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Comment by ar15saveslives | Hacker News Reader

Your definition of "hateful" can differ from mine.

Fair enough, but that only goes so far. The usefulness of language depends on there being commonly held definitions between the speakers. If I said, "your definition of 'broom' can differ from mine", things would start to fall apart pretty quickly.

Now that our (US) government is in the business of defining our words for us (eg, "terrorist", "hate speech"), I think it would be wise for us commoners to start working out amongst ourselves what we want these words to actually mean so that we can agree on their definitions.

My current definition of "hateful" would be anything that points to some "other" as "less than".

What's your definition?

The word hate is no longer useful, because it's become a shorthand pejorative to be wielded by the Left. Don't like Obama, you hate black people, don't like Hillary you hate women, etc.

Well, when a person says "I don't give a damn about diversity" - for me it's far from "hate speech". Or when Trump insults some journalist, it's stupid and childish, but it's just an insult, not hate speech. And the fact that the journalist is a woman, doesn't make him "sexist".

My definition of hate speech is when Trump says "hey, {black people,white people,men,women,gays} are garbage, they shouldn't have rights, and I don't want them to exist".

Does he say that?

Of course he doesn't say that. Or at least he hasn't yet (that we know of).

I can see that my definition of "hate speech" is much, much broader than yours, however. So it will only be a time-sink for us to try to come to any agreement in the immediate future.

That said, I appreciate your response and will give it some thought.

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