Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. That's what snarky one-liners on inflammatory topics do, and we don't want that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We can keep the history. But to be clear, naming a building after someone is a form of endorsement and honor. That’s not the same as history.

It’s a bit like statues. A statue in a museum is history. A statue in the town square is an honor or endorsement. They’re different things.

This argument is as predictable as much as it is done in bad faith.

No one is calling for this person to be erased from history. They are asking that he no longer be honoured as a consequence of what he said.

Indeed, teaching people what he did and said will be the best way to prevent history from repeating.

shaggyfrog says >They are asking that he no longer be honoured as a consequence of what he said.<

But he said a lot! E.g., Millikan contributed greatly to science and had some views that are unacceptable today. So do we celebrate his useful contributions or do we punish him after death by un-naming buildings, etc.? Could we not possibly do both?

What if we found a letter written by Albert Einstein that derogatorialy used the N-word? Would we never again speak of Einstein, of his opposition to nuclear warfare, of his personal trials as a Jew, etc? Would every reference to Einstein initiate a conversation that ended with the mention of his (here hypothetical) N-word letter?

The end-game of this woke attitude is the death of history (since no history will be acceptable and all will be subject to revision downward at any time) and, in the long run, the end of social knowledge.

I go the other way on this. We used to erase Millian's awfulness and celebrate the rest. We now decline to do so.

We're embracing all of the history in full, considering it and treating it the way we feel is right. We may revisit decades hence and treat it differently again, who knows? I don't see history being "erased" here.

Stopping celebration of a thing is not the same thing as erasing it.

> Life will be so much better after we erase our history so we can repeat it.

So you're saying the way to prevent a repeat of the holocaust is to setup awards and honors in the name of Adolph Hitler?

There's already another holocaust ongoing (see what the CCP is doing to the Muslim Uighur population). No one seems to care. It's all about the money at the end, all the holocaust museums didn't seem to prevent a repeat.

I didn't know anything about WWII until I attended Adolf Hitler Art Academy. Thank goodness they weren't forced to change their name.

This is the perfect comment.

I disagree. There is no history being lost here. We aren't sending gag orders to Wikipedia, for example.

It's just a name on a building.