Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

Has the illiberal left not been smugly telling us "Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" when others lost their jobs? They hardly have any right to complain when they are hoist by their own petard.

View on HN

A discussion on what is right is not a game between two football teams and you don't even know what my "side" is. Fwiw, feel free to look up my seven-year-old HN comments about James Damore.

My comment wasn't a criticism of yours? It was more of a comment on the past views of others on HN.

OK cool.

That doesn't explain why the right - which has been just as smugly insisting that freedom of speech must mean freedom from consequences - doesn't seem to have a problem with it.

I couldn't care less what the conservatives think. Their blatantly fake support of freedom of speech was always conditional and self-serving.

Almost everyone's support of freedom of speech and any freedom is conditional and self serving, that's just human nature. Why are you going out of your way to only complain about the "illiberal left?"

Because 1) conservatives rarely bother to speak up on HN; they know they are quite unwelcome here and 2) the illiberal left claims to be allied with liberals and that's clearly false.

Conservatives speak up all the time on HN, and weirdly enough they sound exactly like you do, down to the inability to refer to the left without a pejorative.

Conservatives ignorantly tend to refer to everything to the left of them as "liberals" even to behavior that is quite illiberal, so the distinction is important. But you're welcome to believe whatever you wish; it's a free country.

> as "liberals" even to behavior that is quite illiberal

That's actually the label the left has taken on themselves, blaming conservatives for it is really weird. Yes, the behavior of the modern left has little to do with the classical liberalism, but it's not the conservatives' fault that the left took on themselves this mantle and then failed to live up to it.

but all the center-right comments (what you guys call conservative or more commonly the f-word) are made from throwaway accounts

Because they have been deliberately excluded from participating in the discussion early on, so the only solace they have is watching the left eat their own. If the right doesn't get freedom, they'd at least enjoy their enemies getting the same treatment. It's a sad bargain but the only one available as it seems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com