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The UK has been home to several chilling episodes of police harassment triggered by tweets that were considered possible hate speech. The tweets in question wer
by leephillips 6y ago
The UK has been home to several chilling episodes of police harassment triggered by tweets that were considered possible hate speech. The tweets in question were innocuous, simply repeating common knowledge that can be found in any introductory biology textbook. I hope this initiative (although it also smells like ideology itself) puts a stop to that.
- wilsocr88 6y agoPattern recognition leads me to believe that this will not serve its intended purpose, but will instead be misused as a bludgeon.
- AndrewDucker 6y ago"Common knowledge that can be found in any basic biology textbook" That sounds like transphobes out harassing people again. The "but we were just stating some basic biology" is the first line of defence for what has been found to be unprotected abuse in the UK.
- leephillips 6y agoI’m not quite sure what you’re saying, but it sounds eerily close to the claim that scientific facts can be hate speech.
- insickness 6y agoProof that science denialism is just as much a problem on the left as it is on the right.
- andrepd 6y agoWhat science? The scientific consensus is that there is such a condition as gender dysphoria, that is, people who perceive themselves as a gender different from their biological sex. In my experience, the phrase "I was just stating basic biology" is a dogwhistle for transphobia.
- happytoexplain 6y agoWhile I might agree with a slightly different version of this opinion, I strongly disagree with the terms "proof" and "just as much" here.
- andrepd 6y agoExample? Let us decide if they were so innocuous. To be clear though, I'm against police harassment regardless.
- happytoexplain 6y agoThe examples you have in mind may be totally reasonable - but conflating "factually true" with being somehow unassailable on any other qualities, or being above reproach and not hateful, is a super common fallacy. E.g. pointing to differences in cranial shape between races is often used, with various levels of implicitness/explicitness, as a way to express race-based hatred.