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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Replying to @VincentFletcher @quantum_boulder and
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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Replying to @arthur_affect @VincentFletcher and
I'm not saying UK law gets the balance right either, far from it, but can we at least acknowledge that "person with massive amounts of power and money smears some random as a neo-Nazi and defends it on the basis that it's technically not falsifiable" is not an ideal scenario?
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Better than that selfsame rich person being able to sue some rando for everything they have because they called them a neo-Nazi on Twitter
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