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Comment by gdhbcc | Hacker News Reader

Then you dont get freedom of speech.

Defending rights isn't easy.

Most of the world is fine with their version of freedom of speech. The extremist version from the US is rare, and causes huge amounts of harm.

US business owners need to wake up to the fact that their products are seen as publishers, not pipes, and that publishers in most of the world are regulated.

In point of fact, US law defined (via the DMCA "Safe Harbor" clause) most communications-media products (fora, video sharing sites, music repositories, etc.) as pipes for this reason. "They're pipes" is how the US regulates them.

Is this still accurate after SESTA/FOSTA?

In general, yes. SESTA/FOSTA nudged the definition of the safe harbor away from content that facilitated sex trafficking. This has no bearing on whether, say, iTunes is still safe in sharing the subversive, anti-government music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. ;)

Can you explain how US free speech causes harm?

The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville was the sort of fascist rally that other countries would categorically refuse a permit to. The US does not, in general, refuse permits under the assumption that a group (even a group with a violent ideology) will turn from a peaceable demonstration to a violent riot. Federal, state, and local law is heavily bent toward assumption of good faith.

Charlottesville had several injuries and one death.

An overweight woman died from a heart attack.

Meanwhile over here we have a dead German every day on average. If I were to name the ethnic origin of the murderers I would get sued.

This goes both ways.

I take it you're contradicting the coroner's report that Heather Heyer died of a blunt-force chest injury? Given that the driver of the car was convicted in her murder, you may want to walk that back.

Sure. And when a "new German" stabs an "old German" in the heart and kills him, he died of "causes unrelated to the injury" to quote one of our coroners, 6 hours (!) after the attack. These things aren't worth the papers they're printed on. A tool in the hand of politics

[1] https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article181477442/Obduktionse...

... probably also worth noting: not unlike the US, crime metrics on immigrants in Germany suggest that as a population, they're less likely to commit crimes than native Germans.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/may...

politifact, sure. Last year, there have been 28 rapes or sexual assaults in my city. According to police reports, witness reports and phantom photos, 26 of those are not from Germany. In the end-of-year reports, that number is close to 0. Funny how that works. because double-citizenship, acquittals, people never being caught, unknown identities.. you pick one

The source you've linked to doesn't mention a stabbing, and nothing I've been able to dig up suggests there was a stabbing in the Köthen death. Death from heart condition was unrelated to the injuries sustained from a fall the victim suffered scuffling with the 18-year-old (which, yes, smells fishy, but I think you're casting aspersions on an unrelated coroner who was looking at a woman with a crushed ribcage because of possible malpractice on a local-to-you coroner's part, which is... Well, this is the sort of misinformation-spreading and stereotyping, and the harm it causes, that we're discussing in this thread).

Are you conflating the facts from two situations? Media coverage of the Köthen protests suggests there was a stabbing incident in Chemnitz close in time to Köthen.

All of that having been said: I think your point that Germany has laws discouraging you from casting aspersions on groups due to individual actions of the groups, and America has far fewer such restrictions, stands. Except... Germany's homicide rate is lower than the US. So Germany's clearly doing something right relative to its neighbor 'cross the pond (of course, it may not be this---but given that Germany had to deal with actual Nazis and the US has not yet had that challenge, I'm not in the habit of gainsaying Germany's strategy here regarding laissez-faire freedom of speech).

It wasn't a stabbing, the rest was correct. It was very close after Chemnitz and the following protests, so this case was given close attention. Unwanted attention, so this ridiculous report was put out, and later the details were kept secret as "Ermittlungsgeheimnis".

I'm just using this ridiculous case to make the point that these reports don't mean anything. Both cases had extreme political pressure to make things happen.. and that exact thing was written on the report.

But besides that: I think it's faulty logic to say that as long as Germany's homocide (or whatever) rates are lower than the US, it must be better. You can't compare things like that. A murder used to be something extraordinary. Now it's everyday. According to statistics they're at an all-time low. See the case above and numerous other examples.

Well, no. A murder didn't used to be something extraordinary. Especially not in Germany---with respect, we are still talking about the country that committed genocide as state policy in the '40s. Germany's murder rate has remained basically flat for decades [https://ourworldindata.org/homicides]. What has changed is the population has risen by about 10 million in 50 years, so with a flat rate, you're going to see more murders.

...but more importantly, what has also changed extraordinarily is communication. We see a lot more of the murders, be they local, national, or international (the fact that we, a German and an American, are discussing Australian policy in response to a New Zealand murder spree is indicative of this). Internationally, we're a lot less tolerant of murder than we were because we can see it now. And as a species, we're pretty bad at risk assessment and filtering with this newfound panopticon power. It's a pretty well-documented phenomenon that fear in Germany of crime doesn't align with the hard numbers on incidents. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-09/german...

People see what they expect to see all too often.

If I may make an observation... You appear to be ascribing to some conspiracy-theory thinking in the statement that the coroner report aligned with perceived political pressure. Where is that notion coming from?

You think it'S a conspiracy theory to believe that days after Chemnitz, when another German was dead in that part of Germany, a coroner report that was pushed out hours after the attack, stating that although he was attacked and died on the spot, it didn't cause it - that all that is nothing but the truth? Ok yes I gladly accept that label

He died six hours later. You're really playing fast and loose with documented facts in this discussion. Were you there?

The report was extraordinarily fast, widely criticized even by common news outlets.

So no, you were not there. You have sources you trust more than the official reports, reason to believe those reports are bogus based on those sources, and you're using your beliefs about German process in a German autopsy to evaluate practices in an American case.

I don't think we have any more to discuss. I don't trust your unnamed sources. And I have a sinking suspicion they're exactly the sort Australian telco would find it necessary to de-list from DNS.

Because he doesn't like it and doesn't consider government "tyranny" harm.

I'm not sure how you consider blocking 4chan "tyranny" compared to some of the stuff the US government (or any government, for that matter) gets up to?

> Can you explain how US free speech causes harm?

A good example that could be considered to be overall harmful would be the anti-vax movement. It has spread by speech over social media through patently inaccurate information.

> Then you dont get freedom of speech

Does Australia have an enumerated right to free speech? I thought that remains a somewhat novel feature of the American Constitution. (Owing--in large part--to our culture.)

Freedom of speech is not just a law that happens to exist in some countries, it's a moral principle.

I believe you mean that separation of hate speech from freedom of speech rights isn't easy.

I think the hardest thing for folks is actually arguing that speech X, Y, and Z are hateful, because all people of every political background who log online seem to want to do is legislate others into silence or post innuendo and memes about people's character behind their backs.

There's an essay I found pretty unique, "Reflections on Debating The Right" on Current Affairs, explaining why much more public debates would be helpful... of course, that website could well be blocked soon in Australia for their articles on Palestine, given the precedents now set!

Debating a bad actor isn’t debating.

People on the right (the proles, not the rich people making money off the whole affair) don’t want to have honest intellectual discourse. They want to ‘own libruls’ and be smug (despite their choices actively hurting their livelihood and their lives leaving little to be smug about).

There’s nothing to debate, they’re just idiots. Easy to fleece idiots considering how easy it is to make money by throwing out a bunch of controversial statements and then retracting when their audience has moved on.

I hope you're never categorized as a bad actor for a view you develop by your friends or fellow activists. From what I can tell, the bleeding-edge version of the line between honest soul and bad actor is under continuous deployment... it will be crucial to study each set of changelogs! By the way, do you think sex work is liberating, or capitalist exploitation? What do you think, a 2-state solution or not? I wouldn't want to get cancelled by talking to you.

I hope to come back to this debate in a few decades and see that Robinson's pieces on debating the right, along with Mark Fisher's "Exiting the Vampire Castle" and Benjamin Studebaker's "The Left is Not a Church" will be considered important overlooked resources.

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