[zahlman]

In my moral calculus, it is literally not possible for a person to say something that is so bad that it becomes morally worse than actual physical violence. I know from experience that I am not at all alone in this, and I suspect that GP thinks similarly.

Emphasizing the nature of Mr. Maguire's opinion is not really doing anything to change the argument. Emphasizing what other people think about that opinion, even less so.

> Zed’s team should have been fully aware of what kind of people they are partnering with.

In my moral calculus, accepting money from someone who did something wrong, when that money was honestly obtained and has nothing to do with the act, does not make you culpable for anything. And as GP suggests, Microsoft's money appears to have a stronger tie to violence than Maguire's.

[runarberg]

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]

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.

[dlubarov]

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.

[runarberg]

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.

[zahlman]

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.

[runarberg]

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).

[zahlman]

> 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.

Nothing you have quoted evidences this.

> When he publicly shares the Pallywood conspiracy theory he is engaging in and spreading a hateful genocidal rhetoric.

Claiming that your political outgroup is engaging in political propaganda is not the same thing as calling for their deaths. Suggesting otherwise is simply not good faith argumentation.

Nothing you have done here constitutes a logical argument. It is only repeating the word "genocide" as many times as you can manage and hoping that people will sympathize.

> This is hatespeech and is illegal in many countries

This is not remotely a valid argument (consider for example that many countries also outlaw things that you would consider morally obligatory to allow), and is also irrelevant as Mr. Maguire doesn't live in one of those countries.

[zahlman]

> 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.