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by natch
3333 days ago
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Pretty sure it was the university administration, not the student body, that said the Ann Coulter event wouldn't happen. And I believe this happened because at previous events clashes between protestors on both sides, right and left (or all sides if you prefer) had turned violent. And since then the university has changed its decision. Also I don't think we know that the protestors were students. Although it's reasonable to think that at least some of them might have been. To me it's far more interesting to look at the Chinese students associations as a phenomenon with a longer history, predating the recent free speech brouhahas. The groups have been around since at least the early 1980s and are staffed by brainwashed zealots who were raised in a country where the official school curriculum teaches them things that are simply false (edit: as does ours too (US) but in China it is at an entirely different level), and media is tightly controlled to the point that journalists sometimes just disappear. The liberals in the US are more in line with the thinking: "tolerate everything but intolerance," so you see them react strongly when intolerant people try to spread intolerance. It's hard for some people to wrap their head around the seemingly contradictory idea of not tolerating intolerance... you may be one of those people. But the Chinese folks are an entirely different thing, imho. They are complicated (due to national pride coupled with a huge chip on the shoulder from their history of getting surpassed in the last century) but suffice it to say they have a very rigid line of thinking about things they were force fed from an early age, and this goes way back. |
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