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Comment by twobyfour | Hacker News Reader

Still disagree vehemently. One "brilliant jerk" who isn't shy about saying that "gays shouldn't be allowed to marry" or "Jews kill and eat babies" or "all muslims are terrorists and we shouldn't allow them in the country" in an environment that is tolerant to his views can make an environment hostile for 50 non-jerks whom you'll never have a chance to discover are brilliant.

If you try to tell me I have an obligation for the sake of "progress" to tolerate people who condone or advocate either violence or the denial of rights towards myself or people I care about, I will laugh in your face and ask you (politely, the first time) to get out of my place of work.

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Advocacy =/= Violence. This is one of the worst ideas of our century, that the words themselves cause injury akin to bodily harm.

There should be a power struggle at the implementation level of ideas. This is where violence may or may not actually occur. But the advocacy level is below that. Certain ideas may make you uncomfortable, you may fear they will be implemented, but they are still only words.

The point of the article still stands: If you rigidly restrict what is okay and what is not okay to say, you risk actually valid countercultural views ever making it to the implementation level.

Advocating genocide is violence, I think most people would agree. Talking about "ideas" is so abstract and antiseptic; clearly there are things beyond the pale.

Advocating genocide is not violence. You can have someone on the internet yelling to kill all the muslims but if they never actually throw a punch, they are not committing violence.

Are you just arguing strict semantics here? If I'm Jewish and someone advocates for killing all the Jews, to me that is clearly a physical threat and potentiality assault.

There is also a very real normalization that goes with online threats. If 100 people talk about running over liberals in a chat room, and then one of them does it; the other 99 facilitated that violence.

> "If I'm Jewish and someone advocates for killing all the Jews, to me that is clearly a physical threat and potentiality assault."

Groups that do just that have governmental support in Canada, the UK and many other first world countries, and this is one of those things that one simply isn't allowed to speak of publicly.

And society is not worse off for the lack of that discourse.

It most certainly is worse for the Jewish people living in fear for their safety in such societies.

We need to be able to attack bad ideas, and few ideas are worse than "Death to all people of <ethnic group>!"

I think you misread what I wrote. I meant that society has not been made worse by "death to the jews" being considered hate speech, i.e. we're (weakly) better off having 'banned' such phrases.

I agree with that. You must have misread my previous comment :)

I'm generally for free speech, but very much against governmental support of groups advocating violence and very, very against shutting down discussion of whether, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood does or does not advocate ethnic violence.

Advocating for genocide is a form of violence. If I ask Bob to punch you, I am responsible for the harm that falls on you, even if I did not throw a punch. Limiting “violence” to only obvious physical contact is disingenuous.

Verbal violence is a real thing that has real impact on people. Ask anybody who was in an abusive relationship, even if they were not physically beaten. Or consider that Trump has not physically thrown a punch, but most reasonable people would agree he has caused a lot of harm to minorities and immigrants’ safety and ability to share their brilliance with the world.

There is a moral blame you have for asking Bob to punch me, but you aren't going to spend an evening in jail for assault, Bob is. In this entire scenario, you are assuming Bob has no agency.

> you are assuming Bob has no agency.

We don't take into account peer-pressure when charging adolescents. However, that does not mean that peer-pressure does not exist, on the contrary, it is sometimes the sole motivator behind the deed. These things don't conflict.

I think you’re making a good argument, but I have a problem with your broadened use of the word “advocate.”

If Bob only made the decision to punch Alice because Mallory asked him to, yes Mallory shares in the responsibility. But that implies a notion between Mallory and Bob that is rather different from mere advocation. I do not consider a scenario in which one party convinces another, both with agency, to be advocation. In some cases, I would even consider the person who provided the imperative for violence to be more responsible than the person executing the imperative.

But we are getting into Wittgensteinian weeds here with respect to definitions. For my part, I consider advocation to be the scenario in which one person or group receives peacefully submitted recommendations for a course of action. I think an advocate can be responsible, but I do not think it is productive to use one word to describe the impact of both advocation and execution of a thing.

Using your real world example, I can agree that Donald Trump has committed real harm to various people. I cannot agree that Donald Trump’s position is one of advocation; in fact, I would say that Trump is one who is advocated to. A position of advocation, in my opinion, implies a position that is lesser in power to one which has the power to effect the change on their own.

It literally is not.

It literally is Assault in the First Degree in many states however.

Name three?

> Advocating genocide is violence, I think most people would agree.

I disagree. I do not consider peaceful advocation of an extremely controversial or violent activity to be violence in of itself.

Moreover, I think it is important to be able to express why advocation of a thing can be bad without resorting to conflating the advocation with the thing itself. You lose a lot of nuance in discussion (and charitability for opposing views) with this kind of hyperbole in the general case.

> Talking about "ideas" is so abstract and antiseptic; clearly there are things beyond the pale.

I disagree with this as well. In my opinion, things are only beyond the pale if there is nothing new to contribute to the discussion, not because we are born with a heuristic that refutes it automatically.

For example, we should consider advocating genocide bad because every critical, completely informed examination of genocide comes to the conclusion that it is a net loss for society, and there is no novel information to lead us to a different conclusion. We should not consider advocating genocide to be bad because we believe genocide is bad a priori; this is in fact untrue.

Note that I disagree with dialectic methodology, not overall conclusion. It is important to use rational methods for deriving conclusions instead of subjective dismissals. It is bad to beat a dead horse when we know the result is bad for society, but we can’t begin from a position that is unwilling to examine certain subjects because others consider them “beyond the pale”. Rational dialectics generalize to other topics and arguments; subjective heuristics do not.

Advocacy is the road to violence. Sure, saying “I wish you and everyone like you were dead” is not the same thing as killing them. But in a public sphere, or a private conversation, words matter. Arguing against the humanity of others like you’re talking about your favorite kind of cheese is appalling: “I do like cheddar and I don’t like Jews.” It isn’t physical violence, but I don’t know a distinct word to define that changing of the tone, the introduction or affirmation or just open acceptance of hate within a community. And given the natural, possibly even biological predilection toward in-group/out-group bias and groupthink in humans, suggesting dehumanization has real consequences. Here in the US, there is one group of people who are almost entirely impervious to the dehumanizing power of that kind of speech. That group is white cis hetero men. And they make the laws that form the legal consequences of saying hateful things. To no one's surprise, the legal consequences are basically nil. Historically, the social consequences were also light or non-existent. It was no one’s business who was or wasn’t a member of the Klan. But now, the most powerful group, while still making most of the laws, no longer holds complete control over social consequences. The people whose ancestors or contemporaries were hung from trees or tied to fences in the Wyoming cold or shot down in a walmart have more social power. We listen to them and respect them and create consequences for expressing hate toward them. We're starting to insist that everyone be respected, not just white guys. To me, this is progress, not oppression and in no way restricts the flow of good ideas.

Advocacy is not violence, but advocacy of violence is close enough.

There is a distinction to be made between advocacy in general and advocacy of harm (such as deportation or the denial of civil or human rights and of course including violence) or the spreading of slander/libel (e.g. [1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of...

So you established a “Socratic baseline”, so to speak. You’ve made it clear that for views that are extremely different from yours, you’re unwilling to tolerate even a brilliant individual for any amount of productivity.

Now can you tell me what amount of difference in views you are willing to tolerate for the sake of working with someone brilliant and productive? If you eat meat and one of the most accomplished physicists in the world is militantly opposed to eating meat, would you work with them? What if they refuse to eat lunch with you if you eat meat? What if their views on abortion are diametrically opposed to yours, and they actively vote against your ideals? What if they believe all human beings with mental defects should be aborted in the womb?

In other words, I want you to haggle with your position a bit so I can understand how you react in the more real world scenario, in which an otherwise useful individual’s views are very different, but not cartoonishly different from your own.

> You’ve made it clear that for views that are extremely different from yours, you’re unwilling to tolerate even a brilliant individual for any amount of productivity.

What they actually said was "people who condone or advocate either violence or the denial of rights towards myself or people I care about"

Yes, they are intolerant of those people, regardless of how useful they can otherwise be to society. I think we both understand what the parent was saying, and it seems pretty reasonable to me.

Are you so incapable of taking an individual situation on it's merits that you can't even handle to possibility that others might not have set in stone rules or mathematically model-able behaviors?

Yes situational ethics is messy, no they are not invalid because they are messy.

I’m sorry, but it’s not clear to me what you’re saying here. Let me restate my point more succinctly: people are generally intolerant of others once those others are sufficiently different from themselves. But they are not typically intolerant of people who are only slightly or moderately in opposition to their views.

I would like the parent commenter to consider how much comfortability they are willing to sacrifice in order to get along with someone who is extremely useful. This is a scenario with real world applicability which is not as easy or convenient to say, “I’ll simply not work with them.”

I’m not attempting to invalidate their stated position, I’m trying to understand how they react when it becomes messier.

> people are generally intolerant of others once those others are sufficiently different from themselves

Eh. I don’t see how this statement is justified without heavy qualification.

Fair enough; let’s go with an easy example. Someone wants to kill you, and is actively trying to kill you. Naturally, you don’t want to die, and are actively trying to survive. You two are in rather extreme opposition; are you willing to tolerate their presence?

Maybe the word “intolerant” is what you disagree with. I think that word is useful because it forces us to examine situations in which we are reacting as strongly to someone as others react to us. In other words, I think it’s helpful to consider “intolerance” to be a symmetrical position, not an asymmetrical one.

If we take this abstraction and pull it back down to reality: many people are sufficiently intolerant of gay people that they actively work against them having particular rights. Gay people are generally intolerant of this view, in that they actively work against that one.

Now, personally I believe gay people should have the right to get married. But if I initially consider these conflicting positions as symmetrical disagreement, I force myself to rationally derive which one is the “bad” one. “Intolerant” is therefore a helpful, generalizable placeholder for any given pair of conflicting viewpoints, positions, values, etc.

>How much comfortability they are willing to sacrifice in order to get along with someone who is extremely useful

Yeah, you want them to give you a predefined, quantified, model of their behavior.

Not at all. I’m not asking for a numerical analysis or rating; I’m asking for a qualitative assessment of what sort of scenario turns their personal knobs in such a way that they are willing to put up with an inconvenient situation.

A quantitative assessment isn’t reasonable here, and I haven’t requested that. It’s fully possible to examine questions like these in an exact manner without getting to a point of precision. Philosophy does it all the time.

I think there are grey areas in terms of what opinions are intolerable. ("Meat is murder"? Does anyone really feel threatened by that? What about forced-birth advocates who want to deny women the right to make decisions about their own bodies?)

There are not grey areas about "usefulness". I don't care if you're Albert fucking Einstein, I'm not going to let you scare off the other high performers or even cleaning crew that make my business productive and livable.

Oh man, I will take clean toilets over profits any day.

Hah.

But seriously, how am I supposed to hire and retain anyone if the workplace is hostile? Turnover and rehiring has costs, even if it's turnover of minimum wage staff.

And as a hiring manager I don't have any particular interest either in working in an environment that is hostile towards me. Or are you saying that I have an obligation to spend the majority of my waking hours with people who suggest that I have no right to be alive; or that I belong pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen?

And if I'm not willing to accept a workplace that's hostile to me, how can I ask the people I hire to accept one that's hostile to them?

No, I'm dead serious. I was at a warehouse that went through janitorial staff every month (this was more to do with us being a very second-third-27th chance employer, but in K's case also... not hostility but sexual aggressiveness from many workers) I know what turnover does to over all moral and productivity and I would take good janitors over a raise any year.

> There are not grey areas about "usefulness". I don't care if you're Albert fucking Einstein, I'm not going to let you scare off the other high performers or even cleaning crew that make my business productive and livable.

Okay, that’s a fair position and that essentially answers my question. I don’t really have an argument for or against what you’re saying here, I was just curious to see if there is any level of utility at which you’re okay with someone being disliked by the rest of the staff.

> Are you so incapable of taking...

Please leave this sort of thing out of comments on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You chose easy examples. What about the harder ones?

You obviously have some in mind, how about suggesting them?

I actually don't have any in mind. I just find it less helpful to focus on the easier examples.

In general, I'm more interested in the underlying dynamics, as well as the processes we use to determine what is morally acceptable or not. I think that looking at the more complex issues and at the ways in which the different viewpoints evolve over time shines more light on these important fundamental aspects.

A really popular (or rather unpopular) one is that women and men are differently capable.

Even with all the caveats in the world (that different means neither better nor worse, that this doesn’t make hiring or salary discrimination ok, etc etc), you’re likely to get in trouble because of it.

This is pretty much the perfect example of what is considered wrongthink today, but I have confidence, will be common knowledge in 50 years. This is the example people should be using more instead of the one Altman used (disparaging comments about gay people).

So here’s the truth as far as I see it:

Yes. Women and men are differently capable.

However, there are many ways in which we traditionally believed them to be differently capable that were actually that way due to discrimination and injustice.

So, people will be rightly annoyed when someone tries to downplay the effects of systemic injustice.

When we have fixed our systems to be more just and inclusive, only then can we begin to talk about inherent difference.

Until then, it is not urgent.

Justice first.

> When we have fixed our systems to be more just and inclusive, only then [...]

This is not something that ever finishes.

I think we have to allow both to happen side by side, constantly struggling to balance them as best we can.

Any critique of Islam.

Who decides what voices should be silent?

Voices that call for repression of rights for certain parties should be silenced.

Gay people are a subset of people who have been harassed because of something that a) they cannot control, b) harms nobody (As long as it is between two consenting adults, but that's the same for heterosexual relations).

Fascists are a subset of people who have been harassed because a) they call for non-whites to be exterminated, b) previous fascist movements have put into practice that goal.

The difference is: If I speak about death to gay people, historically this has led to gay people dying -- even if a gay person sat still, they would be attacked. If I speak about death to fascists, historically this has led to fascists dying -- but only after they have mobilized to take power andor spread their beliefs.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out which voices should be silent. That is, if one values equality among fellow humans, and keeps a gentle eye on history.

So, fascists should not be allowed the privilege of free speech?

This gets kind of dicey to implement in a place like SF, where it seems like half the people my age think that all registered Republicans are, ipso facto, literally fascists.

Show me a committee of people who you think should be trusted to decide what speech is not allowed.

And I will show you a group of fallen men, like the rest of us, who will abuse their power for political gain.

And where do you draw the line? Maybe you could get everyone to agree on "kill all gays" being irredeemably intolerant. But what about conservatives who think that children benefit from having a mother and a father and so believe that only adoption by married heterosexual couples should be allowed[1]? According to you, is that just wrong or is it worthy of censorship? And what of the many religions who believe that wives should obey their husbands? And what of discussions of multiculturalism and its potential threats to social cohesion? You give only easy examples, but the trouble is never with the easy examples.

[1] And the for the record, I'm in favor of allowing adoption by gay couples.

Someone stated:

  >Voices that call for repression of rights for certain parties should be silenced.

  This is going to sound unbelievably pedantic and frustrating, but... What about the right to free speech?

This comment was deleted, but I wrote a response I feel should be heard anyway. So here it is:

1. Vulnerable groups should be protected. If my speech has historically led to The Right To Life of others being violated, then their right to life is much more important than the freedom or protection of my speech.

2. The right to free speech is a legal device to protect you from the government coming into your home and taking you to a gulag for stating certain things. In no cases are your rights to speak being violated, you can speak these things privately within your home. However, when in public and on private land, we need different rules. Just as public indecency violates your right to wear or not wear whatever you wish when out and about, so do hate speech, libel, slander, and defamation laws also restrict what you can state in public.

3. I wonder why people only bring this up with respect to social justice discourse. A couple of months ago, a person was taken to court by someone in government for laughing at them during a speech. Just this week the CDC was banned by the government from saying "evidence-based" and "science-based". And yet the social groups (on 4chan, twitter, facebook, HN, etc.) that frequently claim for freedom of speech with respect to social justice is curiously silent about examples of actual government repression of speech. This leads me to believe that there is a certain disingenuity when this is used as a rebuttal.

Haha, I was writing a reply, too!

In Sam's case, it sounds like all of his social discomfort is happening entirely within free speech principles?

From what I can gather, Sam sometimes freely-speaks an idea that other people find harmful. Others then freely-speak back to him that he should stop, because it's harmful.

But it sounds like Sam's arguing not just for the right to free speech, but the right to have everyone listen to you. That right is limited by others' rights to live peacefully, and not be regularly subjected to words that harm them.

I think we're in a weird situation where nobody is really worried about Sam's ability to remain free, but at the same time nobody is all that interested in listening to the weaker voices that might actually end up silenced. In fact, that's almost a given: if a million people are going to read your blog post then, no, social mechanisms aren't going to shut you up.

What's in the back of my mind is an unremarkable person who has an opinion that their boss doesn't agree with. We never read their blog posts, because by definition I'm talking about when the power dynamic is backwards.

> But it sounds like Sam's arguing not just for the right to free speech, but the right to have everyone listen to you.

EXACTLY. It's amazing to me how many people take it upon themselves to conflate Right To A Platform and Right To Speak Unrebutted with the Right To Free Speech

But what are rights to begin with? Take this as purely a devil's argument and not something I am advocating, please.

Let's take a 30 year old and a 15 year old. We accept in a society that two 15 year olds can consent to sex to each other. We do not accept that a 30 year old and a 15 year old can consent to sex.

But for a person with a sexual preference for teens, their attraction is

(a) something they can't control

and

(b) something that doesn't harm anyone if there is consent between both parties.

There is a lot of room for argument here. Take a 15 year old and 19 year old. Is that okay? What about 17 and 19? Where's the line? How can it possibly be the case that age difference necessarily indicates a power differential that inhibits consent in all circumstances?

So we are in a pickle now. Either this similar argument is wrong, and hence the original argument can be questioned, or this argument is good, and hence the majority cultural belief about such relationships needs to be drastically questioned.

Either way, we should allow people to voice their arguments.

  But for a person with a sexual preference for teens, their attraction is

  (a) something they can't control

  and

  (b) something that doesn't harm anyone if there is consent between both parties.

Honestly, I haven't seen much evidence for point (b). It ultimately comes down to experience and power-dynamics. We can accept that two people of the same age do not have a drastic advantage over each other. It is much less likely that a thirty year old does not have an advantage over a fifteen year old. Even if that advantage is one that is not acknowledged by either party, it exists to some degree.

A minor is someone who we have arbitrarily decided has less ability to determine how to act compared to an adult. Yes, different cultures having different ages indicate that this is arbitrary, and yes it is difficult to know where to draw the line exactly, but the fact is that to protect minors the line needs to be drawn somewhere. It is mildly contradictory that a 16 year old in Britain can sign up for the armed forces, have a child, and get married, but they are not allowed to drink or drive a car. That doesn't mean that those boundaries should not exist, however.

Ultimately the exact definition of these sorts of things come down to cultural handshakes. Why do people drive on the left-side or right-side of the road? It's a cultural handshake. Consent between two parties of different emotional maturity is a difficult thing to figure out, hence why we have the cultural handshake that says that for certain parties it is unacceptable for them to liasion at certain ages.

To say that those power dynamics apply to two adult men of the same age, is -- to put it mildly -- ridiculous.

Again, the question is whether or not there can be consent, not whether or not there is a power differential. The existence of a power differential doesn't necessarily mean there can't be consent. Citizens consent to, for instance, the regulations relating to driving when they get their license that the government (which is superior to the individual) sets.

But again, my main point stands. If we are to shut down any discussion of the scenario I gave, which many people would be willing to do, by your own considering this would be shutting down a discussion on whether we can drive on the right side of the road or whether we should shake hands.

And then this is predicated on such lack of debate not causing any harm, when it can be argued there is similar harm as what people say gay people experience.

Again, please, these are devil's advocate arguments. Not personal views.

>It doesn't take a genius to figure out which voices should be silent.

We live in a political environment where you can be labeled a fascist for not wholeheartedly supporting an array of ideas that have been determined to be so obvious that they don't warrant discussion (large scale immigration, white culture as toxic, transgenderism as normal and desirable, just to name a few).

Given that context, you'll excuse me if the idea that we can easily figure out who deserves to be silenced is implausible.

This does not answer the "who" question.

I can't be on board with this because the way it's treated currently is a one way street. As much as I hate the stuff you're mentioning specifically, I'm not going to call for those people to be silenced when it's acceptable and somewhat popular to say the same thing about whites, men, straight people, etc. And ultimately calling for silencing the far right while doing and saying nothing about equally abhorrent ideas on the far left only creates useful propaganda for the people you want to silence.

As for your specific example, it doesn't really fit into what's happening now. Violence towards people labelled as fascists is common, but not the other way around. And in parallel cases, things like "death to cops" has absolutely led to an increase in people murdering police officers. This whole thing is benefiting the far right from a propaganda standpoint.

  when it's acceptable and somewhat popular to say the same thing about whites, men, straight people, etc.

You're ignoring the power dynamics. Take trans women for example. 46% will commit suicide, over 80% have experienced assault (and only a slightly lower statistic for sexual assault). Thus a cis person saying something of the sort like "trans women should be murdered" is propagating an idea that has very real effect on the world. Since it is already accepted that trans women are harmed as such, making such a statement propagates the harmful ideas further. It is very likely that after that person makes such a comment, a trans woman will die.

In contrast, cis white men are not being murdered by trans women. Thus for them to state that "cis should die" is a act of protest, and has very little effect on the real world. The difference is: Is this likely to happen, is this happening, and has this happened? In the former instance the case is yes, in the latter the case is no.

  Violence towards people labelled as fascists is common, but not the other way around.

On the contrary, fascists have murdered in recent years: 1 British politican (Joe Cox). 2 American Representatives. A number of American people[0][1]. I can bring up more examples but I'd like to get off this site sometime today :) Besides, it's trivial to google.

Indeed, White Supremacy is listed as one of the things that the US DHS is working to combat[2]

  "death to cops" has absolutely led to an increase in people murdering police officers.

Source please? All I've seen is more police killing unarmed and already restrained people.

[0]: James Fields was a fascist. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/13/charlottesvi...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/27/portland-dou...

[2]: https://www.dhs.gov/blog/2017/08/16/did-you-know-four-ways-d...

http://www.newsweek.com/police-line-duty-deaths-increase-201...

And there have been specific instances of BLM activists killing police, this being the most high profile one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...

We also had a Bernie supporter shoot Steve Scalise, and the general social media response to Rand Paul being assaulted was celebratory and saying he deserved it for being a Republican.

Seems like the power dynamics doesn't necessarily mean what these people are saying won't lead to violence. There are certain things which no power imbalance excuses, and in my opinion this is one of them.

And what happened in Dallas is much more clear cut than what James Fields did in Charlottesville. He seemed to have snapped after someone hit his car with a bat. Seems more like road rage to me based on the video. I think they're going to have a hard time convicting him of 1st degree murder, honestly. Plus, had the police done their job that entire situation likely would have been avoided. The violence should not have been allowed to escalate like it was.

The whole discussion is bogged down because no one knows exactly what everyone else means by "voices being silenced". It seems incredibly unproductive to discuss in this vague, confusing manner.

"Social networks", which I've quoted because I don't mean the modern sort.

Normal humans will, in fact, stop associating with unpleasant people just as a matter of course.

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