This site has such incredible ups, but the downs are equally staggering and disheartening.

I have experienced this first hand in New Jersey, Boston, and Colorado. It seems to me that the only people who don't see a pattern are the people creating the pattern.

Edit: Claiming that you are right and someone else is wrong because they don't have evidence is posturing.

Where did I claim to be right, rather than ask for evidence to support someone else's claim? You seem confused.

There is a pattern because individuals across the country are seeing these things happen first hand. The people in this thread are evidence. Asking for links for every claim is the exact thing the GP was talking about.

> You can't reason with postmodernists since they eschew science and evidence-based reason as tools of oppression.

You are evidence that this is happening.

Even a cursory glance at my posting history would make a mockery of that claim. Drop the empty rhetoric, bring in the evidence.

Hah! Just looking at your posting history _in this thread_ would lay waste to your statement. You said that people had to prove to you widely known facts. Fine. When people gave you evidence in terms of links, you dismissed the links and said in a huge educational system, how is this a pattern?

That's a neat rhetorical trick by the way. If the evidence is too specific and easily substantiated, it doesn't indicate a pattern. A broadly based claim is dismissed as rumors and anecdote, and obviously not specific enough to be evidence. Head you win, tails I lose. Nice.

I'm looking forward to seeing you respond to the other specifics that we brought up. Probably not evidence of a pattern eh?

> This site has such incredible ups, but the downs are equally staggering and disheartening.

You do know your comment is funny, and even funnier because you have no idea that we're all laughing at you?

Regardless of how wrongheaded you feel another commenter may be, it's never okay to treat someone uncivilly like this. If you don't think they're worth conversing with, that's fine. In that case, just refrain from commenting. It does no one any good to lower the level of discourse.

I hate moral panics too, but in my opinion the stories of people such Allison Stranger, Laura Kipnis, Nicholas and Erika Christakis, etc., are decent evidence of a dangerous trend.

I find it very hard to believe that suddenly this particular group of people need The concept of burden of proof and evidence explained to them.

For me it's a pattern of repeated behavior.

Don't even know why we're debating facts here, nobody disputes that when Milo attempted to speak at Berkeley, bloody riots ensued. They burned out a lot of telegraph. Also, when Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter attempted to speak, the Berkeley PD stopped them for speaking. [0][1]

The first few dozen results on Rochelle Gutierrez were that she claimed that math was racist. An article from the Washington Times, which is not exactly a right wing rag. [2][3]

To bring up mentions from long ago, here's a wikipedia link to the Sokal Hoax. Alan Sokal, a physics professor, thought that a paper that was shot through with nonsense as long as it hewed to the left's ideological views, would get published by a scholarly journal. And so it did. [4]

Also, University of Wisconsin's speech code in 1999. All the left leaning humanities professors wanted star chambers where they could try and punish people who didn't agree with them. [5]

I don't even know why I'm bothering to respond, as you're going to brush all these facts off as not representative of a pattern of the left trying to crush all dissenting a speech, and then bemoan all the members of hacker news who disagree with you as "downs" as "deflections"

It's always fun to watch ideologues squirm.

[0] http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/... [1] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/thanks-to-blocked-lecture-... [2] [https://www.google.com/search?q=rochelle+gutierrez&source=ln... [3]http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/its-not-just-a-joke-anymor... [4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [5]https://www.google.com/search?q=university+of+wisconsin+spee...