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Re:Ask HN: Are we still allowed to be controversial without ... by krapp on Thursday March 09, 2023 @10:02AM (#35081881)
> I really wonder how the battle against the nebulous "hate speech" became so widespread almost instantly in the Western world.

Because some asshole Austrian speechified a country into burning down half of Europe and killing millions of Jews, and after a whole ass world war the Western world - the parts that actually had to rebuild their societies from the ashes, not the US, for whom the war and Nazism in particular were more business opportunities than anything - decided that even free speech needed to have limits.

edit: of course the US has limits on free speech as well, just not for "hate speech" per se.

Re:Ask HN: Are we still allowed to be controversial without ... by conradfr on Thursday March 09, 2023 @11:35AM (#35083145)
So a war that ended almost 80 years ago is responsible for the battle against "online hate" that started like two years ago?
Re:Ask HN: Are we still allowed to be controversial without ... by krapp on Thursday March 09, 2023 @02:08PM (#35085229)
Contrary to popular belief, human culture didn't begin on Twitter. The battle against "online hate" is just the current generational manifestation of a conflict that, yes, has its origins in the ideologies and cultural shocks of World War 2. Particularly where the meme-complexes of modern anti-Semitism and fear of "cultural Marxism" in academia, gender roles and homophobia are concerned, many of which were established either by the Nazis directly or the initial right-wing political shift in the US following the war. Today's redpillers, anti-wokists and the like are just rehashing beliefs that were old hat in their grandparents' time. Even the culture war over transgender identity isn't new - there was an episode of All in the Family about it in the 1970s.

I mean go look up any of George Carlin's old bits on political correctness and they would fit in perfectly in a modern day context, despite being made before the WWW was so much as a gleam in Tim Berners' Lee's eye. You'd just have to update the technological referents.