Texas A&m Bans Part of Plato's Symposium
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The controversy surrounding Texas A&M's ban on part of Plato's Symposium has sparked a heated debate about freedom of speech and censorship on college campuses. Some commenters are scratching their heads, wondering how institutions that once championed free speech are now suppressing certain texts, with one remarking that "we were broadly against colleges and universities banning politically incorrect speech." As the discussion unfolds, a consensus emerges that the ban is a result of a backlash against progressive ideologies, with some attributing it to "bigots" seeking to "turn the tables" and others pointing out the hypocrisy and bad faith arguments that have fueled the debate. Amidst the finger-pointing, a practical suggestion surfaces: actually reading Plato's Symposium, a task that can be accomplished in just a couple of hours.
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And you don't seem to be making the argument that they did this without realizing the consequences, or anything of that nature. Perhaps you are confused, I see that alot from people who don't use punctuation.
Yet they did it.
>And you don't seem to be making the argument that they did this without realizing the consequences, or anything of that nature. Perhaps you are confused, I see that alot from people who don't use punctuation.
I'm not. I don't need to make any arguments. It is a fact that it was done and it is a fact who it was done by. There is no disputing that. You can guess whatever reasoning you want, I do not particularly care. It was done by the Texas Board of Regents, not liberal woke purple haired coast elites. Get a grip already.
> Perhaps you are confused, I see that alot from people who don't use punctuation.
Funny coming from the poster with a bunch of posts that are flagged. I didn't even flag them!
When they're out of power, they call for freedom of speech and local control. When they're in power, they call for censorship and ban locales from making their own rules.
There are no foundational principles involved.
Likewise uncountable is the number of times I've said normalizing free speech restrictions against the other side will come back to bite you once they're (inevitably, especially given these tactics) in power.
I can see how 'pro-speech' might have appeared to be a right-leaning position when violations were typically against right-leaning expression, but I never got the sense that either side really gave a damn.
Politicians complaining about free speech almost uniformly are referring to speech they don't like. Just like when they say they want to be "moral" its their morals, and when they say they want safety it's safety for a certain kind of person.
But the media (institutional AND social) ends to just accepting their stated motivations at face value. And at this point it's making us all look like idiots.
A thing you can right now do is read it (1-2 hours): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm#link2...
Or just the two sections in question:
Aristophanes’ myth of split humans (7 minutes): https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/eros/platos-other-half
Diotima’s ladder of love (20 minutes) https://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/103/jowett_symp_A.htm
cuz even alluding to it makes texans uncomfortable. doth protest too much i think
Recent events...
- Went to a concert, an underage kid with a fake ID couldn't get a beer, turned to me and goes "Isn't this guy a f----"
Uh... well, he may be making your night less enjoyable, but I don't see why gay people have to catch strays cause of it...
"I don't think I'd call anyone that" was my response, and "it's okay to be gay" was a follow up
- My boss said something was retarded. I'm a bit wishy washy on the r-word myself as, while I'm friends with people with Down Syndrome and other maladies, it never occurred to me to relate the word to them (especially since they're generally really very nice people)
It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association)
But now I've stopped using it entirely, although in this case I did not correct my boss (who I respect as a person and enjoy working for very much)
- One of my other friends called something "gay" recently
"Don't call things gay bro" was my response. As my mom explained to me in sixth grade "even though you don't really even have an idea what it means to be gay, when you say that negative things are gay, you're implying that being gay is negative, but gay people just are themselves and don't deserve that"
I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that and I'm damned proud of it
All these losers trying to turn back the times to put gay people back in the closet give me "peaked in middle school" vibes, and it's sad to see that it's also slowly becoming normalized with people who I don't even think have that inclination or care to say prejudiced shit again too
Usually cerebral palsy, I think, or (less commonly) epilepsy. I'm not sure it's still that common in the UK; I don't think I've heard it in the wild since the 80s [1], though some of that may just reflect the people I talk to as I get older.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Deacon#Blue_Peter_and_cul...
The only way for you to achieve the goal of making sure nobody’s feelings are hurt by words is to take away the power of the words. You only give the words MORE power by reacting to them.
Who said anything about scolding anyone lol. I responded very calmly.
I'm sorry, but you'll never win me over that the world be a better place if only we could bring back overtly prejudiced speech.
Actions have consequences. You can say whatever the hell you want, but doesn't mean you deserve respect, or not to be corrected, or not to face the consequences of saying overtly bigoted words.
The fact is... calling negative things gay implies being gay is bad, and therefore we should stop calling negative things gay if we want to support all the good people in the LGBTQ community.
>I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that
Making a point of trying to shame other people for using words you don’t like is a losing game in the long run.
The “actions have consequences” argument is what lead us to where we are now where you can see an obvious backlash.
Heck the papa John’s pizza guy got fired for using a magic word in an obviously non-derogatory way, and it was the same “actions have consequences” mentality even though basically nobody would be genuinely offended by his usage of it.
If you continue to make a big deal out of every usage of gay and retarded those words will only grow in power and popularity because you are showing someone that they have the power to get you to freak out if they use them.
You can see the opposite effect with traditional swear words, which are so used in popular media that they have lost almost all of their power.
In fact, the culture at the school changed, and people stopped saying gay so much. It was very cool.
You should try standing up for something you believe in sometime, maybe you'd like it.
“Queer” is another example. It used to be a slur, gay people decided collectively that they were going to take the word back, and it worked. Go ahead and call someone queer as a slur in San Francisco, it doesn’t really work the same as if you had called someone queer in the Midwest in 1990.
It’s not doublethink, it’s a provable phenomenon.
Sure, use whatever derogatory or offensive words you want, I don't really mind, but I am damn sure going to judge you based on it.
I don't tend to be the "don't use that word" type of person though. But I'm absolutely the "get the fuck out of this 'will make me dumber' conversation" type of person.
The genuine hateful usage is the actually bad thing that people want to stop, but many people mistakenly think they are actually fighting hatred by policing other people’s vocabulary.
The idea that gay people walk around and hear "Oh that's gay as hell!" whenever someone stubs their toe, or loses in a game or whatever and don't have that affect them is silly and it clearly progresses into a culture where people don't feel comfortable being themselves.
It's a good thing that since I've grown up we don't say "oh you're not acting black enough", or "oh that's so Jewish", or any other variation of things that may not seem harmful at the time but end up perpetuating a "right" and a "wrong" whether intentional or not.
All I'm saying is that making it your personal mission to make sure nobody uses the words in any context has lead us to where we are now, where we have a big backlash and young people are using gay and retarded more than they ever would have if we maybe just chilled out a little bit with the language policing.
We have taken this magic word mindset so far that we created a broad set of words that were so taboo you could get fired for using them in ANY context, even if you are talking about the word itself (like the case with the Papa Johns guy). And we had institutions like Stanford coming up with inane things like the "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" where they wanted to police words like "crazy" and "dumb".
I think about this quote from Ricky Gervais a lot. He's had more than a few controversies, which you may or may not agree with but I think his take here is apt.
"Please stop saying 'You can't joke about anything anymore'. You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system."
>I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that
Making a point of trying to control which words other kids are using counts as policing language in my opinion.
Is telling people that they can't tell other people which words they use a form of language policing?
(In a thread concerning Plato, I thought this question needed to be asked.)
And I don't think elections or "the culture" should have anything to do with it. If that's how we made every decision, life would only improve for whoever exists in the overall majority. What if we each chose to have some integrity and do the right thing, even when there's nothing measuring it? It wouldn't kill us, I don't think.
Trump's openly crude behavior is normalizing such behavior amongst the impressionable.
And society will be worse for it for a long time to come.
It is a shortening of spastic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(charity)
Universities that have accreditation (typically regional accreditation for nonprofit and private research universities) have to meet certain standards for certain curriculum design. Within those requirements there is wide latitude.
The issue is only when professor suspect of being liberal changes assigned reading in any way. That is the only possible big issue
/s
(oh, I see the problem now; they're supposed to be implied to be, by strategic omission, old independently wealthy slave-owning dudes who were into the flute girls?)
Similarly, I believe the Renaissance was not so much a "rebirth" of culture as it was italian port cities suddenly benefiting from a sudden influx of highly educated people bugging out from Constantinople; more a translation than a reappearance.
in particular the big trade cities like Venezia had been pulling out anything and everything as the ottomans closed in; had been going on for a while before Constantinople fell.
but broadly speaking, yeah the collapse of the Byzantines and their stores of classical history is what drove the rediscovery and later the Renaissance
It's almost like the bullying is trickling down, right?
I studied Attic, Koine, and Homeric, as well as a few other dialects for 10 years through college until I left my PhD program in Classics. Learning Greek was _very_ hard and even after that time I still had many gaps.
There's certainly a lot to be said about the manifold interpretations of Platonic Idealism; what I'm saying is that when we've historically introduced new philosophy students to things like Jowett's translations ("But tell me, Zeno, do you not further think that there is an idea of likeness in itself, and another idea of unlikeness, which is the opposite of likeness, and that in these two, you and I and all other things to which we apply the term many, participate-things which participate in likeness become in that degree and manner like; and so far as they participate in unlikeness become in that degree unlike, or both like and unlike in the degree in which they participate in both?"), there's also a grammatical issue. Yes, I can deconstruct that and reassemble it in more colloquial terms. The problem is that for a lot of students, they don't develop interest enough to engage in the deconstruction until after they've gone through the arduous process of reading that and thinking "WTF?!"
I’m not convinced that better translations are doing much to fix the deeper issue in most readers: the lack of broad exposure to the Western canon which seems to cultivate a real preference for rigor over comfort.
I want to go try some Plato in Greek. Do you have the reference for that passage? (Thankfully I got the unabridged Liddell and Scott lexicon which encompasses Attic not just New Testament words so I’ve been able to read Homer.)
They probably had this attitude, but I didn't find it objectionable at all, and I'm not a native English speaker. If a 19-year old engineering student can't read that, even in his own language, what's the point? The guy's a bore.
I think it's probably better to just read them having picked them off a bookshelf than in a class though.
Plato is not exactly burning up the airwaves right now. Most likely the only exposure most people will have to this work (or any of the libraries of work that's been banned in this manner) would be at college, assigned to them for a class.
Now, if they actually banned a book, like "you will go to jail for having this" I would be concerned.
I'm gradually tuning out Hacker News, because it persistently tries to ignore the politics that are destroying the United States and freedom of enquiry.
There is a dead comment below that tries to raise an argument but was killed instead. This is no longer a place to go to discuss ideas.
There are many places that focus on, allow, or encourage political content. Hackernews is not one of them, as by express design, it deems politics as off topic:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550912 - European Commission issues call for evidence on open source (356 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550777 - Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success (198 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46547303 - Iran Protest Map (170 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544625 - The Trump Administration Says It's Illegal to Record Videos of ICE (65 points)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46546188 - Texas first state to end American bar association oversight of law school (63 points)
There is a difference between discussing politics and political discussions. Things done by political bodies that have impact can be reasonably discussed.
Well, even Republicans accepted that an insurrection was a bad thing:
> There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill. This is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.
* https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1346909901478522880
* https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/marco-rubio-2021-tweets-...
Are insurrections, now five years later, a good thing?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
Just not THIS insurrection?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/j6/
You cannot isolate technology from forces that shape and harness it. It is fine to restrict political discussion lest it overwhelm other more fruitful discussions, however burying one's head in sand while the society is being "engineered" is not the mark of a curious person.
We have always discussed politics here. I agree with your point that HN shouldn't just be a forum for political content, I regularly flag posts about 'President posts insane thing on Truth Social' or 'Congressperson votes in ways people don't like,' but the intersection of economic, technological, intellectual, and political power is always going to throw up challenging ethical issues.
That's all very fine and well in theory, but it's like saying the topic of the ship taking on water is not allowed to be discussed when you're on a Star Trek cruise:
* https://startrekthecruise.com
Sure: a gash in the haul doesn't cover things like Kirk, Picard, Sisko, or Janeway, but it's kind of a prerequisite that nothing is happening to hull integrity before the others topics can be entertained.
For me, at least, this is one of his most important essays and worth re-visiting from time to time - https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
"I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan."
I read Graham’s point as narrower than “there’s nothing to learn.” He explicitly says: “There are certainly some political questions that have definite answers.”
The warning label is about identity capture. Once a view becomes part of who you are, the odds of real updating drop: “people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity.” Or, put positively: “you can have a fruitful discussion … so long as you exclude people who respond from identity.”
So the issue isn’t the topic. It’s what happens when belief turns into a kind of badge.
Ellison basically said, repeatedly, that we need AI to keep the poors in line and prevent "bad behavior"
Project 2025 never says it loudly but its unambiguous in those aims
Professors should be free to teach whatever they want that's relevant to their courses. Students are adults and can make up their own minds.
No longer? Flagging comments isnt a new feature, and if anything, the site has been getting more political as time goes on, not less.
One prominent example was formal logic, which was significantly developed in the middle ages, but received scant attention in the Renaissance.
Speaking of reconciliation, might I interest you in a reconciliation of Aquinas and Spinoza, by way of Galois Theory?
This is kind of bad faith.
> They developed a great deal of formal logic... it seems more like they were mostly slathering on the tech debt. How am I mistaken?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/
> Abelard was the greatest logician since Antiquity: he devised a purely truth-functional propositional logic, recognizing the distinction between force and content we associate with Frege, and worked out a complete theory of entailment as it functions in argument (which we now take as the theory of logical consequence). His logical system is flawed in its handling of topical inference, but that should not prevent our recognition of Abelard’s achievements.
and you might be more familiar with Ockham's Razor. There are others, but you can do your own research if you're interested. There was a lot of work that needed to be done in between Aristotle's incomplete Syllogisms and the incomplete understanding of propositional logic that Sophists used, that helped birth Frege's Begriffsschrift.
I haven't quite figured out how Alberic's argument goes through in Abelard's logic. but can clearly see that as the latter denies ex impossibili quodlibet something has to break. (for eiq merely observes that if False is True, then everything at least as true as False —ie everything— is True. In other words you have a degenerate situation, in which False == True)
Have I understood his logic so far?
How so? I'm dead serious; Algolia will confirm — and you sound like part of the small audience that would actually know what the differences to be reconciled are.
Be back after (making a few other replies and) reading up on Abelard. Is this the same Abelard as Sic et Non?
Thanks for the substantial reply!
Example: starting from Frege, we can get from:
https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=46166
to
https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=125658
and then
https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=131444
I would encourage fellow like-minded Aggies to do the same.
Drs Austin and McDermott are surely spinning in their graves right now.
It's always been possible for any of them to decline into lesser institutions of not-as-much-higher-learning as they started out with.
Wouldn't leadership integrity and actual scholarship make the big difference between those that are able to strive higher each generation compared to those who strive lower?
Who is it that wants to aggressively devalue Aggie degrees that have already been earned, especially in the eyes of the world, along with any to be granted in the future anyway?
It's not only "The Eyes of Texas" that are upon this.
Referencing the University of Texas (Austin) school song in a reply to an Aggie, them fightin' words
More related, with A&M generally being traditionally conservative* and also being a research university that values higher learning -- yet still a public school -- they are going run up on these issues given the current state of "conservative" (maga) politics. UT is getting the same pressure, but being a traditionally liberal leaning school with a rich history of protest leading to change, they are able to resist a bit more -- which I always respected (except for Thanksgiving rivalry games) -- but even they are slowly caving-in. Texas use to mind its own business, scoff at whatever ideology the federal government was pushing and, for the most part, let people and institutions be. How we became a maga lapdog is truly baffling.
*Has the George H.W. Bush library and a Corps of Cadets (student military organization) that deeply intergraded into school tradition, for starters. Also, oil money.
PS. Hook'em Horns :)
Biological sex has multiple dimensions, ascribed gender (which is social, and of which legal gender is one of many forms) has a number of dimensions per form that depends on the particular social milieu, gender identity (which is a mix of social and psychological) has multiple dimensions that vary, again, at least by social milieu, and many of the dimensions involved are not strict binaries. So both the base and exponent in your formula are unjustified.
So, no, doctor (of what?) or not, I don’t think you have a solid grasp of anything relating to gender.
You claim to be a doctor (again, of what?). Have you even heard the word intersex before?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
Anyone speaking about “plasmas” and “Bose-Eisenstein condensates” is just spewing woke horse shit they must have learned in a liberal indoctrination center(universities )
Sarcasm aside, a lot of people seem to act like no new information can be discovered by humanity beyond what was taught to them as a child in k-12
Intersex is a concept that bears looking into. We’re taught that it is as much as 0.4% of population, which is arrived at through removing context multiple times. Nowadays it is used to argue that there is a spectrum, not a sex binary, but this was not its meaning empirically. (Same thing with “sex assigned at birth”). You’re getting down to some very rare “differences of sexual development” (example: Y chromosome not getting expressed) whereas intersex individuals empirically belong to one or the other genotype. And the majority do not identify as “non binary” and don’t want to be used as examples.
I’m sure I’ll be debated, one comment can’t carry all the proof, but read some sports medicine papers on sex differences, that area has the facts.
Edit: weird. On the app I'm using ("Harmonic") it redirects to a syllabus PDF. But when I open in a browser it opens to an article.
Quite sad to see the school administration get compliance here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260107085450/https://dailynous...