Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

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It’s relevant because the underlying principles of not tarring vast populations with collective responsibility, or silencing entire categories of ideology, in response to the acts of a few extremists is completely abandoned by the left when they have something to gain from it.

If right-wing terrorists are treated differently by the US government, it is probably because there are not large organizations of them, nor are there groups of them overseas that we can engage militarily. When there have been large, organized right-wing terror groups like The Order and the Aryan Nations, they’ve been vigorously investigated and shut down in accordance with normal law enforcement.

Taking the further step of outlawing free expression or infringing upon the freedom of association—even when truly reprehensible ideologies are at issue—is not a step that any Western government has taken for any other terrorist threat.

I think you’re not very educated on what ISIS is if you think they are more organised than the radical right groups.

I mean, here in Europe many of these right groups and parties are even funded by a foreign nation state. They’ll call it fake news, but it’s actually in their own books. You can’t be a political organisation without having public books here, and every right wing movement in my country is mainly funded by Russia. They may have different names, but they’re extremely organised.

Maybe that’s different in America, but I doubt it, though it’s obviously harder to prove if there isn’t public records.

If and when that’s the case, it’s appropriate for eg the FBI to intervene, and most of the well-organized groups have been broken up. The issue in the US now is lone wolves, who are orders of magnitude less well-organized than a group that used to control vast amounts of Iraq and Syria by force of arms.

The proposed solution of cracking down on, say, conspiracy theory forums is categorically different from cracking down on actual terrorist organizations, and more akin to silencing radicalized imams and the like. While it’s true that many European countries do suppress particular political ideologies, even most of these bans are superficial, which is why Europe still has crypto-fascist parties.

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