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Comment by alex_young | Hacker News Reader

It's really important realize this distinction. Imagine a newspaper printing a letter to the editor from a person whose words have previously incited a riot.

I find it surprising that they enabled the account again at all after the 6th.

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In the terrorism of the 60s through to the 90s a common demand in hostage situations was to have a letter read out in the media. The PFLP would do it, the Red Army Brigades, even the Unabomber demanded his manifesto be printed

They needed to take hostages to get published because most media wouldn't air their messaging because of their support of violence

In the modern age they'd all have free platforms and likely amplification.

If they had a platform, wouldn’t they then not need to resort to violence to get their message heard?

It seems like those are examples of censorship driving individuals to violence.

You also can't rule out that if they had a platform, they'd use it to incite others to resort to violence on their behalf. For example, the Unabomber's manifesto expresses his belief that violence was necessary to provoke revolution against the technological society. The Unabomber's bombings were the "pre-violence" required to get his ideas out there, of which of which a violent revolution was one.

Agreed. It doesn’t seem obvious to me whether or not censoring results in less violence in the parent’s examples.

Maybe it is obvious to those more well read on them.

Censorship driving people to violence in this case is much like a girl being pretty driving a goon to rape. The cause of the act in both cases is the perpetrators warped sense of ownership. Specifically ownership of other's thoughts, body, and time. They would feel entitled to that ownership whether met with resistence or not. In this case censorship seems reasonable otherwise you end up tacitly fostering the perpetrators view of ownership with your submission.

Given Trumps comments about women and Giuliani getting caught with his hands down their. The statement "not able to keep his hands in his pocket" is super on point.

Your account has been using the site primarily (exclusively even?) for political and ideological battle. That's the line at which we ban accounts, regardless of which politics or ideology they're battling for (see [1] for more explanation). We have to, because it destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation, not smiting enemies.

I've therefore banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. The rules are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I believe they did so to fire a warning shot, to be able to argue later that they were not banning immediately. I bet they knew that guy wouldn’t be able to keep his thumbs in his pockets – and that’s 100% on him.

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