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Comment by to3m | Hacker News Reader

Which certain easily offended religion is this?

Why don't you publicly insult them all and find out?

For science, of course.

"Fng goats" is not an insult against Muslims, but rather something that offends a lot of people from goat-rich countries around the mediterranean, even Greece.

> "Fng goats"

Let's not mince words here: it's fucking goats (or Ziegen ficken originally).

Jeeebus... here I was, thinking that goat-fucker is pretty much a generic insult at the schoolyard level and that any adult[1] being called a goat-fucker would probably just laugh it off and get on with their day.

[1] Or semi-clueful child for that matter.

EDIT: I should say, my point is: Given that the actual number of people who fuck goats is miniscule, but probably not zero, the "accusation" is a priori so laughable as to NOT constitute defamation in any reasonable sense. (Hopefully the courts will agree, but it's ridiculous that the prosecution is even allowed to go forward.)

Calling people from that region "goat fuckers" unfortunately has a long history. It's not a generic insult and the use was obviously deliberate. (Of course that was the whole point of that poem.)

OK, so what does it mean? (Semantically) I have a hard time believing that it actually literally means what it says.

How is it different from a generic insult?

Is it akin to calling black people monkeys? (As obviously ludicrous as that is.)

Not from that region but it's probably similar to calling someone a "redneck" which is to say someone that's akin to a country bumpkin. I do think that at some point in history, and even today, it was probably common to fuck goats in some parts of the world on account of that being what was available. I remember watching a Vice video about some parts of Central/South America where it was very normal for adolescent boys to have a "chicken" that they pleasure themselves with. I'll let you google that one yourself.

Does anyone actually get offended at being called a "redneck"? (I'm not from that neck of the woods, so I have to ask.)

(Btw, according to QI the statistic for, uhm, "having sex" with a chicken in Iowa/USA was actually something like 1 in 6.)

the "accusation" is a priori so laughable as to NOT constitute defamation in any reasonable sense. (Hopefully the courts will agree

From what I can tell, he's not being charged under defamation law, so I don't think that's very relevant. It's an old law that criminalizes "insulting a foreign head of state".

It's an insult people from Greece or Turkey hear a lot more often, and many of them seem to perceive it as a racial slur.

Just like you wouldn't be offended by racial slurs not referring to your particular race.

Ah, ok, so it's akin to a racial slur. Thanks for that explanation -- it makes a little more sense now.

> Just like you wouldn't be offended by racial slurs not referring to your particular race.

Personally, I'm not offended by racial slurs referring to my race, but then I was born lucky (white, male), so I probably don't appreciate what it's like to be a minority...

... but is Erdogan from a minority?

(I must confess I know very little about Erdogan, but most of the media I read portray him as just a few inches short of a megalomaniacal dictator.)

EDIT: I find it interesting to contemplate Erdogan's reaction to this compared to the (hypothetical) way, say, Obama would have reacted to this. (Not a US-ian, just for the record.)

Erdogan isn't a minority in his country. And we don't care if he is offended or not. However, there are millions of Turks in Germany, and we should care if they feel offended.

Islam

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