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Comment by erkt | Hacker News Reader

250 years ago some people made some bad posts about throwing some tea into the harbor. Calling for revolution isn't a bad post.

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Big fucking difference between saying you want to throw some tea into a harbor vs inciting that hotels containing asylum seekers should be burnt down.

That's charitable to say that nobody was saying anything except for "let's drown that tea".

Weird that you think it was legal for people to say "kill the king" back then.

Buddy you aren't addressing the comments that are replying to you.

You gotta stay on-topic. You keep coming up with random things to compare to that make no sense to anybody but you. Who said it was legal to say "kill the king"?

Diffrence being state did not have control to stop disgruntled people from organizing. And it might be that preventing such formations is actually detrimental long run.

The state did everything they could to prevent it back then, just as they do right now.

Everything they could was a lot less back before the fruits of industrial productivity allowed people to have their basic needs met while giving a huge fraction of their surplus to the state to do what it pleases with.

Using this line of argumentation, you might as well start enslaving (sorry, “impressing”) people into your navy again.

Yes, and perfect law enforcement is much worse than society than spotty law enforcement, because spotty law enforcement is how all societal progress got made.

Imagine if we jailed every gay person the moment they had a gay thought. How legal do you think being gay would be now?

I mean, in terms of property damage, the Boston Tea Party was a pretty big deal. Probably in arson territory in today's dollars.

This comment is remarkable in its lack of nuance. There's a huge spectrum of, let's call it, aggressive speech, ranging from trying to organize against an oppressive figure or class, to just punching down against people and groups who have either done nothing to the author of that speech which warrants an aggressive response, or where the target of that speech is already a victim.

My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.

And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?

>There's a huge spectrum of, let's call it, aggressive speech, ranging from…

Why do you talk like that?

Are you one of the redditors that has been invading this heterodox environment.

>There's a spectrum of aggressive speech, ranging from

Is sufficient and much less cringe.

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