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Comment by AyanamiKaine | Hacker News Reader

There is one question I ask myself everytime. Do words hurt in such strong ways that they should be censored? Some simple words may express the wish to end the existence of a particular group of people.

Other words are used to express that something cannot be human. While I personally dont feel much when such words are used against me, others explode with emotions.

I dont see a problem with respecting others if they say a specific word hurts them, why should I use it?

My main question is when people express their opinion and emotions with specific words and we would ban them as hateful. It wouldnt change their emotions or opinions just limit their tools at the current time to express them.

Is supression of opinions and emotions even a good idea? Wouldnt it lead to the search of new tools someone could use?

Our world would be better if we could respect people and their boundaries more.

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> Is supression of opinions and emotions even a good idea?

This is the wrong question. Having free opinions and emotions is such a basic and fundamental good, that any restriction needs to be a lot more than "a good idea" - it needs to clear a lot of thresholds. So it's more like "is it such an undoubtedly good idea with such a large margin that we want to take the risk?"

Words shape worldviews of other people though, and in some circumstances they may act in accordance with those altered perspectives.

This is an absurd standard that no society can hold members to.

If you are judged not on your actions but on the actions others may take due to words they heard from someone who heard them from someone who heard them from you, then we might as well close up shop.

The responsibility for actions remains with the people who those actions.

The exceptions we have traditionally made, "You can't shout 'fire!' in a crowded theatre" same quite reasonable next to, "You cant discuss the sexual dimorphism of humans because someone somewhere might feel bad about themselves"

The standard can be, "don't utter words with the intent of spurring others onto antisocial actions."

Who decides whether or not there was intent behind your words?

What do we do when people disagree about the intent behind a word?

Who decides what is antisocial?

What do we do when people disagree about what is antisocial?

I don't believe there are neat clean answers to any of these. The closest we'll get will involve mutual respect, assumption of good faith, and dialogue. We can't have any of that if our starting point is, "I believe your words are secretly not what you say they are" or "I will hold you responsible for anything bad that anyone does that might be tenuously connected to your words"

Yes, people can always claim that wasn't their intent, but what you see quite often nowadays is people openly saying their intent is to get people to take action. "I wouldn't personally... but I have massive respect for those who do. We need more people with the balls to do something about it."

This is probably less restrictive than you are advocating for in your previous comment: as long as there is plausible deniability, the speech goes free.

> Some simple words may express the wish to end the existence of a particular group of people.

There’s a strong case to be made, that if there’s any ideas that should be considered heretical it’s ideas like that. On this, I think you’d find broad agreement.

However in the current orthodoxy, politely declining to agree that men can be women, to cite one example, is treated as literal genocide.

If we are allowed to paint all ideas we disagree with as literal genocide, then not only have we destroyed the meaning of the word genocide, but it’s not really possible to discuss ideas anymore.

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