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by droptablemain 1061 days ago
So what's next? Get these people fired from their jobs for having unapproved ideas? Also, who decides what is or is not toxic?
3 comments

From [1]:

Snippets of posts with IP addresses at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, University of Chicago, and the National Bureau of Economic Research headquarters include: "Rapefugees Welcome!!!!! - Merkel"; "bietches are fugly"; and "Its about ching chong taking bubba's job and bubba putting on a white pointy hood in response."

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-yale-toxic-posts-ejm...

You make it sound like it's a matter of academic freedom. It is not.

Do you or do you not think that it should be acceptable to use language like "d4mn j3ws" in an academic forum?

I remember a short time when posting "hacked materials" was a thing people were up in arms about, but that ship seems to have sailed.
What are the hacked materials in this case?
The IP address <-> post link that required a lot of CPU to brute force.
You mean the publicly posted IP address <-> post link? That's not hacking.
That's sorta like saying that running JTR on password hashes doesn't amount to hacking.
> Do you or do you not think that it should be acceptable to use language like "d4mn j3ws" in an academic forum?

Of course it's not acceptable. It's not acceptable for any academic to disagree with me period. All those posters need to be rooted out, fired, and blacklisted.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but you need to have a little more empathy for those aren't part of your "white boys club." Don't you think women and minorities need to know if their colleagues are posting their horribly sexist and racist thoughts online? Read the examples in the paper and then tell me that the colleagues of these people don't have a right to know.
Well, if you don't mind being harsh, I'll tell you this: In your woke-scolding, you are assuming the both the gender and race of the person who you are replying to; probably based on a single comment.
IIRC this is a private forum frequented by academics, not an academic forum. That is an important distinction.

Should that sort of language be "acceptable?"

Well, I find it absurdly distasteful.

But clearly it's acceptable to some people.

Outside of the bounds of legality, you don't get to decide what is or is not acceptable for other people when it comes to speech.

The hell I don't. I, and society, judge people all the time. That's how the real world works.
No, sorry. You don't get to excuse 3000 years' worth of antisemitism with a Wikipedia link to a nursery rhyme.
People have always been fired/distanced/exiled for antisocial behavior. Not to mention employees are terminated for much, much less justified actions all the time. This isn't new, it's as old as time. Bigots can go mask off when they're not on my payroll.