Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> I refuse to believe that any single person would not want to stop someone from bullying someone else into their own suicide!

There are plenty of people who do want the freedom to say exactly what they choose, including a lengthy period of directed harassment, and shrug their shoulders if someone commits suicide over it. There's not much that can be done other than ban them from civilized spaces.




"Bullying" is a judgement. Intrinsic to the word is a judgement that what is being done is bad, and the person doing it would not describe it that way.

And by that I don't mean that it's not bad to bully people (it's rather tautological), I mean that talk of bullying often begs the question, and is intentionally done in order to elide past the actual events that occurred. Lèse majesté laws against talking about the King, elected officials, or even cops or bureaucrats now get justified as anti-bullying.

I missed any rant about politics in the blog however. But this thread has a smell of "my politics aren't political because they are true, and your politics are political because they are lies."


What the referer-replacement page was talking is Kiwi Farms, which is doing the kind of stuff that even the US First Amendment's very expansive protections fails to protect. (The criminal liability here is "intentional inflection of emotional distress", although note that most lawsuits that allege that are groundless lawsuits that largely fail to make it pass the motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim stage as "they made me feel bad" isn't sufficient to allege an IIED).


> The criminal liability here is "intentional inflection of emotional distress",

Intentional infliction of emotional distress is a tort, not criminal.


I mean this is correct. Bullies, or at least the adult ones, don’t call what they do bullying (except the absolute geniuses that think “actually bullying has a social corrective behavior, I’m just helping actually”).

We’re all just busting each other’s balls, right? Look at George, he’s laughing! He’s totally in on the joke and not at all just showing submissive deference in order to not lose face.




Consider applying for YC's W25 batch! Applications are open till Nov 12.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: