Hacker News Reader

Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Does the Big Bang Theory encourage violence against creationists?

I don’t ask that question seriously, just to point out that generalising things isn’t always useful. For example, “hate speech” is a defined term and the Big Bang theory ain’t it.

View on HN

I don't think "encourages violence" is the standard that's being applied here. For example, on the 14th of June 2017, a political activist who'd been radicalized by Facebook made a list of elected members of Congress, went up to them, and asked them about their party affiliation before opening fire on them. There were zero mainstream calls to for Facebook to crack down on the communities or content that radicalized him, and this incident is almost completely absent from the narrative about the dangers of Facebook. Not only that, respectable mainstream media organisations like the New York Times falsely claimed that actually, the party that had been targetted was the one whose rhetoric was causing members of Congress to be shot, erroneously blaming the shooting of Gabby Giffords on them when in reality it seems to have been inspired by anger at her specifically that had nothing to do with national partisan politics at all.

> Does the Big Bang Theory encourage violence against creationists?

Excellent point. There's much broader support for banning advocacy of violence, than for banning statements that offend the audience's religious sensibilities.

Perhaps a better example is speech that advocates abortion rights. Pro-life advocates consider such speech to incite murder; pro-abortion advocates don't.

I think this adds an interesting wrinkle to the hate-speech / censorship debate: It shows that even meta-rules meant to keep a discussion civil (i.e., we won't allow speech that advocates violence) aren't necessarily neutral to the viewpoints being discussed.

In one of the controversies discussed in the article, Facebook banned an ad on the grounds that an upside-down red triangle constitutes hate speech - it's "a triangle symbol used by Nazis to identify political prisoners", you see. So I'm not sure the concept is quite as well-defined as you're suggesting.

Except that is defined, that's a thing that's real, and the upside down red triangle specifically was used to identify political prisoners of the Nazi party, like liberals, socialists, and unionized laborers.[1]

I guess I'm not sure of your point, because to me, the use of the symbol, in a political context, and especially in the context of a polemic populist political campaign, is problematic, regardless of whether or not the Trump campaign or whoever backed that advertisement knew what it was.

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

The question isn't whether it's problematic in some generic sense, but whether it's hate speech or a call to violence. I'm extraordinarily skeptical that anyone sees a red triangle and thinks "ah, I understand, the triangle is telling me I should go engage in political violence".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com