Comment by zahlman
4 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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> 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.