You are vehement in your defense of hating in response to hate.
Hate never solved anything unless you’re willing to resort to violence.
I was born and raised Catholic, so if I have a beef with the Catholic church I’ve earned it.
I think it’s OK to have a beef with an organization. I just don’t like attacking individual human beings because of an identity. Especially in this place, we’ve been careful to enshrine the idea that people have value even if the ideas they cling to don’t. That’s why we don’t allow personal insults and ad hominem attacks in most places here. We fight ignorance, not the ignorant.
No, I’m defending of people who are rightly angrily critical of harmful official Catholic dogma, but do not always remember to couch their criticism with the disclaimer that they have no problem with the substantial number of Catholics who still identify culturally with Catholicism but distance themselves from the harmful dogma. I do not think most of these people are really bigoted against Catholicism as a cultural identity.
If break the rules in righteous anger, you still have broken the rules.
The alternative is that “ideas or persons we approve of are exempt from the rules because we hate the same thing and fuck those.”
Well that’s the moot point, isn’t it. The rule is against hate speech. Unless the motivation is bigotry against Catholicism as a cultural identity, rather than criticism of ideas, it is not hate speech.
Again, if the attack is against the identity and not the ideas or historical facts, it’s a lot closer to hate speech.
This argument smacks of “some identities cannot be protected by rules against hate speech because they are too awful.”
On the gripping hand, if someone tries to defend the ideas of an identity by claiming it’s an attack on the identity itself, that’s dishonest and should be called out. The distinction must be preserved by all involved.
And I was the first to point this out in this thread.
But again, there is a substantial difference in whether the belief is held my a small minority of extremists who are nominally associated with the religion, and whether it is a mainstream belief endorsed by the global leader of the religion to whom the great majority of believers defer. In the latter case, I think there is just as great a burden upon adherents to distance themselves from the specific dogma, as there is for critics to constantly frame criticism with the caveat “not all X”.
I give up. You are intent on seeking an exception to hate speech rules by disqualifying some identities based on the critieria that satisfy you emotionally or intellectually.
Making exceptions always ends well, after all.
Do you feel that believers in Scientology or Trumpism should have their cultural identity protected in the same way?
I think the differentiation between ideas and cultural identity is never a bright line, they are almost always intertwined.
I would submit it has always been open season on all religions here.
I don’t hate trumpians or Scientologists, even if their beliefs are dispicable. When I criticize a group like that, I make sure I shape the attack to be specifically against the beliefs, not the believers.
Someone needs to knock those Pastafarians down a peg or two…
I think that is getting close to a distinction without a difference.
But when the cultural identity is so strongly associated with a certain set of beliefs there is really no meaningful distinction. I doubt that you would feel much burden to constantly caveat your criticism of Trumpist ideology or Scientology with the caveat that maybe not all Trumpists or Scientologists think this way.
I would consider a personal attack on a trumpist to be a faux pas, a misstep and possibly a violation of the rules if against a poster… Because it’s ad hominem, identity politics aside. I would always strive to never personalize it. There’s never any valid justification to it.
I cannot imagine why. Even harmless, hateful words can leave to horrible actions in the real world. One person makes harmless jokes, the next repeats them as fact, the next calls for action, someone else plots revenge. In the end, people die and the first person in the chain feels no responsibility.
History, even recent history, shows us where bigotry leads. History, even recent history shows us where religious bigotry leads.
To go back to the Thread title question. As I already mentioned IMO the OP’s specific example sounds like gratuituous “whatabouting” trying to throw a “hypocrite card” at the board. My take? Hell no, making what is clearly from context a sardonic reference to a known bigoted point of view by quoting or describing it without circumlocution or trigger warnings, is NOT itself AUTOMATICALLY “hate speech” requiring intervention by the mere existence of the words in that sequence. Context counts, and the number of things that are off limits regardless of context should not be expanded lightly.
Can you cite a real world example where a harmless joke leads to deaths?
Again, this cuts both ways. There is a difference to the extent that Catholics themselves can assert a cultural Catholic identity while distancing themselves from the evil and harmful ideas that the acknowledged formal global leader of their religion advocates. This is quite different from the mistaken notion that the vast majority of non-violent Muslims have any burden to explicitly distance themselves from the small fringe minority of violent Islamists that are nominally associated with their religion.