Hacker News Reader

Comment by to_bpr | Hacker News Reader

The number of actual nazis around is so incredibly small that it's not just statistically insignificant, but had that car related incident not happened recently it would go almost totally unmentioned.

The number of people such as yourself who want to censor speech and police thought, however, is frighteningly high. You are the same as those who advocated for book bannings and burnings at other points in history and it is depressing that your point of view has the strength it currently does once again.

View on HN

Maybe not Nazis, but violent bigots are quite abundant. 19 trans women have been murdered just this year, and that's just what gets reported. I hear personal accounts from LGBTQ friends daily about threats and actual violence. Then there's all the other stuff people like me deal with: losing housing, jobs, family because we finally got up the courage to live as who we are rather than what powerful sections of society expect us to be.

I'm a lot more afraid of someone who's decided it's time to "show them queers who's boss" with me as the target than someone who wants to keep that same person off Medium. There are ample publishing opportunities for bigots. Unlike refusing to serve someone at the only grocery store in town, one of a million publishing outlets refusing to take an article has minimal effect.

Relevant aside: the picture of the Nazi book burning often shown when talking about free speech was from a clinic in Germany that researched and supported LGBTQ people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...

>Maybe not Nazis, but violent bigots are quite abundant. 19 trans women have been murdered just this year, and that's just what gets reported. I hear personal accounts from LGBTQ friends daily about threats and actual violence

19 people out of a group of 0.3% of the population (self-reported) being murdered is far below the average intentional homicide rate of the general population.

By far I mean it's working out at about 0.2/100,000 compared to the 4.8/100,000 as experienced overall.

Can we not discuss this without leaning on appeals to emotion and hearsay?

>> Can we not discuss this without leaning on appeals to emotion...

No. I'm not a robot. The value and limits of free speech are all about feelings, especially whose feelings matter more and in what contexts. Without feelings, rights wouldn't matter because no one would care how people treat each other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com