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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

Oppressive Speech: https://doi.org/10.1080/00048400802370334

Performative Hate Speech Acts. Perlocutionary and Illocutionary Understandings in International Human Rights Law: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334199177_PERFORMAT...

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You are attempting to frame state controls on speech as some form of "liberation". This is quite literally 1984 "Freedom is Slavery" kind of thinking.

Can you be more specific? Give examples of what you mean, if you can.

> “Freedom Is Slavery” because, according to the Party, the man who is independent is doomed to fail. By the same token, “Slavery Is Freedom,” because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want.

Ok but how does that relate to perlocutionary and oppressive speech?

These are not mutually exclusive. One of the primary reasons for laws is to stop people from infringing on the rights of others. These laws are therefore state controls that can simultaneously yield freedom and liberation.

Defamation and libel laws are a classic example. They are an infringement on an individual's right to free speech. However we as society have decided that is justified when that speech is being used to infringe on the rights of another person. Hate speech laws are basically the same thing as defamation and libel laws except they are scaled up to protect groups of people instead of just individuals.

Whether these tradeoffs of one group's rights for another group's rights are worth making is certainly up for debate. However it seems pretty obvious that hate speech laws do serve to provide liberation and freedom for people who would commonly be the recipients of hate speech.

the whole concept of "oppression" in modern context holds absolutely no merit, it's a divisive racist view of American culture and it's been used for political gain again and again.

Since it's published by supposedly reputable academics I think it's a perfect example of misinformation.

There has been oppression and struggle against it for as long as human civilization has existed and writing to record the struggles of the oppressed.

Of course, but when people use that word today they're often talking about something very different from actual persecution.

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