@sumudu Absent Without Official Leave; military acronym.
@matigo I disagree fundamentally. The epithet has to be a generalisation that can be applied to a whole class of people without knowing much else about them. Hate crimes, and hate speech, are one form of identity politics.
// @larand
@matigo I don't think people should simply bve allowed to declare "this is hate speech". They are welcome to say "I think this is hate speech". It is then up to whatever mechanisms society has put in place to determine whether anything should be done about that.
And if we don't like the mechanisms, we still have some democratic abilities left.
Closed societies like schools and even some businesses are different, but again, there ought to be an opportunity for reasonable disagreement there too.
New monthly report [jeremycherfas.net].
Seems like just a couple of weeks since the previous one. Which is because it is just a couple of weeks since the previous one.
@matigo Words can definitely be violent, threatening and scary. I would count that sort of disagreement as hateful. To say "Well, it's only words" is to ignore the power of "mere" words. And while it may not be possible to offer hard and fast rules about what precisely constitutes that, I suspect it is a lot like pornography; one knows it when one sees it.
@matigo That is indeed pointless and, worse, counterproductive. If people can't distinguish disagreement from, for the sake of argument, violent disagreement, they are only going to encourage the latter.
@matigo I can't be bothered to read the item you linked to, but I do find myself wondering whether that article defines disagreement as hate. If it does, I'm with you.
If it doesn't, then what is the fuss about?