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Comment by freeslave | Hacker News Reader

Despite all the hand-wringing in this thread, Canada has had anti-hate speech laws for some time now and our society has yet to collapse.

https://cfe.ryerson.ca/key-resources/guidesadvice/legal-rest...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_Canada

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Some societies used to have caste system and did human sacrifices, yet it took thousands of years for them to collapse. When they did collapse, it was due to outside invasion rather than their ideologies.

Good news: your society isn't collapsing. Bad news: it looks like it is going to shit.

Canada has some very real problems, most-recently in the headlines the atrocious ways we have treated our indigenous population through the years. In many ways, we have always been shit.

Regarding our laws protecting people from discrimination in speech and deed, however, I'm going to have to disagree with you.

Countries don't collapse because of censorship. But Canada specifically has a not-so-stellar history of this sort of thing; e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_13_of_the_Canadian_Hum...

"Not collapsing" is not the optimum we should aim for.

No, we should at least aim for the ability to recognize understated sarcasm.

This comment confuses me. There’s plenty of reasons to wring hands over a new law, and the existence of an old law doesn’t change this. It’s well known that the old hate speech laws have existed for 20 years, and also that they have been unevenly applied (not investigating extreme hate from Imams for instance), and harassing journalists for engaging in basic acts of exposition (publishing the Mohammed cartoons).

The concern is obviously that the new provisions don’t do anything to address these issues, and seem likely to exacerbate these concerns by expanding the scope and the range of punishments in a way that could chill speech, especially since the law doesn’t adequately define its terms leaving that up to unelected bureaucrats.

This law also follows on the heels of bill C-10 which similarly leaves a lot of unanswered questions about how popular youtube channels will be regulated. So Canadians hackles are already up.

The Aztecs had human sacrifice and their society was stable for centuries.

Despite all the hand-wringing.

I'd guess history moves much faster in our times thank to global internet connection and external influences.

China is also far from collapsing.

You’re probably right, but most people also thought this about the Soviet Union in the eighties.

All good then so long as no one weaponises them in future...

> our society has yet to collapse.

"Yet"

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