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Comment by goobatrooba | Hacker News Reader

I read through this drivel and it's nothing more than conjecture and anecdotes from someone who seems never to have been to Europe. Nearly every example of his critique is of the UK, not Europe as a whole, and each of them has plenty of counterexamples of the same thing happening in the US.

In short: nonsense. Completely made up narrative filled with quotes from same-belief people, claiming moral outrage about issues they either don't understand or wilfully misrepresent.

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I'm pretty sure the President and CEO of the leading free expression organization today understands what he's talking about and is fully aware that there are bad things happening in this vein in the US.

The guy who literally actively helped to create the current USA situation? Yeah. All the while he pointificated about free speech, he had clear favorites whose speech mattered and who should shut up.

When the left is censoring more (as was true in the run-up to Trump's election), of course a free speech organization will be opposing left-wing censorship more frequently.

Censorship doesn't help your team, just the opposite. https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...

Trump's election was a reaction to left-wing cancel culture. If people had listened to FIRE, and refuted bad ideas instead of censoring them, maybe Trump wouldn't have been elected: https://qr.ae/pYCVXO

Do you have any specific disagreements you can share with the criticism of the actual content that the parent comment gave, or do you think that the author's job title is more important than whether what they said is actually correct?

The parent comment in question has essentially zero in the way of supporting evidence. The author's first claim happened to be verifiable. I attempted to verify it, and it was pretty clearly false.

What's asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

I guess I might not have been clear. I'm specifically wondering about this part, which is what I was referring to about the critique they gave of the actual content:

> Nearly every example of his critique is of the UK, not Europe as a whole, and each of them has plenty of counterexamples of the same thing happening in the US.

Separated from the ad hominems on both sides, it seems like a pretty reasonable criticism to me. It doesn't seem obvious to me that it should be dismissed as irrelevant.

Well, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that when someone claims that the author is "claiming moral outrage about issues they either don't understand or wilfully misrepresent" then what he does for a living matters.

Sure, but if I'm trying to verify the accuracy of their claims, their job both giving them potential subject expertise but also potential bias towards making the exact claims that are being criticized, it doesn't really clear anything up, so I'm back to trying to understand if there's any counterargument to the criticism other than their pedigree.

>Nearly every example of his critique is of the UK

I just used a word count tool to sanity-check this claim. It said there are 1061 words about the UK and 1684 words about non-UK countries.

You appear to be fibbing about easy-to-check facts. Anyone who trusts you on your harder-to-verify claims is a fool.

There seems to be a bit of a pattern I've noticed with Europeans on HN. They criticize the US constantly, yet flip out instantly when their countries are criticized, to the point of reflexively lying about stuff which is easily checkable.

I can sorta understand lying about claims which are hard to verify. It's distasteful, but I can understand why a certain type of person would do it. But, why lie about stuff which takes under 60 seconds to check? What are you trying to accomplish?

BTW, I hope you aren't in Germany. It's a crime to insult someone or spread malicious gossip online in Germany. Your usage of "drivel" might be considered an insult which could get your phone confiscated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc#t=3m

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