Comment by naberhausj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by naberhausj | Hacker News Reader

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I'm was not familiar with the exact definitions of "protected speech" and "campaign finance laws". Having looked both up, I still fail to see your point. How does our regulation of a candidate's fundraising indicate extreme/nonsensical regulation of protected speech?

Compared to Europe, we don't have any hate speech laws that risk make criminals out of people because of public whim. I will not scoff at that though, because hate speech is only a necessary evil. Do you real feel the range of opinions you can express here is less than what you could express in your average European country?

I think the original definition of protected speech, namely that is inalienable, is the only sane one. How flawed the implementation of that definition is (and truthfully it was flawed from the start) is definitely a problem of course. Any other guarantee would be worthless because very few people will suffer somebody spewing what they view as or want to be lies if they don't have to.

>How does our regulation of a candidate's fundraising indicate extreme/nonsensical regulation of protected speech?

It corrupts our democracy. A democracy should be one person, one voice, one vote. In our democracy the people with money have an outsized voice and therefore an outsized influence which leads to a government that is more concerned with appeasing the wealthy class minority than the majority of the rest of us.

>Do you real feel the range of opinions you can express here is less than what you could express in your average European country?

No, the point is the reverse. We can express ourselves here more than they can in Europe. Even still, I don't think you will find a huge percentage of Europeans who feel they can't legally express themselves. That is because most of the things that are protected here and not in Europe are a net negative on society. I also fail to see how outlawing something like Holocaust denial is a slippery slope to authoritarianism. Why do we need to protect speech that is objectively and inarguably incorrect? Defaming a individual person in the US is illegal. Why should defaming an entire class of people through hate speech be legal?

Plus the US doesn't even have universally protected speech anyway. We outlaw plenty of speech from our meager campaign finance laws to threats of violence. There is no binary choice between free speech and no free speech. We are just debating where the line is and the US isn't drawing the line where most other countries are drawing it.

One person, one vote?

Why should someone get to increase their voting power simply by producing more children to indoctrinate?

In Europe it's illegal to criticize the crimes of religious figures. That's horrific.

>Why should someone get to increase their voting power simply by producing more children to indoctrinate?

Are you serious with that one? There are much quicker, cheaper, and more effective ways to enact political change than spending 18 years and the literally hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to raise a child in order to get one more vote.

>In Europe it's illegal to criticize the crimes of religious figures. That's horrific.

I agree. I didn't say other countries were perfect. However many countries do recognize that blasphemy laws are unjust are have repealed or have started debated repealing them. Ireland is one notable example of a country that amended their constitution recently to remove them. And even in the countries who still have those laws on the books, it is extremely rare for them to be prosecuted.

> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/08/mike-turner-campaig...

> GOP congressman spent $70K in campaign cash on meals, in 370 food-related expenditures

Once a politician gets used to living fat, off of campaign "contributions", they rather start to enjoy that lifestyle and will bend their morals to keep it.

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