Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

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All political ideologues think their opposition wants to take away their freedoms. If you make the rule that people who want to remove freedoms don't get them, you create a tool for any party in power to silence their opponents.

There is no prerequisite like that in the first amendment. Go read the thing. Monarchism was a serious threat to the founders. Monarchists don't believe in many freedoms including freedom of speech. But the founders didn't specify it only applied to non-monarchs. Because they knew such a feature could be abused.

>You just resorted to what I call "the bad child argument". The bad rich child who already has everything wants an icecream. Mom, for once, says no. The child throws a fit and blames mom for it: if you gave me the ice cream I wouldn't have thrown a fit.

What on Earth are you talking about? Neonazis are spoiled rich kids that get everything they want? Freedom of speech is a luxury like icecream?

> Neonazis are spoiled rich kids that get everything they want

They aren't. They are what was once the middle class, which has been chipped away at for the past 40+ years.

There's systems of misdirection that have been set up to convince them they are coming up short not because of how the rules are constructed by those in power, but because of a dis-empowered scapegoat.

This redirection trick away from the powerful to the unfamiliar outsider is literally (and literarily) from antiquity. It's part of an ancient bagful of common political slight of hand tricks used to fool people.

It doesn't work on everyone, but those it does work on...well we've seen what that looks like yet again.

So just as we wouldn't allow people to go around and seriously promote say smoking in front of infants for the health of the baby, we should think twice about allowing dangerous political nonsense to be spread and entertained as if it's true - especially ideas with a history of inciting mass murder.

> All political ideologues think their opposition wants to take away their freedoms. If you make the rule that people who want to remove freedoms don't get them

Analogous would be "if you make the rule that people who you think want to remove freedoms but actually don't" -- instead you're switching goal posts mid-sentence.

Who gets to determine that? The abortion debate is essentially about both sides claiming the other is taking away a persons rights. On one side it's bodily autonomy on the other right to life (and maybe some religious freeeddom too).

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