I never really understood this part of the american culture. I'm not american and to me they are just words, censoring offensive words with beeps on TV is really an american/british thing, it's really strange to me.

> "I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it"

When it comes down to it, no one would really do this.

You don't think that people would defend to the death one of the basic principles of human rights?

To be clear, I'm not saying that Github censoring "retarded" is a human rights issue, but as long as we've gone off the rails let's see where the train comes to a stop.

> You don't think that people would defend to the death one of the basic principles of human rights?

A progressive making that claim would never take a bullet so that someone could fly the Confederate flag, for example. It's just not going to happen.

They may fight to defend the 1st Amendment, but that's easy because it's a proxy behind which exists all the specific instances of speech they would find horrible along with the speech they hold dear.

People making the claim probably mean the latter, but the wording implies something more specific, presumably for effect.

Ah, it looks like the train didn't make it very far, did it.

To be fair, I agree with your original comment. I'm just nit picking on that particular phrase, independent of what you wrote. I think your use of the phrase is appropriate.

Charlie Hebdo did.

They did not.

Charlie Hebdo did not publish, then get attacked for, content they themselves found offensive.

No, they know it's offensive and their fight was exactly about freedom of speech.

Yes, they knew it was offensive - to others. There is no indication that it actually offended them. Which, unless it did, it's not the same thing.

They are caricaturists, nothing can offend them. You miss the point of their reasoning.

Someone actually got arrested and went to jail in France for an offensive parody of one of the equally offensive Charlie Hebdo covers: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/france-beg... (because it was insensitive to French people rather than Egyptians).

That's not entirely fair, either. I'm sure there are plenty of things that would offend them, but they understand that just because something is offensive does not make it wrong.

> nothing can offend them

Then they didn't die to protect speech they were offended by. I don't know how much clearer this can be.

It's not required to be offended personally by something to protect freedom of speech, I can understand how else I should say it. And if you don't want to understand it - Charlie Hebdo also published caricatures about christian religion, so it was offensive for them too, for their friends. Muslims just were more aggressive.

Splitting hairs doesn't make them any easier to find.

They did publish the original danish cartoons, which they publicaly said they found not from a very good taste, and that some were pretty bad cartoons, but that they had to publish them for the sake of free speech, even if it made them a target ( which it did). That's how it all started.

I disagree with what you said and i ask the moderators to hellban you and delete all your comments

Let's see if anyone jumps to defend you...

Except, of course, people literally have.

What the...? What the.. what... I ... WHAT? You.. I can't even.

What?

So if a restaurant asks you to leave because you're shouting ethnic slurs, that's censorship? Come on. GitHub is not the entirety of your expressive domain. If you were disallowed by law from saying "retard" I would be sympathetic to this case. As is this entire thread reads like a series of entitled children whinging that their mums told them not to be nasty at school. If you dislike what GitHub has done, host your repo at one of the other free sites that provide this service, and stop insulting people in legitimately oppressive states by equating your churlish valley bigotry with legitimately repressed speech.

Hey, if you want to argue with the dictionary be my guest. I'm afraid my name isn't Oxford, though, and I'm not really sure how to reach him. Sorry about that.

In that case - since you're merely quoting the dictionary without voicing an opinion - I invite you to refrain from further diluting the present discussion with your vacuous commentary. I assure you that the entirety of HN readership can avail itself of word definition services.

If you're going to ask me to put away the dictionary you could try it without dragging out the thesaurus.

Another profound contribution to the discourse! Are you always so topical, or are you making a special effort here?

Apparently not.

This. Is. Censorship.

It's not in any way a debatable point.

The dynamic that's going on here is that people want to endorse censorship while avoiding using that word.

The difference being that there are no network effects in restaurants and usually there is another one just around the corner.

Bitbucket, gitlab, ? Also, because you do not perceive any network effect in restaurants in no way proves that there are none.