Hacker News Reader

Comment by vpilcx | Hacker News Reader

I think that's really easy to believe in - when you're not at risk in any kind of way.

I mean, if you're a white guy, what do you give a fuck about someone turning America into a white ethnostate? Sure, theoretically, it's morally bad, but you're not really going to be directly affected.

If you're not trans, being characterized as a groomer pedophile has no effect at all to you.

I think it's easy to take a stand in favor of free speech when speech is only speech, but that's a remarkably naive and gullible viewpoint to have. Do you think white supremacists that lynch black people don't use hate speech beforehand and talk about exterminating non-whites beforehand?

"But that's violence. That's diferent.", you might say. How do you think these people meet each other and collaborate with each other and normalize this kind of behavior? Through 'free speech'.

View on HN

Man, I hate doing this, but im going to use identity politics because its fun to use it against the people pushing this shenanigans.

So as someone who is Asian, who thought that claiming the lab leak theory to be racist against Asians to be incredibly stupid, and as someone who has been on the receiving end of multiple insults related to COVID and possibly one violent interaction, I am still a Free Speech Absolutist.

My family knows what its like to live in a world where speech is censored, not by the government, but by everyone you know for saying something out of line with the official narrative. I despise the fact that the current left seems to be all ok with living in a authoritative world where everyone is expected to socially push the current narrative and suppress dissent. The worst part is that since its not directly coming from the Govt, its used as an excuse to continue to push these anti-liberal agendas.

I don't care if I'm on the receiving end of threats or actual violence because of free speech. Giving up your rights due to being scared is cowardice and allows actual authoritarians to take over your mind.

> I don't care if I'm on the receiving end of threats or actual violence because of free speech. Giving up your rights due to being scared is cowardice and allows actual authoritarians to take over your mind.

And assuming that people of color should be the victims of violence because you, personally, aren't concerned with violence is selfish and narcissistic.

And suppressing speech and freedoms due to perceived attacks on identity is a classic fascist move. Funny how that works.

Yeah, I remember during World War II, the Fascists were really giving the Nazis hell. Just classic fascism.

The other side of that coin (which is far more prevalent historically) is that speech restrictions are used to stifle dissent and repress minority groups. I.e. illegalizing anti-war or minority rights speech.

You make the mistake of assuming that those in power will only be preventing speech you agree with rather than muzzling you.

Honestly, I would prefer that over the ambiguity. I'd much rather live in a state in America where being a Nazi is illegal with the side effect of knowing, unequivocally, that I need to leave another state because my existence is in peril.

So are you saying we should outlaw letting people gather and say disagreeable/racist things privately among each other? Boy that escalated pretty quickly. What's next? Should we outlaw people thinking racist and hateful things as well?

Ofcourse, that's what the chip in the vaccine is for!

Actually there are a lot of black supremacists etc, people who absolutely hate me and want my whole race to die and I'll still listen to their podcasts and stuff just because it's something interesting. People who aren't scared to be labelled extreme are usually saying the interesting stuff that needs to be said. You should stop taking everything so serious and just go with the flow

Name three podcasts since there are 'a lot of black supremacists'.

https://soundcloud.com/handymayhem https://youtube.com/@TheUndergroundDialoguePodcast https://soundcloud.com/bmtpod

> people who absolutely hate me and want my whole race to die

What's really interesting about that is I couldn't find one bit of audio that came anywhere near what you're characterizing. Even in the one episode of Underground Dialogue Podcast where they're talking about black secession.

I typed in 'white supremacist podcast'. It took a while to actually get a link because I'm pretty sure Google is censoring the results. (Go, Google!) But here's what I listened to:

https://therightstuff.biz/2023/02/26/ftn-535-some-garbage-po...

I'm obviously just skimming through it but already just from the show notes we have anti-semitsm ('Jewish sex-trafficking money').

Hitting in random points. 22 mins in, nothing. 64 mins "KAnye was right about the jews. tell all black people" 1:51 nothing 3:12 a brief mention of a podcast that I looked up that talks about 'anti-White brainwashing' 4:19 'Columbus Jewish news'

Let's compare that with Hotep because Hoteps in general, should be theoretically the most anti-white podcast out of all the ones you mentioned.

Hotep Episode https://soundcloud.com/handymayhem/hoteps-been-told-you-236-...

First hit: nothing 58 mins: nothing 1h39: mysogyny but within the context of a 'nigga with a pussy' 2h17m - talking about Andrew Tate and Greta Thurnberg; possibly a mysogony subtext 2h43m - anti-Police

> I think it's easy to take a stand in favor of free speech when speech is only speech, but that's a remarkably naive and gullible viewpoint to have. Do you think white supremacists that lynch black people don't use hate speech beforehand and talk about exterminating non-whites beforehand?

What's naïve is thinking that they would stop the lynching if someone told them they weren't allowed to talk about it. It would make zero difference.

> "But that's violence. That's diferent.", you might say. How do you think these people meet each other and collaborate with each other and normalize this kind of behavior? Through 'free speech'.

Conspiracy to commit crimes is illegal for a number of reasons and covers this problem adequately without needing to infringe on speech per se. But you should also remember that it is not words that kill people, it is the actual violence that follows that kills people, and that kind of violence is already illegal.

Plus, racist speech is how we find out who the racists are. David Duke basically outed himself as a Klan member by making racist political speeches in public, for example.

The problem is that these hate movements aren't necessarily linearly correlated to the level of free speech. If there is less free speech, then indirect speech, euphemisms, and dog whistles are used. It doesn't stop it. Once any rule is made, it can be worked around. Even worse, the additional rules often anger and energize these people due to a perceived feeling of persecution. And lastly, the rules always get misinterpreted and abused to shut down significant amounts of speech that should not have been censored.

Unless you can prove with certainty that free speech causes an increase in violence and death, then it's better to default to openness.

The KKK and white supremacists marched in their clown parades regularly for decades and we laughed at them. Is it a coincidence that their movements grew significantly with the amplification of messages against them and social media censorship against them. Various right wing figures used this as leverage to increase their virulence.

Back in the 80s and 90s, we laughed at the KKK. Anyone remember Bustin' Loose with Richard Pryor? Or when Michael Moore got gay black cheerleaders to cheer on a KKK march in some town?

At some point, people decided that we should fear the KKK and white supremacists, and that gave the racists an enormous amount of power even though their numbers are dwindling. I think the world was better when we mocked them and belittled them.

But now the strategy is to call anyone a racist, which is self-defeating and something I vehemently disagree with.

And here's [1] an example of the moment you can see a person double down and becoming even more racist due to being attacked. I don't really like Scott but he didn't strike me as a white supremacist until this comment by him.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/JLPtalk/status/162961454611683328...

I mean, that's a pretty common narrative. "They were being ATTACKED for being racist so they became MORE RACIST." And?

There's this black guy. They did this documentary on him a while back. He went and befriended KKK members and skinheads. Through his individual action, he was able to get people away from white nationalism. White liberals absolutely love him. They point at him as an example of what all people of color should aspire to. Turning hate to friendship through personal interaction.

(Speaking generally, not to you specifically.) The thing is, as a person of color, the onus isn't on me to convert your racist grandparent or uncle from being a racist piece of shit. Fuck them. That puts me in the subordinate position of having to placate a white supremacist and that, in of itself, is fucking white supremacy. Fuck. That.

When you see videos like this, imagine if something similar was made about black people? If I were white, I would be extremely offended if anyone made a video like this about me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZTmbDNLUkk&t=0s

I think the story of Daryl Davis is exactly the point of free speech. If it were up to the fascist liberals, those KKK people would be cancelled into oblivion. But Daryl Davis reached out and talked to them, and through the power of his love, changed hundreds of people. He didn't build up more divisions, he broke them down. This is what Free Speech is all about.

> The thing is, as a person of color, the onus isn't on me to convert your racist grandparent or uncle from being a racist piece of shit. Fuck them. That puts me in the subordinate position of having to placate a white supremacist and that, in of itself, is fucking white supremacy. Fuck. That.

> Is it a coincidence that their movements grew significantly with the amplification of messages against them and social media censorship against them. Various right wing figures used this as leverage to increase their virulence.

Or did we just have a black president and a political party that leaned into white supremacy dog whistles?

I think it's the opposite. It's the people who are at the greatest risk of violence who have the most to fear from censorship. If you are anywhere near powerful enough to commit genocide, you are also powerful enough to ensure that it's your opponents and not you who are censored.

Consider what kind of books are being banned from American libraries. It's books portraying trans and gender-nonconforming people in a positive or neutral light, not books calling them "groomer pedophiles". It's books telling American history from the perspective of America's exploited minorities, not books calling for ethnic genocide or pretending the US actually upheld the principles of freedom and equality it was allegedly founded on.

To support censorship, especially state censorship, is to support the powerful in imposing their version of the truth on everyone else.

I mean, if banning Nazi'ism is considered 'state censorship' then yes, I wholeheartedly support state censorship. If that's 'imposing someone's truth on everyone else', so be it.

Even if you don't value free speech per se, you should recognize the danger of allowing the most powerful to decide what is true or acceptable. You could well find yourself on the opposite side of state censorship. There is no guarantee that Nazis will not again take advantage of a population that is used to follow the state's lead, this time to silence you, or that another group won't do the same. Normalizing such deference to the state is inherently dangerous, and a gift to whoever aspires to take control of it in the future.

It's frankly incomprehensible to me how anyone who doesn't support totalitarianism can look at history (or present day) and dare to normalize any amount of state control over speech.

> There is no guarantee that Nazis will not again take advantage of a population that is used to follow the state's lead, this time to silence you, or that another group won't do the same.

And that's fine. This argument keeps being brought up over and over again, but if this happened, nothing would please more because it would remove the ambiguity from the situation.

> It's frankly incomprehensible to me how anyone who doesn't support totalitarianism can look at history (or present day) and dare to normalize any amount of state control over speech.

I mean, the fact that you can look at The Holocaust or Jim Crow and think that any amount of tolerance should be shown to Nazi'ism or white supremacy is beyond incomprehensible to me. But that's the issue.

For a certain type of person, any legislation curtailing 'free speech', even if that is done to stamp out white supremacy is an existential threat to freedom in America.

But to people of color, allowing white supremacists to spout intolerance publicly with no repercussions (other than maybe getting 'cancelled') is an existential threat to THEIR freedom in America.

I don’t think this is considering the full picture. It would be great if we could magically eliminate nazi ideology, but is the best way to do that really to hand the government extra censorship powers? Do you think the government is going to use that power to benefit the minority groups that need defending, or to advance their own agenda? Even if you have the right elected officials in place to censor things the way you want, what if the next round of elections gives that power to the other team?

Dan Carlin had a great example of this when there was lots of strife between MAGA and antifa groups. Lots of antifa people were calling for censorship of nazi speech while carrying communist flags. Carlin pointed out that if you give the government the power to eliminate that far-right speech, your far-left speech is next to the chopping block.

> Do you think the government is going to use that power to benefit the minority groups that need defending, or to advance their own agenda?

Governments that want to abuse laws can use nearly any law. Don’t like what a media outlet is saying about you? Investigate them for tax evasion.

If you’re worried about government abuses you can argue against having any laws at all.

I don’t know if you’re trying to make an authoritarian argument but it sounds like one.

Yeah I’m worried about government abuses. That’s a pretty fundamental part of democracy

> It would be great if we could magically eliminate nazi ideology

You mean like criminalizing it like the way it is in Germany? That magic?

now I might be naive, but I would tend to think that if I hated someone, for whatever reason, and he lobbied the biggest organized crime syndicate(government) to restrict my ability to talk about my hatred with anyone else, it might just be that I choose to talk with my fists instead of lips.

Surely you cannot think restricting speech helps you in any way? Do you think it helps turn those that dislike you on your side?

> Surely you cannot think restricting speech helps you in any way? Do you think it helps turn those that dislike you on your side?

I think it removes the ambiguity. If you find laws that prohibit someone from being a literal Nazi disagreeable and would choose not to live in a state because of it because of 'free speech', that's fine. Just as I'd be fine for not living in Florida or Mississippi for the inverse of that reason.

what does the "zi" from "nazi" stand for? :) perhaps you should look inwards for similarities.

also, in what way does trying to make someone not be able to talk freely stop people from holding morally reprehensible views?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com