HackerNews Readings
40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

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NikolaeVariusonMay 3, 2021

The Anarchist Cookbook has been out for a while, its probably fine.

rsj_hnonMay 31, 2021

The (obvious) reply is to ban prior restraint. If you can show that the speaker really did knowingly and directly incite violence then you have remedies after the fact once you show that they had a hand in causing the violence. But you do not even arrest authors of books like Rules For Radicals or the Antifa Handbook that excuse or promote violence.

E.g. you can arrest someone for actually shouting fire in a crowded theater after they did this. But there is no pre-crime unit that will arrest someone for speaking based on the assumption that someone else might then commit violence later on inspired by the book.

Similarly there is punishment for someone planting bombs or even calling in bomb threats to a school, but there is not punishment for someone writing the Anarchist Cookbook or arguing that bomb threats are a good idea or that this country would benefit from bomb threats in order to bring about the socialist utopia. None of this requires censorship of mere discussion of controversial subjects before the fact, on the basis of fear that they might be used to incite violence in the future. We even allow people to carry guillotines in the streets and stage mock executions of their political enemies, and we allow people top speak of their admiration for Robespierre. We don't arrest them. But if someone were to actually guillotine an enemy, then they would be arrested. We punish those who commit the violence, not those who inspired them with books we don't like.

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