Comment by zahlman
4 days ago
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> First off, the "cultural Marxism" theory is not about Jews, any more than actual Marxists blaming things on "greedy bankers" is about Jews.
I don’t follow. Cultural Marxism is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which has inspired terrorist attacks, see e.g. Anders Behring Breivik, or the Charlottesville Riots. Greedy bankers is not a conspiracy theory, but a simple observation of accumulation of wealth under capitalism. Terrorists targeting minorities very frequently use Cultural Marxism to justify their atrocities. “Greedy bankers” are used during protests, or political violence against individuals or institutions at worst. There is a fundamental difference here, if you fail to spot the difference, I don‘t know what to tell you, and honestly I fear you might be operating under some serious misinformation about the spread of anti-Semitism among the far-right.
As for Pallywood, it is a conspiracy theory which states that many of the atrocities done by the IDF in Gaza are staged by the Palestinian victims of the Gaza Genocide. There have been numerous allegations about widespread staging operations, but so far there is zero proof of any of these allegations. It is safe to say that the people who believe in this conspiracy theory do so because of racist believes about Palestinians, but not because they have been convinced by evidence. And just like Cultural Marxism, the Pallywood conspiracy theory has been used to justify serious attacks and deaths of many people, but unlike Cultural Marxism, the perpetrator of these attacks are almost exclusively confined to the IDF.
By the way Shaun Maguire has 5 tweets where he uses the term directly (all from 2023) but he uses the term indirectly a lot. And just like Cultural Marxism citing the conspiracy theory—even if you don‘t name it directly—is still hate speech. E.g. when the White Nationalists at the Charlottesville riots were chanting “Jews will not replace us!” they were citing the White Replacement conspiracy theory (as well as Cultural Marxism) and they were doing hate speech, which directly lead to the murder of Heather Heyer.
And to hammer the point home (and to bring the conversation back to the topic at hand), I seriously doubt the Zed team would have accepted VC funding from an investor affiliated with an open supporter of Anders Behring Breivik or the Charlottesville rioters.
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