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Comment by albinofrenchy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> "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.

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