amount of education when it's useful, but is violently hostile to all dissent.

It's quite hard to get there from here. The shock-and-awe of the last few months were supposed to establish dominance, but it's not going to happen without resistance. Harvard is one example. There will be more.

Ultimately the military will be used to force compliance, and - absent a not entirely unexpected medical event - they'll decide which way this goes.

They're so "accepting of diverging viewpoints" they mandated Harvard to devote effort to monitoring the viewpoints of foreign students so they can be deported for wrongthink...

Weird how many people with "diverging viewpoints" are getting grabbed off the street by masked ICE agents then.

Have you no hesitation, even at this late juncture? Read everyone elses comment above, and try to stretch your critical thinking ability just a bit.

Trump is our Caesar, we have ceased to be a constitutional republic, and you defend this with blithely pretending that 2 months of pure power-madness have not been occurring in plain view of the entire world?

I suspect that such discourse as we have will not be "permitted" indefinitely.

So long as they're their viewpoints.

You don't see letters going out to conservative institutions demanding they hire gender ideology professors or communists.

> it's fairly clear they mean

"It's fairly clear that Herr Hitler only means to instill properly virtuous German educational values."

No, we've seen more than enough to know exactly what kind of administration this is, and how it lies.

FFS it's just 3 months in and already they're kidnapping people from America into concentration camps for the rest of their lives (however short that might be) with no trial nor even the pretense of charges.

Come to think of it, what's The Hacker News policy on storing user information? Is it time for people who aren't fans of the current administration to make new accounts?

I was brought up as an American to believe that most important American value inscribed in the constitution was that the government cannot control your speech. So regardless of what Harvard does or does not do that quote, coming from the government especially, is simply unAmerican on its face.

Whether or not they should is irrelevant. What is relevant is the government cannot infringe on Harvard’s speech.

Also this has nothing to do with immigration. It would be the same situation if everyone at Harvard were 10th generation Americans.

Harvard's admittance policy should not be up to the government outside of preventing discrimination along protected classes. If Harvard admits students that are bad consistently, and they turn out to be bad hires/professional connections, then Harvard the institution will lose its competitiveness with other schools for the best talent and previous alumni will pressure/complain that recent admittance policies are devaluing their degrees.

> Do you think Harvard should admit students that are, "hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence

I'm not sure you thought this through—if Harvard stopped accepting Republicans like you're suggesting, I'm not sure how many people would be left.

> Do you think Harvard should admit students that are, "hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence

Sure, why not? Everything should be open to criticism at our institutions of higher learning. If not there, where? That which is above criticism is dogma.

> including students supportive of terrorism and anti-Semitism

In Trump administration code, this means "has ever said anything positive about the Palestinian people." So yes, them too.

There are 2 issues here. The first is that it's not consistent with ending speech control policies.

The second is that hostility to American values is actually pretty subjective. For instance, the January 6 insurrectionists were very hostile to American values and used violent terroristic tactics to try to destroy the constitutionally mandated transfer of power. But Trump pardoned them all because it improves his ability to wield violence against America in the future.

It's impossible to take any of this document seriously in that light.

1. First off, yes they should.

2. We both know and understand that's not what's actually happening. When you have people peacefully protesting for the genocide in Palestine to end and they get disappeared by the state, then the situation is different. Please, at least try to be honest.

that's an odd take, given how the orangefuhrer treats the C constitution.

Conservatives should start their own universities, if they aren't happy with the existing ones. The federal government has no business enforcing conformity to certain ideological demands in private institutions. It's right there in the very first amendment.