And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff? Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?
I guess the people opposing co-governance are not very fond of following contracts, because at least in NZ the founding document/contract the treaty of Waitangi guaranteed a co-governance (and arguably the commonwealth for a long time ignored those obligations).
That's quite a strong statement to just present as an axiom without even any evidence or premises leading to it. Can you justify this statement, or do we have to just accept it as an axiom?
Should you punish the children for what the fathers did wrong? Because whoever wronged the people are dead since long. The people who were wronged are dead since long. Do the children inherit the sins or the victimhood of their ancestors? Some say yes. They say to the youth: "Look how bad these people were treated long before you were born! Now it's your responsibility to settle the score and pay back."
Others say no. They say that nobody can be held responsible for the wrongs that other people have done, even if those people were their ancestors, or are considered their ancestors by modern measurements. The question is if somebody is to be seen as an individual and judged as an individual, or seen as a member of some tribe and judged as a member of that tribe.
It's worth to mention that things are usually seen in another way. What we're seeing right now is the end of christian morality, where a victim is held in high regard. This is not common through history or through the world. Once these kind of victim-revering morals don't exist anymore, the attitude will instead be: "Your ancestors were slaves, therefore you deserve to be a slave" or "My ancestors conquered your ancestors, therefore we have the right to treat you as we wish" and such awful things.
The word "harem" is derived from Arabic/Persian for "forbidden"; it was a place where men were not allowed, and thus a considered a safe space for the women within.
Little Boy turned actual little boys into carbon ash imprints on the concrete where they sat and ate lunch; it probably saved many more children from burning up in a sustained campaign of carpet-bombings.
To create a new power group to balance rights? It's unstable, but it also leads to things like "women, as well as men, get to vote" and "workers can organise their labour via trade unions, just as owners can organise their capital via shareholdings and loans".
I dont want to be part of a society with built in racist laws.
It’s also what was guaranteed in our founding document - depending on how you read it. That dubious piece of legal work managed to botch the key term ‘governance’ such that interpretation is required and it may, or may not guarantee Māori governance of the country.
Comparing NZ to apartheid South Africa is darkly funny. The oppression I face is underwhelming.
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/treaty/treaty-faqs#Whatdo...
It literally speaking isn’t based on skin colour. In Australia (I think the situation in NZ is similar?) indigenous status is based on descent, identification, and acceptance by the community. Unlike the “blood quantum laws” which apply for Native Americans in the US, there is no minimum percentage of indigenous ancestry required. So you have people, the majority of whose ancestors are European, and who look physically indistinguishable from other European-descended Australians, but who have some indigenous ancestry, who choose to identify with that ancestry, and whose identification is accepted by a recognised indigenous community - they are legally indigenous. An indigenous person can have any skin colour, and due to trends in intermarriage and indigenous identification (which is optional), the distribution of skin colours is changing over time.
It's all signalling. In Australia there are support and administrative bodies at all level of government interacting with aboriginal communities (often failing for different reasons, mostly budget). A 'Voice' (which is still vaguely defined as having influence but no power) does not magically create harmony between the past and future, it only continues the divide.
We are stuck in a world of trying to simultaneously give back the 'old past' while carrying on as-is otherwise. That is impossible. We must work towards a common, prosperous and respectful future for all inhabitants that recognises and admits the things we can't undo or change. We are trying to have it both ways, and it will leave the divides strongly in place.
Weird how you seem to recognize what culture is, yet in the same sentence it means nothing more than sharing a skin tone
The idea that pale-skinned people can't be Indigenous is mainly one that exists on the political right. In 2011, conservative Murdoch newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt was found (in a civil, not criminal, proceeding) to have violated the Racial Discrimination Act by authoring a newspaper column arguing that pale-skinned people couldn't "really" be indigenous. [0]
By contrast, my local federal member of parliament is Dr Gordon Reid MP [1]. He identifies as Indigenous, but his skin tone is pretty similar to my own, and (as far as I know) my own ancestry is purely European (mostly Irish, with some English and Scottish too). But, Dr Reid belongs to our main centre-left party (Labor), and the Australian Labor Party has zero objection to pale-skinned people identifying as Indigenous
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eatock_v_Bolt
[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?...
If getting political, the ALP has no objection to anyone so long as they support their view... same as the Liberal party.
But this is the whole ludicrous thing; what are they actually identifying as?. Traditional landowners? Cultural martyrs? 'Aussie?' 'Neglected outsiders? It gets really tricky if they start to actually really dig into the problem.
It's like the argument is saying they're disadvantaged because they're not living their 'full modern Western life' while also supposing somehow 'we' will give back the old ways and apologise. Which is it? Hence I've been saying we need to work out what future 'Australian' is and all head towards that, as best we can. I don't even know what Australian culture is now, it's a mess of trying to be all cultures to everyone.
It also potentially results in two groups of Indigenous people – one group with majority Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in remote/regional/rural areas, who experience a great deal of social deprivation; another group with minority (in some cases even only slight) Indigenous ancestry, found mostly in urban/suburban areas, who experience far less social deprivation. With all this talk of "closing the gap", counting both groups as "Indigenous" makes "the gap" seem smaller than it actually is, and if the second group is growing, that growth can create a false sense of progress of the gap being closed, even as little or nothing improves for the first group.
That's not my take on the requirement that one have ancestral DNA
Furthermore, the official definition is not phrased in terms of DNA, only descent. Many Indigenous communities object to the use of DNA testing in determining Indigenous status, and as a result it is mostly not considered in deciding these questions.
The official definition is ambiguous in using the word "descent" – while most commonly that is interpreted as "biological descent", it isn't clear that merely legal descent (as in legal adoption) is actually excluded. If an Indigenous person legally adopts a biologically non-Indigenous child (or has such a child through IVF, surrogacy, sperm/egg/embryo donation, etc), and the child is raised to identify as Indigenous, and their Indigenous community accepts that child as Indigenous – there is an argument they officially are Indigenous, and given the unresolved ambiguity in the official definition, I don't know how one can say that argument is incorrect. In practice, if the elders of their Indigenous community write a letter declaring them to be Indigenous, the government will very likely accept them (and their descendants) as such.
No way this could possibly go wrong.
I'm not necessarily defending these policies–just attempting to describe them accurately–if one is going to criticise something, it is important to accurately describe the thing to be criticised. This is an issue on which I have mixed feelings and can see both sides of the argument.
But to clarify, at least officially speaking, it is based on blood–it is not enough to simplify identify as indigenous and be accepted by a recognised indigenous community as indigenous, you also have to actually be of indigenous descent – a person with zero indigenous descent is officially speaking not indigenous, even if they identify as such, and even if a recognised indigenous community accepts them as such. The difference from American "blood quantum" laws, is there is no requirement for any minimum degree of indigenous descent – officially it doesn't matter if a person's ancestry is 100% indigenous or 1-in-256 indigenous – but officially a person with zero known indigenous ancestry can't be indigenous. In practice, people with extremely remote indigenous ancestry are unlikely to be able to find a recognised indigenous community willing to endorse their indigenous identification, but standards vary from community to community, and also change over time – sometimes it becomes a very political issue, with certain factions within a community advocating for much tougher membership standards than others, and so it can depend on the outcome of the political battle between those different factions.
In practice, Australia doesn't have any central list of "who is indigenous". Every agency makes that decision for itself. For statistical purposes, the government just uses self-identification, and doesn't require any evidence of descent or acceptance by a recognised community. When it comes to "affirmative action" (reserved jobs, admission to educational institutions, scholarships, etc) and voting rights in representative bodies (such as the "land councils" through which indigenous communities own land), agencies usually require more than just self-identification: generally a letter or certificate issued by a recognised indigenous community body (often a land council), although sometimes other forms of evidence can be accepted instead.
> No way this could possibly go wrong.
There is a lot of controversy in the Australian indigenous community over so-called "box-tickers", who identify as indigenous, despite having only very remote indigenous ancestry, or even no such ancestry at all. The requirement for a letter/certificate issued by recognised community can be a big hurdle for such people, although given the political controversies over the standards for issuing such letters/certificates (and even occasional allegations of corruption), we can't rule out the possibility that some people with zero actual indigenous descent have successfully obtained such letters/certificates. Officially speaking, such people aren't actually indigenous, but the system will treat them as if they were. However, there was a case (in NSW) a few years ago where a woman claimed to be of indigenous descent, and had her claim endorsed by her local land council, which then accepted her as one of its members – a competing faction on the land council insisted her indigenous ancestry was bogus, gathered evidence of her genealogy, filed a formal complaint with the state government agency which manages land councils, and successfully convinced that agency to revoke her land council membership.
You wrote an entire essay on a completely irrelevant point. Don't be a pedant. It's obnoxious.
And if by "race" you mean something which is neither ethnicity nor skin colour, then that is a concept with very unclear applicability to contemporary Australia.
Finally, your needlessly hostile attitude is obnoxious.
were having a convo on a internet board, not having an academic debate. People say “skin color” colloquially when they mean the general concept of race/ethnicity. Is it not used like this in Australia?
The hostile attitude is because you decided to focus on a hyper-specific nuance that nobody cares about. And then write an entire essay about a non-point.
Its like if I were to focus in solely on you purposely misspelling “color” using non-American and then steer the convo into an endless quagmire about semantics. Can you see how obnoxious that would be?
I come to this website because it provides an opportunity for a level of discussion which is closer to an "academic debate" than a "convo on an internet board". If you find that obnoxious, maybe there is some other "internet board" out there which is more suitable for you.
> People say “skin color” colloquially when they mean the general concept of race/ethnicity. Is it not used like this in Australia?
You speak as if the "general concept of race/ethnicity" was identical in every country – it isn't. There are significant differences between how "race/ethnicity" is understood in Australia, and how it is understood in the US-to speak of just two countries. Do you understand those differences?
> The hostile attitude is because you decided to focus on a hyper-specific nuance that nobody cares about
Just because you don't care about a nuance doesn't mean nobody else does. Indeed, the comment you are complaining about was upvoted. And, I've posted many other comments just like the one you are complaining about in the 8+ years I've been here, and many of them have been upvoted as well.
> Its like if I were to focus in solely on you purposely misspelling “color” using non-American
There is a big difference between spelling differences between different Anglophone countries – which are trivial – and differences in how "race/ethnicity" is conceptualised in different countries – which are far from trivial.
Are you or are you not the one who misunderstood that distinction when you responded to my post using an American understanding of the phrase "skin color" (note the American spelling)?
> I come to this website because it provides an opportunity for a level of discussion which is closer to an "academic debate" than a "convo on an internet board". If you find that obnoxious, maybe there is some other "internet board" out there which is more suitable for you.
lol mate. An obsessive focus on a netcode assembly doesn't make people experts on political matters.
The political conversations on HN aren't deep. Actually, they're very superficial.
What's the phrase? "Performative erudition". You aren't having anything closer to academic debate than anywhere else. Let's call it "performative academia".
Your comment was talking about Australia. There are significant differences in how Australians and Americans understand issues such as ethnicity, race and skin colour, and trying to apply American understandings of those topics to Australia doesn't make much sense – which is part of what my comment was trying to convey. But, rather than using this as an opportunity to learn about those differences – about which you don't appear to know anything – you just dismissed it as "irrelevant". If you aren't interested in understanding race/ethnicity/etc issues in another country, why are you commenting about them?
Well, to clarify, your comment did not explicitly mention any country. However, in the context of the conversation, it seemed to be primarily talking about institutions such as the proposed Indigenous Voice in Australia, and the Maori electoral roll in New Zealand; I don't think it was primarily talking about the US since "co-governance" is much less on the agenda there (and the existing institution of tribal governments would seem to cover much of the demand for it anyway). As such, you were talking about race/ethnicity issues in other countries, without appearing to have any understanding of the differences between how those issues are understood in those countries as compared to your own.
Look at the NZ approach of taking race into consideration when prioritizing medical care.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-surgeons-must-now-con...
(Similarly, if you think a teacher is being too authoritarian with their students, you won't make your case any more convincing by making comparisons with crazed dictators.)
That sort of equality was more palatable to many.
The argument is “we can right the wrongs of past racism, but being racist in reverse”.
It’s amazing how many people buy into that argument.
Unsurprisingly, we did try this for a decade or two. It was an extensive and expensive failure and is widely researched and written about [1].
A minor boost to Māori in a waiting list point scoring system for list prioritisation has caused a knee jerk dismissal of the scheme as we see here. Absent from the shouting has been a solution to Māori living shorter lives with worse health [2]. The new scheme also reduces the impact of race on list priorities, as noted at the end of this article [3]. Race is a couple of points out of 100, most being clinical.
The point scoring system is a small part of the large changes underway in the system at the moment. The moves are primarily towards more autonomy for Māori within the healthcare system [4]. The background to this is a recognised failure in the system after a successful court action claiming Treaty of Waitangi obligations were not being met. They weren’t and aren’t [5].
With knowledge of the situation and what’s going on, ‘apartheid’ is a pretty radical take. To my knowledge even the dog whistle politicians in an election year haven’t called new the scheme apartheid.
Update: yes, our dog whistle politics have gone there.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795362...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/20/new-zealand-st...
[3] https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2...
[4] https://www.futureofhealth.govt.nz/maori-health-authority/
[5] https://waitangitribunal.govt.nz/news/report-on-stage-one-of...
Consider two hungry kids at lunch. Consider the difference between stealing the fruit from one kid's plate, and giving extra fruit to the other kid. Both are special treatment. Think about what you can see that's different in these two situations that you would call the same thing.
And your analogy is a poor one for what is happening in NZ with regards to healthcare. Healthcare is a limited resource, and what NZ is doing is letting race be a factor when triaged patients in an environment of limited healthcare resources. You could literally be sicker than someone else, but if you're the wrong race, the other person get treatment first.
So for your analogy, it's more like there are two kids. One hasn't eaten in 3 days, the other 2 days, but the one that hasn't eaten in 3 days is a member of an "oppressive race" (without having committed any oppression themselves mind you, just their ancestors), so the other one gets to eat first.
You need to learn about it before you make claims like that. This isn’t the case, as the links provided describe and as I stated.
Race already is a factor in healthcare - the system is biased against Māori and this is an attempt to even it up.
Patients are triaged for medical care, it's always been that way - it's based on medical need, with the sickest treated first, and those who are less sick wait.
The new system now prioritized people based on race. You could be sicker than someone else, but if you're the wrong race, you wait.
This doesn't "even up" anything. It penalizes people for being the wrong race.
You don't solve racism, by being racist. It's an absurd idea.
Clinical need comes first.
My above links may help you.
“Capital & Coast and Hutt Valley DHBs are prioritising Māori and Pacific in our surgical scheduling processes. The patients’ ethnicity is taken into account along with their level of clinical urgency and the number of days they have been on the waiting list within a given clinical priority band. It is unlikely that any other patients will be significantly affected as a result of this work.” - media statement, May 2020
The last statement "it is unlikely any other patient will be significantly affected" is laughable.
The goal is to affect patients - prioritize a specific ethnic group, so either the change does nothing (then why do it at all?), or it prioritizes certain patients (and if it does it must deprioritize others).
So someone is scored 70 out of 100 in clinical need.
Then someone else is 69. But once you make the race adjustment, they are 71 and get treated first.
So instead of treating the most needy patients first, we penalize certain people for their race.
What’s important to the scenario though, is that at present, Māori and Pacific Islanders get seen less by specialists, less clinical tests, less treatment and then worse outcomes. They die several years earlier than their Pakeha peers. It’s incredible that this is acceptable, but here we are.
Māori and Pacific Islanders are being discriminated against by the system, it’s just that their race demerit points are not nicely documented.
So getting promoted on lists by a couple of points is an attempt to even it up via forced functionality.
I don’t think you and I are ever going to agree that positive description should be used.
Other things are being tried. Part of the massive and overdue restructuring that’s underway to our healthcare system is going to be interesting to watch. “In each local community, partnerships between Iwi-Māori Partnership Boards, Health New Zealand’s regional and district teams, and the wider community will ensure Māori voices are heard, embedded in plans and services, and that health equity for Māori is non-negotiable.” [1].
We will see how it goes. The structural changes so far have been rather painful and seem clumsy when viewed from my adjacent seat.
[1] https://www.futureofhealth.govt.nz/maori-health-authority/
Promoting one group by very definition penalized other groups. You can't have one without the other.
What’s important to the scenario though, is that at present, Māori and Pacific Islanders get seen less by specialists, less clinical tests, less treatment and then worse outcomes. They die several years earlier than their Pakeha peers. It’s incredible that this is acceptable, but here we are.
That's fine, then fix those issues. It's bizarre that a lack of medical care in one group is solved by reducing access to medical care in other groups.
If they don't want to follow a treaty they should rescind it. Until then it is the law of the land and it should be followed.
Or not, as parliament is free to decide. I think my previous statement on parliamentary supremacy stands for itself. If you have something specific to talk about from that Wikipedia page, it's best that you spell it out for us.
Stuff like this may have a certain level of "might makes right" (similar question for Hawaii, although there it's obvious who would win in a fight) but not always (Irish independence at close to the peak of the British Empire, the Cod Wars, that the US didn't keep all of Mexico after the war, just Texas, Arizona, California, etc.)
Of course they have a casus belli. They’d lose if there was a war though so there’s that.
We don't want another Holocaust or Gulag camps here ever again. I'm fine with restricting some speech. It's a small price to pay.
I see all these arguments waxing poetic about how dangerous it is to... I don't know, give anyone power? As if we haven't had these debates before. We have concrete examples of policies and behaviors that are harmful on fascist/Communist (big C is important) levels. We can compare someone's rhetoric and actions to those of people who have done the kinds of harm we want to prevent. We can use reasoning to parse their arguments instead of reacting emotionally. People do this every single day.
If it's really your concern that we can't define what dangerous ideologies are, then educate yourself, because we can.
It's very difficult because calling someone "Nazi" means you get to attack the "Nazi". So people who want to attack others just call them Nazis to justify it.
It's happened a lot in US politics, but for an example everyone here can agree on, "Ukraine is infested by Nazis" was one of the excuses for Russia invading Ukraine.
Yeah, that's not true. That isn't something that happens.
I'd be surprised if you can find even one news article about a non-fascist being called a Nazi and then attacked and everyone being ok with it. Nazis don't get punched as often as they should.
Russia invading Ukraine is not a good example. Much of the rest of the world said "No, you're full of shit and we're sending Ukraine missiles." I don't think anybody has actually supported Russia's "anti-Nazi" justification, even those countries economically bound to Russia and unwilling to resist them. It's just something Russia said, that doesn't mean it worked.
Further, international invasions are extremely different from internal politics are extremely different from personal/public interactions. You're painting broad strokes as if the entire planet of 8 billion people has the same mindset that "you can call anyone a Nazi and attack them." That doesn't even make sense. We are talking about US culture.
Finally, I shouldn't even be replying since it doesn't seem you read the majority of my previous comment. I've already said this: we know what Nazis are. You can call anybody anything, but whether or not they're a Nazi depends on if they hold Nazi beliefs.
NAFTA or TTIP — unless I've fallen for the exact same propaganda that led to Brexit — would have been better examples.
You're welcome to not like the details of the democratic mechanism within the EU; ironically this is in part because some of the member state governments thought that making the EU more democratic would usurp the sovereignty of the member states.
• The Vatican (a "country" on paper; but seriously?)
• The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (not to be confused with the country of Malta; this lot have no territory)
• The Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States
• The African Development Bank
• The Andean Community (another free trade area)
• Both the Commonwealth of Independent States (former soviet bloc) and the Commonwealth of Nations (former British Empire)
• The International Olympic Committee
…
The list of organisations sending delegations is pretty big, even just limiting to the ones important enough to get into Wikipedia; you can probably find a whole bunch more of small ones.
I did not use the word "just".
It is also a FTA. And unlike most (all?) other FTAs, it has democratic elections. All the funky stuff it can do is tied into that democratic process, because that is what the member states wanted.
> into a single country ("ever closer union")
The former is not the latter.
> which unfortunately would be the death of democracy in Europe
Bothering with elections and MPs is a bizarro mirror-world way of doing that.
That aside: Turning the EU into a country would require a massive treaty change; there's no way at all to forecast what this might look like given it's not even on the horizon yet.
They weren't even able to give UK citizens in the EU a way to claim EU citizenship despite several politicians wanting to make it available, because "EU citizen" is really just a shorthand for "citizen of an EU member state" rather than a coherent thing in its own right.
> because the EU is a totalitarian system
I work near to Checkpoint Charlie, I've been to the DDR and Stasi museums; if you think the EU is "totalitarian" you don't know what those words mean.
The way you're using the word, I think 100% of all treaties would fail, given they are not (generally? Ever?) negotiated directly by parliaments.
MEPs are pretty much powerless, which is why the EP fills up with joke candidates who think the EU should be abolished or who don't even bother turning up at all.
Turning the EU into a country would require a massive treaty change
Why? Since Lisbon was rejected the EU treaties have been "self amending" (i.e. worthless). The EU routinely goes beyond its treaty-granted powers without pushback. It just gave itself powers to censor things globally, a power that appears in no treaty.
Also the EU already has: borders, taxes, a civil service, an army, a spy agency, a diplomatic corps, law making powers that override all others, a flag, a national anthem, a president, a cabinet, a central bank, a currency and dozens of other country-like things I'm forgetting. It's already more than half way there.
if you think the EU is "totalitarian" you don't know what those words mean.
The EU is a totalitarian system; the freedoms you have today that didn't exist in the DDR are because the EU has not yet been able to completely subsume the post-war countries and institutions put in place by the allies.
Nonetheless the fact remains that the EU is not a real democracy. In a real democracy, elections mean things. Elections to the EU Parliament don't because the MEPs aren't empowered to change anything. This reality was made brutally apparent when the self-proclaimed Parliament was entirely cut out of the process of choosing the leader of the government. Instead you got vDL, someone with no history as an MEP and who didn't campaign. Why did she get the job? Nobody knows! The tiny number of people who theoretically made that decision point-blank refuse to tell anyone how it was made. That's way closer to DDR style leadership than democracy.
Second: UK parliament theoretically has this power, but in practice private members bills are either trivial, filibustered, or both ("nurses should have free parking at the hospitals they work in"). In practice this is up to the government, and given how much of the uk government is "convention" rather than constitution, it's almost impossible to untangle it without at least a politics degree.
Third: can you name literally even one other trade agreement that tries? If there is one, and there may be, I've not heard of it.
this is based on the idea of streitbare demokratie[0]. Which basically states that the foundation of the state (bundestag, bundesregerung and courts) has the right AND duty to defend itself against parties/elements who wish to abolish the "freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung" (freedom/democratic foundation/order).
This concept actually is worked out in various different laws in the Grundgesetz.
It solves the problem of the paradox of intolerance quiet well in my opinion, and considering germany's history it is a very, very good system to have.
For those that don't know, so-called "deadnaming" "is the act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning, such as their birth name."
And these kinds of laws also exist in more extreme "free-speech" countries like the United States (where the guarantee of free speech doesn't cover, for example, libel).
I'd be very surprised if the German law (if actually policed) expands to anything an individual might be insulted by, especially if the offense is one of self image.
You must make intentionally untrue statements with the intent to harm that causes harm.
The truth is a perfect defense. Even if you thought you were lying, you are protected. If you believe what you are saying, you are protected. If you did not know for certain that you said a lie, you are protected. If you did not mean to cause harm, you are protected. If no harm occurred, even if you tried to cause harm, you are protected.
The standard is extremely hard to reach, possibly even too hard, and it is clearly qualitatively different than most other countries.
> The truth is a perfect defense. Even if you thought you were lying, you are protected. If you believe what you are saying, you are protected.
IIUC the truth is a perfect defense in most states, but in some states maliciously stated truths (insults, more or less) can be defamatory. For example, see Johnson v Johnson in Rhode Island, where one Clifford Johnson was required to pay compensatory damages for (more or less accurately) calling his ex-wife a "[redacted] whore" in public. (He was also initially ordered to pay punitive damages, but that was reversed on appeal.)
> If you did not know for certain that you said a lie, you are protected.
I don't think this is the case in most states. If you say something with reckless disregard for the truth, it can be defamatory.
> If you did not mean to cause harm, you are protected.
I think this is typically only true of defaming public figures.
Much like many other things. But, alas, we do not yet live in a world where people treat each other with even the simplest basic respect and we have to force the issue via laws.
Here's a quick test. Let's say Bob goes for a walk, but Bob's neighbor, John, is a complete dick and whenever Bob leaves his house to go for a walk, John follows him and just hurls non-stop insults at Bob.
Should John's behavior be illegal? You could argue that as long as he's not trespassing anywhere, and he has the right to free speech, then John should be legally allowed to do this. In that case, it makes no sense to make deadnaming a criminal offense. There's no discussion to be had, as we've decided that asshole-ish speech is not illegal.
If you say no, it's verbal harassment, and should be illegal, then you're saying free speech does have limits, and we just gotta decide if deadnaming is bad enough to be illegal.
So unless you follow someone around and harass them - just saying someone's so-called "deadname" shouldn't be illegal.
I worry that we've started to use the ponderous blunt government legal system more and more widely for things that used to be resolved via society and community censure. The law should be restricted to the most serious and large scale community disrupting acts, not for policing every bit of cheating, insults and lying. It's very unsuited for the latter.
Hurricane declining to accept KiwiFarms' /36 into its BGP table is community censure.
On a local scale, 'community censure' may work well. But not so much on a global scale, where a few determined activists anywhere in the world have the power to get a person fired, take away various online accounts or services, or maybe even have their banking services removed, all over issues of 'speech', with no due process.
100% agree. But since public shame and censure no longer work for limiting people's actions[1] that negatively affect others, what else do we have?
[1] And any time anyone tries, people scream "CANCEL CULTURE!!!!".
Which would also apply to places like pre-Musk Twitter, reddit, tumblr and Facebook (and indeed every social media site), all of which have lead to targeted and sustained harassment of people, often for things they didn't actually do.
"Who directed 'The Matrix'?" probably shouldn't be a controversial question, let alone one with potential answers that are considered offensive or even illegal.
Not everyone is a world famous artist that certainly can hire a whole team of body guard h24 all year around if they feel like it's appropriate.
I'm not aware of the the law in question. It seems strange to me to target specifically naming the person with this or that name, rather than cover the case in a more generic way like creating threats on someone's life or social integrity through public release of intimate information.
Yours is not a remotely apt comparison of the situations.
You can still have an intellectually unhealthy society subject to groupthink and stagnation if you make it illegal to say many things.
It’s actually the opposite. Plenty of authoritarian regimes look awfully peaceful because the only acceptable views are the government approved ones.
Id take political strife any day over forced “political harmony”. Far better to “air the dirty laundry” than pretend it doesn’t exist.
Political harmony is a problem if forced, but a common vision shared by much of society is a strength if arrived at through healthy, intellectually honest debate.
Political debate is fine and healthy, but it should not be possible to end a debate by being louder, more obnoxious and more ready to do violence than the other debaters.
I prefer a messy, publicly conflicting government to a smooth running authoritarian police state any day
While I agree that making it a crime is a bit over the top, it's just not a good look to complain about it.
[2] (with an NSFW header image) explains that it only covers "[deadnaming] with the aim of harming the person" which is completely different from "deadnaming [is] a crime", right?
[1] https://apnews.com/article/germany-transgender-legal-registr...
Germany treads very lightly when it comes to limiting speech, even for Nazi things.
They have plenty of far-right racist groups that model themselves after the Nazis.
As long as you don’t display the swastika gratuitously (there is no blanket ban), you’re quite free to organize a racist political party and takes seats in the government.
Hell, there are still SS alumni groups in Germany. They arent banned.
No.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/13/afd-party-ban-ge...
"Considers" can mean someone had an idle thought about it. It can also mean that the full apparatus of the government is able to do something, and is allowed by its own rules to do so, and just hasn't yet. This "considers" is the second kind.
That was my entire point.
This is the image it projects, and maybe it was even true in the past. But not any more.
https://www.racket.news/p/madness-american-satirist-cj-hopki...
American playwright and humorist C.J. Hopkins, profiled in this space on numerous occasions, has been sent a “punishment order” by a German judge, offering him a Sophie’s Choice of 60 days in jail or 3,600 euros.
His crime? Essentially, insulting the German health minister in a tweet, and using a scarcely-visible image of a Swastika on a mask in a book critical of the global pandemic response, The Rise of the New Normal Reich.
They're literally punishing a guy for calling someone else a Nazi due to their political policies, under anti-Nazi laws. It's the wrong way around but they don't seem to care, the victim in this case was protesting against their COVID laws so down with those sorts.
Also remember the EU just handed itself the power to force tech firms to globally censor anything the EU decides is misinformation, which in practice appears to be anything that disagrees with their policies or ideology.
A lot of people on the right are talking about the US having a mental health crises when it comes to mass shootings. If that's really true, then yeah, that's how we get natsies.
> Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?
Well I mean if there's a mental health crisis then yeah, people are going to say that. I personally don't think the founding fathers of the US understood the future gullibility of their citizens.
They absolutely did. When only white, male, decently educated property owners could vote, they had decent reassurance that a constitutional republic with state-specific voter management could work.
I think they'd be horrified to see that today we don't even demand a basic proof of civics education. And I hate that Ramaswamy made that suggestion in such an embarrassing, conversation-poisoning way.
The problem of course being that intelligence tests were used in the 60's to deny voting rights. But the founding fathers were okay with slavery, so would they have been okay with that for that purpose?
Originalism has a purpose I think, but, we've changed so much since then...
The founding fathers certainly did assume there were gullible voters even among the select few who could vote.
Protections such as the Constitution itself (that old archaic document!), the Senate, supermajorities, an independent legislative, executive and judicial, etc, etc.
I laugh when people say “Congress is deadlocked! It needs to be fixed!”. No, it’s working exactly as intended.
Are you talking about his "failed Civics 101" gaffe re: historical ordering of Constitution and Revolution?
I have been convinced for a long time that a test of basic civics and current events is a necessary (and possibly a sufficient) condition to fix most of the failings we see in representative democracy, but the Overton window is nowhere near it, and Ramaswamy is hardly the candidate I'd want proposing it.
The whole question and answer bank could even be given out online or in print cosr free - my bar is pretty low.
Currently I would suggest that most of the failings in, e.g., US democracy are coming from the Republican party and I'm pretty sure most of them will have passed a test of basic civics, etc., yet are demonstrably bad at governance.
There are always going to be people who are fearful and ignorant and looking for a convenient external something to blame their problems on. There are also the people who are raised with those views and others who feel excluded and find a place to belong with a group of "outsiders". I don't think we can ever get rid of racist ideologies. We've evolved to be tribal and distrustful of outsiders and some will struggle with those feelings more than others. We're always going to struggle with racism and that's going to include Nazis. That doesn't mean we're powerless against them, but censorship and oppression certainly isn't the solution.
> And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay
Germany is not okay. Personally, I think Germany takes things way too far and that state censorship really is dangerous, but I also recognize that they've been in a very difficult position since the end of the war. I can't really fault them for over-correcting, but I do feel for the German people who have to live under unjust laws.
To their credit they've also relaxed a bit over the years. For example, they lifted the ban on Mein Kampf and it flew off the shelves (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38495456) not because the country was full of secret Nazis this whole time just waiting for it, but because the German people strongly desire freedom.
It's worth noting that even in Germany and other EU counties that gave up basic freedoms in an effort to oppose racism there are still racists. Innocent people get hurt by oppressive laws and racists gain a talking point for recruiting that resonates with a lot of people. It's a lot easier to feed into a person's victim complex when they're actually being oppressed.
Most of these laws stems from a time where monarchy wanted to suppress unsanctioned speech.
The Nazis made a lot of political capital because people wanted them banned and censored. Of course that was just political play and they set new standards for suppression of information and propaganda, but that came after they got into power.
> Also of note is that Germany already had and still has laws against numerous forms
> of speech, most notably anything that could threaten the public order, which you
> could mold into a justification to basically stop any speech.
There are laws against hate speech: "Volksverhetzung", a more direct translation: "incitement of the people", i.e. hate speech with the intent of causing mob violence or the persecution of minorities. There are also laws against disrupting the public order: "Erregung öffentlichen Ärgernisses", so "causing public offence", but those don't really target speech, they're more about taking your pants off in public and peeing on the sidewalk.
Also, neither of those laws are from the time of the monarchy.
> The Nazis made a lot of political capital because people wanted them banned and
> censored. Of course that was just political play and they set new standards for
> suppression of information and propaganda, but that came after they got into
> power.
> Wir gehen in den Reichstag hinein, um uns im Waffenarsenal der Demokratie mit
> deren eigenen Waffen zu versorgen. Wir werden Reichstagsabgeordnete, um die
> Weimarer Gesinnung mit ihrer eigenen Unterstützung lahmzulegen. Wenn die
> Demokratie so dumm ist, uns für diesen Bärendienst Freifahrkarten und Diäten zu
> geben, so ist das ihre eigene Sache.
> We enter the Reichstag [Weimar Republic parliament] to stock ourselves with
> weapons from democracy's own arsenal. We become assemblymen of the Reichstag to
> take down the spirit of Weimar with its own support. If democracy is so stupid
> to supply us with hall passes and diets for this disservice we do to it, then
> that is its own problem.
I picked the example because it can collide with freedom of speech as you can imagine. If you demonstrating something and your placard is seen as insulting, the police can force you to take it down.
Laws against speech like "Volksverhetzung" were already in place in the late 19th century. The monarchy was ended in 1918. There is a constant with laws restricting speech and it is mostly those in power just wanting to do so. That was mostly the case in Germany.
> As Goebbels, the Nazi's chief propagandist, himself said
Perhaps he said that so people start to destroy democracy themselves. He had a knack for propaganda and fooling people.
> To their credit they've also relaxed a bit over the years. For example, they
> lifted the ban on Mein Kampf and it flew off the shelves (https://www.bbc.com
> /news/world-europe-38495456) not because the country was full of secret Nazis
> this whole time just waiting for it, but because the German people strongly
> desire freedom.
The reason Mein Kampf could not be distributed until a few years ago is because after Hitler's death, the copyright on Mein Kampf fell to the state of Bavaria (for convoluted reasons), and Bavaria just never reprinted it, nor gave license to reprint it. Therefore, any copying of the book was piracy and was prosecuted under piracy laws. Because German copyright ends 70 years after the death of the author, this no longer applies, and the book can be printed and distributed again.
Note that public distribution of the book for nazi propaganda purposes is still banned under German hate speech laws ("Volksverhetzung") - not because it is this particular book, but because all nazi propaganda in public is blanket banned. This is why the now-released official Bavarian-government-approved copy of Mein Kampf contains additional commentary by historians to situate Hitler's remarks in historic context.
Bavaria used copyright to enforce an "unofficial" ban on the book. It's ridiculous to try to paint the situation as one where Bavaria just never got around to reprinting it.
> To their credit they've also relaxed a bit over the years. For example,
> they lifted the ban on Mein Kampf
Because it's essentially impossible to ensure that any particular advertisement will only be seen by adults, this however means that games not approved by the USK may practically not be publicly advertised at all. Because game publishing companies have a strong incentive to be allowed to advertise their games, they will often self-censor to ensure USK approval. This is done for commercial, not legal reasons; if the companies didn't want to advertise their games, they wouldn't have to abide by USK guidelines.
It is also illegal to advertise tobacco in Germany, and it is also illegal to sell tobacco to minors. Unless you believe that this constitutes a "tobacco ban" in Germany, it is hard to argue that video games are "banned" under this law.
That said, the 2018 change in USK policy that allows video games showing anti-constitutional symbolism to still be approved as long as the message is clearly anti-nazi is still perfectly reasonable, and probably a good development, as it aligns USK policy in this regard with policy that it previously took on other media.
That's a ban by any reasonable standard. That's like saying that a requirement that churches be built on the moon wasn't banning churches, or a requirement that Jews who own businesses pay a 95% tax isn't a ban on Jews owning businesses. In some technical sense it's not a complete ban, but if the government says that if you do X, you face so many restrictions that you'd go broke, that's defacto a ban. It's an excuse made by people who like to pretend that they're not getting their hands dirty by literally banning something, while banning it in practice.
In the US we have our own problems with censorship. I've had to track down copies of video games released overseas to get uncensored versions myself. Censorship in art is a huge problem, but it's a lot more dangerous when people can't even recognize when it's happening.
https://www.racket.news/p/madness-american-satirist-cj-hopki...
Just when you may have thought things couldn’t get any crazier: American playwright and humorist C.J. Hopkins, profiled in this space on numerous occasions, has been sent a “punishment order” by a German judge, offering him a Sophie’s Choice of 60 days in jail or 3,600 euros.
His crime? Essentially, insulting the German health minister in a tweet, and using a scarcely-visible image of a Swastika on a mask in a book critical of the global pandemic response, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. He was first accused of this “crime” in June, shortly after Roger Waters was placed under investigation for wearing his clearly satirical “Pink” costume in a stage performance in Berlin. As I wrote when C.J. was charged weeks later, authorities claim that through the use of the mask image, C.J. was “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”
You're equivocating between two different meanings of "Nazi" in this sentence.
> And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff?
They aren't, they moved the Overton window so far via a ratchet effect that they're unable to calmly discuss immigration policy.
I am confused as to what this last sentence has to do with anything.
Only for certain definitions of okay