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Comment by lowiqengineer | Hacker News Reader

“Banning” ideas? The authoritarianism is getting less and less guarded.

It’s hardly authoritarian to disallow certain ideas being funded by the tax payer. We wouldn’t be upset if frenology wasn’t allowed in government agencies.

I think the idea behind the ban is that critical race theory delivers a certain leftist ideology veiled in an intent to address race or gender issues.

Agree with this or not, but this seems where to discussion should take place.

> I think the idea behind the ban is that critical race theory delivers a certain leftist ideology

You believe the ban is ideological, and... you aren't horrified? What happens when Harris bans discussion of libertarian ideas in the treasury department?

What do you mean by "discussion"? If "using taxpayer money to host mandatory courses", I think every ideology should be banned from this in government institutions.

However, to ban these in the private companies that want to do business with government agencies is of course too much in my opinion.

Federal employees in the treasury, while being paid, should discuss .. the treasury. Not libertarian ideas, not CRT, or any other controversial theories. They are free to do that on their own time however.

What do you imagine a treasury employee does all day, sits in a locked room and counts coins without any connection to the outside world? These are the people that are directing monetary policies that affect people's lives, well being and equity. Without an opinion on CRT itself, which I don't know much about, I think learning from any side about how those lives are affected, and the history of the country, is exactly what well informed government official should be doing.

It like telling a programmer they should only ever have a terminal and a code editor open, and ban using a browser during office hours.

She puts way too many people into the industrial prison complex to argue against libertarian ideas.

Libertarian ideas aren't racist. This is a false equivalence.

This goes much further than banning funding by the tax payer. It disallows companies that want government contracts from having internal training that goes against the ideology the government has dictated even when that training is entirely unrelated to the contracts the company is bidding for.

You just defined "funding by the taxpayer". Since money is fungible, any monies paid toward vendors teaching CRT is defacto taxpayer funding.

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