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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Of course people are going to question your definitions when you've gone overboard in making one absolutely wrong and the others absolutely right.

There's bad in both sets, which is why banning 1 group could have an effect on the other 2, eventually.

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Well to be fair, one is entirely bad, jut to be clear thats the Nazis. There may be some rogue elements in the other groups who perhaps would use violence to further their cause but it is not their fundamental belief. Whereas Nazi ideology specifically calls for the extermination of others, neither of the other 2 groups are anywhere remotely near that position.

There are no good Nazis. Sure there were some Nazis in WWII that were Nazis because they were German soldiers and not necessarily because they wanted to exterminate Jews and gypsies, so some of them did good things (not in the name of the Nazis but because they were not entirely evil people) but anyone claiming to be a Nazi today is doing so because they believe in Nazism ideologically and everything that goes into with it.

This is part of the problem with these debates that I've noticed: it's an attempt on the one hand to carry on the debate purely in terms of free speech, abstracted from the contents of any particular ideology.

And yet, part of what makes you "wrong" to oppose speech of particular groups is that you are just as bad as them. That's a judgment of the "wrongness" of a particular ideology, being directly appealed to, to justify a position on free speech.

For some reason that's supposedly not a slippery slope toward widening the scope of "free speech" to include things destructive of democracy.

Funny how the "slippery slope" argument seems to only get used by people resorting to false equivalencies immediately upon commencement of discussions on this topic.

Right, this is precisely my point. I can't count how many times I've seen people defending hate groups resort to slippery slopes and false equivalences. If you don't give hate groups unrestricted access to audiences, they claim 1984 is supposedly right around the corner.

But if you confront them with the slippery slope of equal logical validity which supports the opposing argument, suddenly they're mindful of the dangers of slippery slope arguments.

If democracy can't stand up to a laughable idea then it was a nice run. If we start taking away fundamental human rights the moment we hear some words we don't like, they probably deserve to destroy our democracy.

Really? You think that Nazis are unfairly characterised? That's the hill you want to die on?

If by unfairly characterized you mean every white guy and their jewish grandmother having been called a Nazi in the past year, then I might consider it.

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