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Comment by ArchTypical | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

It's called "context".

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.

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