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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

Free Speech is important.

Germany has it. The Netherlands have it. Australia has it. Estonia has it. Brazil has it. Many countries in the world have it.

What Americans defenders of Free Speech never seem to grasp is that their variant of Free Speech is only the most extreme one on a whole spectrum of "Free Speeches", and that their variant does not really deliver more benefits than the (ImO) more sensible variants. I would argue the extremist position is -- as usually -- inferior to the nuanced, balanced ones.

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How do you know that something is extreme if you can't hear it? How do you engage individuals, hopefully productively, if you don't allow them to speak?

If the answer is social norms, how do you prevent those norms from drifting overtime into authoritarianism? Start small, attack only the extremists. Then slowly turn your forces against your opposition. This is the kind of thought that Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote about in "First they came...." Notice that historically that poem applied to Germany and even Estonia and Australia. These countries were or seem to be morphing into an authoritarian state.

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The reason for this poem is also the reason for the restrictions on speech in Germany. Go figure. Also, the US has been morphing into an suthoritarian state for quite a while. What is not the freedom of white affluent males is under constant attack there. From the war against drugs to the war against women's rights, there are countless examples.

> How do you know that something is extreme if you can't hear it? How do you engage individuals, hopefully productively, if you don't allow them to speak?

Or, perhaps more importantly, how do you challenge or disprove their arguments? The answer to "bad" speech is to counter it and illustrate its flaws; banning some speech can have the effect of giving it credibility that it doesn't deserve.

Germany has free speech, except if you want to criticize foreign dictators [1]. I think I'll stick with our extremist variant, thanks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair

This particular article of the german penal code is a relic of the German Empire (1871). Last December, the government decided to get it removed from the penal code.

As the article correctly notes, the criminal case was dropped. Also, the law parts of the case was based on was practically forgotten for a few decades now and will be removed soon.

There is too much self censorship by the media and by the people that even in the countries that supposed to have it, it is not really practiced. So, free speech is just a buzzword. Nobody speaks their mind unless it is in a range that is currently accepted by the society.

A world where everyone blurts out whatever is in their head free from any consequence isn't as I understand it the desirable end goal of the right to freedom of expression. Moreover that sort of view on it is profoundly anti-human since, as you note, we live in large groups with an attendant milieu that is unavoidable.

> Free Speech is important. Germany has it.

East Germany also had it, so did Nazi Germany. Yes, on the same principle: as long as you didn't want to say things that the Government deemed verboten you were free to say whatever you liked.

> East Germany also had it, so did Nazi Germany.

No, they didn't.

Declaration of Human Rights:

> Article XI – The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, _in the cases determined by the law_.

In East Germany and Nazi Germany, people were persecuted and killed without being brought to trial and facing justice.

> No, they didn't.

Well, yeah. The point is neither does Germany today.

> In East Germany and Nazi Germany, people were persecuted and killed without being brought to trial and facing justice.

Whereas being arrested, tried and merely jailed for something you say, as happens in Germany (and Austria), is your idea of justice and not being persecuted?

BTW, don't try to make out this is an argument about today's Germany being as unsophisticated and brutal as Nazi Germany or East Germany. Obviously it isn't.

This is solely about the principle of free speech: you either believe in someone's right to say what they want or you don't. You can't just sometimes believe in it.

> Well, yeah. The point is neither does Germany today.

According to the definition of the Declaration of Human Rights, they actually do.

> Whereas being arrested, tried and merely jailed for something you say, as happens in Germany (and Austria), is your idea of justice and not being persecuted?

Freedom of speech alone doesn't guarantee freedom, liberty or justice.

> This is solely about the principle of free speech: you either believe in someone's right to say what they want or you don't. You can't just sometimes believe in it.

That's the problem; we have different definition of "freedom of speech". The US interprets "freedom of speech" according to the definition given by the Bill of Rights, while the rest of the world use the definition of Declaration of Human Rights.

> According to the definition of the Declaration of Human Rights, they actually do.

It doesn't matter how many times you mention the "Declaration of Human Rights", they actually do not.

> Freedom of speech alone doesn't guarantee freedom, liberty or justice.

I didn't say it did, I asked if you thought being jailed simply for something you say is justice or not being persecuted?

> That's the problem; we have different definition of "freedom of speech".

Actually, there's no problem, because it's really simple: if you do not believe in the right of people to say things you may not happen to like, then you do not believe in free speech.

Jailing people for things they have said is self-evidently not allowing free speech.

I tend to agree. Rallying thousands of people to get somebody fired because he or she said something out of the line is extreme approach to free speech I don't see outside of America. ;)

Germany does not have free speech. You are not allowed to deny the Holocaust by law.

Except they obviously do have free speech. The fact that they can't say everything doesn't mean they can't say anything. By your standard, no one has free speech. In America, you're not allowed to advocate for the violent overthrow of the government: 18 U.S. Code § 2385 - Advocating overthrow of Government (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2385)

Advocating violence and denying a historic fact are two completly different things. You're not allowed to threaten someone with murder either, but that's not a restriction of freedom of speech. Threats of violence are neither ideas nor opinions.

However denying the Holocaust is very much an opinion and freedom of speech would mean that I could freely state this opinion and have it judged on the free marketplace of ideas.

Like sedition, denying the Holocaust (and hate speech generally) is a speech act with real world consequences, not merely an opinion. The point remains that freedom of speech is not a binary condition. No one has total freedom of speech; having some restrictions isn't the same as existing under a dictatorship with no freedom of expression at all.

Freedom of speech means free to speak, not free of consequences. That was never my argument. A threat of violence is an attack, and I should expect defensive consequences. Stating the opinion that the Holocaust never happened is not an attack. Nobody is hurt by this, unless people judge it to be a valid idea and act accordingly. But freedom of speech also means to trust people to deem such an idea preposterous. There are instances in history where this didn't work out, but the general tendency indicates it to be a good protocol. The alternative is to forbid certain ideas or opinions to be perpetuated. However, who can assure you that the power to ban certain ideas and opinions will not be used for malicious intent in the future? So, yes, free speech can only be a binary condition.

Ok, in the US you're also prohibited from obscene speech, which is, according to Miller v. California, expression that '(1) "the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the [subject or work in question], taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest" and (2) "depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, contemporary community standards, sexual conduct defined by the applicable state law" and (3) "the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value"'. There's no threat of violence here, just community standards that are bother by your artwork, poem, song lyrics or whatnot. Since this is clearly a restriction on your freedom of speech, you clearly have zero freedom of expression in the U.S.

Balanced and nuanced according to whom?

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