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Comment by chrisfosterelli | Hacker News Reader

Is there any practical evidence of this slippery slope? Here in Canada hate speech, defamation, and obscenity have been illegal for a while. The idea is that you have freedom of expression, but it only extends as far as it doesn't infringe on another person's entitlement to a life free from discrimination & harassment. I don't feel like this has been a slippery slope for us, only a different place to draw the lines between your rights and mine than where America does. But I'd be curious if there's any practical examples of this happening in other countries.

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There have been numerous ludicrous prosecutions and lawsuits of people in your country for violating these laws. Mike Ward, for one. A few other comedians as well. Bill Whatcott. Gregory Elliott.

Some of these people were found guilty, some acquitted. All were prosecuted under these laws.

To be clear I don't agree with any of these people. I don't even find the Mike Ward joke particularly funny. It's a throwaway bit meant to be offensive from my point of view. But I don't think they should be able to be thrown in prison, fined, or sued, because someone's feelings got hurt over some words.

Thanks for engaging with specific examples, I do appreciate it. I wasn't familiar with most of these except for Mike Ward and I gave them a read. It seems that Mike Ward and Gregory Elliott were acquitted while Bill Whatcott was fined $17,500 for distributing anti-homosexuality flyers, containing images of dismembered fetuses and beheaded children, at schools. Perhaps this is just a difference of opinion, but I don't feel this outcome is unreasonable and I don't see the "slippery slope" aspect of it. It's unfortunate that the stress and cost of court were caused on people who were acquitted but that strikes me as a general problem of our legal system rather than one specific to free speech laws.

> you have freedom of expression, but it only extends as far as it doesn't infringe on another person's entitlement to a life free from discrimination & harassment

How do you determine this? If I define a common word to be offensive towards me, how would you argue against it if I really feel that way? Where do you draw the line?

The criminal code describes specific protected categories & speech and, if it becomes unclear, the courts determines the specific line in individual cases. In some cases it goes to the supreme court to set a general standard.

Typically it's up to the society's jurisprudential body to determine if harm has been caused in each individual case, the same way damages are determined in most infringements - i.e. slander, libel, defamation, obscenity, incitement, sedition, etc.

The problem with successfully silencing people is that you tend not to hear about it. Still, some examples can be found[0]. Take one where France used their hate speech laws to ban dissent from their foreign policy:

>In 2015, France’s highest court upheld the criminal conviction of 12 pro-Palestinian activists for violating restrictions against hate speech. Their crime? Wearing T-shirts that advocated a boycott of Israel — “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel,” the shirts read — which, the court ruled, violated French law that “prescribes imprisonment or a fine of up to $50,000 for parties that ‘provoke discrimination, hatred or violence toward a person or group of people on grounds of their origin, their belonging or their not belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race or a certain religion.'”

Or in the United Kingdom,

>In 2010, a militant atheist was given a six-month suspended sentence for leaving anti-Christian and anti-Islam fliers in a religious room of the Liverpool airport; according to the BBC, “jurors found him guilty of causing religiously aggravated intentional harassment.”

[0] https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-la...

The US has their "matter of national security" bs for that. The Occupy movement was repeatedly referred to as a terrorist thread by the FBI and DHS to justify the brutal crackdowns. And if that doesn't work to silence someone, just declare your victim insane and have them mangled by one psychiatrist after the other for the rest of their life. That even works pretty much everywhere. There's a thousand ways to achieve this that don't involve limiting freedom of speech. The cases you cited are pretty much the opposite of that. They were public trials for everyone to follow.

The whole "freedom of speech" story in the US is the most successful brain washing story on this planet. You hammer this into children's brains from young age on, to make sure it becomes the knee jerk reaction to everything that the government does to fuck you over. Having only two political parties with candidates from the elite, detached from reality. Political decisions don't get made on the basis of what's best for the people, just do the opposite of what the other party would do. Working two jobs at minimum wage to feed your family. No health insurance, if you get sick just chew pain killers all day and keep working. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. US Life expectancy on the decline for several years in a row. "At least I can complain about it, so everything is fine. Just imagine I'd live in a country where I couldn't insult and verbally abuse others!"

If it's that bad, surely you'd agree that it shouldn't get any worse.

Another Canadian here. Saw a video of an American pastor last week saying homosexuals should be lined up against the wall and shot. Great people they are protecting down there.

The same laws that protect them protect gay rights activists. If the democratic majority in a town with a church like that was allowed to choose a side to ban, who do you think they would pick?

That's basic political speech and is currently the law in some countries.

If you don't believe in freedom of speech for people you despise you don't believe in it at all.

But I'd be curious if there's any practical examples of this happening in other countries

Certainly. For example, in Germany it is illegal to curse at the police. There is a rather well-known video where police confront a man at his door but can't do anything more until he calls them cunts, at which point they turn around, force their way in, and arrest him.

How do you define discrimination and harassment precisely, so that the line is clearly drawn and does not slip?

There is something to be said comparing the modern hate speech vs free speech debate to defamation and libel civil cases that have already been established across the world – and how we as a society handle weaponized language.

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