Comment by runarberg

zahlman 4 days ago

> I don‘t think you grasp the seriousness of hate speech.

No; I think you are wrong about that seriousness.

> by partaking in hate speech (including by sharing conspiracy theories about the group) you are playing an integral part of the violence against the group.

No, I disagree very strongly with this, as a core principle.

> and serves as an integral part to justify or deny the violence done against Palestinians in an ongoing genocide.

And with this as well.

> If you disagree, I invite you to do a though experiment. Swap out Palestinians with Jews, and swap out the Pallywood conspiracy theory with e.g. Cultural Marxism, and see how Shaun Maguire’s speech holds up.

First off, the "cultural Marxism" theory is not about Jews, any more than actual Marxists blaming things on "greedy bankers" is about Jews. (A UK Labour party leader once got in trouble for this, as I recall, and I thought it was unjustified even though I disagreed with his position.)

Second, your comments here are the first I've heard of this conspiracy theory, which I don't see being described by name in Maguire's tweets.

Third, no. This thought experiment doesn't slow me down for a moment and doesn't lead me to your conclusions. If Maguire were saying hateful things about Jewish people (the term "anti-Semitic" for this is illogical and confusing), that would not be as bad as enacting violence against Jewish people, and it would not constitute "playing an integral part of the violence" enacted against them by, e.g., Hamas.

The only way to make statements that "serve as an integral part to justify or deny violence" is to actually make statements that either explicitly justify that violence or explicitly deny it. But even actually denying or justifying violence does not cause further violence, and is not morally on the same level as that violence.

> There is a reason hate speech is outlawed in almost every country (including the USA; although USA is pretty lax what it considers hate speech).

There is not such a reason, because the laws you imagine do not actually exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...

American law does not attempt to define "hate speech", nor does it outlaw such. What it does do is fail to extend constitutional protection to speech that would incite "imminent lawless action" — which in turn allows state-level law to be passed, but generally that law doesn't reference hatred either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

Even in Canada, the Criminal Code doesn't attempt to define "hatred", and such laws are subject to balancing tests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_Canada

> The Pallywood conspiracy theory is exactly the kind of genocidal hate speech I am talking about. This conspiracy theory has been thoroughly debunked

Even after looking this up, I don't see anything that looks like a single unified claim that could be objectively falsified. I agree that "conspiracy theory" is a fair term to describe the general sorts of claims made, but expecting the label "conspiracy theory" to function as an argument by itself is not logically valid — since actual conspiracies have been proven before.

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runarberg 4 days ago

> First off, the "cultural Marxism" theory is not about Jews, any more than actual Marxists blaming things on "greedy bankers" is about Jews.
I don’t follow. Cultural Marxism is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which has inspired terrorist attacks, see e.g. Anders Behring Breivik, or the Charlottesville Riots. Greedy bankers is not a conspiracy theory, but a simple observation of accumulation of wealth under capitalism. Terrorists targeting minorities very frequently use Cultural Marxism to justify their atrocities. “Greedy bankers” are used during protests, or political violence against individuals or institutions at worst. There is a fundamental difference here, if you fail to spot the difference, I don‘t know what to tell you, and honestly I fear you might be operating under some serious misinformation about the spread of anti-Semitism among the far-right.
As for Pallywood, it is a conspiracy theory which states that many of the atrocities done by the IDF in Gaza are staged by the Palestinian victims of the Gaza Genocide. There have been numerous allegations about widespread staging operations, but so far there is zero proof of any of these allegations. It is safe to say that the people who believe in this conspiracy theory do so because of racist believes about Palestinians, but not because they have been convinced by evidence. And just like Cultural Marxism, the Pallywood conspiracy theory has been used to justify serious attacks and deaths of many people, but unlike Cultural Marxism, the perpetrator of these attacks are almost exclusively confined to the IDF.
By the way Shaun Maguire has 5 tweets where he uses the term directly (all from 2023) but he uses the term indirectly a lot. And just like Cultural Marxism citing the conspiracy theory—even if you don‘t name it directly—is still hate speech. E.g. when the White Nationalists at the Charlottesville riots were chanting “Jews will not replace us!” they were citing the White Replacement conspiracy theory (as well as Cultural Marxism) and they were doing hate speech, which directly lead to the murder of Heather Heyer.
And to hammer the point home (and to bring the conversation back to the topic at hand), I seriously doubt the Zed team would have accepted VC funding from an investor affiliated with an open supporter of Anders Behring Breivik or the Charlottesville rioters.

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- zahlman 4 days ago
  
  > Cultural Marxism is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory
  No, it isn't. I've observed people to espouse it without any reference to Judaism whatsoever. (I don't care how Wikipedia tries to portray it, because I know from personal experience that this is not remotely a topic that Wikipedia can be trusted to cover impartially.)
  > Greedy bankers is not a conspiracy theory
  I didn't say it was. It is, however, commonly a dogwhistle, and even more commonly accused of being a dogwhistle. And people who claim that Jews are overrepresented in XYZ places of power very commonly do get called conspiracy theorists as a result, regardless of any other political positions they may hold.
  > Terrorists targeting minorities very frequently use Cultural Marxism to justify their atrocities.
  This is literally the first time in 10+ years of discussion of these sorts of "culture war" topics, and my awareness of the term "cultural Marxism", that I have seen this assertion. (But then, I suspect that I would also disagree with you in many ways about who merits the label of "terrorist", and about how that is determined.)
  > honestly I fear you might be operating under some serious misinformation about the spread of anti-Semitism among the far-right.
  There certainly exist far-rightists who say hateful things about Jews. But they're certainly not the same right-wingers who refuse to describe the actions of Israeli forces as "genocide". There is clearly and obviously not any such "spread"; right-wing sentiment on the conflict is more clearly on Israel's side than ever.
  The rest of this is not worth engaging with. You are trying to sell me on an accounting of events that disagrees with my own observations and research, as well as a moral framework that I fundamentally reject.
  I should elaborate there. It doesn't actually matter to me what you're trying to establish about the depth of these atrocities (even though I have many more disagreements with you on matters of fact). We have a situation where A accepts money from B, who has a business relationship with C, who demonstrably has said some things about X people that many would consider beyond the pale. Now let's make this hypothetical as bad as possible: let's suppose that every X person in existence has been brutally tortured and murdered under the direct oversight of D, following D's premeditated plans; let's further suppose that C has openly voiced support of D's actions. (Note here that in the actual case, D doesn't even exist.) In such a case, the value of X is completely irrelevant to how I feel about this. C is quite simply not responsible for D's actions, unless it can be established that D would not have acted but for C's encouragement. Meanwhile, A has done absolutely nothing wrong.
  
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  dttze 3 days ago
  
  > No, it isn't. I've observed people to espouse it without any reference to Judaism whatsoever.
  That’s the point of a dog whistle. Are people who use (((this))) idiom also not antisemites because they don’t explicitly mention Jews? Also look up Cultural Bolshevism and who used that term.
  
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  runarberg 3 days ago
  
  In my circles there is a saying: If you are at a party, and somebody brings a Nazi to the party, and nobody kicks the Nazi out of the party, then you are at a Nazi party.
  Sequoia Industries were made aware that one of their partners was a racist Islamophobe, they opted not to do anything about it, and allowed him to continue being a racist Islamophobe partner with Sequoia, one can only assume that Sequoia Industries is an Islamophobic investor. I personally see people knowingly accepting money from racist Islamophobes as being a problem, and I would rather nobody did that.
  
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  zahlman 3 days ago
  
  > In my circles there is a saying: If you are at a party, and somebody brings a Nazi to the party, and nobody kicks the Nazi out of the party, then you are at a Nazi party.
  Yes, you are from exactly the circles that you appear to be from based on your other words here.
  In my circles, that reasoning is bluntly rejected. The reductio ad absurdum is starkly apparent: your principle, applied transitively (as it logically must), identifies so many people as irredeemably evil (including within your circles!) that it cannot possibly be reconciled with the observed good in the real world.
  And frankly, the way that the term "Nazi" gets thrown around nowadays seems rather offensive to the people who actually had to deal with the real thing.
  
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