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Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

"In mind" - what does this mean? Who exactly gets to define "in mind"? Like, you're now literally reading people's minds about their intentions? So I don't need to explicitly tell people to go do bad things, I can just say I'm upset about something and that's enough? I can make some bogus claim and that's enough? Because there aren't that many people spewing bullshit all day long on twitter? And let me take a wild guess on what your conclusion will be for people who say vague things on "your" side vs the "other" side...

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That’s the difficulty, isn’t it? If I say, let’s go and burn that police station down now! Let’s be there at 9:15. It’s pretty clear. If you say, I wish that police station would get burned down. I don’t know. It’s not a nice thought, but you’re not actively working to have it burned down. On the other hand the wish does not have pure intentions.

This is why I think it’s impossible to “monitor” and purge or ban violent tweets or what have you.

One, what is the intention of the speaker, two who is responsible for the audiences reaction? Do you take the most extremely negative interpretation? It cannot work.

And that’s not even taking slang into account where violent words don’t mean violence and normal words can take on other meanings.

Context matters.

"Let’s go and burn that police station down now"

If anyone I knew said that I would treat it as a dry joke.

I guess this is the problem in identifying “shooters”.

Lots of people kid around about horrible things but don’t mean it. One day you find out that one of the kids was not joking and actually meant it. Even people who are friends of the perp have problems sussing this out and can only do it in retrospect.

What about songs like kill the police by ice tea. A direct call to action exists / police have been killed but he still is free to act in police dramas?

If we took “progressive” politics out of it but retained that we need to remove “violence” from discourse, yes they would have to be banned from Twitter.

Progressive politics will say we have to consider the background of the singer and the audience as mitigating circumstance so they might let it slide.

Objectively it would have to be banned if we use Twitter’s new rubric.

(fyi the song is Cop Killer by Ice-T.)

Endlessly peppering people with questions is sometimes called Sealioning. How about engaging with the point(s) made by the person you're replying to, and offering your own suggestions for how you'd go about things. Also, the HN guidelines (link at the bottom of the page) encourage you to respond to the strongest possible interpretation of what was said, rather than the worst.

But that's the ENTIRE point here! This supposed itty-bitty exception - "Hey, just no bad stuff, okay?" - is actually EVERYTHING. You say something like "Just no hate speech" or "Only if they have violence in mind" and those statements inherently violate the very notion of free speech the people are erroneously saying they're in favor of, and those innocent-sounding qualifiers are why things are devolving so rapidly. We've taken a simple concept that worked brilliantly for 250 years (free speech) and in the blink of an eye, now that online life has (for better or worse) usurped the government's role in setting rules for society, we're just rearranging how the game is played. This is the broader issue, online life (for lack of a better phrase, but I hope you get my point) has become so ubiquitous that it's like some sort of alternate society with a new governance. We wouldn't/couldn't insert these qualifiers into the constitution, but here we are giddily doing it for our new alternate world.

By all means offer your own proposals, ideally taking account of widely known priors such as the events of last Wednesday.

That's not what sealioning is.

http://wondermark.com/1k62/

Reasonable people can disagree

From Wikipedia

> Sealioning (also spelled sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate".

One post is not it.

It's not just one post. The same person posed something like 15 different questions in the thread. Soliciting clarity on another's views via questioning is a valid kind of discourse, but Socrates also took time to listen to answers and offer his own views rather than throwing out 5 questions in a row.

Also, if you read that Wikipedia article to the end you'll realize that I pointed you to the original use of the term.

No he didn’t. He just made that one post with the questions and you randomly accused him of sealioning. Just asking questions is not sealioning. I know where the term originated.

That's simply false. Anyone who looks back up the subthread can see for themselves that there are 9 posts from the same person and most of them are rhetorical questions. I don't know who you think you're going to convince by making such counterfactual statements, but I see no point in further discussion. Bye.

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