I think it's just that there's a lot of dramatic and hyperbolic words and phrases in there, here's a list from a quick pass:

> religion, anyone, conviction, enemy, must, silenced

> most, pitiful, cowardice, all, should, every last one of us, ever, surrendered, tyranny, fighting, capitulate, cower, fear

> my own country, America; disgusts, good men, put down their lives, secure, blessings, liberty, lack, confidence, courage, even, a word, defense

A few of these would be fine.

Oh. Reminds me of that one time, where some jerk went all wise on me, by picking individual words from my post then responding "strong words".

On the surface, I was the angry stampede, and he was the voice of reason. Except he didn't seem to notice that my "strong words" tended to cancel each other (some of the words he cited actually restricted the scope of the others).

It's like the tone is more important than the message. Can't people read, before they take offence to surface details? I hope this is a loud minority problem.

Lesson learned: thou shalt not use strong words, even to express a fair and balanced position. What a mess.

I dunno, someone was asking why the downvotes, that's all I could think of. I agree it's nasty to highlight the words like that.

Dramatic is the right tone here. We are seeing the collapse of intellectual freedom and openness in the places where it was supposed to be valued most. This does not bode well for our civilization. My generation, the millennials, holds free speech in much lower regard than previous generations. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millen... . Everyone who values freedom should be very alarmed.

Millenials didn't invent video game ratings, movie ratings, the seven 'dirty' words, the hays code, or blacklists.

If your generation targets something that's actually harmful, you're ahead of the game.

Consider a space that becasue all speech is allowed, is dominated by speech that marginalizes some subset of the population. Is that 'free'?

I think that if you want a place of intellectual exploration, excluding people is as dangerous as excluding certain ideas. And there seems to be a trade-off.

I very recently graduated from a college where these activists were very active. I can assure you, that there is not some epidemic of racism or any other kind of discrimination that this is a legitimate reaction to. It's nothing short of a political power-grab and an attempt to shut down any discussion by people that they don't agree with. They have successfully created a climate of fear. The reaction among all of the different institutions--different academic and administrative departments, student groups, greek organizations, alumni groups, etc.--is nothing short of race to capitulate the fastest.

Unfortunately I think this makes universities less hypocritical because it's more in line with the way academia works on the inside.

> why the downvotes? This sounds like reasonable comment

Happens all the time here, unfortunately, but questioning why is a waste of time. Half the posts in this thread - ironically about free speech - are grey. The surprising thing is that your post isn't, simply for mentioning the D-word.

That reminds me: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/

Maybe the majority of the readers are in a university.

I suspect the downvotes are happening for the same reason that so many potential voices on campuses are being rejected outright -- because they don't toe the line. ;-)