The Stupid Thread 2 (Part 1)

Did it? I don’t see how that passage is hate speech? To the colonial’s the native Indians were savages. The British had to ask the tribes they were working with not to scalp any living colonials…

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FB doesn’t allow you advertise to your website if you sell guns, this doesn’t surprise me one bit.

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Feeling justified in using the verbiage isn’t a distinction a computer can really make unless you program it as such. Even then it’d be a nightmare to try to solve.

Maybe with enough AI you could flag the “supported hate speech” to keep, but I don’t even know where you’d get the data for that

You can’t advertise anything with a naughty word on Twitter…

@pfury

I’m saying, I don’t understand how “merciless Indian Savages” is hate speech. I assume that’s the hate speech part. I honestly don’t get how that’s hate speech.

“The Nazi’s were merciless savages gassing the Jews during WWII”

Is that hate speech?

*Hate speech really confuses me and I’m not being an ass. I just don’t get it.

When posted as an out of context line? Shit even the original line was meant to be hateful toward the natives wasn’t it?

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and condition

Are Indians and Nazis somehow the same thing? Indians are a race of people. People chose and choose to be Nazis.

It’s the very definition of hate speech.

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It’s Facebook, not some database for scholars. It’s where scholarship goes to die. Wasn’t FB originally created for college kids to hook up?

No, FB did not flag the DOI as hate speech, only a passage. A passage which was clearly hate speech.

Your post, with its lightheartedness and whimsy, has inspired me to to do just that. It isn’t good to take threads so seriously that we examine every little detail or get upset if someone doesn’t post in the way we want. I’m glad you set the example by showing me how little this thread means to you.

Doth my ears sense sarcasm?? How can that be?

Look, if you want to approach this thread with the same fervor you have shown in other threads, that’s your prerogative. I can’t stop you. But know I’m going to make fun of you for taking everything so damn seriously when it seems to me that you are. It’s nothing personal which I’m sure you don’t take it as so…

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I don’t think it was meant to be hateful. I think it was meant to be descriptive. By colonial standards, they were savages and they faught like savages (scalping et al) without mercy. I don’t see anything hateful at all.

As an aside, as warrriors, they probably loved being described that way. Is it hate speech of the intended victim likes it?

Maybe in 2018, which is a problem in my opinion.

Eh we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I can’t fathom a situation where I hear/read that sentence, in modern or back then times and it’s NOT meant to make me hate the natives.

Did the people responsible for that passage love the Indians or did they…? It is an obvious case of dehumanizing the Other. The question isn’t whether or not it is hate speech but if we can judge the people responsible in their historical context.

Jefferson owned slaves. He impregnated a slave, who was also his sister-in-law, when she was a teenager and he was middle aged. He was obviously a racist (how else can you justify enslaving a race of people because of their race?). That doesn’t mean we don’t try and understand him and his racism in context.

I don’t know how Jefferson felt about the native population.

I disagree. I think it was a) meant to make the recipient of the Declaration, King George and by extension the British, feel bad about the use of “merciless savages” against the colonials, b) describe the unconventional (savage) way the natives conducted warfare, and c) stir patriotism in the men that had been fight the natives for years prior to the Declaration.

Back then, you conducted war like a gentleman. You didn’t scalp your POWs (in their eyes). What’s a better descriptive term to use than savage in this case?

In my opinion, it had little to do with hating the natives (many fought for the colonies after all), but as another example of why America was done with British rule.

Until that characterization was used to defend exterminating them.

You might want to read up on scalping. It wasn’t exclusively an Indian practice. One colonial governor offered a bounty for Indian scalps, including those of children. Scalping may even have been brought to the Americas by Europeans.

And war was never gentlemanly.

Do you want the short or long answer?

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