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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

> Violence and dehumanization of women should not be acceptable outcomes of free speech. We also have to consider whose voices are being heard, and whose are being silenced. Does free speech apply to women, to survivors of rape and sexual assault? Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?

Every time someone insists on an escape hatch, it is immediately abused. One could have seen this coming.

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Remember how the homicide rate exploded after violent video games became popular?

They know this logic doesn't make sense. People are unfortunately happy to lie about it, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

They insisted rock and roll, jazz, and dancing they didn't like were going to harm women too. Somehow that didn't seem to happen either.

Don't forget the D&D satanic panic! I also remember my local Baptist youth group burning Harry Potter books back when they came out. These people are unreasonable, they don't care about logic. They care about imposing their views and morals on those around them.

No, no, no. You're both wrong. It was heavy metal.

RIP Ozzy.

They have a religion whose identity is in being oppressed in a world where they are the de facto ruler.

>Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?

Worth pointing out that their definition of "right to object" is evidentially identical to "right to censor".

Well, that's not precise. They are simply objecting. Others are listening to them. I have a right to tell you to go eat a pile of dung[0], for instance. Should you then go eat the dung, it is not that I exercised my right to make you eat dung.

They are simply participating in the once-maligned "cancel culture" which was protected as "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences". These kinds of escape hatches always have these results because one's enemies find a way to use them as well.

0: Just for the sake of argument. I'm not actually insulting you.

I am absolutely against the concept of "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences" in the same way I am against Soviet "freedom of speech but not freedom after speech".

That makes no sense. Frequently the "consequences" of speech is other speech. Are you going to try to argue that the original speech should be privileged over the response?

I do not give a shit about people responding to speech with speech. I am arguing that responding to speech by using your authority over the speaker to hurt them, or by lobbying an authority to do so is something different than speech. Did you see the context for this thread? This is the rhetorical question I responded to: "Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?". I hold that they absolutely do have a right to object to such speech, any speech in fact, but "objecting" is not the same as lobbying Visa/Mastercard to ban speech they believe "promotes and normalizes violence against us".

>>"objecting" is not the same as lobbying Visa/Mastercard to ban speech they believe "promotes and normalizes violence against us"

Why not? Like, I'm a full on anarchist, but how do you create any sort of functioning society without out people being able to say "we as a group don't like that shit and are going to do things to stop it from happening"? Like if burger king comes out and says "We sell dogs here now" am i not allowed to say "fuck this, I'm allergic to dogs but I loved whoppers, I'm going to picket outside BK until the king fixes this travesty of hamburgers?"

Again, I'm an anarchist so I have weird views on a lot of topics, but isn't this a problem that "the capital class wants to continue to have profit go up and to the right on their charts, they're cowardly and uncreative so they fear anything that destabilizes this movement on their charts, and large networks of people are the only thing that can utilize this fear to cause them to change their behaviors"?

If the shit that you don't like is people talking and that causes your society to stop functioning, your society should not exist.

> lobbying an authority to do so is something different than speech

Really? How is it different, specifically?

If you're a guest in my house and you say something racist and I ask you to leave...

Or you're a customer in my restaurant...

Or you work for the company I'm a ceo of...

Which one of those freedoms should I be disallowed from using?

(The actual issue here is that mastercard/visa are effectively a duopoly with no competition. The only reasonable way to have a monopoly provider of a vital service is to make it part of a democratic government)

>Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?

If men don't, then neither should women, who are murdered at 1/10th the rate men are.

Murder is not the only violent crime. Please don't construct such obviously poor strawmen. Both men and women suffer similar rates of violence, albeit typically different violence.

Trans people suffer a wildly higher rate of violent crime than either cis gender.

> Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?

I mean this sounds reasonable until you also consider that shows like Game of Thrones would then also be banned, and probably plenty of popular books.

Hell, you could use the same reasoning to target most video games, since most video games use some level of violence.

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