Nobody calls a death threat "hate speech." That is implicitly suggesting that the people who use the term "hate speech" don't consider it hateful.
Now if you queried someone directly, they would of course say it's hateful (I would think). So what that ends up suggesting is the term "hate speech" is really just a short-hand for racially derogatory statements. AKA racist comments.
People have decided the term racist and racism are too detached and not emotionally impactful, so now we have "hate speech" which is more forceful.
It does, unfortunately, seem to imply that somehow threatening someone with death is less hateful than racism.
Now, the post you were replying to seems to be a reaction to the post which uses racist tweets and hate tweets interchangably. That apparently stuck in his craw, so to speak, because there were plenty of other very hateful tweets going on during this election that had nothing to do with racism, yet they are excluded from a post discussing "hate tweets."
>People have decided the term racist and racism are too detached and not emotionally impactful, so now we have "hate speech" which is more forceful.
This isn't why the term hate speech came about. The term hate speech came about in order to have a word applies not only to racism, but also to sexism, anti-semitism, homophobic language, etc. It is an umbrella term that refers to speech that is directed towards people solely based on the (usually immutable) group to which they belong.
It is not a synonym for hateful speech. Hateful is its own term. E.g. "I going to kill white people because I hate them so much" == hate speech (and also hateful). "I'm going to kill that guy because I hate him so much" == hateful (but not hate speech).
For the record, I come down firmly on the side that both are wrong. But bringing up one when the conversation was originally about the other tends to lead to derailment.
Semantic wanking. If a conversation about Free Software was filled with discussion of Visual Studio Express, it would be just as silly as this.
"Hate Speech" was a term cooked up to bundle homophobic, racist, and anti-religious speech together. It means whatever the people who came up with it and publicized it want it to mean, and pretending that one doesn't know in order to have a strawman debate for you is a waste of everyone's time.
(Not that I don't find the term distasteful. I find the idea of criminalizing both internal states and speech pretty vile.)
Now if you queried someone directly, they would of course say it's hateful (I would think). So what that ends up suggesting is the term "hate speech" is really just a short-hand for racially derogatory statements. AKA racist comments.
People have decided the term racist and racism are too detached and not emotionally impactful, so now we have "hate speech" which is more forceful.
It does, unfortunately, seem to imply that somehow threatening someone with death is less hateful than racism.
Now, the post you were replying to seems to be a reaction to the post which uses racist tweets and hate tweets interchangably. That apparently stuck in his craw, so to speak, because there were plenty of other very hateful tweets going on during this election that had nothing to do with racism, yet they are excluded from a post discussing "hate tweets."