Hacker News Reader

Comment by danharaj | Hacker News Reader

"I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death (of other people) your right to say it."

There's a reason why we set the bar for prioritizing safety over speech at credible, immediate threat rather than an abstract threat. Effectively every movement or political group has committed acts of violence. Whether its Islamists blowing up marathons or shooting up nightclubs, or right wingers shooting up churches and mosques, or liberals trying to assassinate congressmen at a baseball game. If you look hard enough you can point to deaths or criminality caused by most political speech, and use that as justification for bans.

> liberals trying to assasinate congressmen at a baseball game.

One deranged man not liberals in general. There have been numerous right wingers shooting up churches and mosques and planned parenthood buildings.

You know full well that their post was discussing a more abstract point. Violent extremists exist among all ideologies and groups, and always will.

it just is way out of place compared to the frequency of the other acts of terrorism to the point of being silly to include. it's how people "both sides" things and it's dangerous to the focus of where we should be worrying.

I think his point stands broadly regardless of the specific example you take issue with. The heyday of radical left wing terrorism in the US was the 60's and 70's

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_terrorism

> it's how people "both sides" things and it's dangerous to the focus of where we should be worrying.

I'd say it's the people going "But not MY side!" that we really need to be worrying about here.

I agree both or all sides engage in self-serving agenda and bad policies. Nobody is perfect.

But it is hard not to see that extreme ideology drives the agenda of one or a few sides, while most sides are willing to compromise with reasonable, evidence-based solutions that the ideologists reject outright. It is irresponsible to say in that case that both sides are being unreasonable - that false equivalence promotes an unhealthy stalemate and gives cover to those who blindly delay progress.

Even when available date supports such a claim?

Well, the example here was "my side only does this a little, so Not MY Side!"... In other words, the data did not support such a claim.

It's hard to take such a disregard of proportionality seriously.

There are two ways to take it: the "everybody has been bad" GP used, and "the probability of any one event being X is lower than the rest." For the former, it would make sense to look at how guns are promoted as problem-solvers, and for the latter is worth discussing how group values make a person more likely to inflict firearm injuries. Utility vs. incitement, I suppose.

Please see SDS and the Weather Underground, in that case.

perfect. thanks for proving my point. if all you have are some radicals from the 60s and 70s you can't say that liberals are an issue nowadays on the scale that is radical right wing terrorism.

Speaking as someone old enough to remember the Weather Underground, I would not conflate “anti-authoritarianism” with “Liberalism.”

Liberalism in today’s society is stuff like taxing people to pay for health care, or living wages, or supporting the right of workers to unionize.

The Weathermen’s stated political goal was to overthrow U.S. imperialism. That is not something I would lump in the same basket as liberalism.

So I would say that this isn’t an example of liberal thinking at all, whether from the 60s or any other decade. Just because it isn’t “conservative” doesn’t make it liberal, and trying to lump everyone into a false dichotomy is rather Fox News, in my opinion.

I used to love the "US out of North America NOW!" graffiti.

But maybe that was AIM, not Weather Underground.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com