It resonates with people who aren’t personally affected by the Overton window shifting towards extremism. It’s now more normal to fling racist slurs at people online, and that behaviour is coming offline as well. When we used to “deplatform” racism this sort of talk wasn’t within the Overton window. Of course if you’re not personally affected you’ll say this is fine, marketplace of ideas etc. Let the marketplace sort out if racism should be normalised or not.

It doesn’t even lead to better discourse. We’re both here, commenting on this forum right? It’s because the level of discourse here is higher than elsewhere, certainly much better than “free speech” platforms like Musk’s. How can that be, when HN has extraordinarily strict rules on acceptable speech? Even calling someone an idiot can get you banned here, let alone a pajeet or Paki. If you truly believed in freedom of speech, you’d quit a forum moderated like this.