Truth is clearly subjective. If you don’t believe that, you’ve not studied history or believe too strongly in your chosen tribal beliefs. I don’t have to rehash this - if you’re curious read about it. But briefly, most of the words you use like bigotry or racism or violence or fantasies are all totally subjective, frequently misused, and completely inappropriate as tools to suppress speech in any free society.
If you believe these words are misused, that implies you recognize a context in which they can be used properly, eg that concepts like "violence" and "racism" have specific, commonly understood meanings and are not "all totally subjective."
I see what you’re saying but also don’t think I totally agree. I count purposeful ambiguity and purposeful false equivalence between situations that aren’t describable by the same words as misuse. But to answer more directly - those two terms have had historical definitions that were more clear, but have been manipulated recently for activist purposes. For example the word “racism” is now thought by many (on the progressive left) to mean any inequality of outcomes because of Kendi’s writings on “anti racism” and the DEI movement (the E being for equity).
Truth in the philosophical sense is subjective but this is simultaneously true and completely useless. We deal with the universe usefully only by putting a limit on the fuzziness we accept.
> Bigotry or racism or violence or ... are all totally subjective
These are all trivially objectively defined to the satisfaction of reasonable parties. What you do to people who try to deliberately play in the margins and rules lawyer is just save time by banning them right off.
> completely inappropriate as tools to suppress speech in any free society
You can't do any of them on this forum because a forum that allowed it would be trash and we wouldn't be having this reasonable discussion there.
It's completely reasonable for a society to limit dialogue around open bigotry and violence. You push said discussion out of the public eye where its both less apt to spread and less likely by dint of its secrecy to seem to others like a reasonable and acceptable thing. Note how hard it is to promote your shit via Gab vs Youtube.
> These are all trivially objectively defined to the satisfaction of reasonable parties.
I think "reasonable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. For instance, there's plenty of online debate about whether "transwomen shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's running" is bigotry or not, which side have you termed "unreasonable"?
I also think these words can have several quite reasonable but different definitions. For a trivial example, does "racist" apply only to "ought" statements or to "is" statements?
Your first example is the perfect example of defining reasonable parties. The issue is really simple. There is a championship where contestants are categorized or separated based on physical attributes. What the contestant feels about himself is completely irrelevant, that was not the point of the separation. Nor was the toy between the contestants leg.
Reasonable and trivial. And, perfectly matching OP's observation, the "issue" (there is none) is then completely muddered up with people's feelings and other things that are not related to the original 'issue': a championship has different categories based on physical attributes.
It's like a bunch of high school students having a lot of drama over nothing, and pretending they are discussing the most important issues in the world.
> A forum where you can't promote bigotry, fascism, violence, or outright fantasies is a healthier forum.
HN is that forum, yet HN isn't an echo chamber there are still plenty of healthy discussions including most sides. When reddit turned into an echo chamber that wasn't a good thing.
When you come from an echo chamber then a fair place will look like an echo chamber against your views.
I've seen posts from most views get upvoted to the top here. Compare to for example r/politics, I've never ever seen a conservative post get even close to the top there. That is what an echo chamber looks like, here on HN you will get exposed to good arguments from most sides.
I mean you actually can promote bigotry and even fascism on here as long as you’re civil about it. Fascists often have a hard time being civil, but bigots can be very adept at it.
No, you can be a bigot and fascist and talk about what you think, but I've never seen fascism or bigotry causes being promoted here. Stating your opinion isn't the same thing as promoting a cause.
Ha, well this is exactly the kind of fine semantic discussion that this topic usually generates. I’m not sure I understand exactly what distinction you’re making here or why it’s especially important.
