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Comment by GrumpyBen | Hacker News Reader

You're linking a source that you don't understand. "Toute personne qui refuse délibérément de s’affilier ou qui demande à ne plus être affiliée à un régime de sécurité sociale"

This has nothing to do with freedom of speech.

And since when is it illegal to talk about homosexuals, non-white people or jews ?

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My link about health insurance was poorly proving my point indeed. I provided another one in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13411732

Your point concerning talk about the aforementioned minorities has already been answered.

>And since when is it illegal to talk about homosexuals, non-white people or jews ?

See: Eric Zemmour

You're allowed to talk about them provided the contents of your speech is "they're great and I love everything about them".

I'm not particularly fond of Zemmour, but his multiple condemnations absolutely qualify as political censorship.

I don't know Zemmour other than by name. So I went on his Wikipedia page to take a look at that. The french one appears to have more information.

- Condamnation pour incitation à la discrimination raciale en 2011

- Condamnation pour provocation à la haine envers les musulmans

- Condamnation d'I-Télé pour "rupture abusive de contrat"

One is about racial discrimination. One is about inciting hate against muslims. The last one is about a private company. The guy also happens to have written a book about gays where... I'll just quote wikipedia: ""gays" would have been stigmatized and isolated, like the lepers of old."

Help me out here. How do you get from there to "You're only allowed to talk about gays if you say 'they're great and I love everything about them'"?

The devil is in the details. What passes for "inciting *" is very broad, and is (in itself) the mechanism by which political censorship is applied.

I truly urge you to read up on this affaire. What he actually said really wasn't that big a deal.

I can see how your general point about political censorship could be true (I don't know enough about this to pass judgement), but I'm asking specifically about your comment on homosexuals.

Just to recontextualize this: This is a thread about the viability of startups in France. As I mentioned a bit further up, there are "no hate speech" rules all over Europe. Germany for example is far, far stricter than France about it ... and Berlin has a vibrant startup scene.

I generally agree that "inciting" is a loosely defined term and I, too, dislike how easy of a tool it can be for political censorship. But there's worlds between those details and some of the claims I'm finding in this thread.

Hmm we may have a misunderstanding. I didn't make a comment about homosexuals, specifically. My point was rather that there are, de facto, state-enforced standards for political correctness in France and that this maps directly onto a form of censorship.

Or am I still missing your point?

I see what you're saying, yeah. I don't think we disagree, I misunderstood your original post.

I wrote a bit more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13411875

You can't base your thinking on one particular example. Judges can make mistakes.

The law makes racism, antisemitism and homophobia illegal. That's fine for me.

It was an example.

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