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Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

I'm okay with racists, xenophobes, misogynists, flat earthers, vaxxers, truthers, etc. keeping their thoughts to themselves.

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So anyone who doesn't agree with you becomes just a label?

That kind of dehumanisation and humiliation is exactly what helped create Brexit/Trump.

And I'm still seeing it happen, so I can only imagine it's going to create even worse things than those two.

> That kind of dehumanisation and humiliation is exactly what helped create Brexit/Trump.

I hate seeing this, as it's become massively apparent that these political events have given the green flag for racism to decamp from the shadows into public life.

I'm following a pretty funny Twitter account now, that posted exactly what I'm talking about, only a few days ago.[1] I'm 100% fine with conservative/liberal viewpoints, just as long as they're not completely charged with prejudice for another person.

"Fierce austerity is required for our economy, and welfare must be curbed" - fine, I disagree, but absolutely fine.

"We voted for Brexit to get those f*ng foreigners out of our land" - nah, mate.

[1] https://twitter.com/AnInfiniteDaz/status/968042985924517888

My deal breakers are hypocrisy and punching down.

Exactly. I'm further left than most democrats, maybe a socialist, and got vilified as reactionary capitalist Trump supporter more than once during the last election cycle because I didn't support Hillary, even though I supported Trump even less. The Left cut off their nose to spite their face and fractured the unity. They've been captured by the same fox news style brainwashing that took over the conservatives during the last Bush administration.

You should take a moment and critically contemplate why you think that someone who is not a leftist liberal is automatically a racist, xenophobe, misogynist, flat earther, vaxxer, truther or other arbitrary pejorative.

A self righteous, binary "us vs them" outlook is a sure sign of an impoverished mind.

I have far more experience with the left than you. I happily ignore my tribe's kooks too.

All the whackadoodles are a distraction. Don't fall for it.

I've no idea if you or I have the most experience with the left, but I live in a socialist country where the leftist 'whackadoodles' have had way too much cultural/political power, and they have been very successful in labeling all viewpoints that do not agree with their narrative as evil.

What is such behavior trying to distract me from?

It's not only these that have learned to keep their mouth shut. I'm even skeptical that they do. Extreme positions are uncontrollable, they demand to be heard. The more moderate, the more nuanced a position is, harder it is to put it on card board and hide your face behind it. And by moderate, nowadays, we should understand anything that is not extreme left or right. There's a deep commonality, unconscious most of the time if not always, between those extremes. That's why they only think and act and hate as if only they exist. They and their enemies.

We agree that extreme demands attention. We probably disagree on what to do about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

I grew up believing silence is death. The distinction, lost on all the defenders of hate speech, is punching up vs punching down.

No, not all. I would never trash an under privileged group of people but I do recognize the reason that hate speech is protected constitutionally and why it has been upheld in the Supreme Court. Fuck censorship.

See? We don't even share the same definition for hate speech.

What do you mean? I'm just saying that I wouldn't use hate speech but I defend the right of others to do so. You said "lost on all the defenders of hate speech". I am a defender, but not user, of hate speech.

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