No Free Speech for Loony Ideas?

There is a young Chinese writer in New York who is undoubtedly full of hate. He wrote columns condemning whites and condemning Asians that are quite nutty. See here and here. They were so nutty that there were only minor protests about them. But then he did the unforgiveable! He wrote another nutty column about blacks. So we read the predictable:

""The 22-year-old author of a column titled Why I Hate Blacks in the regional newspaper AsianWeek has been dismissed, and the paper's editors said Wednesday that they suffered 'a serious lapse in editorial judgment' when they published his column"

See also here for more backgound. The paper's apology and lots of comments are here.

It seems to me that treating blacks as a class especially protected from any negative mention is clearly racist and that underlying that racism is the thoroughly racist view that the problems with blacks are so insoluble that not mentioning them is all you can do about them -- the "bigotry of low expectations", as President Bush has called it.

Doesn't anybody think it is odd that you can aim the most swingeing criticisms at conservatives and Christians but not at blacks? Those who criticize Christians and conservatives would appear to think that they can put the people concerned on the right path by their criticisms. Do the same people think that nothing you could say would improve the behavior of blacks? It would seem so. And they accuse conservatives of racism! The fact of the matter is that Leftists have ALWAYS made sweeping judgements of people on the basis of their race.

And banning loony ideas generally seems a bad move to me. I can think of two scientific ideas offhand -- continental drift and a bacterial cause for stomach ulcers -- that were once almost universally dismissed by all the good and the great as loony -- but which were eventually proved right-- the latter quite recently.

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