The SPLC settlement is a very bad thing, even though they were totally out of line

Saying someone "has the intellectual and moral integrity of the KKK" is basically just a way of saying to them "you're baaaaaad".

If we imagine accusations being placed along a spectrum of specificity with something highly specific at one end e.g. "you murdered Noel Edmonds at speaker's corner yesterday at 7:05pm by bashing him over the head with a hammer" at one end, and the least specific accusation we can possibly imagine at the other (something like "you're baaaaaad") it's easy to see at which end of the spectrum "you're baaaaaad" falls.

If we combine this with the common sense idea to be slanderous, an accusation has to meet some minimum threshold of specificity - you have to actually accuse someone of something - then it's not inconsistent to imagine that "... is an anti-Muslim extremist" falls on one side of the threshold while "is as bad as the KKK" falls on the other.

/r/samharris Thread Parent