[xroche]

> They'll eventually come for you too no matter how much you generally agree with them.

Reminds of the Maoism movement in European universities (such as in France) a few decades ago, where people critical of Mao were harassed and treated as fascists. With some universities would make Maoism a de-facto precondition to be accepted as researcher.

This seems to share the same mechanism: very few righteous people having no longer any morale compass due to ideology, and cowardliness of the rest of the herd (including the administration) that refuse to stand for reason and logic.

[hintymad]

Taleb calls this Minority Rule in his book Skin in the Game. The most intolerant wins because of asymmetry:

"The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly. "

[gorwell]

We're getting way too close to struggle sessions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

[silexia]

The original post mentioned physical violence towards him including being spit upon and having feces thrown.

[Zababa]

I think one key difference is that the violences are not physical but I wonder if it's not on purpose so that people can easily accept them.

[blacktriangle]

We're well past struggle sessions.

[oolonthegreat]

I'm asking as an outsider who wants to learn: do you mean people in european universities got harassed because they were against Mao? do you have any articles about this that I can read?

[xroche]

This really depended on the university. Some of them were not affected at all, some other had sections where you could not do any research or teaching without being from the "right obedience" (communist, Maoist, etc.)

The most extreme being (in French - https://www.deepl.com/fr/translator) the Vincennes university: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_universitaire_de_Vincen...

[ TL;Dr: The most Maoist university at that time, with communists fighting (with violence) against Maoists inside the university ]

Note that this was a more "experimental" university, aimed to attract the most radical teachers (!)

There are plenty of research for the years between 65-75

[blacktriangle]

Don't even need to go that far back in history, here's a wonderful example from BLM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jCpUMUezzY