Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobessebot | Hacker News Reader

The precise question was:

"Would you say that you are free to express your opinion in public or do you have to be careful with certain or many topics?" („Würden Sie sagen, man kann seine Meinung in der Öffentlichkeit frei äußern oder muss man bei einigen oder vielen Themen vorsichtig sein?“)

As a German, I believe that I am free to express my opinion, nevertheless I would say that there are obviously many topics of discussion where one has to be careful just because there is lots of potential to be misunderstood.

How am I supposed to answer this poll?

View on HN

The term for this (most commonly in social sciences research ?) is 'double barreled question'. It is bad specifically because you do not know which question is being answered.

The obvious bias of this website is...obvious.

Often I don't feel free to express my views in the US, not because there are social consequences but because it is simply not a space where my opinion is useful or valid. E.g., I don't feel free to express my views publicly about other peoples parenting decisions.

The article posted here starts with an outcome and then takes a poorly written poll question as the sole piece of evidence to support its preformed conclusions.

The poll in no way supports the statement: "The view of Germans that they are living without free speech would be of little surprise. What is most disconcerting is that they seem to reconciled to living without this basic human right."

Even if the poll supported the first sentence, it doesn't even COME CLOSE to supporting the second one.

"Do you feel comfortable voicing your views in public, or do you think it's bad to make thoughtless claims about someone else's religion?"

"Have you stopped beating your wife?"

Turley is extremly biased and the whole article is ridiculous. Even the article that he cites is from "die Welt" which itself is a pretty biased right conservative medium.

I think it is way more problematic how he intentionally misinterprets a survey of 1283 people to spread the constructs in his head.

yup...the article started with an outcome and a belief and found sought evidence to justify it. That this is the best evidence they can find? really?

It's not about agree or disagree...its just that if this is the best argumentation you can do for your point and hold that opinion in good faith, you should probably re-evaluate your point before you try and convince others of it.

Characterizing Turley as “biased” and “right conservative” is pretty disingenuous. A few years ago I would have called him a pretty standard Hacker News liberal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Turley

> In appearances on Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show, he called for criminal prosecution of Bush administration officials for war crimes, including torture.[21]

> He has opined that the Supreme Court is injecting itself into partisan politics.[29] He frequently has expressed the view that recent nominees to the court hold extreme views.[30]

> Turley described U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in an op-ed as President Barack Obama's sin-eater, writing:

> “For Obama, there has been no better sin eater than Holder. When the president promised CIA employees early in his first term that they would not be investigated for torture, it was the attorney general who shielded officials from prosecution. When the Obama administration decided it would expand secret and warrantless surveillance, it was Holder who justified it. When the president wanted the authority to kill any American he deemed a threat without charge or trial, it was Holder who went public to announce the ‘kill list’ policy.”

I think it’s more accurate to say Turley is a libertarian-leaning liberal in a party that’s closed ranks around its statist wing and thrown its libertarians completely under the bus. (And I say that as a statist who didn’t agree with Turley back then!)

Turley is best known among "liberals" for having supported the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, suing Barack Obama, opposing the ACA, supporting President Trump's extralegal redirection of funds to his border wall project, and opposing Trump's impeachment. I don't think he's a pretty standard Hacker News liberal.

I'm not sure I remember any time during my adult life where the Democratic party had a libertarian wing. I'm curious what you think are examples of libertarian Democrats. People like Feingold and Wyden get cited here because they're ardent about conventionally-construed civil liberties, but that's just a small part of what a libertarian is.

He also called for Bush to be prosecuted for “war crimes,” opposes the death penalty, etc. And lots of Hacker News liberals opposed Obama for drone strikes, surveillance, etc.

I recall a pretty strong civil libertarian wing among democrats during the Bush era. I’d say Howard Dean at least had some libertarian tendencies, such as supporting gun rights.

Lots of Democrats support gun rights. The Illinois death penalty was eliminated by a Republican governor. That doesn't make them Libertarians. No Democrat supports eliminating the Department of Education, for instance.

In the US, there are certain opinions for which you'll suffer repercussions from public shaming to losing your livelihood to getting taken down from social media. For example, last year you couldn't discuss the lab leak theory of covid. When you discuss these topics, you need to 'be careful.'

I think your translation is slightly imprecise. It’s unclear in the English whether the “you” in “you are free to express your opinion” is being used as the 2nd-person pronoun (i.e., equivalent to German Sie) or as the generic pronoun (i.e. man).

For those who can’t read the German version: it’s the latter.

Unfortunately there is no way to distinguish these two in English other than using the somewhat dated pronoun “one”. It usually doesn’t cause any confusion but I think in this particular case, the answer is different depending on the meaning. I might feel safe to say my opinions, because I don’t believe anything particularly controversial, but still think “one” might need to be careful depending on the particular content of “one”‘s views.

Good point, however the more important question is what is meant by "careful".

The way the researcher wanted you to.

Most often, I don't worry about being misunderstood, but that people will overestimate my interest in debating a topic to some ultimate viewpoint or stalemate. I like trading a couple of comments - asking a question, hearing a bit from others, but I'm not there for a showdown. It's easier to feel this out amongst your circles of friends and acquaintances, but the scope explodes on the internet. I run a sports forum and I'm frequently amazed at people debating a subjective non-topic like their life depends on it. I have no idea where they find the time.

"Careful" is not a perfect translation of "vorsichtig". "Vorsicht" has a connotation of avoiding danger. So if you have to be "vorsichtig" to avoid being misunderstood, that doesn't just imply that there is potential to be misunderstood, it also implies that it's dangerous to be misunderstood.

An important contextualization for Americans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a

In Germany you can't advocate for far-right organizations (or the German communist party!) because there has been .. trouble with that kind of thing in the past.

So the communist party can exist, you just can’t campaign for it?

How does that work?

It doesn’t exist anymore. Its modern successor, Die Linke, still exists and gets about 10% of the vote. Advocating for it is perfectly legal.

Thats just wrong. Die Linke are no communists but socialists. And even that only in parts. There are many "social democrats" as well.

We have communist parties here but they almost get no votes ( DKP and MLPD)

Die Linke is in fact the successor to the Communist Party, although their ideology has shifted over time.

KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) — in East Germany, merged with SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) in 1946 to form SED. In West Germany, banned after 1956.

SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) - ruled East Germany until the democratic transition in 1989. Rebranded as PDS in 1990.

PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus) - Merged with the minor party WASG in 2007 to form Die Linke.

Yes they are the successor. But does that matter? The CDU was founded mainly by previous members of the Zentrum party. That was the party that voted with the NSDAP for the "Ermächtigungsgesetz" that gave Hitler the power over germany.

But the party changed over time and today it doesnt matter anymore. Same goes for die Linke in my opinion. The only thing that should count, are the targets of a party.

Yeah so under Stasi a lot of people had to be careful with certain topics as well.

The comparison is just so ridiculous that I don't even know where to start.

I am not saying it is equivalent if you think about it.

I honestly don't know what the perception of people is that they compare modern day US with the Stasi times.

I'm serious, the comparison is so out of this world, but I keep hearing it.

Tell me anything that is politically incorrect that you could say in a bar that will get you tortured/executed/imprisoned.

I'm really not saying that this political correctness craze is any good and I'm pretty much on the it's too much in many cases side, but the degrees between getting bad looks and a discussion that gets heated.

Whenever I also have this argument, some people go nut picking and get me a couple of example where you could say that, I'm not even saying those don't exist, and they are terrible, it's just not even close to systematic and nothing to do with the Stasi times.

Also in regards to Germany, have you ever been there? I know it's anecdotal but people basically there just speak their minds, I've heard mall kinds of right wing politically incorrect stuff, on both sides.

I'm fairly sure that at any point in history there was a fairly large set of controversial opinions, voicing of which could cause you trouble. Number of opinions you could voice that would get you in very serious trouble is fairly low right now in Germany.

Obviously the magnitude of the trouble you would get in differs. However if you are not careful you still will get into trouble. It is as if you read in a lot of opinions in my statement that simply isn't there.

"Number of opinions" is a bad metric. Suppose that number is as low as 1: you can't express the opinion that Uyghurs are being genocided.

Would you call this nearly-perfect free-speech?

I think it's really hard to come up with a good metric for freedom of speech with the amount of effort you usually put into online comments. But I bet there are NGOs with various opinions on the topic that rate countries. For example Germany is #13/180 in the Reporters Without Borders ranking of freedom of press https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table, which probably correlates well with garden variety definitions of freedom of speech.

Yes and the reason why we aren't ranked higher is that the press was not properly protected by police at right wing and anti-corona-measure protests.

We were ranked at place 11 but were downranked cause of continous attacks on journalists.[1] But the people wo did this are those who cry loudly: "We have no freedom of speech". I even read in this thread "Germany is a totalitarian dystopia with no free speech"

Those people are so far away from reality. I am concerned they might never find back.

[1] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/panorama/pressefr...

"Germany's Network Enforcement Law, or NetzDG … requires social media companies to block or remove content that violates one of twenty restrictions on hate and defamatory speech in the German Criminal Code," Diana Lee wrote for Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. "In effect, the NetzDG conscripts social media companies into governmental service as content regulators," with millions of euros in fines hanging over their heads if they guess wrong. - https://reason.com/2020/10/12/german-style-internet-censorsh...

Germany Raids Homes of 36 People Accused of Hateful Postings Over Social Media - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/world/europe/germany-36-a... (a few of the arrests were for threats and coercion, I'm sure you'll prefer to focus on those)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com