Hacker News Reader

Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

The US "commitment to freedom and human rights" rings a bit hollow, IMHO. If you look at western Europe, free speech is restricted a little more, so "hate groups" are illegal. Yet in pretty much all other aspects, these countries are better at ensuring human rights for their citizens.

I'm fairly sure that the US is lagging due to historical reasons. Without a war like Germany experienced, there is too much resistance towards a "clean cut" elimination of racism, so you get an exponentially slow decay instead.

View on HN

So Germany, Japan (and other countries that experienced destructive wars) have eliminated racism?

Well, eliminated is a bit strong, as you can never eliminate an ideology.

The main point, however, is that Europe has shown over a span of several decades that restricting hate speech a) does not lead to any slippery slope where other forms of speech are restricted and b) that restrictions of hate speech are effective at reducing racism in society.

> The US "commitment to freedom and human rights" rings a bit hollow, IMHO.

Another example of this is how many governments we overthrew during the Cold War, and how many dictators we installed in their place.

> If you look at western Europe, free speech is restricted a little more

I wouldn't call that "free speech".

According to the Cato institute, the most free countries in the world are mostly in Western Europe:

> The jurisdictions that took the top 10 places, in order, were New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and Denmark (tied in 6th place), Ireland and the United Kingdom (tied in 8th place), and Finland, Norway, and Taiwan (tied in 10th place). Selected countries rank as follows: Germany (13), the United States and Sweden (17), Republic of Korea (27), Japan (31), ...

So, yes, I would call what they have free speech, in any meaningful use of the word.

Source: https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index-new

Hmph. Citing a libertarian organization founded by, of all people, Charles Koch and funded by the Koch brothers. [1]

1. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Cato_Institute

I don't think the prevalence of hate groups is necessarily related to any countries' commitment to freedom and human rights.

Virtually everyone outside of the hate groups wishes they didn't exist, but it's precisely the commitment to freedom that makes it hard to shut them down.

Is this a human rights issue? Again, we agree that we don't want these groups to exist, but I don't think there's ever been a "right to not have people hate you". I don't see a direct line from human rights to lack of hate groups.

Germany implemented laws that forbid holocaust denial for example. The US has no such laws pertaining to its groups.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com