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Comment by abnry | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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 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.

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?

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