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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

You're trying to skate over the difference between good-faith political debate and bad-faith encouragement of violence and sedition.

Diverse dissenting views are fine. Plotting armed violence to overturn a legitimate election result isn't.

If the far-right can't operate without plotting armed violence - and there's plenty of evidence it can't - then it puts itself outside the reach of any free speech arguments.

Not just because its views are abhorrent, but because it would gleefully destroy absolutely all forms of dissenting free speech itself if given the opportunity.

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A for-profit corporation like Apple shouldnt be the arbitrer of what constitutes good-faith and bad-faith political debate

Unless it impacts the bottom line.

"Plotting armed violence to overturn a legitimate election result isn't"

There are already laws and means to deal with plotting armed violence. None of them include (or should include) banning the phone company / app company / phone maker / etc.

Swap out a few nouns in the comment and you have a comment describing why the left shouldn’t be allowed to engage in public discourse either due to all of the support given to the BLM riots over the summer.

The fact that people seem to be honestly blind to how dangerous this line of reasoning is legitimately astonishes me.

> Plotting armed violence to overturn a legitimate election result isn't.

Not condoning any sort of violence or the riots from Wednesday but I think it is worth observing that the problem isn't that there are people who are trying to "overturn a legitimate election result". The problem is that there are people who believe that the election results were not legitimate. They are acting on that premise and so in their mind they are acting to overturn an illegitimate election result. Simply asserting that they are wrong will not change things, in fact it has a good chance of making things altogether worse as it simply emphasizes the grievance that their concerns aren't being addressed.

Resolving these issues isn't going to come from simply insisting that the other side is wrong. and it isn't going to come from disappearing Trump. Trump is not the source of the problem. Anything we can do to create extreme transparency and rebuild trust in our voting mechanisms would be a good start.

Even if we could magically convince everyone that the vote was 100% accurate as is, the result is still evidence of significant divisions in the American electorate. Resolving these political differences isn't going to be easy.

I'm not going to pretend to have some magical solutions to these divisions but we are going to have to find a better way to understand and mediate our differences. We need to find a way to rise above the tribalism that is growing stronger every day.

This is really a key point. If the same thing that happened on Wednesday happened in Belarus, I'm sure a lot more people would be sympathetic toward it. Sometimes, as a last resort, violence is necessary to depose evil rulers. So the most important question is how did we get to the point where a large portion of the country is living in an alternative factual reality, to the point where they think the U.S. is now like Belarus in this sense. Also, generally, how do we align better as society on what is true and not true. And I have to say that I personally think Twitter banning the other side is potentially going in the wrong direction as far as solving this problem.

> Simply asserting that they are wrong will not change things

No one is “simply asserting”. They’ve dragged this to court and had ~60 cases thrown out for a lack of evidence. They’ve made the choice to ignore this and acted out, violently, at the prompting of their favorite social-media driven personalities.

You are too focused on the election. The divisions in the electorate pre-date the election. It should be noted that the vehement disagreement about the election is really centered on just a tiny percentage of the votes in a few swing districts.

My point about division is true even if everyone suddenly accepted that the election results were accurate. We need to figure out how to resolve those underlying political differences or every single future election is going to be problematic.

What would you say are the "underlying political differences" here? I'm genuinely curious.

Not possible to outline the details but these are the areas that need attention by serious thinkers. Many of them intersect with each other and this isn't in any particular order:

    * the role of the federal government (federalism, states rights, etc)
    * immigration: byzantine system with no clear rationale driving policy
    * foreign policy: China, Russia, Middle East, North Korea, defense budget
    * global trade: human rights, free-trade, regulatory frameworks
    * sustainable energy policy: fracking, pipelines, renewables, environment
    * education: federal vs state, vouchers, charter schools, fixing urban education
    * police/judicial: militarization of police, public safety, efficient court systems
    * welfare system: another byzantine system with no clear rationale to drive implementation
    * healthcare: yet another byzantine system

Apple changed the pistol emoji to a squirt gun glyph on iOS.

It displays differently on iOS and Android now.

Apple is indeed pushing a specific political agenda.

Regardless of how you feel about gun rights, politically-motivated altering of text is a terrible thing. Imagine if you couldn't type a certain text string on iOS? Altering emoji to be one thing instead of another isn't much different.

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