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Comment by halfjoking | Hacker News Reader

I don't approve of any type of censorship.

Don't care if it's neo-nazis, islamic jihadists, cult-like evangelical christians, militant atheists, or the President.

All ideas should be allowed. Specific calls for action of violence/killing should be restricted, but Trump isn't doing that. I don't know why people think this is ok.

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What exactly do you think the end result will be if his supporters believe that the election "was stolen from them"? Give me a break.

It's harmless unless the Supreme Court believes it. I believed the 2004 election was stolen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXyl_YNA8Hs

I didn't feel the need to do violence because I'm a reasonable person. I listen to the other side and try to understand where they're coming from. We need more of that and less fear of ideas. Maybe things wouldn't be so polarized if we did more of that.

The rules of the world, of democracy, are only made possible through human belief in them. Indoctrinating a large group of people with false/misleading information to try to weaken/de legitimize the rules and systems of democracy will more or less lead to breaking of them, at that point who cares what the supreme court believes, it probably won't have any effect, the damage is already done. I wish we had an educated, critical thinking, rationality driven humanity but the fact is a majority of them (on either side) are not but right now, only one side (not even most of R's, just Trump and his hardcore fans) is trying to weaken the democratic process by lying.

Exactly. A perhaps pertinent point here is that Mao's revolution in China had less than 3% of the working class people behind it, by their own polling (Mentioned in Tony Cliff's works on marxists.org).

A revolution can be led by a minority, and almost always is, you don't need a majority you just need power, force of will, and either a distraction for the ruling forces, or enough people in the ruling forces to turn a blind eye (As with Castro -- who got the middle classes on-side first to support the revolution, and then took power while they were feuding among themselves)

Isn't that more than a bit paternalistic? Who gets to decide what people can believe about the election? You? Give people the facts, and let them come to their own conclusions.

>You? This is unnecessary.

Why? Parent poster was making a judgement as to what people should be allowed to believe, and they didn't point to any authority or why that authority should be in charge. How do we know the parent poster doesn't consider themselves to be a good enough authority to decide? They seem to present themselves as one.

What do you think the end result will be if talk is off the table?

Considering the relative fitness of each 'side' here, I would expect any sensible progressive to be doing everything in their power to let their opposition air their grievances verbally.

Bannon went straight to calls for violence .. and got banned entirely.

I'd have thought the likelihood of somebody dying is far greater from these tweets, than shouting fire in a theatre.

> All ideas should be allowed. Specific calls for action of violence/killing should be restricted

Um...

You can say that gay lifestyles are against God's will (OK) without saying people should punish gays for being gay (BAD)... note that I am an atheist have neither of these beliefs it's just an example

It gets blurry as to what is specifically a direct call for violence versus "plain old hate speech".

I'm all for nuance, but I can't imagine this being the hill people want to die on RE: censorship. As long as the calls for violence aren't overt we're cool with them? I might be in the minority but I don't have a problem lumping plain old hate speech in with inciting violence. I'm trying to imagine the best possible take on what Trump is trying to do by tweeting incendiary misinformation and I just can't get there.

I'm not advocating for censorship, I'm simply pointing out that it's not so simple as to say that if there is no direct incitement to violence, that said speech is "acceptable".

Ongoing dehumanization of "others" is dangerous territory and needs to be acknowledged as such.

I think the closest solution is "cancel culture" (hate that term) where the general market rejects the offering but it's still allowed for "fairness".

Oh I agree with you, I was referring to the person you were replying to. The idea that a private company making decisions about users on their platform is censorship is ridiculous to begin with. 1 in 10 Americans use Twitter, to say that Twitter is even capable of censoring the president, even if had they would disable his account permanently, would be laughable.

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