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Comment by rangoon626 | Hacker News Reader

I think most people don’t understand that the regime will define and redefine what hate speech is, over time.

It’s those icky conservatives now, but the same mechanism will be used against more people tomorrow, as needed.

Well, Merriam-Webster dictionary changed the definition of "sexual preference" to justify the outrage against Amy Coney Barrett after the fact. You probably can't get any more Orwellian than this. I guess something about free markets and private companies though.

Do you have a link to a diff?

As usual, no one bothered to properly archive it and people took screenshots instead. So unfortunately, neither archive.today nor wayback machine has it and the last capture before that was in 2016. But even Snopes confirms it, if you don't want to take my word for it.

Snopes link for the curious: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/merriam-webster-barrett-se...

Is there a regularly updated official list somewhere of newly-considered-offensive words so one can proactively update one's vocabulary?

Other than regularly following Twitter drama or joining some Discord echo chamber, I honestly don't think there is any reliable way to know what is now considered offensive and what is not. The reason why All Lives Matter is considered racist is literally based on some obscure web comic about burning houses from years ago and everyone will get angry at you if you don't understand what the hell are they even talking about. Oh and by the way, silence == violence, so it's not like staying apolitical will help you much.

https://static.attn.com/sites/default/files/allhousesmatter....

I hadn't heard about this before, so I did a search. It seems from this Newsweek article that the dictionary is not denying that they made this change, but implying that it was planned for the future and then they did it earlier than planned because of the public attention it was being given.

https://www.newsweek.com/amy-coney-barrett-preference-defini...

No one considers systematic consequences of rules and laws, these days. Everything is short-term pragmatic cynicism.

Well, this debate has never happened before.

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