It's strange that stories from the progressive end of this discussion get (often rightfully) flagged into oblivion in seconds, but this conservative campus panic story survives to 45 comments.
I'm not sure what you mean by "this discussion", but if you mean ideology in general, HN has had plenty of stories from progressive perspectives on the front page. This is an area where perceptions are particularly unreliable. Each side tends to feel that the site is biased against their side, often quite passionately.
We sometimes turn off flags on stories that are substantive and interesting and where there's hope for a thoughtful discussion. Sometimes those stories have one ideological polarity, sometimes another.
I'm not sure what qualifies this as a "conservative" story. This is a human interest story concerning people who were quite clearly harmed because of this school's actions.
To me, that takes precedence over partisan politics. And it's not like this is Tucker Carlson reporting on Fox News, this from is a pretty respected, left-leaning site.
The 8chan warrant story is still on the 2nd page after a whole day, and wasn't flagged.
And this story is about a $887 million institution pressuring a working-class assault victim to drop charges against their attackers, by using libel and economic sanctions.
So what makes this story 'conservative'? That the victim was white?
Most of the interest in this story has been in right-wing media stemming from a false "racism" accusation that is a PART of this case and also due to a bigger narrative around left-wing campuses. I'd frame the story differently than you did, but the bigger point is that we shouldn't pretend this isn't mostly a right-wing media news story for these reasons.
I think we both agree that if the racism charge had strong merit (it didn't), then most would see this as a liberal news story because that's mostly who would be focusing on it. People tend to be drawn to stories that reinforce their world view.
That, of course, doesn't mean it shouldn't be part of the discussion here. (I've been active in this thread so obviously I think it should be here.)
Edit: Also, I'm not the person you were responding to but this was very dishonest of you:
> That the victim was white?
OP said exactly why they thought it was conservative. They cited that it was because it was related to "conservative campus panic." To pretend they could have said it because "the victim was white" is very dishonest of you.
> OP said exactly why they thought it was conservative. They cited that it was because it was related to "conservative campus panic." To pretend they could have said it because "the victim was white" is very dishonest of you.
Dishonest? In your very post, you agree with me! You say if the racism charge had merit, i.e. if the white kid was at fault, then it would be a liberal story. Just like [1].
Saying they thought it was conservative because it was related to conservative campus panic is pretty much circular logic, and doesn't explain anything. If anything was dishonest in my post, it was the implication that the attitude was limited to pessimizer, when in fact it seems to have seeped into the terms 'conservative' and 'liberal' themselves.
We sometimes turn off flags on stories that are substantive and interesting and where there's hope for a thoughtful discussion. Sometimes those stories have one ideological polarity, sometimes another.