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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

It does seem tame, but a quick search suggests it may be an anti-semitic dog whistle.

Some insults are simply worse depending on who they are targeting. It is the difference between calling GW Bush a monkey because he occasionally looked like a monkey and Obama being called a monkey as a racial slur. The former is a childish insult that is easy to ignore. The latter is a form of bigotry that shouldn't be tolerated.

> Some insults are simply worse depending on who they are targeting.

That's just an ideological step that is unwise to adopt. Taking that as a philosophy, anything you say is an intolerable statement because of who might get offended by it. This is antithetical to free speech as prior restraint. I don't know why anyone would subscribe to such a viewpoint. Every philosophy has boons and banes, but that doesn't mean the philosophy is absolute nor moral.

I think the position you're addressing is actually a practical one. Context is huge in communication, and who is being addressed is a big part of that context. It's hard for me to believe that you actually think that taking that specific context into account leads to the conclusion that all statements are intolerable.

No, the unwise thing is to ignore context and history.

"This is antithetical to free speech as prior restraint"

No, it isn't. Free Speech doesn't mean you get to ignore context, and it doesn't mean you don't face consequences for your speech.

> anything you say is an intolerable statement because of who might get offended by it.

That isn't what OP said though. I believe they were commenting that all words are not the same to every group of people and cultural and historical context matters.

Exactly. It has nothing to do with who might be offended. It has to do with a history of racial oppression. No one is going to complain if you compare a individual black person to a rat or an individual Jewish person to a monkey because there is no historical precedent of those insults being used as blanket attacks against those groups. It is when you flip those two that you will get in trouble.

It's called "context".

Why is making fun of Obama as a monkey any different than with Bush? Why is it racist? Obama is white, Bush is white. They both have big ears.

Similarly, Trump is mocked as an orangutan. Is that racist against his European heritage (red/orange hair of Irish/Scottish/German)?

Much of the point of a dog whistle (as I understand it) is plausible deniability. The parent comment stands: shutting it down over something that "may mean something" -- even though with context you may be quite sure -- is a bad look.

The next step is simply to point at the myriad of other times anyone called someone a rat on Twitter and Twitter is left to defend a position of shutting people down over what they were thinking when they wrote something.

They should have used one of the many better reasons they had for this this case.

Or we should just be willing to call dog whistles what they are and stop feeling the need to respond when people cry 'but that person used the word rat over there!'.

It's possible I've been living under a rock, but while I'm aware of rat being pejorative, I'm finding out in this thread for the first time about the anti-semitic undertones.

It's pretty clear that the difference is context, but I also don't think there can be clear guidelines if Twitter is expected to delve into the context for each tweet its users make.

In fairness, context typically doesn't provide smoking guns as pungent as this one. I'd still say it's not beyond reasonable doubt (and I'd guess most would be ok with that for a Twitter ban -- it's not prison or death).

So, sure, everyone should call it a dog whistle on the preponderance of evidence, but there were almost certainly better grounds for the ban. I doubt there will ever be a good ban target whose only giveaway is dog whistles.

I was aware of it, but I couldn’t have told you about it without prompting. I didn’t remember it that well. As soon as someone mentioned what it was it made perfect sense to me.

Yeah, that’s the complex part of all of this. As you said context is king here, and Jones is very well known for making implicit or explicit derogatory remarks about Jewish people. There really isn’t room for him to claim “I didn’t know that“.

> there were almost certainly better grounds for the ban

I think you’re right that this was sort of a cherry pick.

He’s done way more than enough stuff in the past to earn him a ban but they never acted on it.

After the hearing and his behavior immediately after I’m guessing they were tired of defending him and having to answer these questions AGAIN.

But it would seem especially strange/capricious just say “that thing you did three months ago that we gave you a pass on? Now you’re out.“

So I think they just chose the latest thing as their “instigating” incident and said that plus the totality of his previous behavior meant a total ban.

Even though the most recent thing is not as bad (relative to his previous ‘highs’).

> After the hearing and his behavior immediately after I’m guessing they were tired of defending him and having to answer these questions AGAIN.

Did you listen to the hearing?

Jack was being questioned for unfairly silencing conservatives.

I know with the hearing was about. And I know they’re desperately trying to say that they are not silencomg conservatives. Jones has been a very obvious case of someone who has stayed on the platform despite violating the TOS multiple times.

And then after the hearing: Jones went up to a reporter from CNN, screamed in his face, made anti-Semitic remarks about him, AND POSTED IT TO TWITTER.

They was supposed to continue to let the TOS violations go? He probably chose the worst possible time/place to misbehave.

The only thing that would make any sense is that he PURPOSEFULLY did this to get kicked off as “proof” he’s being censored. I’m sure that’s the narrative he’s pushing.

Did he know the end was coming anyway and decided to make the best of it? Did he think they were “losing“ the hearing and he needed to provide “proof”?

Or is he just that incapable of controlling himself/behaving?

Doesn’t matter. He explicitly chose to shoot himself in the foot. I don’t see how Twitter had a choice.

“Do we want all the Democrats mad at us over Jones plus all the Republicans over ‘censorship’... or do we want to enforce our TOS, say he didn’t give us a choice, and be no worse off than yesterday (slightly better with Ds)?“

> I know they’re desperately trying to say that they are not silencomg conservatives.

And then they go and silence Alex Jones the very next day...

> Jones went up to a reporter from CNN, screamed in his face, made anti-Semitic remarks about him, AND POSTED IT TO TWITTER.

He confronted one of the key people responsible for deplatforming him.

He wasn’t screaming and he didn’t make anti-Semitic remarks.

He did get in the guys face and was making a lot of offensive comments.

> The only thing that would make any sense is that he PURPOSEFULLY did this to get kicked off as “proof” he’s being censored

Of course he did.

Now all conservatives have to do is document all the offensive left-leaning tweets over the next few weeks and Congress will drag Jack right back to explain his clear bias against conservatives.

Or alternatively Twitter will be forced to start applying its rules equally to the left (fat chance). I’ve reported 3 significantly more offensive tweets already today.

If Jones did nothing then smaller less popular conservative voices would continue to be unfairly silenced and in the long term he would surely be banned as well.

Quite. See, for example, the 1940 Nazi propaganda film "The Eternal Jew." Quoting Wikipedia: "The film utilizes a montage that juxtaposes these images of ghetto Jews with images of rats to draw an analogy between the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe with the migration of rats. For example, one of the shots shows a pack of rats emerging from a sewer, followed by a shot of a crowd of Jews in a bustling street of the Łódź Ghetto. Close-ups of those in the crowd reveal sickly, malformed facial features. The narrator states that, as rats are the vermin of the animal kingdom, Jews are the vermin of the human race and similarly spread disease and corruption."

Is Oliver Darcy Jewish?

Does it matter?

If this kind of behavior is against the platform rules, should the rules only apply if someone can prove that the person didn’t make a mistake in who they were targeting?

I am not a fan of Alex Jones but he is not an anti-semite.

In fact I suspect you have it backward. Jones will be intimately aware of (some of) the far left and (some of) far right anti-semite culture - it takes some character to see the big picture and in my personal exhaustive experience with that world most people exposed to those cultures would become anti-semites fast.

Jone's nemesis is altogether more abstract - he sees himself as crusader against a modern meme similar to communism or fascism.

I've seen clips of Alex Jones deriding Brian Stelter, zooming into his face, calling him a "devil" and a "demon" of all things. It was rather surreal. What could Alex Jones possibly getting at with that?

I think it's possible many people don't have much experience with anti-semitism so it seems unrelated (as for me) but given Jones' track record and other clips I've seen of him, it's pretty clear he plays with anti-semitism.

I have a lot of experience with anti-semitism - I've followed many extreme forums over the years and it's one of the most consistent patterns - even in oppositional ideologies.

Alex Jones is influential enough that he could, to use the parlance 'name the jew' and most of his followers would follow along with it or he would get new ones. If you think that he would find himself marginalized you are absolutely wrong - that would only occur at one level of society and the polite part isn't close to being meaningful - there is a huge market for this.

Throwing all people you find objectionable into one bucket is an error.

There's a funny irony in suggesting that one heard a dog whistle.

That’s kind of the point. It’s a message intended to be “heard” by a certain audience but not everyone the same way dogs hear a dog whistle but most humans do not.

It seems like every comment by someone the left doesn’t like is a kind of dog whistle.

Doesn't mean they're wrong. There's a reason they don't like those words/phrases.

> Doesn't mean they're wrong.

If you have watched Alex Jones before you will know he happily speaks his mind and is not afraid to come across as offensive or crazy.

It is not in his character to hide secret meanings in his content.

He was put on notice by Twitter with a week ban. That's the exact circumstance where someone like him would start using coded language to try and avoid a ban while still promoting his ideas. That's the purpose of coded language.

Ah. the good old: lets criticize a generalization by making a generalization.

Always a strong argument :)

Since when does the broadness of an observation or argument have any impact on its validity? Who made up that rule?

I'm confident that people tend to extrapolate anecdotal negative experiences about groups of people in bad faith, and that, as the group size increases, this tendency increases relative to the availability of more objective observations. If that's true, the broader the group subjected to a negative generalization, the more likely it is that the observation is as I described. Combined with intuition about the nature of the negativity, I can sometimes feel confident expressing an opinion about the observation one way or the other (e.g. "I think X people are less conversational" vs "I think X people are mostly violent thugs").

Comparing Jews to rats is a classic Nazi trope. It's actually a dog whistle, for real and true.

I'm not sure it's subtle enough to be a dog whistle; it's more like a train whistle, really.

At least the grandparent comment had the decency to generalize about a smaller, more ideologically narrow group of people than "the right" or "the left".

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