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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

It’s possible for a democratic political system to exist, and still prohibit insulting politicians. It’s quite possible to criticize any politician without resulting to ad hominem attacks. Even the former US Vice President Dick Cheney nearly faced consequences for violating senate rules by telling a senator to “go f___ himself.”

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Do you genuinely believe that laws that try to separate criticize versus insult can work?

I can't see anything other than laws like that being abused by politicians and government officials to quell speech and create a chilling effect amongst the populace.

Dueling used to be acceptable in the US and that didn’t prevent free speech. As long as it’s limited to reasonable fines simply requiring civility is unlikely to significantly quell free speech even if it did get abused by government officials.

>As long as it’s limited to reasonable fines

This will only result in those not living paycheck to paycheck being willing to speak out.

If this were true, then low-income people wouldn’t speed or run red lights. (In reality they still do it, they just wind up in debt trap.)

It seems to be working fine for Germany. In general I believe the chilling effect is often moderated by the Streisand effect.

What goes around comes around. Mr Cheney got a nice cold serving of revenge by a constituent in Miss. who, apropos, was inspired by mr Cheney's own exchange with sen. Pat Leahy. Around the :24s mark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmhmYYjrVUY To his credit Cheney took it in stride.

Are you talking about Cheney swearing at Durban? I don't recall him facing any consequences. All I remember is some pearl clutching about it and then nothing else. I don't think he even broke any senate rules, as the senate was not in session at the time he swore. Since then, public swearing and insults by US politicians seems to have only increased.

There was some tut tutting about the VP technically being a senator since the VP casts tie-breaking senate votes. But I don’t think it went anywhere serious. Anyways, it later turned out the VP is allowed to shoot people without consequences too, so it seems VPs are given a certain amount of immunity. Point is, there are rules on political speech, but it doesn’t have to quell political debate.

As another commenter pointed out, it looks like it's against German law to insult anyone, not just politicians.

If only politicians were protected from insult, I don't think that would be compatible with democracy at all.

I'm wondering if enforcement of this law is consistent. Somehow, I'm pretty doubtful, but I'd like some confirmation of how it works over there.

It is never proactively enforced, it always requires a "Strafantrag" of the insulted party.

> Even the former US Vice President Dick Cheney nearly faced consequences

But everyone else called him a "pimmel" with no consequences at all.

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