Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

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Why are you assuming they are foreigners? Why do you assume these were not natives in their own country who held these feelings anyway? Do you observe and respect any festivities in the calendar at all? Christmas? Thanksgiving? Easter? Passover? Diwali? Why are these not "dumb superstitions", but other people's are?

You don't get to decide how somebody else is going to react to something, you only get to decide if you care.

You don't get to tell them to stop believing in Islam because they're in a country where that is a minority belief, you only get to decide if you care about offending them.

In this specific case, the lecturer clearly did care - she warned before the course and shortly before the lecture moved to showing that image. That's the issue here, not whether displaying the image was contentious or not: she showed due diligence and her faculty decided it was insufficient. So what would have been sufficient?

That we can have a debate about, but some BS about "western values" and a strawman argument about "submitting" to "superstitions" is not even worth me caring about, other than to call you out as making a statement completely typical of far right-wing xenophobes and racists. Please don't do that here.

Great response. I’m surprised to see xenophobia on HN.

This story is about overbearing administrators infringing on academic freedoms, not Islam vs Western Values. But a lot of people have the Islam v The West hammer, so they’re going to use it in this nail.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument

>... her faculty decided it was insufficient. So what would have been sufficient?

>That we can have a debate about, but some BS about "western values" and a strawman argument about "submitting" to "superstitions" is not even worth me caring about, ...

Difficult to have an argument about after the fact. "You are free to leave" seems to be the exact argument that was made, beyond that there is no argument that would have been sufficient. If that's not enough, it is because of superstition, for lack of a better word. And this caused a panic reaction. It would be superstition even if the sides were switched and Feedome of Speech were the deeply held, now insulted believe that would include for example showing religious imagery in class (often forbidden in school charters to create a neutral environment).

From what I read I guess that Freiheit der Lehre (freedom of lecturing) is fairly constrained and lecturers are generally treated not with the same respect as a professor for whom they work. So it is to some a degree a systematic, institutional proble about powerstructures. Not worth the risk can become either you are not worth it, subjectively, or you are btter than that, optimistically speaking. Now I don't have a cromulent quote handy on collectively held believes. Suppose there is no mainstream concensus on that.

While the OPs comment is needlessly coarse, a charitable reading still gets at something important, something you evade addressing by repeating what are effectively tired liberal relativist platitudes about neutrality.

What this firing, and events like it, demonstrate is that there is a zero sum game where foundational beliefs are concerned. Here, the game is between liberalism and (this form of) Islam. If the professor isn’t punished, liberalism wins. If the teacher is punished, this Islam wins. You can’t accommodate both. An Achilles’ heel of liberalism is the notion that it can accommodate everyone, that liberalism is some kind of neutral absence of beliefs that can somehow accommodate fundamental differences and become the basis of a universal society of Man rooted in nothing. Vulgar consumerism has tried to fill that void, but appetite is no basis for a society, to put it mildly.

I disagree that this has to be a zero sum game. There are many courses of action that could have been taken before, during and after the lecture by the lecturer, the students who felt affected by the lecture, and the faculty administration, none of which would have to involve punishing anybody and that would have led to a better outcome.

For example, somebody, somewhere, could have created a forum for a more socratic method to discuss these images and people's reactions to them to help improve understanding on all sides.

Saying "I'm going to do something offensive, and if you're offended that's your problem because I've told you, and I've told you I don't care about that offence", is about as constructive as a response of "I have been offended, and even though I was warned I was about to be offended and did not take the appropriate measures I was offered to protect myself from that offence, I will complain that I was offended".

Rhetoric (in the philosophical teaching sense), is a hell of a move to double down on when you're dealing with topics where the discussion itself can have real consequences.

It is not a "tired liberal relativist platitude" to suggest that a contributory cause of the issue here was all sides involved stopped caring about consequences to others, and instead all erred towards self preservation while maintaining an insistence that rhetoric will work and dialectism would fail.

Self-preservation might be rational as a mammalian instinct, but in a philosophical setting (and a lecture touching on images of theological subjects surely is such a context), it's that conservatism that is tired and relativist: true liberalism (not libertarianism), was the essential lightning rod that was missing from the conversation.

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