Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I find it odd that this needs to be either a post or something the community talks about. It'd be like an article titled "Local gas station provides gas to Nazis"

Why of course they do. A secular, open society means you can have whatever opinion you like, as long as it is peaceful, and you can participate just like anyone else. How else would you want it?

Modern activists seem quite odd to me. In the states, at least, you have the right for free and open political support to seek redress for your grievances. That is, something's not right about society or the government, so you use persuasion to argue your case to the rest of us.

But that's not what's happening. Instead it looks a lot more like economic warfare. Person A, B, and C are wrong. They must be punished. There's not the usual outreach of persuading others that we've traditionally had. It's much more about being in the right club.

View on HN

Being a Nazi is a priori violent. They have declared an intent to commit genocide by subscribing to that ideology. They ought to be excluded from society at every turn, because their goal is the destruction of our society and the mass murder of our peers.

How the hell is breitbart even remotely comparable to nazis ?

The problem with this argument is that everybody can be called a Nazi. The only people who're using the word "Nazi" to describe "Breitbart" seriously are those who completely disrespect the millions of actual victims of the Nazi regime.

OK, so I would and have made the argument that brietbart is Nazism rebranded, since identifying as a Nazi is unacceptable these days (but decreasingly so it would seem).

However, there are far more clear examples of Nazis, like Richard Spencer, who writes pieces on the best way to genocide the black race and things like that. You do a disservice to the people they are harming by refusing to acknowledge that actual Nazis exist, are recently emboldened, and are gaining state power in some cases.

So what do you propose that we do? Kill him?

Crazy people can be as crazy as they want, as long as they don't harm others. But restricting the freedom of speech is a slipery slope that I want to avoid for all costs, lest people that are not Nazis start being called Nazis and are silenced.

This [1] is an article about what real Nazis are like Ipossibly simlar to Spencer, but definitely not similar to Trump).

[1] https://regiehammblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/this-hitler-n...

On the gas station example - I recently recall wedding stores being unwilling to sell items to LGBT couples.

Not the sharpest comparison since the LGBT community at large has never called for any ethnic cleansings as far as I'm aware

That's kind of my point. That's much more unwarranted than dropping Breitbart as a customer yet still happened.

This isn't a modern phenomenon. Boycotts go back at least a century. It's a form of free speech like anything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com