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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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)?

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