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Comment by xyzzyz | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, US is pretty much the only country where this stuff is unlikely to happen. Most European countries will happily punish you for your speech if it offends the prevailing sensibilities, religious or secular.

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>US is pretty much the only country where this stuff is unlikely to happen

Not really, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law

Edit: reading the replies, some users seem to have lost their reading comprehension skills, the US is not the only country where this would be unlucky to happen.

Not really, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite...

Can you name even one case?

Your link indicates the US has no blasphemy laws, btw.

I think GP point is that it's not the only country where this could not happen.

Better to link directly to [0], which lists a few cases from a long time ago, but overall the situation in the US looks pretty good. In the rest of the world however...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law_in_the_United_St...

Your link only refers to religious sensibilities, and I specifically mentioned secular sensibilities as well, precisely to preempt this sort of retort. For example, France is marked green in your link, but it very much does exactly what I said in my original comment: prosecutes and punishes people for their literal speech. Here's an example high-profile case from last year.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60022996

Can you name a single country in the world which has similarly liberal free speech norms to US? Something close to the Brandenburg v Ohio standard? I'll wait.

>Your link only refers to religious sensibilities

Yes because that's the topic and "US is pretty much the only country where this stuff is unlikely to happen" is simply wrong, about the rest of your comment you could be right or wrong but I honestly don't really care.

>will happily punish you for your speech

getting drunk in a mosque/house of worship which is probably not this guys property is a very creative definition of 'speech'.

I'm not sure why speech in modern American discourse seems to have moved from actual, literal speech, to behaving like a crazy person in places that aren't actually yours. It's more like an 'in your face'-ism, like a license to pester people.

So you're telling me that if I bring, for example, a pig into a synagogue I won't face any legal repercussions?

I'm guessing you could be cited for trespassing if you were asked to leave and didn't.

If you are found guilty of trespassing and you were trespassing with intent to harm the religion then it might be a hate crime charge too.

> Most European countries will happily punish you for your speech if it offends the prevailing sensibilities, religious or secular.

O.o Europe is a pretty big place. Most countries will let you speak your mind freely because free speech is a thing. As long as you don’t break any laws (hate speech etc)

"You can say anything you want as long as it doesn't break the law" is rather weak standard for free speech, in fact it makes the mockery of the concept. By this token, Soviet Union and North Korea also have free speech: criticizing the Juche is an illegal "hate speech" after all.

It's literally the definition of it, though. The law is what creates freedom of speech, and one way or another, it sets the scope.

This is not so:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That's just fluff.

>The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ arguments that foreign national visa applicants have any First Amendment rights when initially applying for visas from abroad

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/federal-judge-upholds-....

That's law, too.

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