Comment by runarberg

Comment by runarberg 4 days ago

Just to be clear we are talking about genocidal and racist hate speech here (you can see for your self). It it is not some one off things he has said (which to be clear would be bad enough) but something Shaun Maguire has defined his whole online persona around. Speech such as these are an integral part of every genocide, as they seek to dehumanize the victims and justify (or deny) the atrocities against them.

As an aside—despite the popularity of the trolley problem—people don‘t have a rational moral calculus. And moral behavior does not follow a sequential order from best to worse. Whatever your moral calculus be, that has no effect on whether or not the Zed team’s actions were a moral blunder or not... they were.

samdoesnothing 4 days ago

It's only a moral blunder if you either decide everyone is guilty of indirect association with "bad" people, or if you selectively chose who is guilty or not based on some third factor (generally ingroup/outgroup). The former doesn't result in making Github threads, and the latter is a kind of behaviour that ironically leads to the sins underpinning this whole issue.

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dlubarov 4 days ago

Genocidal speech? Where?

The site you linked to just seems to brazenly misrepresent each of Shaun's tweets - e.g. the tweet that "demonized Palestinians" never mentions Palestinians, but does explicitly refer to Hamas twice. Not sure how Shaun could have been any clearer that he was criticizing a specific terrorist group and not an entire racial/ethnic group.

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runarberg 4 days ago

the post on genocide.vs is almost two years old. Shaun Maguire’s speech has only gotten worse since. NYT took up that story when his speech started targeting a particular American Politician with his racist Islamophobia. Go to Shaun Maguire’s twitter profile, scroll down e.g. to his May’s tweets before he became so obsessed with being racist against Mamdani, along the way you will find plenty of tweets e.g. the Pallywood conspiracy theory, and plenty of other genocide denial/justification, intermixed with his regular Islamophobia. Just see for your self.

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- zahlman 4 days ago
  
  I read the NYT story. It doesn't portray anyone who comes anywhere close to being genocidal.
  > plenty of other genocide denial/justification
  So he disagrees with you about this word being appropriate to describe what's actually going on. This is not a fringe viewpoint.
  
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  runarberg 4 days ago
  
  It very much is a fringe and very hateful viewpoint. There is a difference between disagreeing with how a technical and a legal term is used to describe atrocities, and flat out denying and justifying said atrocities. Most people who don‘t describe the Gaza Genocide as a genocide are doing the former. Shaun Maguire is doing the latter. When he publicly shares the Pallywood conspiracy theory he is engaging in and spreading a hateful genocidal rhetoric. This is hatespeech and is illegal in many countries (though enforcement is very lax).
  
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zahlman 4 days ago

> Speech such as these are an integral part of every genocide, as they seek to dehumanize the victims and justify (or deny) the atrocities against them.

That does not make such speech genocidal.

It also does not make such speech worse than physical violence.

It also does not make the speech of someone you associate with relevant to your own morality.

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