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Comment by pulisse | Hacker News Reader

It's illegal in Colorado for a business to refuse service to someone because of their sexual orientation. That's the law under which the state tried to penalize the baker.

Alex Jones violated Twitter's ToS by, among other things, encouraging armed violence.

There's zero tension in thinking that both Twitter and the state of Colorado acted defensibly in these two cases.

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One: https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/..., so Colorado is wrong.

Two: Using a figure of speech is not “encouraging armed violence”.

"People need to have their battle rifles and everything ready at their bedsides" is not a figure of speech I've ever heard. Is Milo Yiannopoulos's quote "I can't wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight" a similar figure of speech?

Excusing extreme calls-to-action after the fact as "figures of speech" gives license to say anything: when you've found you've gone too far, you can simply walk it back and say it was metaphor. Should any of Milo's or Jones's followers act on this, would you still say their comments were just figures of speech?

Yes, it’s _obviously_ a figure of speech. Alex Jones is not, nor has he ever been, a leader of armed resistance of any sort. Neither was Milo. They do not _actually_ urge armed resistance. Anyone who argues otherwise is being deliberately obtuse. If you want to go after violent resistance, check out hundreds of accounts of violent Antifa activists which are, miraculously, not banned from Twitter.

the second part of that quote makes it much less worse. 'everything ready at their bedsides' implies resisting an armed attack as opposed to going out and hurting other people. previously i'd only seen the 'battle rifles' ready part of the quote in the media. though, possibly the rest of the context is probably worse for jones :/

> though, possibly the rest of the context is probably worse for jones :/

If the rest of the context was worse for jones, the press would have used it.

Full context is available in a tweet linked in the article[1], but Jones states "We're under attack and you know that and you've pointed out that mainstream media is the enemy. But now it's time to act on the enemy... They're coming and they're coming and they're coming. They think they can really take down America. This is it." before urging his followers to have rifles ready.

[1] https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1029477795561463808

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