Comment by tylerhou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tylerhou | Hacker News Reader

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> Picture instead private businesses who all refuse to do business with Jews.

This is a false equivalency.

Race, religion, etc. are protected classes. It's impossible for people to change their race, and our society has agreed that we shouldn't force people to change their religion.

Political beliefs are not protected classes. When your political beliefs include inciting violence by spreading unfounded conspiracy theories, then private companies have a right to kick you off.

> Certainly all the tech companies banding together to silence politics they don't like plays exactly into the narrative the far right is pushing.

In my opinion, the far right is already too far gone — they are already conspiracy theorists. Any contradictory information will be used as evidence to show that the conspiracy is much wider and bigger than one could have imagined — adding to the weight of the theory. There is no reasoning with them unless someone they truly believe (read: Trump) dismisses the theory convincingly.

Protected classes were defined in the law only because we decided they should be. Nothing says it can't include more or fewer things as the winds of opinion blow in a different direction. A religion isn't really much different from other belief systems after all.

This is a common error in reasoning by the way: looking to the way current law happens to be and inferring from that what the right thing to do is. For example, it is not against the first amendment for Amazon to ban Republicans. This does not mean it would be a good thing for Amazon to ban Republicans. Similarly I'm sure, if you tried, you could come up with all kinds of unjust laws that punish things that should not be punished (I certainly can think of many).

> This is a common error in reasoning by the way: looking to the way current law happens to be and inferring from that what the right thing to do is.

I understand this, and the understanding is implicit in the way I phrased: "our society has agreed that we shouldn't force people to change their religion." It's also worth noting that "religion" here usually refers to practices and beliefs that don't infringe on other people's rights. To evaluate whether these practices infringe on someone's rights, one should take into account their protected classes: i.e. you're not allowed to discriminate against a person's skin color even if your religion says that you should.

Our society has also agreed that certain beliefs are reprehensible and deserve no place in society: both major political sides think that advocating for violence is unacceptable, and therefore both the Democrats and the (centrist) Republicans cannot claim that private companies who refuse to host a platform that allows calls for violence are unjustly discriminating — if the politicians want to be logically consistent. (This is what I meant by "When your political beliefs include inciting violence by spreading unfounded conspiracy theories, then private companies have a right to kick you off.") This is a positive statement, not a normative statement.

Normatively, alt-right beliefs should not be given the same protections as religions because they infringe on other people's rights. For example, repeated, false allegations of voter fraud indirectly infringe on people's right to vote because they effect court cases that call for legitimate voters to be disenfranchised.

Amazon is not banning Republicans. Amazon is dropping a risky client after having more than reasonable doubts about that client's ability to operate in good faith. Republican views are not being censored. The fact that this site happens to cater to a lot of "Republicans" who feel marginalized by public discourse is merely a very telling correlation between a political view and a tendency towards violent tendencies and conspiratorial beliefs.

A religion is similar to politics only in that they are both beliefs. Your argument is essentially that any belief could/should be protected. I don't think you mean that, so I urge you to try to come up with a more coherent formulation.

I would start by exploring the differences between what it means to hold a religious belief vs a political one. Maybe start by comparing how each of the above has changed, or the associations thereof with their respective ideals over, say, the last 1000 years. Maybe then proceed to identify from where a religious belief manifests vs a political belief. Finally, you could look towards the kinds of answers of which each respective belief offers explanatory power (i.e. What kinds of questions does religion answer vs politics?). We could probably even take this a step further and look at the history of each as well no? Political leanings have existed at least as long as religious beliefs. At one time these were likely the same! So what is it about the history of politics and religion that has lead us to the the kinds of separation we have reached today?

I have confidence you can come up with many kinds of differences. Good luck!

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