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Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003

On the contrary. I'm not afraid of Nazis, I'm afraid of those who would restrict speech for Nazis. Because once you break the seal, it's simply a matter of time until it's another unpopular thing which gets silenced... and another, and another, until we don't have freedom of speech any more. The road to hell is very much paved with good intentions.

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Me personally? I am pretty afraid of nazis, that's their whole deal, violence on people, that was kind of the whole big problem with them initially and what led to a world war and genocide. A nazi isn't just someone with different viewpoints from my own, it's people who based their whole ideology on violence, against me, my wife, my children, my friends, my coworkers.

> it's simply a matter of time

How much time? Because the way free speech absolutists talk about these ideas always seem to imply that we are mere moments from a country like Germany collapsing into authoritarianism. What evidence do we have that the US's level of free speech is truly better than a country like Germany which does specifically restrict the speech of Nazis?

Certainly, you express what used to be (and probably still is?) conventional wisdom. But, some of us have changed our opinions on this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Can you point to a single time that banning the speech of Nazis has led down a vast slippery slope of further speech bans, particularly in a vaguely democratic country?

Russia is allegedly attacking Ukraine due to Nazis there. The issue with these things is that you can easily motivate horrible things with the "but we are attacking nazis!" argument, that is why people hate it when you say that.

And Russia is transparently lying. “But you call everyone a Nazi” isn’t particularly persuasive - it’s just Republican agitprop.

I used to believe this vehemently. It has become clear that that’s a notion from a bygone age.

The internet has created a global town square where the loudest voices are the ones that catch people’s attention, regardless of the veracity of their claims. There is no truth any more, only the cult of personality.

Tomorrow the US installs a racist, rapist, treasonous kleptocrat as president because the majority of people are unable to think objectively and swallow his promises at face value, despite every indication that life will be immeasurably worse if you’re not a billionaire oligarch.

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