[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.

[runarberg]

> Claiming that your political outgroup is engaging in political propaganda is not the same thing as calling for their deaths.

I don‘t think you grasp the seriousness of hate speech. Even if you don’t explicitly call for their deaths, 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. And during an ongoing genocide, this speech is genocidal, and is an integral part of the genocide. 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).

The Pallywood conspiracy theory is exactly the kind of genocidal hate speech I am talking about. This conspiracy theory has been thoroughly debunked, but it persists among racists like Shaun Maguire, and serves as an integral part to justify or deny the violence done against Palestinians in an ongoing genocide.

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.

[zahlman]

> 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.