Comment by _iyig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _iyig | Hacker News Reader

Historically, UC Berkeley was home to the Free Speech Movement. Today, UC Berkeley Professor of English Grace Lavery had this to say about the book in question:

>Since some ppl have misunderstood my tone, and censorship is an important matter and as a public educator I have a duty to be precise, let me clarify:

>I do NOT advocate defacing library books.

>I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre.

https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1327743400553172997

As to the burning of books generally:

>Remember: all you’re doing is removing a commodity from circulation—much as one might destroy a contaminated crop, or take action if a distributor failed to do so.

https://twitter.com/graceelavery/status/1327746546851524608

Not a view I would have ever expected to hear from a public institution of learning.

For context, here is author Abigail Shrier’s synopsis of the book in her own words. Judge for yourself whether it constitutes hate speech:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6MYb0rBDYvs

>hate speech

It is amazing that this term is used so frequently while being entirely undefinable. Hate is an emotion that is unquantifiable in the general sense but is used ad nauseam throughout the media without regard to it's undefinable scope. Worse yet, it is used in laws that have incarcerated people base on some perceived level of "hate", again which has never been defined.

I agree with what I perceive the gist of your point.

In many countries though, the "hate speech" IS explicitly defined in law; I find it frequently creates more questions than it answers though ("Why is Group A protected but Group B and C are not"?), while providing meaningful insight into cultural views of the mainstream (ditto).

There's any number of western liberal democracies with Blasphemy / Hate Speech laws on books, where strictly speaking an Atheist would struggle to even explain their views. And of course any number of countries of any political persuasion where such laws are meant to stifle and are exercised for suppression of viewpoints.

I don't have an answer to this. However we define it, some people/groups genuinely hate, without cause reason or empathy, and they genuinely provoke and exercise violence. Inasmuch as we try to get to a root cause of the problem, I can understand why well meaning people can attempt to define precursors of violence and suffering. I just haven't seen it done well yet :-/

>"hate speech" IS explicitly defined

I suspect, though, that these laws are a continuously moving target, from what I have observed with various incidents in the UK for example.

The real miscarriage of justice is that I can't take the tweets of "be gay do crimes" leftists off of Twitter and burn _those_. They are giving moderate liberals a bad name.

Censoring the book at this point is going to cause a Streisand Effect.

The Tweets cannot be censored, and moderates have very little control over the narrative.

What should the narrative have been?

If the book is good, "Author encourages you to form a strong relationship with your child so that strangers won't tell them what to do. In this specific case it was something about gender."

If the book is bad, "Author says some silly transphobic things, tries and fails to smear trans people. Rebuttal in the top comment."

But now that it's censored....

"Stealing things is okay because optics are not a real part of politics!"

"I will just do whatever I want, and in 1,000 years history will vindicate me and the moderates will finally stop voting Republican"

"The communist revolution is but Two Months away! Never vote in any election! Punch a moderate today!"

And on the other end of the horseshoe:

"The left wants to burn books!"

"Perhaps everyone left of center are the real Nazis!"

"When are they gonna start rounding up white people?!"

"Why do trans people drink the blood of Christian children?"

Nothing but bad-faith arguments and strawmen. Somewhere, Scott Alexander is spinning in his office chair.

It's gonna be a shitshow and the best I can hope for is a stop-loss mitigation. Please don't shoot, I'm a centrist and I like private property rights. The only book I've ever burned was an old encyclopedia I found in a dumpster.

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