I'm histrionic. Says the gentleman screaming at me that I'm a 'fucking dipshit,' a 'fucking turd' and every other playground insult he can dredge up. Stay classy you self-described genius. 
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These are all, as Bryan helpfully reminded us, examples of insults that are matters of opinion and therefore cannot be legally actionable in a defamation suit, as opposed to his bizarre example of accusing someone of murdering civilians during wartime
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Replying to @arthur_affect @VincentFletcher and
To be fair, I wouldn't say that calling someone racist or transphobic falls within the same purview as, say, calling them an idiot. It's an insult, but it's one which clearly implies a sufficiently specific factual assertion as to have a meaningful truth value.
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Replying to @quantum_boulder @VincentFletcher and
Not really, or at least not to any greater degree This absurd idea of throwing the corpus of someone's tweets before a jury and saying "Now evaluate this for hatefulness toward Black people" is about as absurd as "Now evaluate this for education level and erudition"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @quantum_boulder and
Like, yes, you could say that by reading someone's writing you can come up with arguments for or against the idea they deserve to be called "a racist", but you can say the same thing about calling them "an idiot", or calling them "a bully"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @VincentFletcher and
I think it's the specificity of the insult that makes a difference here. The set of factual propositions implied by calling someone a transphobe is much smaller than that implied by calling someone an idiot, which makes the "greater degree" quite self-evident, no?
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Replying to @quantum_boulder @VincentFletcher and
No I mean, the word "idiot" is fairly non-specific as used in popular slang, but I personally think the world has a lot more transphobes than idiots
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Replying to @arthur_affect @VincentFletcher and
Unless you're conflating "greater range of true propositions" with "greater number of actual instances of the proposition being true", I don't see how the relative numbers of each matters here. The specificity seems a lot more relevant.
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Replying to @arthur_affect @quantum_boulder and
Don't take this personally Arthur old chap, but a career as a barrister does not await you.
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Stevens v Tillman, 1988, established that accusations of "racism" were per se nonactionable; Grutzmacher v. Chicago Sun-Times, 1994, went further and established that even calling someone a "neo-Nazi" is non-actionable, as it does not refer to specific facts but to opinion
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Replying to @arthur_affect @VincentFletcher and
Of course this probably doesn't hold true on Rainy Tea-Stained Fascism Island, but I can't imagine wanting to live there, much less practice law there
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