Tenn. K-Sigs "saved" by free speech. AMAZING!!!

[Kevin]

Originally posted by librasoul22
[B]
ktsnake, how many black people have you ever met? Because to say that "many" or "most" don't know the history is a gross overgeneralization. Maybe you get around though, and have actually encountered 12% of the population of the United States. I don't know.

I'm sure that you'd probably win the "how many black people do I know" contest

However, I'm sure that if we're talking about a statistical sampling compared with 12% of the entire population of the US and all the different backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses that we both probably don't have daily access to I'd say whatever sample we have would be pretty difficult to generalize.

So some hard facts about folks not knowin' much about history? An article in Newsweek dated 09/15/97 talks about a survey conducted of 159 upper-classmen at Stanford University (yeah the one that costs $100,000 to go to for 4 years) the survey found that "one-third of those surveyed believed that the Enlightenment preceded the Renaissance. Two-thirds could not name the sixteenth-century scholar who first proposed that the earth revolves around the sun; many confused Galileo with Copernicus. Approximately 72 per cent failed to credit Gutenberg with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. And the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor eluded a full three-quarters."

I'd say my argument that most people out there don't know even the simplest facts about history probably don't know a hell of a lot about a people's struggle for equality, let alone some of the trials it faced 50+ years ago.

I'll state this again so no one gets me wrong: I think what these guys did was pretty stupid. But my position all along was that UT had no business censoring their speech. Government institutions have no business doing that no matter how inflammatory or offensive the speech may be. Their HQ on the other hand responded appropriately. I applaud them for yanking that charter -- those guys had no business representing their organization.